If being a universal requires existential independence from language, then all universals must consist entirely in/of that which is not existentially contingent upon language. — creativesoul

Are you continuing with this nonsense even after I explained why it is nonsense?

A structuralist approach to language use emphasises its role in the construction of a social reality. A semiotic generalisation of linguistic structuralism shows how reality in general is the product of structuring constraints.

So if we are talking ontology, then human language use really does construct humans - at a social level. But it doesn't construct them at a more basic neurological or biological level. You need the language or neurons or genes to do that.

So when Aristotle started the business of thinking about reality in structuralist terms, he could see that the universal definition of "a man" would have to reflect these levels of organisation. Men were reasoning animals that might even participate in an even more abstracted logical realm of semiotics.

But Aristotle didn't know about genes and neurons. So that is why his approach to substantial being was a little hazy on the details of what might properly constitute the different levels of structuralism going on.

So my complaint - which you have so far failed to answer clearly - is that you are bringing an epistemic quibble to an important ontological debate. You are simply saying all knowledge of reality is linguistic and so every concept a cultural construct.

Well, yes. It is a pragmatic fact that we need a more abstract semiotic machinery - like language - to do the meta-structuring of our biologically and neurologically structured experience of the world. Pigeons can categorise. But speech let's us take it to another level. And formal mathematical language can take us a step even beyond ordinary language. All this is epistemically understood.

But then it is an ontic category error to confuse the linguistic basis of knowledge with the knowledge claims then being made.

So "being a universal known as a man" has to be understood in terms of what constraints really form "a man". And it is an ontic mixture. Social constraints - our shared cultural image of masculinity - clearly play a real part in producing "real men". A man can be measured by the degree to which he does or does not conform to some generic cultural stereotype.

But then there are also the neurological and biological constraints in play. Any reasonable use of language is going to acknowledge this at least implicitly. A man has a dick, two balls, and the usual complement of X-chromosomes, on the whole.

He is generically an animal while also generically a reasoning being. And neither of these generalisations are "social constructions". They are both accounts of the reality. It is just that the cause of this reality is on some levels genetic and neurological, on others social and cultural.

Maybe you get this, maybe you don't. But you seem to be striving to blur the line between social construction as an epistemic issue and social construction as a cause of substantial being.

You keep repeating your magic phrase - "existentially contingent upon language". Well some aspects of "being a man" are clearly existentially contingent on the cultural ideas that only language encodes.

It we were talking about bacteria, or stars, then no, our conceptions of them have very little bearing on their existence. We can exert some constraints on bacteria - like inventing antibiotics and seeing them evolve resistance. But really, we don't construct their existence through just talking about them.

However palaces and fences and iPhones are examples of other kinds of objects - artifacts - that are clearly very dependent on the games of linguistic social construction. Through our conceptions, we are the causes of their existence - the reason why they exist materially.

Perhaps it is unfortunate you picked on such a confusing example of "a man" as your example of a universal. It could be a good example as it illustrates the hierarchical nature of structured being. But only if you are already clear about the pansemiotic underpinnings of structuralist holism.

Snore....

Having done so, I'm waiting for a sensible reply. I realise that will never come.

Of course not, that would be contradictory to say that a continuity has bounded lumps. If it has bounded lumps, it is not a continuity. This is simply a matter of avoiding contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

So how do you divide up a foot into inches unless there is some underlying continuity to be divided?

The "unit", being an individual thing cannot be defined by a dichotomy, it can only be described. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now you have switched track from epistemology back to ontology? One second we are talking about units of measurement, the next about actual substantial objects out there in the real world?

Always a pleasure doing business with you, MU. ;)

But sure, a complex substance is going to be predicated of multiple dichotomies or universal contrasts. But surprise. That is why Aristotle defined complex being in terms of hierarchies of constraints.

Your compositionalism vs Aristotle's structuralism.

So you are going to bore me with repetition as usual? I've already told you why I don't agree. Your move.

The candidate is what counts as being "a man". Are you saying that being a man doesn't involve - in large part at least - of being a composition of things that are not existentially contingent upon language? — creativesoul

I'm saying that counting shaping or structuring constraints is different from counting compositional elements.

So you are thinking like a reductionist. Aristotle was thinking like a holist.

Ad homs are a sure sign that one doesn't have an argument. — creativesoul

Hey, you just invented a new category of fallacy!

I said that a continuity is measured by discrete units. — Metaphysician Undercover

So are these discrete units bounded lumps of continuity or not?

What dichotomy properly defines your notion of "unit" here. Clearly you have in mind the idea of a sameness that repeats. We can cut the whole into a set of similar parts. The one can stand for the many.

I see a whole tangle of metaphysical dichotomies in play here. The usual story. As it should be.

First, the concept would need to be one that sets out the elemental constituents of the candidate in question — creativesoul

So I am right that you simply fail to get what a structuralist ontology is about? You are wedded to logical atomism. Aristotle wasn't.

A degree is a discrete unit. By measuring a continuity in degrees, you are applying discrete units to the continuity. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now you are saying that a unit is a continuity chopped into discrete pieces? That is, it places limits on the continuous so that bits of continuity can be treated as the same and thus counted as repetitions. A degree is a difference that isn't a difference fundamentally, just the very same thing happening all over again?

Hmm. Seems familiar.

If a thing is hot, then it is not cold. To say that a thing is hot to the degree that its not cold, is to replace a clear logical principle with an ambiguous one, allowing contradiction that the thing be both hot and cold, qualifying this with the ambiguity of "by degree". — Metaphysician Undercover

So much for Aristotle's distinction between contradiction and contrariety then. What a goof that guy was!

The temperature is meant to be objective and any temperature in itself, is neither hot nor cold. — Metaphysician Undercover

Depending on the application, what is hot by one standard might be cold by another, but the independent standard allows us to avoid the nonsense of "it is hot to the degree that it isn't cold". — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you ever read what you write? Or is making sense utterly irrelevant here.

The difficulty, it seems, is developing a method for taking account of which constructs set out that which is existentially contingent upon language, and which ones set out that which is not. — creativesoul

Pragmatically, where is the difficulty?

You seem to want to turn an ontological question into an epistemic one. Your tactic seems to revolve around emphasising the doubt that we can truly know reality because we only know reality via the structure of words.

But while that is a routine epistemic challenge, it is pretty irrelevant once you accept a pragmatic approach to belief and just get on with ontologising.

Yes, language is a reality-making game. But then was Aristotle using ordinary speech or pioneering a new logical level of semiosis to "talk about" the universalised concept of "a man". Are you actually critiquing Aristotle here if you are only merely carping about ordinary language usage?

His method seems inadequate, or 'hazy' as you say. — creativesoul

What I am emphasising is the structuralism that was implicit in his substance thinking. The holistic causality used to account for the nature of Being.

So your comments seem overly focused on linguistic structure. And even linguistic structuralism - of the familiar Continental/Saussurean type - strives after a more sophisticated triadic or holistic reading.

Proponents of structuralism would argue that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure—modelled on language—that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the "third order".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

And then we now know enough about biology and neurology to see how those are also levels of organisation that are the product of semiotic codes. Maths and logic - as languages - are a still higher level of structuration.

So there are men as biological animals, men as socialised humans, and men as rationalising scientists and mathematicians. Three levels of substantial being right there. :)

What counts as being a "man" is what one is taught counts as being a man. That varies tremendously from group to group, or it can at least. — creativesoul

So is a penis a social construct? Is an X chromosome a social construct?

Sure, social construction is a thing. But so is biological construction. And semiosis recognises other kinds of "language use" beyond just words, like the language of the genes.

Aristotle was right about humans as substances as their being is organised by a structure that is more than accidental. Genes and neurons encode a purpose and a design. There is a reason why bodies and behaviour hang together, or endure.

Aristotle was hazy about the detail. Yet he was a structuralist. And a social level of construction - the one that employs actual language - needs to be understood in similar structuralist fashion.

He initially learned what counts as being a man the same way everyone else does. — creativesoul

So you are talking past what counts in terms of biology so as to focus on what counts in terms of culture. And yet both of these are realities of the experienced world, not imaginative fictions.

Definitions of masculinity might change as the needs of particular social systems evolve. But anthropologists can find the structural logic, the evolutionary sense, that explains the prevailing definitions. Or else they can show how some signifier of masculinity - like wearing a tie - is a symbolic "accident".

Social constructionism is properly a theory about social realities. It doesn't mean culture lives in a fictional world. Culture is all about the symbols that are the language which can be used to structure a world of social meaning.

What makes the measurement meaningful is its relationship to something outside the category of the things being measured. — Metaphysician Undercover

So when you measure a degree of continuity, what else do you measure that against except a corresponding degree of absence of discreteness?

A is continuous to the degree it isn’t .....

Go on. Try to fill in the blank with a word that doesn’t mean discrete.

As I said, you have no description of the qualitative difference between what has already been, and what will have being in the future. What you express is the description of an agent at the present, who has constraints relative to the past, and freedoms relative to the future. You have no description of what it means to be constrained or to be free. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agents?

My account was rather more general than that.

Here's an example. Say we have hot and cold, as dichotomous terms which define each other, with degrees of difference assumed to be "between" them. By defining hot with not-cold, and cold with not-hot, and degrees of difference, we have no description of those qualiies, what it means to be hot, or what it means to be cold. So if you proceed in this direction now, to define what it means to be hot, and what it means to be cold, you'll see a fundamental difference between them, such that hot and cold are completely distinct ideals which cannot be related through the degrees of difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hot and cold are defined by a temporal asymmetry - a direction in which time or change flows. So cold is more than just not-hot. It is a state of maximum entropy. While heat is then the opposite in being an order or energy - a negentropy - available for dissipation.

We have some exact maths that describes what we now mean by differences in temperature.

Hot and cold are discrete, while the degrees of difference are continuous. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is rubbish.

In all such instances there is an incommensurability between the discrete (hot and cold, constraint and freedom) and the continuous (degrees of difference). Incommensurability is beyond the capacity of mathematics. So we have an incommensurability between the continuous existence of the agent at the present, and the two discrete things, constraints of the past, and freedoms of the future. That incommensurability cannot be grasped with mathematics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Good try. But completely irrelevant argument.

The maths of limits works. My approach explains metaphysically how it could in fact work. It explains in what sense there are limits to approach even if these limits could never be reached.

If one extreme of a dichotomy is defined by its "distance" from the other, then it is both possible always to be measurably moving towards one limit - by measurably moving away from the other limit - while also never arriving at this other limit, as then that would result in the nonsensical claim of having left the other limit "completely behind". The other limit would have to have vanished. And what then could measure a distance from it?

You're missing the point. — Metaphysician Undercover

You're avoiding the point. If we were still sitting around on our chuff, not doing the maths, we'd still be convinced by Aristotelian level physics no doubt.

But there are fundamental differences which cannot be expressed as mathematical relations, such as the dichotomy between future and past, the difference between what has been and what has not yet come to be. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? The past is the constraints on future degrees of freedom. The future is the remaining free possibility that the past hasn't managed to constrain. Of course the definition is reciprocal.

The patterns of nature are revealed to us before we apply mathematics to them. — Metaphysician Undercover

Maybe before science got going and the game changed.

Did pre-scientific folk intuitively believe that cannonballs followed a parabola, or that a rolling ball on a frictionless plane would roll forever?

Was that much of nature really revealed by an Aristotelian level of physics?

Three centuries of mathematical empiricism have bent the modern mind to a single interest in the invention of engines for the control of phenomena - a conceptual network, which procures for the mind a certain practical domination over, and a deceptive understanding of, nature, where thought is not resolved in being but in the sensible itself.

Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge

There's your 'immanent metaphysics' in a nutshell. — Wayfarer

A silly reply if my immanent metaphysics is what I've said it is - a full four causes naturalism.

He was hardly a systematic or monolithic thinker. — Wayfarer

Are you kidding?!? That's like saying Led Zeppelin was hardly a rock band. :-O

The fact that he was an idealist philosophy is something you continually try to deprecate, but it is a fact nonetheless. — Wayfarer

And yet he started from psychology - from a proper kind of cognitive and evolutionary idealism, not a muddled mystical one - and worked his way outwards to recover the material world.

That's only a matter of perspective. The other perspective claims that making categorically distinct things, like the sensible and the intelligible (the particular and the universal, material and immaterial), into two poles of one category, with degrees of separation, is the real mistake. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well if a dichotomy is a mistake, you should be able to expose that fact.

For instance, the material and the immaterial is indeed a weak-arse dichotomy. It is just a simple negation. It is the claim that there is the material .... and the not-material.

Well what can you really make of a vague distinction like that - one without proper self-grounding context?

Matter and mind is also a bad dichotomy - one that doesn't really make intelligible sense as I keep telling you. There is no formal reciprocal relation being described.

A properly formed dichotomy is one that is self-grounding, self-contextualising, in being reciprocal or inverse. A is not B because it A is 1/B. That is, A-ness contains or partakes of the least possible degree of B-ness. And B-ness in return is defined by containing or partaking in A-ness to the least possible degree.

That is why information and entropy make a nice dichotomy. Informational certainty is inverse to entropic disorder. There is a formal connection via the reciprocal relation. Each others its other to become itself. The greater the separation, the more sure the polar distinction.

It's the same with the infinite and the infinitesimal. They are defined as each other's reciprocal. And physics has found the same duality in the Planck scale. And that is what has got physics so excited about holography - the duality of fundamental theory found in the AdS/CFT correspondence.

So there are clear rules for forming proper dichotomies. It's not a matter of "perspective". It is an exact mathematical relation.

Again, that is why I champion semiotics. The possibility of information arises at exactly the point when physics is at its most constrained, or mechanical. One can see the connection by which a fundamental distinction must emerge. If you limit physical dimensionality - degrees of freedom - so that it approach zero, then you get the emergence of the counterfactual possibility of a symbol or informational mark.

Life is chemistry reduced from its 4D chaos down past 2D surfaces and 1D chains all the way to the possibility of zero-D codes. DNA is a strand - a linear sequence. Any codon could be the next in line. That reduction of physical causality - the fact that any codon could be next - then allows DNA to represent pure information. Or at least a variety of amino acids that can be connected in a 1D chain to curl up and act as a 3D shaped message, an effective cause, in a 4D brew of cellular action.

It is this form of idealism, the desire to make all things mathematical, which drives this mistake. So of course the mathematics will support it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Mathematics reveals nature's fundamental patterns. So a lack of mathematical rigour is always going to be the actual mistake.

Writing helps clarify thought. — Mitchell

Exactly. And an unreceptive audience is a help in making the effort as you get old and lazy. :)

It keeps the ideas circulating as well as making some fresh connections. I used to write books. I might well start another next year. The problem is I don't feel any burning need to.

It's only for my own benefit. I don't expect people to read them. ;)

This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.

This is an example of the bad thought habit I just highlighted - turning a "soft" contrary into a "hard" contradiction. It is the reductionism you always complain about.

So it is not a problem that knowledge is structured by it having two poles of being - ideas and impressions, concepts and percepts, rationality and empiricism.

Psychologically, we know it is just a fact that our mentality is divided in this fashion. But the big mistake is to turn it into some absolute ontological separation - the duality of a hard contradiction - when really it is only the relative thing of a dichotomous contrariety.

If you turn to a powerful model of a "knowing system" - like Stephen Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) neural networks - you can see this point made mathematically and explicitly. He models awareness in terms of a "long term memory" layer in interaction with a "short term memory" layer. So the basic potential here is "memory" - a state of encoded representation or response. And then hierarchically, all you need is a contrast of characteristic timescales. Sense data or impressions are the immediate reaction to the events of the moment. Concepts or ideas are the long term memory states that create the more general context that can interpret the particular events forming a perceptual state in the short term memory layer.

It is an important fact that the best mathematical models of psychology support the view that ideas and impressions are not hard contradictions - a dualism - but only a soft or relative state of dichotomisation.

All mindfulness boils down to a "memory response" - some intra-layer neural competition that is an adaptation of internal state to some applied perturbation (a changing environment). And then you get a useful structure, a complexity of response, just by a separation of spatiotemporal scales of adaptation. Ideas vs impressions is a natural divide that "processes" the world in a balance dichotomous fashion.

So you are enthusiastic about philosophical approaches that appear to endorse full-on dualism. Science misses something as it rejects a hard division of reality into the material and the immaterial. Science is wrong in thinking that materiality vs immateriality is only a relative affair so far as its physicalism is concerned. You take it as just an obvious fact that there is an empirical world that is available to the senses, but then an actually separate rational world that is available to ... the nous, the mind, the secret sauce spirit.

Yet natural philosophy rejects actual dualism. And science supports its immanent understanding of nature.

Dichotomies or symmetry-breakings are how nature achieves intelligible structure. So - in its highly developed state - nature will appear to be broken by its dualities. But mystery is avoided by recognising that any such duality can only be soft or relative. A pair of developmental contraries, not a pair of existent contradictions.

But if you want to keep lapsing into a reductionist ontology, and then complaining bitterly that "science" doesn't accept the resulting hard dualism, that must be your private psycho-drama in the end. A properly organic conception of nature doesn't even need to go there. It can show that the dualism is always the product of a semiotic or epistemic "cut". Any division must arise out of a shared commonality.

And resolving that division means dissolving it back into a state of vague potential. It is not logically permitted to collapse all the material aspects of the account to immaterial ones, or vice versa.

If Peirce were an "objective idealist" in the sense that you keep wanting to claim, then he would simply be wrong by his own lights. There would have to be something very queer about his thinking. He would have to be contradicting himself.

But if you read him as talking of structuring contrarieties, then you can see he was emphasising the complementary nature of reality - its hylomorphic organisation where even the Cosmos at its most physically simple can be considered to have mind-like features.

Poetically, matter is effete habit, deadened routine. Substance at its most unlively.

You can read it as an endorsement of transcendent theism if you like. Plenty read it as an endorsement of immanent panpsychism.

But perhaps it actually is just this organic thing, this middle path between hard realism and hard idealism, that one would dub pan-semiosis.

Essential attributes and accidental attibutes are both properties, and properties are universals. — Mitchell

What is more important here is that the accidental and the essential (or the necessary) are a dialectical dichotomy - defined as a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive pair of complementary terms. And so through the unity of opposites, we can track their emergence from pure possibility (vagueness) as each other's mirroring generality.

In the view I am taking, all universals are not singular but dual. True generality is defined by matched pairs that speak to opposing extremes of realised being.

So if I say form, you say matter. If I say discrete, you say continuous. If I say chance, you say necessity. If I say flux, you say stasis. And so on through all the fundamental ontologically-basic categories.

Once the duality, or complementary logic, of "metaphysical strength" universals is accepted, then it becomes obvious that the two need the third thing of a ground of common being from which they can arise as the opposed limits of "the possible". They point back to their own grounding in vagueness - pure potentiality - by the very fact that they represent the counterfactual extremes on that possibility.

For the discrete to be distinct from the continuous - for that distinction to be actualised in a general way by a world - then each must successfully exclude all possibility of its "other". Thus also, the possibility of the "other" must exist to actually get excluded in this fashion. The potential is defined (in dichotomous contrast to the actual!) as then the state where nothing is yet excluded. So before the dichotomy can be the case, there must be the third thing of a vagueness that is neither discrete nor continuous in any degree ... a state that is just the potential for such a division to arise.

Of course, not all "universals" are metaphysical strength dichotomies. That is where a lot of confusion starts. Whiteness is a reasonably strong universal, in being the complete opposite of blackness. But a horse is really a fairly particular "universal".

The concept of "a horse" sort of excludes donkeys and mules and zebras. But the boundaries are vague. And more importantly "a horse" does not stand completely opposed to any other generality. A horse is a living organism as opposed to an inanimate object. A horse partakes of more fundamental metaphysical dichotomies. It is a continuous whole in terms of itself, a discrete part in terms of its world. But even here, the boundaries of the concept of "a horse" remains vague. Is the sweat that is about to drop off the horse still part of its structural continuity or now part of what counts towards defining its structural discreteness?

The problem with the conventional take on universals is that people try to reason about them using the logic of particulars - the predicate logic secured by the three laws of thought. Peirce unpicked that logic by showing that generality is rightfully defined by the LEM failing to apply, and vagueness by the PNC failing to apply.

This opens up the system of reasoning so that we can see that what defines the metaphysically fundamental categories is the absolute division they achieve via dialectical opposition. The discrete and the continuous mutually define the extremes of a certain kind of universal possibility. And in defining the extremes, they together point back to the undivided potential that must have been there to birth them.

Aristotle of course tackled this in his Organon in contrasting contradiction and contrariety.

Two statements are contradictory if one affirms or denies universally what the other affirms or denies particularly. But two statements are contrary if one affirms or denies particularly what the other affirms or denies particularly of the same thing.

So a contradiction excludes a middle, but a contrariety admits to a middle. The same substance - your soup - could be hot, or it could be cold, or it could be anywhere in between. If all soup is hot, then it is a contradiction if your soup is cold. But if my soup is hot, then it is only a contrary fact that yours is cold.

The trick then is to see that when we speak of universals as the product of dichotomies or dialectical opposition, we are now contrasting two particulars. They are only contrarieties (as if they were contradictions, then one couldn't even be considered a possibility, and if one wasn't possible, then its "other" can't even be crisply defined).

If the poles of a dichotomy are only contraries, then only the vague, or pure potentiality, counts as some actual monistic universal - but now an apophatic one, defined by its actual non-existence.

What actually exists is not the "oneness" of this potential but the "many-ness" of the divisions that proved to be possible. So universality unfolds hierarchically in the manner first articulated by Anaximander (well, metaphorically by the Hesiod also). That is, metaphysics seeks to identify the most general dichotomies (or symmetry breakings) that then led to the increasingly more specific ones.

Anaximander actually managed a strikingly thermodynamic view. The Apeiron first separates into the hot and the cold, then follows the division into the dry and the wet. Earlier I highlighted the fundamental division that modern physics appears to have arrived at - the two basic "directions of action" of a (gravitational) integration and a (quantum) differentiation.

But whatever the story, the logic is the same. A first most general symmetry breaking paves the way for a casade of further symmetry breakings. Universality has hierarchical organisation - an unfolding direction in time. The most general change sets the scene for more particular change. And every metaphysically significant change takes the logical form of a dichotomisation.

Hence why hylomorphic substance was taken by Aristotle to be the foundational state of being. The combo of en-mattered form and in-formed matter. Everything definitely begins only when material cause and formal cause are brought together in an actualised state of contrariety - when they are realised with the middle ground that connects them as the matched extremes of a state of possibility.

But then when did these two "actions in directions" first arise? The talk of prime matter and prime mover tries to bypass this question by just claiming their actuality, their divided particularity, as something static or eternal. So again, to get beyond the usual impasse, we have to have a triadic metaphysics where the grounding potential is defined apophatically in terms of what we consider to be the most fundamental pair of universals. If this is form and matter, then that is what a vague beginning swallows up.

Substance can't be the substrate of substance. But a potential could be divided in any fashion by a dichotomisation. And logically - reversing the hierarchical story to be seen in metaphysical development - the first dichotomy is then going to be whatever is the most general possible one. If generality has to set the scene for specificity, then that is why Anaximander (or the Hesiod) intuitively sought the most general possible dichotomy as the first act of world-creating symmetry breaking. And - back to modern physics - why a theory of quantum gravity seems fundamental to explaining the "how" of a Big Bang creation event.

Remember that I was talking about a contextless fluctuation. So it is the fluctuation that is an action in a direction. And these would count as the accidents predicated of the potential.

[EDIT] Also note that following the logic of vagueness - "that to which the PNC fails to apply" - the accidental vs the necessary becomes a moot distinction when talking about the potential itself. As complementary generalities, they themselves are only actual once stably realised in a world as contrasting limits on the nature of being.

So properly speaking, this firstness of a bare fluctuation is neither really an accident nor an essence during its first moment of happening. But retrospectively, as a stable world develops as a result, it can be seen to be more of an accident than anything else - given the apparent lack of a context to have been "its cause".

This is the difference again between reasoning about the general with the logic of particulars vs reasoning with a metaphysical logic that is rooted in a fully triadic view - one that dialectically derives the particular and the general from the vague.

I would also question pure form at the end. — Andrew M

Thanks for clariflying. And here I would clarify that I only mean that the form would be expressed in its most definite fashion at the end. It would become clear to see in the substantial end state of development.

So you keep repeating. But didn’t Aristotle leave some room for the accidental? - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(philosophy)

Just consider action and direction to be accidental properties of potentiality. They might get actualised as a bare contextless fluctuation, but it ain’t a necessity. However having happened accidentality and set off some reactions, then the regularity of a habit might well develop. Necessity might make its belated entrance on the scene.

Aristotle does in fact use the expressions “prime matter” (prôtê hulê) and “primary underlying thing” (prôton hupokeimenon) several times — Mitchell

Thanks. So you are thinking "hupokeimenon" here makes a further distinction in regard to substantial being? Or is hyle not meant to distinguish matter - as the ultimately unformed - from hupokeimenon in fact?

Prime matter is normally mentioned in contrast to a prime mover, isn't it? So in that context, it would be more generic than "prime substance" as it is matter and form that give you a substance.

However a prime substance could be read as a claim that the hylomorphic condition is what is most primal. The underlying substratum is that which already underwrites both material cause and formal cause in a most primitive sense.

I could get behind either reading to an extent. Though as I argue, neither completely works. You need Peirce's triadic metaphysics which starts with a primal potential - something that is neither yet material, nor formal, yet already the possibility for that hylomorphic combo to arise.

En-mattering requires in-forming. And in-forming requires en-mattering. And all that exists at the start is this mutuality, this dependent co-arising, as a potential.

The other obvious key difference is the Peircean view is based on form as constraint. So Aristotle still frames the issue as having to drill down to a substance than can underlie all construction. That was my point about him being focused on an actuality that can have potentials predicated of it.

It is presumed that for something to persist through all change, some quantity of that thing must be conserved through the whole history of the Cosmos. You don't get something for nothing. The Cosmos has a substance conservation principle.

But like Anaximander, Peirce is taken an open systems view. The Cosmos is formed by "pinching off" some quantity of substance in become semiotically closed by its particular sign system. Like an organism, or a dissipative structure, it sits in an infinite bath of potential, and then forms a structure that can feed off an inexhaustible supply that flows through it.

So again - as I remarked about material instability being regulated by stable information - the paradigm has to be flipped on its head. The substrate that persists through the material changes is in fact primarily the formal one of the emergent constraints.

Matter doesn't play the role of the stable unchanging stuff which gets reworked into multiple forms. Instead, it is the raw and unlimited action that gets constrained by some kind of global organisation of closure. Substance gets its "materiality" by prime matter or raw potential become trapped into certain restricted "habits". Finitude is what finality - final and formal cause - imposes on infinitely unbounded fluctuation.

Yet, you say my reading is tendentious! But, keep coming! You're more than halfway to NOT being physicalist already, you're only an epiphany or two away ;-) — Wayfarer

Never going to happen. Not unless I get a brain tumour or something. 8-)

Aristotle scholars call it "Prime Matter", not "Prime Substance". — Mitchell

Yep. That was my point. I was puzzled Andrew was calling it prime substance. But then I guess that the problem is Aristotle was ambivalent about the status of prime matter in exactly the way I tried to describe.

In places you can read him as trying to talk about pure potential. The material aspect of reality would be no more than "the accident of a fluctuation" - the possibility of an action in a direction, without yet a definite context - if we dial existence back to its first bare beginning.

But then - I agree - that even a fluctuation is already "formed" in some matchingly minimal sense. So you can’t escape this Firstness as being substantial as well.

It sounds paradoxical. My own reply is that at least Firstness or vagueness is our conception of whatever it is that could count as being the least substantial state of being. It is a suitably apophatic description. We can get some kind of useful handle on the Big Bang "pure materiality" this way.

Then also it feels right to assert that matter comes before form when taking this approach. If prime matter is a substantial state, it is the least substantial form of material/effective causality in lacking yet a world with a history that might provide any proper regulation. The full form of that world is not going to be completely revealed or expressed until "the end of time".

So finality, or the prime mover, is placed where it should be, at the other end of existence's journey. The Cosmos has to grow into its Being, even if - through mathematics - we can understand that Being to have retrospective necessity. If the beginning was a symmetry, then only certain ways of breaking that symmetry were ever possible. And so the form of the Cosmos can be regarded as latent in prime matter. It could be considered "prime substance" on that ground.

It's all very tricky. And the "prime problem" is that Aristotle was focused on how actuality creates potentiality, rather than the more truly foundational issue of how potentiality creates actuality. Or perhaps even just that the scholastics were interested always in arriving at that interpretation as they wanted to bend Greek philosophy towards the central purposes of their theistic metaphysics.

The need to assume such a principle, that plasma employs semiosis, which is contrary to the evidence, points to bad metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't see how that can be the case without there being mind in the first place. When Peirce says that 'matter is effete mind', this does seem to be his meaning. As we've discussed, he seems to have acquired this idea from Emerson, Schelling, Kant, and others of that ilk. He is also invariably categorised as an idealist philosopher - actually as an objective idealist. — Wayfarer

So, the reader or interpreter of symbols, and thus of form and matter, is herself exhaustively constituted by matter/symbol ('symbol' here understood in the broadest sense as inclusive of sign, icon and symbol). Matter/ symbol reads itself? — Janus

The pansemiotic claim is tricky. I readily admit that it is a speculative project. So I will try to explain it better.

Straightforward semiosis is no problem. Humans use language to regulate social behaviour. It is just taken as obvious that language is a symbolic activity where tokens or symbols are used so that a realm of ideas can interact with a world of material dynamics.

Then Peirce sought to define what was the "core machinery" by which language could gain this meaningful "modelling relation" with the world. He drilled down to describe it in epistemic terms - understanding semiosis as the logical act of reasoning. So words have their purchase over reality because of a triadic sign relation. There is the world. There are the signs we form that "represent" it. There is then our habits of interpretation - the understanding we form by virtue of a sign-mediated relation with the world.

This is pretty much straight linguistics. It is a more sophisticated take than Saussurean semiotics in being triadic rather than dyadic. Peirce makes the Kantian point that the sign stands between us and the world. And so the sign represents not just the world, but also "us". The signs we form are inherently "self-interested" in that they represent the world in terms that are pragmatic or purpose-imbued, not nakedly of "the thing in itself". So the mediating level of sign - the "umwelt" that forms our "state of sensation" - is a representation of our state of being, our wishes, desires, interests, and history, as much as it purports to be a representation of the world beyond.

Another important wrinkle of the Peircean approach is that he saw sign as itself having an immanent developmental story. It begins as merely a potential relation - an icon. Develops to become an indexical sign. Then only ultimately reaches full-fledged status as a symbol. So first it is just a picture that can be recognised as involuntarily predicting some state of affairs. Then it becomes a more deliberate pointer - like a dog's wagging tail or a road sign. Only finally is there a full "epistemic cut" where the relation between a token and what it stands for becomes arbitrary and therefore a wholly voluntary, or "self-produced", communicative act that requires interpretance.

The word "apple" - either as a spoken sound or scribbled writing - and an apple have no necessary connection. Therefore the habit of understanding the physical mark to mean something becomes entirely "mental". Mentality begins definitely at that point.

So semiosis is straightforward and uncontroversial. Peircean semiosis is pragmatic as it is clearly tied to an epistemology of the self. The sign relation makes us as much as it makes the world that exists for us. It is an understanding of language use and human reason that gets Kant and manages to accept the key part of idealism without rejecting what matters about realism.

Then armed with an understanding of the triadic semiotic relation, we can see that it applies to life as well as to mind. We can see that brains use neurons to encode the world, form a modelling relation with the world based on sign. And the immune system is semiotic. So is the gut. They use a system of molecular receptors to decide what is self and what is non-self. Then the genes of a cell are clearly a coding machinery, embodying a model of the self in a world in their ability to interpret the signs they are getting in terms of the states of being they are trying to achieve.

So science has no problem seeing Peircean semiosis as a completely general account of life and mind. It describes a triadic "world-making" relation that run all the way from the first biological act - the first time a molecule functioned as a message - right up through complex bodies, to bodies with brains, to brains with language, to languages that were logical, mathematical, and capable of "total reasoned abstraction".

Then we can start to talk about pan-semiosis. This would be a continuation of the story beyond the kind of complexity we recognise in living and mindful systems.

Now Peirce did attempt this with his Cosmological semiotics. He described the triadic relation in a way where the Universe's coming into being as a realm of definite law could be understood as the psychological development of habits of regulation.

As Wayfarer notes, late in life, Peirce did become overtly religious - or at least "spiritual". But how seriously should we take that, given that his semiosis arose out of a scientific psychological model, and then out of a logical generalisation of that psychology?

Wayfarer keeps returning to the one quote that is his convenient hostage to fortune. But it is unfair on Peirce to read his incredibly broad-minded approach to a "philosophy of nature" in such a narrow and self-serving fashion. His semiotics provides an intelligible bridge between the divided camps of physicalism and idealism. To claim Peirce is then just an idealist is cheap and slipshod.

Anyway, Peirce's cosmological semiotic is more a "logical poetry" than a physics-based theory. It was inspired by the dawning thermodynamic understanding of his time. It did foreshadow quantum physics in its emphasis on indeterminism and the observer-depend nature of reality. Peirce even foreshadowed general relativity in proposing that an evolving universe might show curvature over cosmic measurement scales - his early career as a scientist meant this kind of measurement issue was exactly his forte.

So the context of Peirce's cosmological argument was that he was fully up to date with the science of his age. And he could see that the Newtonian notion of an eternal Comos with fixed God-given laws was pretty "unnatural" in a world where mind, reasoning, growth and evolutionary development were a central fact.

Thus Peirce created his theory of an immanent pansemiotic cosmology where hierarchically complex existence was formed via a "universal growth of reasonableness".

The story went that in the beginning was a Firstness, a bare potential of spontaneous fluctuation or tychism. The sporting of absolute chance. So there was a vagueness with no particular matter or form. But then that meant there was nothing to prevent accidental fluctuations that were some kind of context-less event - a bare action with a direction of some kind.

Then if something could spontaneously happen once, it might happen again. With nothing preventing it, you would have a host of fluctuations and so now the Secondness of some more definite act of interaction. One fluctuation would react with another. The possibility of a history of collisions, deviations, agglomerations, deformations, etc, could start to form.

Then once you have this random play of interactions, regularities would start to emerge. Over time, a history would start to exist in a way that became generally constraining. A habit or state of equilibrium would result.

This was straight thermodynamcs. Inject a hot particle into a tepid gas standing at equilibrium and the particle will eventually knock about in a way so that its momentum converges towards the general average. A cold particle will get bumped and jiggled to heat it up to the average. So the laws of nature can be understood as nothing more than the kind of rational patterns that emerge as the "sum over histories" of a set of interaction - a prevailing statistics.

The Universe would have been born of unbounded fluctuations - the primal chaos of a Firstness. But it then could not help but to self-organise in the fashion described by both thermodynamics and quantum physics. The first random actions might have any direction, any strength. But then their interactions would thermalise them, tame them, bring them towards some common equilibrium that gave the Universe an overall direction or developmental flow. A collective history become a collective constraint. Existence becomes a single universal habit.

So Peirce's semiotic - the triadic system of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness - is the ontological version of his epistemic triad of world, sign and interpretance. Semiotics in the linguistic or psychological sense is about the symbol~matter distinction - the epistemic cut by which a realm of ideas can come to regulate a world of material dynamics. Now Peirce was using the same causal machinery to explain the physical world as if it had "a mind".

The metaphysical question becomes how much is this just a nice analogy and how much a proper theory of nature and existence? So pan-semiosis would be showing how it is actually a theory more than an analogy.

Well if we look at the way physics went after Peirce's time, we can see how the observer issue moved back to centre stage.

Newtonian physics was reductionist in being a realist physics based on just observables. Basically, humans believed they were looking at reality with a God's-eye view of it. There was no issue about where to place the epistemic cut between the observer and the world observed. Naive realism applied. Then came Kant to show the psychological problems inherent in that. And then Peirce - whose career as a scientist was all about science's fundamental issue of how to make an "objective measurement".

But the observer issue became central to modern physics in the 20th century. Quantum mechanics showed something really "weird" was going on as humans just couldn't seem to disentangle themselves from the world they wanted to measure. But relativity was just as weird. Again, an observer was only relatively disentangled from what they meant to observe. And even eventually thermodynamics returned the same metaphysical shock. Chaos revealed the initial conditions measurement issue for describing dynamics. The Newtonian approach to entropy turned out to be also the inverse of a measurement of observer uncertainty - the metaphysical twist that turned physics towards its new information theoretic perspective.

So nature really seems to be trying to tell us something. To understand it, we need a semiotic lens. A fundamental theory of nature will have to include the observer along with the observables in some formal fashion. We can't pretend to have a simple God's-eye view like Newton. The "mind" itself must be reduced in some completely general fashion. And Peirce offers the most general story on how observers and observables - selves and worlds - are developed through the mediation of the third thing of the signs that connect them.

So the metaphysical project is clear. Physics is already charging down that road. But there are still some paradigmatic shifts in thinking that are a long way off for virtually everyone. We can't "get" pansemiosis until we have made some quite significant changes in orientation.

The key one that currently interests me is the importance of material instability to the whole picture.

The usual assumption is that the material part of the story must be about stability, definiteness, concreteness, persistence. It just make sense that the material foundations of being must be sturdy for the more delicate business of symbolically-encoded complexity to arise. You definite parts to start constructing elaborate wholes ruled over by rather immaterial ideas or purposes.

But the recent biophysical revelations about the molecular basis of life show that a cell depends on its fundamental instability. All its molecular parts must be in danger of falling apart to make them in fact easily controllable by the cell's information. So life seeks what was, back in the 1980s, called the edge of chaos, or self-organised criticality. It is materiality at its most fragile or labile that is "living enough" to become the robust foundation of living processes. As what is poised on the point of falling apart is also poised on the point of falling together. All the molecular chaos needs is a steadying genetic hand - enough of a signal pointing in the "right direction" that is the falling together.

So biosemiosis is about this central understanding. Life depends on fragile material. It wants a material foundation so labile that it can then become "completely regulated" by the ideas and purposes remembered at the informational level of the genes. The job of stabilising is owned by the system's information. The mind of the cell - as a collection of learnt habits - is the source of its long-run stability.

So consciousness is often thought of as being centrally about spontaneous creativity and maximum fluidity. But neuroscience has also come to realise it is the same story of a regulation of uncertainty. The mind is centrally about habit formation. And it exists to stabilise a collection of useful physical or behavioural interactions with the world.

Any other model of "the mind" - like a spiritual or freewill one - is fundamentally flawed. Even the linguistic human mind is all about creating a social and cultural stability. Humans - as animals - are a bunch of unstable degrees of freedom. But language is society's way to bind humans into collective organisms. As we see in modern society, personal instability is promoted - we are brought up to imagine that anything might be possible in terms of how we might behave. And then that individuated instability becomes a potent energy that society can harness - keep nudging just enough so that we collectively fall together in some enduring direction while always seeming to be on the verge of catastrophically falling apart.

OK, this story of semiosis as "the stable realm of symbol regulating the instability of material reality" works for life and mind. Then pansemiosis would extend that to the physical world in general.

And again, this is simply just the view that physics has been backing into for about 100 years now. Quantum mechanics tells us the Cosmos is fundamentally indeterministic and then needs "a context" to collapse its uncertainty. What creates material stability is thermal decoherence. And this context, this history, is then "written into" thermal event horizons. The holographic principle shows that the physics of "material events" is ruled by the "information content" that can be encoded on the "surface" of a physical region of spacetime.

So it sounds odd if - as MU does - we try to understand pansemiosis in terms of the Cosmos literally having some kind of mind that is interpreting physical events as symbolic activities. This starts to sound like the pan-psychism of Whitehead and his prehending particles. Atoms are reading each other as signs rather than just colliding like material billiard balls. Spooky, hey?

But still, modern physics actually has rejected the material billiard balls now. Two particles crash into each other and recoil in some far less material way. In quantum language, the collision starts to become a blizzard-like exchange of virtual particles - tiny messages that you are getting too close to me and need to start backing off. The pressure of exchanges increases until the other particle is forced to veer off.

And then as we really step back to a quantum field description, the reason why two particles bounce off each other becomes just some kind of statistical effect - an completely informational one. The probabilities of where the two particles ought to be becomes exponentially "anywhere except as close as this". Even the last material connection of virtual particles has vanished. The quantum picture has switched to one of pure sign. All the physics can properly describe is the abstract image of a completely generic wavefunction. Somehow an observer must then intrude "physically" to tell us what actually happened on this or that particular occasion with the same kind of probabilistic set-up.

So I accept that pan-semiosis sounds weird. But reality is weird! And pan-semiosis is a metaphysics weird enough to account for all of the phenomena that science is most concerned about. It is a metaphysical machinery that can span the gamut from the quantum to the cosmic, the physical to the mental. Even if physics ends up calling it something else, it will still be pansemiotics as Peirce originally envisioned it. And it is quite nice that in theoretical biology at least, a conscious connection to Peirce has been forged in the public embracing of "biosemiosis" over the past 20 years.

So with prime substance we have true metaphysical immanence. — Andrew M

So where exactly did Aristotle spell out an argument for prime substance? Do you have a reference in mind?

Did you mean something like an Apeiron? I agree that nothing comes from nothing, but also it can't be the case that immanent being is an efficient/material tale of how something comes from something. That way lies only infinite regress.

So the Peircean take is that something definite arises semiotically from a "something" that is its radical "other". A Firstness, a logical vagueness, a bare potential. If the crisply existent reality we now see all around us is composed of a variety of hylomorphic substances, then logic can say that how that state of affairs developed was by some first act that is hylomorphism at its most decomposed. :)

So the first substantial act or occurence would be the least possible state of being in terms of being en-mattered and in-formed - some kind of spontaneous fluctuation.

This Peircean notion most resembles Aristotle's talk about prime matter. But I don't recall there being a reference to prime substance as such.

Janus is right. Here you are just trying to win an argument by playing with definitions.

Sure you can identify being with mind, consciousness or spirit if you are asserting ontic idealism. But the metaphysical understanding of “being” is the general one here. Idealism is just one of the possible ontic positions.

So, again, the question that occurs to me, is that if there is a top-down organising principle, as systems science seems to be saying, what is responsible for that, because the ‘immanent metaphysics’ model seems very bottom-up, as far as I can understand it (which I readily admit might not be very far.) — Wayfarer

The Peircean position which I take would see this matter - like a plasma - as the simplest form of actualised substance. Then human being stands at the opposite pole in being the most hierarchically complex form of actualised substance that is currently known by us.

So plasma is animated by top-down telos and order, as you would put it. It is hylomporhic substance. It is not bare stuff but stuff shaped by entropic purpose and lawful structure. Both a plasma and a human are fully developed, fully actualised, fully hylomorphic, substances. They just stand at opposite ends of a spectrum that defines the fundamentally simple and the massively complex.

So far, so Aristotelian. The physical difference between a plasma and a human is one of degree, not kind.

The Peircean twist would be then to question what makes life and mind distinctive. A human is not merely just more complex. A human is semiotic - a living organism in a modelling relation with its world. So there is this extra symbol~matter twist - the epistemic cut - that goes now to a difference in kind.

However then - a further now metaphysically speculative slant, as it is not quite yet mainstream science - we could see all nature ruled by semiosis. Even a plasma may have this irreducible structure in some meaningful sense. And so we would be able to track a continuity of kind (to some degree) as we go from living organisms back across the epistemic modelling divide to regard the simple material world again.

The advantage of this pan-semiotic view is that it would properly ground the phenomenon of living being in the world. It would articulate both what is the ontic difference, and also what is the basic dynamical causal mechanism “all the way down”.

Semiosis explains immanence or self-animation through an appeal to the dual reality of both matter and symbol. And it is nice if we can understand the symbol part as being there at the fundamentally simple level too - as we discussed in your thread on physics’ turn towards information theoretic descriptions.

I don't see how the repetitious maintaining of whatever systems, objects, processes, needs to happen. Novelty schmoevelty.. it's all the same- MAINTENANCE. — schopenhauer1

Are you ever going to deal with the reality that this could be your minority opinion. Maybe what you see as repetitious maintenance is something most folk are evolved to enjoy?

I mean, according to you, it would make no sense that I would ever have spent hours a day laboriously hitting a tennis ball back over a net, time after time. And if I couldn't find a hitting partner, I would even just use the wall. Yet no one ever forced me to do this.

Sure, you can also point to an imperfect world where jobs are dull and unrewarding. Life can involve a lot of necessary chores. But that just says something about those particular forms of activity. The fact that "work" and "repetition" can also be highlights of our existence means your basic thesis is flawed. The problem isn't with existence in general, it is with particular situations that we might feasibly improve upon.

I mean why do you keep repeating the same basic lament, laboriously re-typing the same sentiments? Why do you feel so compelled to maintain this system of anti-natal protest?

Is it work that you ... enjoy? :-O

It can't merely count as a distraction from the truth of existence if anti-natalism claims to be that truth.

So to answer your question, there are various realist views even within Scholasticism. But I think they ultimately boil down to either transcendent or immanent realism. — Andrew M

But immanence needs to account for itself by way of some inner mechanism. And Aristotle rather danced around on both sides of the argument.

As Boethius put it, "... Aristotle, however, thinks that they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in sensibles." — Andrew M

That is a familiar framing of hylomorphism that lends itself to a fairly nominalist reading. Actuality is substantial being. Potentiality is the properties that can be predicated of substance. Materiality becomes some sort of passive brute existence. This is an ontology of a world of already given objects, not one that is in fact a story of immanent development - a process with a self-structuring flow.

To be fully immanent, a tale of prime matter and prime mover is not enough. This is an ontology targeted at recovering the physics of a world already gone cold and congealed - a classical realm of atoms blundering about a void.

It is presumed that substance is ideally understood as a passive, enduring, solid, bounded, state of "matter with properties". That is certainly the world that is most immediately familiar to us, as humans, with human purposes. Our interest in reality revolves around how we can use the world to build things and regulate things. We are looking for the "secrets of construction". And so the idea of a stack of bricks and a set of architect drawings strikes us as the most natural image of natural causality.

But metaphysics has to step back and understand immanence in terms of actual developmental processes. It has to be more like Anaximander and Heraclitus. So bricks are mud that has ceased to be muddy. They are substantial only because they have approached the limit of a process - the entropy dissipating one of drying out and forming tighter mineral bonds.

A truly immanent metaphysics sees the material parts as much emergent as the "immaterial" whole. And so this requires a triadic framework. The part and the whole, the matter and the form, the physical degrees of freedom and the physically constraining laws, must co-arise out of a primordial vagueness or chaos.

Aristotle rather dismissed Anaximander and Heraclitus on this score. And he was right in a way.

There is a secondary story of actuality yielding potentiality in that once the world is substantially formed - once it is a realm of cold and congealed stuff, a clutter of material objects - then constructive causality really becomes a big thing. You have a foundational simplicity - some range of stable substances with their stable properties - that can then start to generate an emergent complexity. You have your world of atoms that start to combine mechanically and build more complicated designs.

So Aristotle is quite focused on that secondary tale - the one where constructed complexity becomes the further possibility immanent in any stable substance. Once you have a lump of wood, you can start thinking about fashioning a table. But give a carpenter a bucket of water, and the lack of inherent stability in the water means there is not a lot of furniture immanent in it. A water bed at best.

There is nothing wrong with telling this follow-on story where potentiality gets switched to become a predicate of substantial actuality.

But true metaphysical immanence is about how the potential produces the actual. And that requires a bootstrapping or self-structuring view of causality.

This is confusing, because nominalism is 'names only' - i.e. that what realists think are universals, are really just names for similarities. — Wayfarer

And so nominalism depends on an ontology where everything is a material particular. The differentiation of being is the primary fact. The integration we see and give name to is entirely secondary. It is not recognised as something that is equally real.

As I argued, a triadic metaphysics accepts that the integration, or the constraining top-down causes, are "merely" emergent and not primary being. But then so also is any local individuation or differentiation. The particulars are just as emergent, so have the same ontic status. Neither are "real" in that sought-for sense.

And even the primary reality is just a primordial notion of bare potential. It ain't "real" either.

You wouldn't say that laws are expressions of latencies that is actualised by concrete instances? I'm having trouble understanding 'emergent' as that seems to suggest laws or regularities are 'consequent to' - that first of all there's material bodies, then the laws 'emerge'. — Wayfarer

Development proceeds from the vague to the crisp. So from the first moment, both the universal laws and the concrete instances have only the haziest existence. The first act - the Big Bang moment - counts as no more than a fluctuation, a fruitful suggestion, the right start to a proper separation.

And we see this in the quantum physics of the Big Bang. It begins as a hot soup of radiation, an undifferentiated mess of potential being. There are no local definite particles. It's too hot and small. There is no organised physics of constraining forces. Again, it's too hot and small.

The strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, even gravity - none of these clearly exist at the first moment. The familiar laws of physics have not yet emerged. It takes cooling and expansion to allow the familiar laws to condense out and start organising the initial maelstrom fluctuation.

So electrons and electromagnetism are both emergent features of our classical reality. The particulate matter, and the laws that rule them, have to pop-out in mutual fashion due to developmental symmetry-breakings or phase transitions.

We can of course look back and read their future existence into the white hot and formless first moment of the Big Bang. The mathematics of symmetry now account for how they were inevitable as the way things would eventually get structurally organised. But properly speaking, both the matter and the form only emerged into actual substantiality when the Universe had developed enough to make another break in its initial state of high symmetry.

Physics already takes an emergent view of law as well as matter. Although it is true that most physicists wouldn't put it that way.

Whereas I had thought that in modern cosmology, something like the dimensionless constants (which might correspond to constraints) are real prior to the particulars, and that when laws to emerge, it's because these latencies are now being actualised - 'what is latent becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

The terminology here is confusing. Physics calls things like the various coupling constants of the forces "dimensionless". But the truly fundamental constants - the "dimensional" ones, the foundational triad of h, G and c - seem more properly the dimensionless as they are only measured against each other. They are bootstrapping in that they don't require measurement against some further external dimensioned backdrop. You can just set their "strength" to 1 and get on with it.

So the dimensional constants - h, G and c - are the properly latent ones as they encode the very fact of a "reality forming dichotomy" in my view. They are what I would rather call "dimensionless" precisely because they only stand in an inverse or reciprocal relation to each other. All the basic aspects of the Universe are a playing off of h vs G (that is: the quantum action vs the gravitational action).

The quantum action stands for a primordial notion of differentiation. The gravitational action stands for a primordial notion of integration. And then c - the speed of light - captures the universal "rate" at which they interact to form a substantial state of being.

So the dimensional constants are certainly latent in the potential that became the Big Bang cosmos. They are our most naked description of the fact that reality exists because any naked potential is a potential for just this kind of differentiation~integration kind of world-making dichotomy. If there is causality, it must take this logical form - material particulars vs global constraints.

Again, h scales the bare act of differentiation. G scales the bare act of integration. Once you have these two polar tendencies in operation - the "accident" of a Big Bang fluctuation - then you get the third thing of a rate, a universal speed, at which they mutually develop into increasingly concrete being.

The big question then is what to say about the dimensionless constants - all the further couplings strengths of the various forces and masses that become "exposed" due to further symmetry breakings as the Universe cools and expands.

It could be that they are mathematically hardwired as well. There may be a fundamental geometric explanation - a mathematical constraint that lurks and gives a constant its necessary value. Or it could be that we have to accept some kind of multiverse scenario where a random range of these dimensionless constants could be expressed. They themselves might be a "degree of freedom" within the bigger cosmos-forming picture.

The jury is out. But I obviously favour the simpler idea that all the constants will turn out to have a sufficient mathematical necessity so that our Universe can be understood as a single unitary "mathematical event".

All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? — Mitchell

There is also what CS Peirce called his extreme scholastic realism, or realicism. That follows from Avicenna and Duns Scotus. And it fits with a modern systems science view of causality.

The way I would put it is that universals are our names for natural limits. They are the emergent regularities - the symmetries or laws - that emerge to bound nature.

So as Avicenna argued, the world in itself is not pre-divided into the general and the particular - some realm of matter vs some realm of form, for example - rather it expresses everywhere that potential to become divided in this fashion. It can become organised or structured in a way that is understood as a separation towards these two complementary poles of being.

So the particular and the general are both limits - the furthest that reality can go in these two kinds of opposed developmental directions. The limits are themselves thus also real. They actually do causally limit reality's development. Their existence is not fictional, just as the fence around a paddock is really there.

But also, these limits or bounds are not real in the embodied, substantial, hylomorphic fashion that most folk mean when they talk of the "physically real". In being limits - the place where reality finishes or completes the fullness of its "coming to be" - they are also exactly where substantial reality ceases to be. The line we draw to mark the circle isn't part of the circle. We can certainly give a name to a limit - an edge where things suddenly stop. We can point in a direction to where it lies. However the reality of the limit lies in this apophatic fact. It marks the edge, the boundary, of what you are calling reality.

To flesh this out further, in systems science or hierarchy theory, we would call the general and the particular, global constraints and degrees of freedom. So universals really refers to the notion that reality is organised by its emergent constraints. Restrictions arise that give form and purpose to substantial being.

Then particulars are degrees of freedom, or the material and efficient causes of substantial being. Constraints give shape to bare material possibility. And then having being shaped, this stuff can start to have constructive action. It becomes a substantial kind of possibility - a play of atomistic being - which combines and reacts in the familiar Newtonian mechanistic fashion.

The explanation gets confusing at this point because an atom is a universal term. Just like any substantial being, we can point to the form and the purpose that gives an atom its shape - its mode of being as a degree of freedom, as a primary material/efficient cause, with the "goal" of blindly and mechanically reacting so as to produce more complex constructions.

However this is consistent with Anaximander, Avicenna and others who say reality itself is just the potential to become organised by a separation towards the opposing limits of particulars and universals, constructive degrees of freedom and limiting constraints.

Atoms are a substantial expression of this ontology on the smallest or simplest scale - as modern quantum particle physics makes plain. But the same hylomorphic principle applies at every level of substantial being, including the most complex, as with life and mind.

So this extreme scholastic realism or systems thinking treats both the particular and the general as limits. Both are emergent from reality - this "reality" being itself the third more primordial thing of a not-yet-divided potential with a readiness to become structured by the division represented by the particular and the general.

Reality thus - as Peirce put it - comes with an irreducible complexity. No one part of it seems actually real. You have a primordial potential that lacks either the particularity or generality of actual substantial being. And then the particular and the general are our names for the complementary limitations on actual substantial being. They are not "real" in the conventional sense either. They are just the two extremes of causal action - the emergence of regularity or law into the developing world, and the matching emergence of concrete or material degrees of freedom into that world.

Actuality or substantial reality is what you finally get out of this triadic or hierarchical process of development. It is the structured result - or at least our snapshot view of whatever degree of definite hylomorphic development has occurred by that point.

Again, it is all a flow, all a process of coming to be. The idea of arriving and becoming completely fixed in a classical physical fashion - a world of definite objects - is itself an illusion, not "real" in the usual way people want to mean it. Like Heraclitus and his river, it looks like an actuality, but actuality remains only relative.

To be actual would be to actually arrive at the limits we encode with the notions of constructing particulars and bounding generals. And achieving that would negate the fact that they are "the limits". If you could arrive at the edge of being, it would no longer be the edge. It is like claiming to have arrived at infinity having done enough counting. Finitude can't touch the infinity that bounds it, though it can strive endlessly to reach it.

To sum up, a long line of "systems" thought argues that the dualism or dichotomy of the universal and the particular can only be resolved triadically.

The usual view of realism seeks to make it a monistic choice - one or the other is the real "real". Atomism was the creed that material particulars are the primordially real. Platonism was the creed that formal generals are the primordially real. Then most folk get stuck with the feeling that both seem kind of real, and so some kind of confused dualism must be tolerated.

The way out of this is to go for the holism of a three-way developmental story. Which - being what we find right back with Anaximander - is also a pretty ancient metaphysical position.

Now we have an emergent systems view where in the beginning is just a bare potential - an Apeiron, a Firstness, an Ungrund, a Vagueness. That's not really real. But it can be logically divided. Dialectically, any potential harbours its complementary opposites. And so within the barest notion of the potential lies the possibility for a dichotomy of the general and the particular. You have two logically matched limits in terms of matter vs form, local constructive action vs globally constraining action.

These are not really "real" either. They are the ultimate limits on being as a possibility. They are the two directions in which a potential can be divided. They exist only as the ultimate extremes of those contrasting directions of development.

However together as a triad, these three can be seen as the fundamental aspects of a holistic reality within which hylomorphic substantial being emerges as an ontically structured state. A world of objects is what we arrive at.

So in the end, nominalism starts to look the correct view, the classical physics view, as we seem to exist in a static Universe ruled by abstract God-given (or mathematics-given) laws and composed of atomistically material particulars. (That is, if we can ignore the reality of bounding laws of physics, we can pretend that material particulars are all we need to consider as "the substantially real".)

Where does pseudoscience fit into all of that? If there isn't a hard distinction between those 3 subjects, can we expect there to be a hard distinction between good and bad science? — MonfortS26

Pseudoscience doesn't fit in. And so it falls out. Not a problem. That is where the feedback loop comes in. The method is designed to amplify the good and damp the bad.

The distinction doesn't have to be hard. In fact it doesn't want to be. It wants to be intelligent and flexible. It wants to be reasonable, in other words.

But philosophy does rely on observation of the world. There is a confirmation step involved in the beliefs it might form. Good philosophical argument involves being able to call forth particular examples that go to the generalities being claimed.

So philosophers, mathematicians, scientists and people in general reason in the same basic way. They make a guess, see that there are consequences of a view, claim support on the basis of what they then can observe.

If you tell me it is raining, I might ask how you know. You will say you stuck your head out and looked. There is no mystery here. I will think that a reasonable reply.

The difference arises in the focus of a discipline, in what it seeks to elevate to formalised practice.

Maths grants itself the freedom to become a pure play of deductive pattern spinning. There is no formal necessity to claim a connection to reality. Although maths is then culturally supported because it in fact does lead to some very big pay-offs in that regard.

Science then gets very serious about models of reality. It wants to formalise the act of measurement as much as possible - ensure it targets a notion of objectivity or mind-independence.

Philosophy plays another kind of useful game. It focuses on abductive conjectures and polishing the machinery of critical thinking. It doesn't have to be about the world. But it is hoped that it might be about the world. Ontologically, it wants to generate abductive possibilities. Then epistemically, it wants to cultivate the right kind of reasoning process. Through philosophy of science, for example, it wants to keep an eye on the habits of science, make sure they are still fit for purpose.

I'm not claiming there is a hard line between any of these reasoning domains. I'm saying they are all useful variations on the one theme.

And I'm not sure what you think could be the alternative. How can thought proceed except first with a fruitful guess, second with the logical working out of the general consequences of that, and third by some sufficient act of confirmation?