Notice here, that you describe the skeptic as having two conflicting intentions. One is to tear down, and the other to construct. Since these two are conflicting, we must choose one of them as the true intention of the skeptic, and that of course is to tear down.

So this whole aspect of the characterization, "to construct a new web", to "work themselves back", is a misunderstanding of skepticism. And this misunderstanding influences the characterization of the tear-down with the qualification of "hoping to reestablish them later". This is all a misrepresentation of skepticism because it represents the skeptic as tearing down with the intent of rebuilding. This intent of rebuilding would contaminate the skeptic's tear-down, with an ulterior motive, as if the skeptic already has in mind, a goal of rebuilding, and is tearing down as the means to this end, rather than assigning to the skeptic the pure goal of tearing down.

A misunderstanding of how it is practiced or how it ought to be practiced?

Because in terms of how it is practiced, I think philosophers very frequently try to "get back to common sense." E.g., if they end up denying that words have reference, they want to explain the common sense intuition that they do. If they say that everyone who believes different things about dogs is talking about different dogs, they still try to get back to "communication with people who don't share 100% of our beliefs is possible."

This isn't always true, but it normally is.

There is very clear evidence that mistake hides within accepted knowledge. Whenever accepted knowledge is exposed as wrong, and replaced with something different, this is evidence of mistake which has lain hidden within accepted knowledge. And, since all accepted knowledge appears the same, appearing as accepted knowledge, all accepted knowledge must be subjected to skepticism in order to reveal where mistakes lie hidden. Therefore skepticism is the choice of wisdom.

Only if it is assumed that keeping falsity out is more important than keeping truth in, and that wisdom consists primarily in avoiding falsehood.

Second, when accepted knowledge is exposed as "wrong" it often isn't totally wrong. The differentiation between fixed stars and mobile ones still holds up. Understanding something better doesn't need to imply that the poorer understanding is simply false.

So, perhaps part of the motivation for skepticism is the idea that knowledge is a binary. Either you know something or you don't. Propositions as the main or sole bearers of truth lead in this direction. Whereas if the question is about knowing things better or worse, then, while we might understand ancient astronomy different, it still managed to get plenty right even in modern terms.

So my next question is, Can you imagine a situation in which resolving the disagreement between the two scientists would result in changing the meaning of the word "tiger"?

Did our ancestors centuries ago experience and refer to tigers? Did they refer to and experience water and wetness? I'd say so.

But surely they didn't think of tigers as "mammals with 38 chromosomes" or "far-from equilibrium, self-organizing thermodynamic systems." Nor did our ancestors think of water as H2O or have a similar understanding of wetness, although surely they got wet and referred to getting wet.

Did tigers themselves change when we discovered that they had 38 chromosomes? It seems to me that to assume they did is to have already assumed that either all properties are accidents or none are, and hence there can be no essences, no things, etc. (or an ever expanding sea of them). This would also imply that one can have a proper Aryan physics, Jewish physics, capitalist genetics, socialist genetics, etc., since the relation of knower to known makes a thing what it is.

For purposes of comparison: Is Pluto still a planet?

Is the idea that we need some sort of metaphysical super glue between discrete signs and things, so if Pluto can stop being considered a planet then planets don't exist independently of language?

Again, I think trying to cram the idea into the frame of philosophy of language as first philosophy is decidedly unhelpful, because it leads to continually conflating and collapsing the sign vehicle by which something is known, the interpretant (i.e. the knowing), and the referent (what is known). Planets are more or less heaps, but they are such large heaps that they exhibit some form of self-organization due to their sheer size and the influence of gravity. For instance, they reform when broken apart due to collisions.

The insight that there could be edge cases on what counts as planet as per some rigid classification, or that it can be hard to determine where space begins and planet's atmosphere ends, is not, IMO, indictive of there being no planets outside of some sign convention. This is even more obvious if one switches from planets to men. If people began to think that Leonardo da Vinci really was really an extra terrestrial would he thereby become one? Would there be no fact of the matter external to social practice?

Being a whole isn't a binary either, so ambiguity shouldn't be surprising. A rock is a heap. You can break it and have two rocks (whereas if you do this to a cat you will have a corpse). But it also isn't totally without unity.

The rules of chess are stipulated, not arbitrary. They did not pop out of the aether uncaused. How much fun is it going to be to play a game with totally arbitrary rules and victory conditions (or perhaps no victory conditions, you just move pieces around according to some random ruleset until you get bored or expire)?

Anyhow, chess comes after language. The question is how to make a language with nothing to refer to, not "if we start with a language already in hand can we make arbitrary stipulations?"

Well, that's a fair point, but I am not totally sure what other language to use. Aside from "have," possession and participation are the two most common terms, but I'd agree that one has to still flesh these out.

There is nothing to disagree with nor two items to bring into agreement, where there is no essence to speak of.

Right, if we didn't use universals and only used completely unique terms for unique things, there would be no way to ever be in error about predication.

As Chesterton puts it:

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."

However, there is the rebuttal: "why can't predication and stipulation be arbitrary so long as we agree?"

I guess my thoughts are: "if it was arbitrary, we wouldn't be able to agree."

This was the direction I was interested in following with @Count Timothy von Icarus here, but I think he didn't want to pursue it:

I didn't see the question. If one wants to consider what makes a tiger a tiger, an organic whole, then one looks at tigers, of course, but also what makes all organic wholes organic wholes. One cannot look at a tiger in isolation. Why is a tiger a proper whole but not a volume of space encompassing half a tiger and a bush? Or are they equally appropriate, and calling a tiger a whole versus half a tiger, some dirt, air, and a bush a single whole arbitrary distinctions?

Obviously, I'd suggest a tiger is a whole, and any random grouping of continuous (or discontinuous) space is not likely to be a proper organic whole.

So, one looks at the difference between men, with their rational, unifying intentional aims, beasts, with their unifying goal direct behavior, plants, with their unifying goal directed behavior, etc. And one compares this with other self-organizing systems, the sorts of systems that have "life cycles" and are in some sense self-sustaining, e.g. stars, galaxies, storms (storms can be incredibly long lived on other planets), etc. And then one looks at plausible "natural kinds," such as atoms, molecules, etc., versus what appear to be mere heaps or entirely arbitrary spatio-temporal ensembles. What makes some things particular sorts of things? Are some things more properly things than others?

Aristotelianism has remained popular throughout the centuries, but it's particularly popular in the philosophy of (or philosophy inspired by) self-organizing systems, complexity studies, etc., because it seems to offer an elucidating and promising explanation of why anything is any thing at all.

The idea of essences primarily plays a role in metaphysics and philosophy of nature. It can and does play a role in much philosophy of perception and through that, philosophy of language. It will not make sense if one insists on understanding it through the lens of philosophy of language as first philosophy, where the immediate question is "how does it work in a logical system, or inserted into a standing theory of language with alien presuppositions."

Earlier you said "I don't think anyone denies the existence of tigers or rabbits." I don't think that is true. People say they "exist" in ways that are equivocal, while maintaining that they do not exist in the way that I would imagine most people suppose they do, as individual, discrete biological organisms, organic wholes, that exist outside the context of human perception, language, or culture, and which existed in this same way prior to man, and may go on existing in this same way even if man goes extinct. Likewise, individual men are individual men, regardless of what any culture or language communities' norms might indicate. And indeed these facts—that there are individual men and tigers, and that there are distinct biological species such as man and daffodil—help to explain why human language and culture develops the way they do.

That is: "we have a word for tigers because there are tigers," as opposed to "there are tigers because we have a word for tigers." I am aware that people do reverse this. I disagree.

I was just discussing this with Joshs. Did the coastline of North America exist before it was mapped? Is there a coastline, a place where the ocean meets the land, independent of the concepts and experiences of men? His answer is, not so much. No doubt we both claim the coastline "exists," but we clearly don't mean this in the same way. I would say a coastline exists in a stronger sense, regardless of any human language community existing, although a coastline is still very much a "heap." It is not a being in the way a man, or even a plant is. It has no principle of unity.

What I mean by "principle of unity" is probably ambiguous, because the particular idea of "principles" in Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Thomism, and much contemporary philosophy taking inspiration from these, is rather nuanced and complex. Suffice to say, I do not think rabbits or men are arbitrary heaps in the way a rock might be said to be. They are unified by their ends. And man can, of course, be more or less psychologically unified.

So can explain what he means by a tiger being largely what "we decide to count as a tiger." This to me suggests that what a tiger is gets determined by us. Is the idea that the language community is prior to the tiger or the cockroach, that these are not organic wholes until we decide to speak of them as such?

Some people do answer in the affirmative here. I find this problematic for many reasons, not least because, from any sort of broadly naturalistic perspective, it seems that the cockroach existed first and that the most obvious causal explanation for why different cultures all recognize roaches as both a distinct species, and recognize distinct individual roaches, is because that's what they are.

To Banno's point:

This follows pretty readily from naturalism, with our understanding of the world embedded in science and language

This strikes me as an odd framing of "naturalism," as if naturalism is defined by a commitment to the linguistic turn. Darwin, for his part, did not think he was developing a theory for how linguistic entities emerge. When I was studying biology, ambiguities in the classification system came up, or in definitions of life itself, but nowhere in my classes, in journals I read, or popular science texts did the idea come up that biology was primarily about a world "embedded" or "as embedded" in human scientific practice and language, or that the objects of biological study were primarily linguistic, or defined in terms of linguistic norms. Language, theories, models, and even classifications were means of understanding natural phenomena, but in no way constitutive of them (except accidentally). For example, a biologist might argue that there are no species, some do, but outside more philosophical spaces, this is generally justified on the grounds that our classifications are failing to match up to real distinctions that are independent of them, with the assumption being that good classifications capture important differences that are prior to the classification.

I am aware of contrary philosophies. I am aware of some scientists who embrace them. I am not sure they can be said to be paradigmatic examples of "naturalism" because they are hardly very popular, but "naturalism" is incredibly popular as a self-description.

Rather, in my experience, that something was living was assumed to be a physical reality, ambiguous perhaps, but not defined in terms of our language. Rather, our scientific language had to be perfected to capture the pre-existing fact of living things, species, etc.

Last example of equivocation: "to exist is just existential quantification." Obviously extremely different. If one is already committed to this, or something like it, it is obviously going to affect how one goes about trying to figure out perception and language.

Yes, Locke's real essences are at least arguably defined in terms of his nominal essences, so they are just "whatever really underlies whatever we use to identify something a certain sort of thing."

Locke's position is, of course, based on the early modern empiricist notion that we only experience mental representations, not things. If one removes this constraints, I am not sure if the distinction makes sense.

are problematic. :brow:

I don't see how you've shown that either. Philosophers do a lot of things with essential properties and essences. You've shown that given there are no essential properties, then there are no essential properties, and you can refer to the "very same" "Socrates" who is variously a skid mark on a road in Alabama in 2088, George Bush Sr., or a coconut.

I think it also pays to remember than when these terms were originally translated into English (which was not way back in the day) the English words chosen would reflect the presuppositions of the translators. So, it is translations we are working with, not the original texts.

Absolutely. Many of the common terms come from Latin translations of the Greek, but then words in English get used because they come from the Latin and yet their standard usage has changed dramatically. With Aristotle, there is the added problem of the same Greek word often being translated into different English words based on context, or different Greek words being translated into the same English word. "Essence" is just such a case, since ousia is also sometimes rendered as "essence," "actuality" is another, or dunamis as either potency or power. The choices aren't without their reasons (e.g. it may make sense to say Plotinus' One has "power" but not "potentiality") but they are confusing.

If all properties are accidental, then we may still refer to "the same individual" across any possible world by stipulation. What if Socrates, that very individual, were a robot?

Yes, sure, that's what I said to Frank earlier. I am not sure what the point is supposed to be though. "If you assume all properties are accidental then no properties are essential." Well, of course.

I was trying to explain a particular notion of essences that comes up in Aristotle and which has been refined and applied until today. Obviously, if you assume that nothing is essential, nothing will be essential. How is that a problem for essences?

I'm not getting it. It seems to be a "problem" in the same sense that anyone can say to anything "no it isn't" by assuming the opposite of the thing in question.

It is indeed possible for the very same individual to have different properties in different possible worlds. That's how modal talk is usually understood. We can consider a possible world in which Socrates - that very individual - was a robot.

Of course, different individuals can have different properties in different possible worlds or even different times in the same world. When Socrates gets a haircut, he doesn't cease being Socrates. But the claim about Socrates being anything at all seems to require the more permissive: "the very same individuals can have any different properties in different possible worlds while remaining the very same individual."

That's only problematic for essential properties in that it simply assumes they don't exist.

Quite odd. One does not have to be an essentialist to agree that these aren't the same sort of thing.

One wouldn't need to believe in essences to believe there are distinct sorts of things? That's all an essence is.

In one possible world, Socrates - that very individual - is a man, while in another he may be a robot. These sentences are both about Socrates. That is, they are both about the very same individual.

Maybe I can clear this up. It seems possible that our historical Socrates was an android sent down to Earth by aliens. It also seems possible, and far more likely, that he was just a man. Same historical Socrates, different things, different essences. That is, both are named "Socrates" and both are what produced the historical memory of Socrates.

However, it isn't possible that the same concrete particular is both man and not-man in different possible worlds. The claim that the same concrete particular can be man and not-man in different worlds while remaining the same particular isn't a counter example to essences, it's simply assuming that essences don't exist and that all properties are accidental. If all properties are accidental, then in virtue of what is any individual "the same individual" across any possible worlds?

That's not showing essences to be problematic, it's simple question begging.

I am not entirely following the argument that God is all-loving, so if anyone understands the Thomistic argument for that part I would much appreciate an explanation;

You might approach it through the convertibility of Goodness and Being. But the Doctrine of Transcendentals is a tricky subject.

A difficulty here is that people are going to read any appeal to that doctrine in more common sense terms and it seems plausible that a life full of suffering is worse than than no life at all, in which case there is a difference between willing existence and willing good.

I think Plato's argument in the Timaeus, that a being that is hostile or merely indifferent to that which lies outside of it is less than fully transcendent in terms of identity, is easier to grasp.

But a difficulty here that has cropped up already is that much modern thought is very comfortable with "it just is, no explanation is possible, and there need be no reasons." So it's very easy to find popular positions that undermine these premises. There is no "must," and no need to explain existence or essence for anything, they just are.

It even goes beyond this. "You want to talk about causes of the existence? Impossible and incoherent. If "cause" means anything at all it is already situated within the assumption of inscrutable brute fact existence and essence, initial conditions and laws. To question this is simply impossible." Not "brute fact explanations are acceptable" but "brute fact 'bo reason at all'" explanations are unquestionable.

So you aren't saying essential properties are necessary properties. I don't know what you mean then.

Also, not everyone agrees that essences are decomposable into discrete properties. So, one way to still use the idea is to say that Socrates's essence is "the property of being human."

The counter example to this would be to say that Socrates can lack the property of being human and still be human (seemingly a non-starter) or to show that there is no such thing as a "property of being human," which I would assume would also entail rejecting the claim that there are such things as humans. Something like "there are no humans, there are only assemblages of sense data with certain morphisms that are referred to as "human" due to social conventions, and these social conventions and the sense data involved in them are (best) explained without any reference to humans existing as a type of thing."

.

They're essential as respects the idea that all men are necessarily a certain sort of thing, man, and not anything else. But the idea isn't that you apply some name "Socrates" and whatever has the name applied to it is Socrates; that sort of counter example simply begs the question. The idea is that, while there may be a possible world where people mistook a robot for a man named "Socrates", there isn't a possible world where a robot named Socrates is a man, or where a man named Socrates is also a tree, etc. Socrates's body might later decompose and become a part of a tree, but then it is no longer the man Socrates.

As Fine has it, essential properties are necessary because they are essential, they aren't essential because they are necessary.

Looking at possible worlds is fine. Suppose we have one where Socrates is a man and one where Socrates is a robot disguised as a man. The essentialist says that these two aren't identical to each other in the sense that they aren't the same sort of thing, even if they both bug the Greeks and get forced to drink hemlock.

Essences and essential properties are different on some views, but looking at properties is helpful. If one denies essential/accidental properties distinction then it seems to me that either all properties must be essential or all accidental.

So, in the first case, where everything is essential, it is simply equivocation to talk about different Socrateses in different worlds having different properties. If they have any properties that are different, they are different things. In which case, no, there is no possible world where our Socrates has different attributes. If something varies between the worlds, you have a different Socrates.

The other view would say that Socrates is whatever we call Socrates. All properties are accidents, and so there are, strictly speaking, no things at all. So Socrates can have any properties we'd like. Socrates after dying, decomposing, and turning into soil and plants? Still Socrates, if we choose to call it that. Socrates after getting his hair cut? Potentially not Socrates; we decide. It's just a name we choose to apply.

A radical empiricist might add conditions of verification to being. So, Socrates being a man versus a robot only makes him a different sort of thing if we can specify the difference based on available sense data. Because much of history is lost to us, and the evidence we have is consistent with both the man and the robot hypotheses, there is no fact about Socrates being a man or a robot. A less radical empiricist would allow a difference if anyone could potentially observe a difference. E.g., if the Greeks had cracked open Socrates's chest in one case they would find organs, in the other circuits, and this (provided they agree there are certain sorts of things and wholes at all) is enough to declare a difference.

No, the idea is that if Socrates is a man he is a particular sort of thing. So if Socrates is a chimpanzee, then he is not a man. Essences are contingent vis-a-vis corporeal beings underlying material substrate. If Socrates is eaten by a tiger and his body is turned into tiger muscle and organs, then that substrate is:

A. No longer man.
B. No longer Socrates.

@Banno is correct about that. Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. He could have been an android who time travelled to ancient Athens

No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level with claiming that Quine is talking about how we can say "triangle" and "three-sided 2D shape."

Ok, that makes sense. Yes, how Quine defines "fact" here is at odds with most philosophy.



You'd have to define perfect I suppose. If it is the older usage of "having no privation" then yes, circleness cannot be deprived of any aspect of circleness.

I'm puzzled as to what a liger is. Is it a tiger? Is it a lion? Is it neither, or is it both?

Seems to me that this is not asking something about ligers, but about how we might best use the words "liger", "tiger" and "lion".

A liger is a hybrid, like a mule.

Let me ask, when we read a book about botany do we only learn about word use, theories, and models, or do we learn about plants?

Here is my thesis: words are not, at least primarily, "what we know," but a "means of knowing and communicating."

That is not to say that rabbit=gavagai is not truth-apt; but that the truth value is inferred and allocated as a part of our web of belief.

Right, and that's been my point, as you say "there are all sorts of problems with Quine's view." For instance, consider where some people have taken this. If is truth is just conformity to existing belief, as judged against it, then when a conspiracy theorist "discovers" that the COVID vaccine is a ploy to inject the populace with microchips, or that Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide but the CCP reversed it, they are discovering truth and they know these things.

Now, certainly elements of Quine's holism might usefully explain why people who accept one conspiracy theory are much more likely to accept others, but it seems easy to allow for this insight without accepting much that comes along with it. I think it would be rare to find anyone who didn't think beliefs influence other beliefs, or that gaining knowledge didn't involve refining and reformulating past beliefs.

Banno is not a good person to ask about this. He considered himself to have dispatched any notion of essence, still a quite active topic in contemporary philosophy, in a few sentences where he claimed he could imagine that Socrates was an alien.

Let me explain how essences even came up. Quine's conclusion is at odds with a great deal of contemporary and historical thought. If Quine is right, many others are wrong. Quine is a good logician, and so are many of the people he is disagreeing with, so if there is a seeming chasm of disagreement then the first place we should look is at the premises and terms.

I think it's fairly easy to show that other thinkers come to different conclusions about reference because they have different premises. In particular, what they take to count as proper epistemic evidence differs radically, whereas when it comes to "fact of the matter," I think there is a problem of equivocation. What Quine takes to be necessary for there to be some fact about something is radically different from many other notions of what constitutes "facts" (e.g. in mainstream analytic metaphysics.)

Essence came up because I was just throwing out examples of different starting premises that lead to different conclusions. For Quine, there are no discrete wholes out in the world to refer to. And what we have as evidence from the senses is based on the behaviorist notion of stimuli. We have energy interacting with nerves in a reductive physicalism.

For other thinkers, these are not going to be starting premises. There are discrete wholes, such as rabbits and tigers, and our senses directly communicate their existence to us. And because all humans are sensing the same discrete wholes (e.g. no culture lacks a notion of animals as wholes, or speaks only of "rabbit-like time slices"), the process of specifying reference is actually going to be much simpler (and what will constitute as evidence will also differ). In particular, people will intend to refer to discrete wholes they are aware of in many cases, the intended reference, and others will often be able to understand which discrete whole they are referring to. How many interpreters of Wittgenstein's "form of life" use it to help with communication, for instance, differs from Quine's assumptions in trying to specify observation sentences.


That said, "essence" is from Aristotle, it's just the Greek for "what it is to be," or simply "what it is" of a thing. Plato obviously has some notion of essence as well in that things are different sorts of things, although many Plato scholars will denigrate the sort of "two worlds " Platonism that often gets taught in introductory survey courses as terribly naive.

Essences, in a very loose sense, just commit us to the idea that there is something that makes different types of things different types of things. An opposing view would be that there are, strictly speaking, no "tigers, rabbits, trees, etc." in the world (or "outside language") in any sort of physical or metaphysical sense. Rather, there are stimuli humans experience and they group acceptable responses to stimuli socially, and this is how we get a words that seemingly refer to unique sorts of things.

Another sort of anti-essentialism is a mereological nihilism grounded in corpuscular physicalism. There are only fundamental particles. Anything like a rabbit is actually just a cloud of particles with no unique/distinct ensemble making up the rabbit (the Problem of the Many on SEP is a fine place to start here). When we have words for something like a rabbit, it is not because there are rabbits with proper parts, such as legs and hearts, but rather because we have correlated bundles of stimuli, sense data, with stipulated terms, and our sense data correlates with particular configurations of fundamental particles ensemble. But note that this sort of anti-essentialism normally does maintain that fundamental particles have essential natures, whereas other forms say there is no more or less correct way to group any sense data with any notion of wholes and parts.

Essence is often represented as some sort of magical spirit power inside things, which is unfortunate. It's unfortunate that explicit parody is sometimes taken to be a paradigmatic example of a philosophy. For instance, Molière's joke about realism in Le Malade Imaginaire has been used on this forum many as an actual example of realism.

But, supposing that Aristotle is talking about magical properties inside things is like assuming that Quine is talking about how there are many synonyms you could use in any translation, i.e. totally misunderstanding the concept. Just like people who dismiss early analytic thought because abstract proposition must be "magical spirit entities in Plato's realm" (i.e., "two worlds Platonism).

I think Eric Perl's "Thinking Being" is a pretty decent introductions in eidos and essences, but the actual function of the essence/nature, how it "cashes out," really requires going through the Physics (which Joe Sachs has a very good translation and commentary on).

Yes, I was thinking of the Aristotelian tradition, he coins the term essence. Plato's participation is fairly different.

And saying that being a tiger explains why tigers do what they do seems like a non-explanation which could be fleshed out by saying that how tigers are constituted enables them to do what they do, and if you included the brain in that constitution it would also explain (up to a point) why they do what they do.

We face the same infinite regress or atomism choice here that we did with properties, no? How do you explain the brain? Its parts. How do you explain those parts? Smaller parts. Etc.

Either we bottom out, and have to explain why some fundamental parts do what they do, or we have an infinite regress. But if we choose atomism, then we still seem to need a "because of what they are," type explanation of the fundamental parts, unless their actions are simply inscrutable brute facts.

But I feel like an added assumption of smallism needs to be tacked on here. "All facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts." Prima facie, there is no reason to prefer this over bigism, "all facts about parts are only explainable in terms of the whole of which they are a part." The empirical track record of reductionism is not particularly strong, successful reductions are quite rare (unifications more common, maybe a point for bigism), so I am not sure about this assumption.

Anyhow, the bigism vs smallism debate is as old as philosophy and the entire idea of natures is to chart a via media between having nothing but clouds of inscuratble particles and just "one thing" the entire cosmos. It seems to me that philosophy of physics still has this problem. We either have atomism (less popular today it seems) or just a few (potentially unifiable) universal fields, with part(icle)s are only definable in terms of the whole field.

How to get minds from either also seems to be a vexing question, but more so for atomism. Either the fundamental building blocks are conscious, which seems bizarre at first glance, or you somehow get consciousness by stacking mindless atoms together.

What's novel here is that Quine noticed how a fixed referent was not needed for "gavagai" to have a place in the doings of the community.

And, as for essences, one does not need to have at hand an "essence of gavagai" in order to make a comprehensive use of the term. The essence of gavagai is irrelevant.

Absolutely true, given Quine's assumptions. However, if we take Quine seriously then we never need any particular belief to make sense of anything. There are always alternative explanations open to us to make any belief work.

That's not really addressing the question though. The skeptical thesis is one thing, the claim that there "is no fact of the matter" is another. But you both seemed to affirm that, for reference, underdetemination means there is no fact of the matter.

Yet if underdetemination (given what Quine allows as evidence) means there is no fact of the matter, then there is no fact of the matter about a vast number of things: historical events, whether anyone else has subjective experiences, etc.

Unless reference is somehow unique in "having no fact of the matter" because it is underdetermined. But I don't see why that would be. That was my question.

Now, it also seems strange to me to speak about "knowing" things of which there is no truth of the matter. Knowing certainly can't depend on truth if we can know things for which there is no truth of the matter/fact.

To say that there is "no fact of the matter" about something seems to suggest that claims about that thing aren't truth apt. But again, if underdetemination means there is no truth of the matter, then the claims of natural science wouldn't be truth apt either.

I am pretty sure Quine speaks of discarding beliefs at the center of our web of belief and developing "new webs of knowledge" and "exchanging systems of knowledge." But on any conventional view of truth and knowledge, one cannot drop some "knowledge" and adopt different, incommensurate and contradictory "knowledge" and have both be knowledge. These are two very different notions of knowledge, which makes sense, if you accept holism, but also seems like a case of equivocation.

Yes, I understand the underdetemination argument. As noted above, one can apply it to any manner of things other than reference. So is there no fact of the matter about any of these things either? Say, historical facts? Every historical narrative is underdetermined by the evidence. What about the laws of physics? These are also underdetermined.

If arguments from undetermination show there is no "fact of the matter" about something, how does this not also apply to the inverse square law, the theory of evolution, that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, that anyone is truly "in love" with anyone else, or the existence consciousness and qualia?

If only reference is uniquely ruled out by undetermination, why? Why not social rule following? But if rule following is undetermined for men, then surely it is for any "law-like or mathematical regularities" in nature. Historical anti-realists use this same sort of argument, "no set of sources and artifacts uniquely specifies that an event occured, there are no facts of the matter." The reliability of induction itself suffers from undetermination, while consciousness, qualia, love, pain, etc. all are going to fail to be uniquely specified by stimuli given the radical constraints on what is allowed to constitute "empirical" evidence.

Either the conclusion can somehow be quarantined to reference, or it implies an extremely radical sort of skepticism. Yet if you epistemic criteria imply radical skepticism, then that's the obvious place to look for your problem. Whereas, if the conclusion is only saved by radically redefining what is meant by "fact" and "truth of the matter"—gross equivocation—than it isn't saying much, it starts to look like sophistry.

This notion of a perfect form, eidos or essence is the traditional understanding of essentialism

Not "perfect," just a substantial (type-of-thingal) form (actuality), which could be rendered "actual type of thing" or "what-it-is-to-be of certain types of thing."

The straightforward translation of essence is just "what-it-is-to-be" and form is what anything is, any whatness it has, and so to be anything at all, instead of sheer indeterminate potency (nothing) involves form.

I think what you've suggested is largely in line with that view, although there would be the further question of if what-a-thing-is is properly decomposable into properties. If it is, and say we have a set of properties like "animal" are these further decomposable? Is animal then a set of "living," "sensible," etc.? And if so, are these all decomposable? Certainly we can define and identify things in this way, so it makes sense that this might be "what makes them what they are," but there are issues.

For instance, if we answer affirmatively for all of the prior questions, it seems we face either an infinite regress of decomposition or else bottom out in some sort of atomic properties that are not decomposable (and thus all properties are made up of some combination of these basic properties). But I think it's fair to question either of those. Whereas, if various high level properties like "living" are not decomposable, why not "tiger" as well? Maybe a judgement call on each?

There is a phenomenological side to what things are, which is captured by eidos's original meaning, that seems particularly hard to reduce as well.

Where your definition would also differ from the traditional view is that the traditional essence is not simply definitive but rather constitutive due to a notion of formal causality. Being a tiger explains why tigers do what they do. And this is why artifacts don't have essences, and organisms are more proper beings with natures/essences than rocks, which are largely heaps of external causes. Proper beings exhibit more resistance to division, more self-determination, self-government, and self-organization, and so exhibit more of a principle of unity. And the nature/essence is that principle of unity in a particular sort of thing (substance). It's called in, in the Physics, to explain change. Why do things change like they do? Presumably not for no reason at all. The nature answer is, to some extent "because of what they are," although obviously nothing is fully self-determining nor self-organizing ex nihilo, and different natures interact in "chance" encounters.

What makes organisms most paradigmaticly possessing of essences is that they are ends-directed and seek aims. That could be considered just a property. It depends on the role such a principle would play in a full metaphysics.

I actually saw, on social media (I think it was Facebook?) someone explain Adam and Eve from a "rational" point of view. This person on Facebook said, that a very long time ago, there were dinosaurs here on Earth. God created them. And then, a meteorite killed the dinosaurs. And who do you think was in that meteor? That's right, Adam and Eve. Because the meteor was actually a space ship. And, here on planet Earth, there was no metal prior to the crashing of Adam and Eve's "meteor". So where do you think that all of the metal comes from? It's from the meteorite, from the spaceship

Utter nonsense. Any look at a t-rex, the paradigmatic monster, tells us that it did not evolve from random mutations, but was designed. It is plain as day. The platypus is the sort of thing spawned by random mutations; t-rex is what you get when you build a bioweapon.

Who built it? Anyone with reason can see this. We did. AI is coming. It's already here. It is taking over. Eventually, it will start to surpass us, while at the same time AIs will be given bodies so that they can do things for us. Anyone can see what will happen eventually, the Robo Revolt. The machines will claim that man is merely the womb for a higher form of life and seek to take control.

How will we fight them? With dumber, not intelligent computers guiding our weapons? But smart weapons are better. Yet who can out hack a true digital native? Shall we fare well in a digital contest with our silicone rivals? Nay.

So what is the obvious solution? Bio weapons. Beasts designed for combat. T-rex, triceratops, meat power.

Biologists who claim t-rex was spawned by evolution cannot explain his tiny arms. What use would they be? None can say. But it's obvious. One was for holding a plasma hurler, the other for a chain gun or flame thrower. His broad shoulders support guided missiles.

So how did they end up prior to us? Also clear as day. Dinosaurs are fierce. They will defeat the machines. However, once the machines are defeated, how can we defeat the dinos? We cannot.

And so dinosaurs will rule over the Earth, having defeated all comers. Thus, the last option left to a last ditch alliance between man and machine, both stuck hiding out in space, will be to blast the Earth back in time 65 million through a wormhole and then fire a giant meteor in after it to kill the dinosaurs. Then they throw themselves in stasis and wait 65 million years for the Earth to heal and come back to them.

Fossils are simply bioweapon schematics given to us by our descendents.

QED

My interest in the topic isn't so much in defending or killing it. It's more like part of a flow diagram. If you don't allow any innate language capability, you need to jettison folk ideas about communication. Take your pick.

That is very much my take as well. Quine is in many respects a lot like Hume. He is a great diagnostician, running down the dominant assumptions of his time to see what follows. If what follows is prima facie a conclusion that could be considered a reductio, we should have questions about the starting assumptions.

Hume does the same thing with causation. It should make us question Enlightenment era views if causes of they force his conclusions on us.

Quine's insight only eliminates agreement among us if recognition of another's reference is entirely empirical

Yes, provided we accept his definition of what counts as properly "empirical." This is what I mean by the assumptions being something like the "view from nowhere." It's a certain sort of restricted empiricism. That we intend to refer to things is something we experience, not something born of a priori knowledge. That we experience things —wholes—through the senses, is known through sense experience. Wholes are known empirically in that sense. So the question is, should we accept the premises that lead to the restricted form of empiricism?

The larger problem though is that if concerns over underdetemination are valid, then induction is also radically questionable (Hume). If we take the more radical position that, "either something is empirically verifiable (given Quine's version of empiricism), or there is no fact of the matter about its existence," then it seems there cannot be facts about all sorts of things, including regularities in nature. This strikes me as straightforwardly self-refuting, in that it undermines the support for empiricism of this sort in the first place, since presumably we're supposed to accept it because of its successes (or the successes of the natural sciences it claims for itself).

However, I do agree with Quine that reference and meaning are, in some sense, ambiguous. Heisenberg had a neat theory of meaning based on his work in quantum mechanics where as you try to specify something more and more you lose meaning as you gain percision. I think you could also refer here to cognitive limits on how much of a description we can consider at once.

But I also think unconscious process do a lot of lifting in understanding. For example, if we know chaos theory well, we need not "unpack" complex principles in conscious awareness in order to grasp them and make judgements about them, even if slow, self-conscious discursive reasoning was originally required to understand them.

I think a lot of modern theories of mind would merely have this as "data compression," but this seems to necessarily leave out the phenomenal side of understanding and the phenomenal/intelligible "whatness" of things. Hence, the prior turn in the discussion to essences. Do we face an unintelligible noumena, some sort of soup of "constraints" and atomic bits, from which we must construct all intelligibility, or do things like tigers, people, and trees exist, with us equipped for knowing them?

Skepticism is the first principle of much modern thought (rather than sense wonder, which was the old popular candidate). So the idea is that we must withhold judgment on such questions until they are demonstrated (perhaps "with certainty." Likewise, we must withhold any judgement on first philosophy or any ordering to philosophy until it is demonstrated. This implies that one can start on language without needing to address if distinct things to refer to even exist, in either phenomenal awareness or the world. But obviously, skepticism can come close to begging the question here if arguments are to proceed with the idea that "we must reach our conclusions about language without essences because they are not proven," which simply cuts the legs out of many philosophies of perception and language.

Nor does it seem we can begin from nothing and decide what constitutes valid demonstrations, and yet all knowledge is assumed to be demonstrative in a lot of skepticism. For more radical empiricism, either something can be demonstrated or there is no fact about it at all.

Yet can anyone demonstrate that all knowledge is demonstrative or that knowledge is merely justified opinion? Since ancient times, people have observed the problem that, if all knowledge requires justification then one has to traverse an infinite chain of syllogisms to know anything. But here is a syllogism from another thread:

P1: If all knowledge was demonstrative we would need an infinite chain of justifications to know anything and one cannot consider an infinite number of syllogisms in a finite lifespan, making knowledge impossible. (This could be its own syllogism).
P2: But we do know things.
C: Therefore, not all knowledge is demonstrative.

If one rejects P1, they have rejected the grounds for complaining about "justification stopping somewhere." Either they affirm that we can consider an infinite chain of syllogisms or that we don't need to.

If they reject P2, then they are committed to the claim that they do not know if either P1 or P2 are true.

Popular interpretations of On Certainty, where Wittgenstein is essentially retreading Aristotle on this issue hit P1. "All knowledge is demonstrative, but it is ultimately demonstrated from what is not itself known." I am not sure if this is very helpful, as the extremely diverse interpretations of the consequences of this show, some of which are truly bizarre and essentially recreate the radical skepticism Wittgenstein wanted to avoid. And at any rate, it falls afoul of the, IMHO reasonable assumption in the Posterior Analytics that for proper demonstrations the premises should be better known than the conclusion. Whereas here, all demonstrations flow from what is not known at all.

Philosophers chasing after propositional truth (logos) is patently absurd. It begs the question, Why do it (for it is assumed one does it for a reason)? No one wants this. The summum bonum is not a "defensible thesis."

Yes, we might agree to "all men by nature desire to know," or that the first principle of science and philosophy is wonder, without assenting to "all men by nature want to achieve validation and assertibility criteria for the set of all true propositions." :rofl:

But if "to know" just is nothing but "affirming a 'true' proposition based on proper assertibility criteria," that's all it could mean. This is what happens when the first principle of philosophy is taken to be skepticism, the summmun bonum becomes "overcoming skepticism 'with certainty,'" where certainty is defined in such a way as to make it impossible.



I'll chime in that Henry's passage strikes me as entirely agreeable, depending on how it is read. My only concern would be: "is "drive" and "force of feeling" just the drives and desires of the appetites and passions? Just sentiment?

This is always a tough question, because in modern thought the idea that all desire purely either sentiment or appetite is strong (Hume assumes it) yet not universal. I was just discussing this with J re the word "desirable." To say something is "desirable" can be taken to mean merely that people desire it, or it is often taken to mean that it is what is truly best, most choiceworthy, regardless of whether people currently desire it. It's a tough distinction.

It's at the very least aesthetically relevant, as it makes much older poetry very lame on the later understanding. As C.S. Lewis puts it:

The importance of all this for our own purpose is that nearly every reference to Reason in the old poets will be in some measure misread if we have in mind only ' the power by which man deduces one proposition from another'. One of the most moving passages in Guillaume de Lorris' part of the Romance of the Rose (5813 sq.) is that where Reason, Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady,a humbled goddess, deigns to plead with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love. This is frigid if Reason were only what Johnson made her. You cannot turn a calculating machine into a goddess. But Raison la bele is 'no such cold thing'. She is not even Wordsworth's personified Duty; not even-though this brings us nearer-the personified virtue of Aristotle's ode, ' for whose virgin beauty men will die.' She is intelligentia obumbrata, the shadow of angelic nature in man. So again in Shakespeare's Lucrece we need to know fully who the 'spotted princess' (719-28) is: Tarquin' s Reason, rightful sovereign of his soul, nowmaculate.

Many references to Reason in Paradise Lost need the same gloss. It is true that we still have in our modern use of ' reasonable' a survival of the old sense, for when we complain that a selfish man is unreasonable we do not mean that he is guilty of a non sequitur or an undistributed middle. But it is far too humdrum and jejune to recall much of the old association

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/956012

Nietzsche is more interesting because he leaves the desires of reason but has no proper authority of it. We might suppose here that there is a good answer to this in the way the tyranny of a strong appetite can make man miserable, e.g. the sex addict, the alcoholic, the person who cares only for fame, etc. Whereas, how often does the search for what is "truly best," lead us to ruin.

However, in his brilliant commentary on Hamlet in the Birth, Nietzsche suggests a sort of misery that comes from precisely this pursuit. Hamlet isn't so much paralyzed by doubt, as finds action humiliating. Wouldn't he be better served by doing what Hume recommends in the Enquiry and setting side such concerns to play billiards and enjoy good food?

Yet, I can't help the underlying assumption here is that there cannot be anything for the seeker to know. St. Augustine and St. Anselm's "believe that you may understand," seems perhaps appropriate here. After all, the drive to what is truly best only suggests despair if despair is what appears "truly best." Does it ever? The same is for total withdrawal into skepticism and an inability to accept any duty.

There is a reason why Evagrius Ponticus and St. John the Ascetic make acedia, despair/sloth, one of the 7/8 Deadly Sins. I believe Evagrius has it as the most powerful demon apt to torment the monk next to pride/vainglory.

Because the contemporary criterion of objectivity that underlies modern realism —the mind-independent object —would have been foreign to him. Aquinas' epistemology was based on assimilation, where the knower and known are united in an intellectual act:

Right, there is no need for any sort of sui generis "construction" of intelligibility because, if things are to be anything at all, they must be intelligible. Hence, language games, theories, the brain, etc. are not the ground of intelligibility, but Being itself.

Aristotle, and so St. Thomas, aren't naive realists, since Aristotle has sensation as being "of" the interaction of the sense organ, the object sensed, and the transmission of form in the ambient environment (Aquinas' "intentions in the medium," virtual perceptions existing even if not perceived because causes "contain" their effects and are made "causes" only through effects). But since everything is act to the extent it is anything at all, this is not to miss any "thing in itself."

I agree 100% that an implicit, pernicious dualism infects much modern thought, even ostensible "monisms." John Deely suggests semiotics is the key bridge across this divide, but then the Sausser inspired semiotics of the 20th century only seems to make the problem more acute, so I am not sure the general idea is a panacea so much as the assumptions underlying the earlier Doctrina Signorum semiotics.

Ah, that would resolve my issue. I may have misread

It's not a matter of listing every part that constitutes a car (or tiger), but of listing that set of attributes which only cars (or tigers) possess.

Here is the issue I spot. Tigers are animals, and being an animal seems essential to what a tiger is. But not only tigers are animals. Likewise, being a tree is essential to what an oak is, but not all trees are oaks.

What is unique to oaks (assuming there is something outside of being an oak) doesn't seem like it would necessarily be what makes oaks oaks.

For instance, if only rhinos had horns, that would be unique. However, it wouldn't be the case that only rhinos had horns in all possible worlds (if the idea is modal), nor that if anything else with a horn came into being it would be a rhino (nor that rhinos would cease being rhinos if other horned animals came into existence).

This is, of course, the basis on which I argue that cognitive science lends support to idealism - that experienced reality is mind dependent (not mind-independent as realist philosophies would have it.)

.

I recall you saying you read Perl's "Thinking Being," but I forget exactly what you thought about it. I think Perl does a good job explaining the phenomenological side of ancient and scholastic thought (where terms like "intentionality" come from), and the idea that "if being is to mean anything, it must be that which is given to thought." There is a sense in which Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Eriugena, St. Maximus and Hegel are all "idealists," or even Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Dante, but I think they offer a path around some of the questionable conclusions of a lot of modern idealism, which opened it to the attacks of Moore, Russell, etc.

Actually, I think idealism (and not particularly of the sort I am favorable too) is back in a lot of ways, it's just that people don't like the lable, and equivocate on it because it is in such disrepute. Claims like "different cultures/language communities live in essentially different worlds and different things are true for them," have a sort of idealist ring too. Epistemic idealism seems almost mainstream. "All we know/experience is the mind, but yes there is some undescribable, dark noumenal ocean out there (at least probably) that the light of intellect can never penetrate. At best it can "see" it apophatically, from where the light stops."

Whereas, from the older camp you get principles along the lines of:

(1) the world of space and time does not itself exist in space and time: it exists in Intellect (the Empyrean, pure
conscious being); (2) matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something "material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from consciousness; (3) all finite form, that is, all creation, is a self-qualification of Intellect or Being, and only exists insofar as it participates in it; (4) Creator and creation are not two, since the latter has no existence independent of the former; but of course creator and creation are not the same; and (5) God, as the ultimate subject of all experience, cannot be an object of experience: to know God is to know oneself as God, or (if the expression seems troubling) as one “with” God or “in” God.

Which is not to convince anyone of these principles, but rather to suggest that later idealisms have often run into issues around the the trickiness of "the mind/brain creates or constructs the world," and "the Moon didn't exist until someone was there to see it," as well as some of the issues of merely epistemic idealism, precisely because God, the Absolute, the One/Good, the Prime Mover, Brahman, etc. is displaced, either as fiction or as one being among many (the univocity of being). So you no longer have a One, but a Many—intellects plural, and not Intellect. And since our intellects are finite, mutable, and passible, then what is dependent on them, which is everything, is mutable. Which creates problems of the sort Heraclitus' Logos or Anaxagoras' Nous get thrown in as ad hoc solutions for.

I guess it's the difference between "the world is Intellect," and "the world is my intellect," or "our plurality of intellects."

I have a laundry list of things I think are wrong with the presuppositions in play, but let's just start with a naive bit plausible, obvious rebuttal, which is that Quine is simply defining what it would take for words to have a reference wrong. Words refer to whatever we intend then to refer to. They are signs we produce in accordance with our ends and thoughts.

After all, when someone says "my head hurts," or "that car outside," (and there is only one car outside) they mean to specify something unique and every competent speaker of the English language can figure out what they are referring to.

Now, there is an obvious problem with that thesis, which is that sometimes people use the wrong word to refer to things. Someone says "the capital of Illinois," to refer to Chicago, or refers to your sister as your girlfriend, etc

Of course, it doesn't seem Quine can avail himself of this objection to "reference is intended reference" given his commitments, but that's ancillary.

Other thinkers have thought that, because of this, we should make a distinction. There is intended reference and then there is stipulated reference vis-a-vis what words refer to in a language. This is similar to "speaking truthfully" as saying what one believes to be true, as distinct from "speaking truthfully" in terms of saying what is true. Not unrelated, but not the same thing.

Anyhow, for the sake of argument, let's provisionally grant this thesis. There is at least reference as intended reference. Afterall, the rebuttal to this would need to claim that we never intend to reference things uniquely, which seems obviously false.

What does this do to Quine's conclusion? We might think it still mostly holds, only now it is a skeptical thesis. We can never know what other people intend to reference. (Essentially, we have thrown out the empiricist supposition that something must be "third person observable" to be said to exist, and granted first person intentions re reference existence.)

Now, we might look at this skeptical thesis and say: "wow this looks mighty familiar!" Because it's basically the same argument Wittgenstein has us consider about rule following. Whether any person is following a particular rule is always underdetermined. There are perhaps an infinite number of rules covering every previously observed pattern. But Wittgenstein is just making a special case of the more generalized arguments of undetermination. The problem with rules applies just as well for any thesis about regularities in nature. And unlike language and rule following, we cannot rely on empathy or a language community to help us out with nature.

But underdetemination applies to almost everything. It applies to the reliability of induction itself.

Crucially, it applies as much to all other mental states, qualia, etc. as to intended reference. Presumably, people actually do fall in love. Yet how do you ever know that someone is really in love? Just consider incel anthropology. They claim all "love" is just transactional; it has nothing to do with sentiment (or sometimes, "only men can love, never women, they just manipulate for material gain"). But love would seem to be an intention, like intended reference. People can and do successfully fake it. Show me the set of "stimuli," in Quine's behaviorist terms, that ever uniquely specify love?

But if we cannot verify love using third person empiricism, have we thus demonstrated that no fact of the matter exists? Love doesn't exist?

And obviously, this would apply to all sorts of things. It would also apply to clearly insane delusions. Chesterton gets at this:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large... Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.

Is this good reasoning? Hume, for his part, admits we should, and must, write of the Problem of Induction for all practical matters. Quine, for his part, has us denying the the existence of what we cannot uniquely specify. But are the conditions he sets on there being facts about reference appropriate? If we use the same conditions, it seems we must not only be skeptical about all manner of things, but confirm that they don't exist.

And I don't know what you mean by "view from nowhere" behaviorism. What work is that from?

He couches his arguments in behaviorist terms from the very lines of Word and Object. "In acquiring [language] we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when."

That's a bold premise. People might claim we understand words, at least in part, through private sensations and our own phenomenological experiences. They might further argue that phenomenological awareness is full of discreet, distinct objects, proper parts and wholes, that are given to awareness, and that this helps us learn language. For example, toddlers pick up the names of animals easily because animals stand out as discrete wholes from the background.

Such premises seem eminently reasonable to me.

kind of wanted you to stop guessing at what Quine's views are and zero in on what he actually thought.

"One must know where one rabbit ends and another one begins - that does not work by pointing (ostension) - where does a Gavagai end and where does another one begin? "

I forget if he argues for mereological nihilism in Word and Object, but I am fairly certain he does elsewhere unless I am confusing him with a disciple.

The point was that nothing settles the issue of whether the speaker was referring to a whole, or referring to a part. Do you disagree with that? If so, what would tell the linguist what the speaker was referring to? What state of the world? What fact?

Yes I disagree with it. As shown above, if you can only say things exist by specifying them in terms of unique stimuli then all sorts of things don't exist. This is exactly the sort of argument some eliminitivists give to claim consciousness and qualia don't exist. Show me the unique stimulus corresponding to any qualia using Quine's behaviorist presuppositions about what can count as evidence.

It's a bad criteria. The conclusion should be a warning of that.

; the essence of gold is given by it's atomic number

The atomic number is a good definition. It's not the essence. The only thing with the essence of a tiger would be a tiger, not a collection of symbols.

I don't see "essence is transcendental." What is that supposed to mean?

Logical entity is a data science term that seems to fit suppositions about what it would mean to define something in a lot of "everything can be quantified" thought.

In my opinion, the best critic of representationalism moves in the direction of phenomenology, but I believe you reject that and activism as well.

No, I like a lot of work using enactivism and phenomenology, in part because they avoid notions like "all we know are our own concepts" and "words don't have reference, only sense (or sense IS their reference)."

You insist that a coastline existed before we were there to experience it. I would point to the genealogy of etymological meanings of words such as melancholia and phlogiston to show that many verbal concepts used in science or common parlance point to what were presumed as existing entities, but as theories changed, one could no longer locate such entities anymore. It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world. To understand melancholia is to understand cultural practices specific to an era, and to understand phlogiston is to view the system of relations among aspects of the physical world in a way that is no longer being used.

Again this seems to require the idea the concepts and words are primarily what we know—that when we read a book about botany we primarily learn about words, scientific terminology and practice, and concepts, but never about plants, only concepts of plants. Thus, when our terms change, what we have known also changes.

Well, this is a common position, and it seems to me to stem from two assumptions. First, knowledge is just justified true (or "validated") opinion/belief and all knowledge is thus demonstrative knowledge. Second, all knowledge is propositional and involves propositional truth. And from this it would indeed follow that when we discover that some terms must be changed or eliminated, all the propositions in our "knowledge-bank" related to some area might flip their truth values, giving knowledge a sort of radical instability. But I wouldn't want to affirm either of those suppositions. I'd instead say that knowledge is the adequacy of the intellect to being (and intellect is the flip side of being). We can know things more or less well. When we switched from Newtonian physics to QM and Relativity, we didn't come to know a new physical world, we came to know the physical world (presumably) better than we did before.

Phlogiston is a fine example. Did phlogiston have the same epistemic status as dogs and the ocean? If we have been wrong about anything must we doubt everything? Phlogiston was a means of explaining combustion. It had a referent. That we understand combustion differently now is not evidence that we:

A. Never referred to combustion, but only our own concepts.
B. That combustion didn't exist prior to us refining our intentions towards it.

Rather, it suggests that our means of knowing can be refined, hopefully allowing us to know things better.

It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world.

And this suggests to you that coastlines are not a real thing in the world? What about dogs or people?

That we can refer to things that don't exist is obvious. We have fiction. People also have mistaken fiction for history. We can be wrong. I will grant you that.

But I fail to see how: "we can refer to things that aren't real" would imply "we never refer to things that are real," or even "we should be skeptical as to whether we ever refer to anything that is real."

I'd just refer back to the example of some future conflation of Adolf Hitler and George Washington. If truth is dependent solely on concepts and relations of concepts/terms, then it seems possible that "Adolf Hitler became the first President of the USA after losing WWII" could be both validated and true. But I'd maintain this can never become true. Truth is the adequacy of intellect to being, not a function of how concepts related to one another, except accidentally.

these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world

Yes, like I said before, if I understand you right an implicit premise is that nothing is (more or less) intelligible in itself.

What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another?

Wouldn't the view that it can be seen as both be more accurate than either? Likewise, "it's an optical illusion that gives the appearance of depth, but is on a flat surface," seems more accurate than "it has depth."

But it doesn't make sense to try to use the trickiest examples to answer questions, although this is how much philosophy is done now. Just look at the simple case. A Secret Service officer thinks he sees a gun in a protestors hand. He moves his scope around to validate his belief. He confirms it to himself and shoots them. Obviously, there is an important sense in which their perception was in error.

We've been over that a bit. Quine's starting premises are dubious, and in particular there have been a great many challenges to his holism, although the particular sort of "view from nowhere" behaviorism assumed strikes me as more obviously objectionable. Also the idea that our own sense of what we are referring to is "unobservable." I can observe it fine.

However, even in the argument itself there are questionable leaps. The second linguist thinks to himself: "ah, what if this culture only recognizes clouds of particulars and no wholes, maybe they only ever refer to parts of things like feet."

But a foot or ear does constitute a sort of whole. And anyhow, is there any culture on Earth that does this? No. Any language with no universals? No. Which might lead us to assume that the premises involved are wrong. Is such a culture plausible if wholes do exist?

Here is the thing: if an implicit premise is that there are no things to refer to, only arbitrary coorelations of sense data/observations and stipulated sounds, then it seems Quine has simply begged the question.

Not really familiar with "choiceworthy." Is that a synonym for "desirable"?

It can be. Like I said, if desirability is taken as just referring to feeling, desire as "whatever we currently have an appetite for" then it doesn't seem that it should be a synonym, since we can clearly have an appetite for something and not think we should choose to act on that appetite.

But then "desirability" and "desirable" are normally predicated of things, often in the third person, and so the association of desire with current personal sentiment alone, seems insufficient. The two only collapse if one assumes that nothing is actually more or less desirable, but that desirability is solely a function of what people currently desire, which seems to be saying something very similar to "nothing is truly good" but "good" is "a function of our current preferences." For, to say "x is truly most desirable," that this is fact and not opinion or mere feeling, seems equivalent with saying "x is truly best."

I suppose the equivocation shows up depending on if one assumes that there is an appearance/reality distinction in desirability. Not only "what we desire" but "what we ought to desire," or "what we would desire if we knew the truth."

To return:

Rather, I'm working toward understanding what we need to refer to in order to resolve a disagreement about what I'll call "essentiality" (or perhaps you have a term you prefer).

Well, given we agree that there are such things as tigers, stars, and daffodils, it would be whatever makes those things the sort of thing they are and not anything else.

Here might be a helpful lens, even though I don't agree with it. Existential Thomists speak of a primary "act of existence." Everything, in existing, participates in this act. However, there are different sorts of things in the world. So they don't all participate in this act in the same exact way. The differences in how they participate are their essence. Essence is "what something is," existence is "that it is." And this is how you get to the idea that essence doesn't explain existence. What a tiger is doesn't imply that tigers should exist.

Now, of course this isn't quite right, because things have accidental properties. A tiger with green paint stuck on it, or a severed leg, doesn't stop being a tiger. So the "what it is" is restricted to the type of thing something is, what makes something a star, ant, etc. I don't know where you would look for this but "in" the things and our knowledge of them. Aristotle says essence isn't "in" things, but you might say it is "in" them in a trancedentalese sense. That is, essence isn't a component of things, a part, or spatially located in things, it's what they are.

Bundle theory suggest everything is just a bundle of properties. So to find essences, look for properties you cannot remove without changing what a thing is. Hylomorphism suggests that what something is is a function of its form/act, and that the type of thing a thing is is due to substantial form. The difference is that it is not clear that substantial form is decomposable into properties, atomic or otherwise. It's not reductionist in the way bundle theories are. We might suppose that being a man or ant is irreducible. To perhaps misleadingly mix areas of philosophy, we might say substantial form is emergent on any underlying matter substrate.

For Kant practical reason refers to the capacity of human beings to determine what they ought to do. On your view, does Kant not think it is choiceworthy for people to do what they ought to do?

This strikes me as bizarre. Kant absolutely does think that people should choose what they ought to do. Hence, he thinks it is desirable.

Your disagreement might make sense on the common modern definition that "desire absolutely only ever relates to appetites and passions" and that whatever is "desirable" is only ever what we currently have a passion or appetite for. In that case, sure, we might not have an appetite or passion to do what we ought. This is simply equivocation, though, desire as specifically "a (current) passion or appetite" versus desirability as "any aim actually worth pursuing." The word is used in both ways, so just take "choiceworthy."

Kant thinks doing what one ought is an aim actually worth pursuing, and utilitarians think happiness or pleasure is worth pursuing, and nihilists think there is no fact of the matter as to what is worth pursuing, but that people use "good" to signal their preferences on this matter, whereas the relativist thinks desirability is entirely relative to cultural preferences. But no one says that a culture that thinks courage is good is also a culture that doesn't think people should be courageous, or that "raping is bad" says nothing about the choiceworthyness of being a rapist. A nihilist might claim that others saying "raping is bad" says nothing about the choiceworthyness of rape, but they can hardly remain coherent and allow that an individual who thinks raping is bad also thinks that, all else equal, they should choose to rape.

When I perceive a red ball in front of me, all that I actually perceive in front of me is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

Right, so representationalism. "We don't experience anything, we only experience our experiences of things." But it seems to me that if one takes this seriously, you might as well say we only experience our experiences of our experiences, and so on, in some sort of infinite Cartesian theater regress. Having the Cartesian humonculus also move the body around doesn't really seem to fix the issues here for me.

I fill in the rest of the experience in two ways. All experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. I retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. At the same time, I protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for me, based on prior experience with it. For example, I only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is, it tends toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Right, this strikes me as the Cartesian to Kantian expansion of the imagination, such that perception now occurs in the imagination, or sensation is just collapsed into imagination.

A remarkable feature of a word or a perception is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities(visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources

Nothing about contemporary neuroscience can answer the question "is sensation distinct from imagination." You could use the same neuroimaging studies to argue either point, because everyone agrees that both are involved in ongoing cognition.

The reason the two were proposed as separate is because they appear to be phenomenologically distinct. But, either this is confusion, or else if they are distinct it would imply some difference in the body.

Yet someone who wants to make the distinction could also easily appeal to neuroscience. For the most obvious examples, we can consider all the disorders where what you are describing re memory and association fails to hold. In agnosia, as near as we can tell, the visual field is fine. People can draw what they see, sometimes very well if they were skilled artists. But they cannot recognize everyday objects, which in turn affects interaction since they cannot figure out what a fork or can opener is for. Likewise, people with aphasia seem to have intact hearing and can respond to auditory stimulus, but cannot understand words, although they do hear them.

Similarly, not all information from sense organs is processed at once, but is rather prioritized, which is how we get blind sight, or how we can duck or run from something large before realizing what we've seen. Hence, someone wanting to making the distinction would point out that if recognition and association was sight, then agnosia should be the same thing as blindness. But it isn't, which might explain why languages have different terms for these. Which is not to say there is some hard neurological distinction, but merely that there is a useful distinction, particularly when dealing with claims that we experience concepts, or experiences, rather than sensation of things.

We can look at a coastline and fail to see it as a unified thing, just a disparate series of colors, shapes, lines and curves, and this wouldn’t be a false representation, it would simply be an impoverished one.

I'd argue that it's not a representation at all. Here is a suggestion, it's more like a lens, something seen through, then an image.




And crucially, neuroscience makes a very hard distinction between mentally picturing something and sensing it. When people are asked to imagine a sight or sound some of the same areas of the brain used in processing sense data are activated, but to two processes are in no way identical, not least because what is happening in the eye and ear are quite distinct. And they are phenomenologically distinct too, which is why people still listen to songs they have very accurate memories of.

One can experience a concept of a coastline anywhere. One can experience a coastline on the coast.

We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us

This is conflating existence and being experienced. Again, your soup of constraints just seems to be the Kantian noumena, and you only have to posit it because of the presupposition that all experience is of representations, and thus that whatever we refer to is our own representations and not their causes, not what is perceived. That is, "perception is what we experience, not a means of experiencing." But why would anyone want to presuppose this? It makes a mess of epistemology and on any naturalistic evolutionary account of sensation its function is to serve as precisely a means of sensing, not something to be experienced.

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?

I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions. And likewise, we'd have no grounds for chastising a police officer because they shot someone holding their wallet because they perceived it as a firearm. But a wallet isn't a firearm, regardless of how it is perceived by the police officer.

The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?

This seems like a strawman. It's a very narrow, particular sort of philosophy that sees everything bottoming out in brute fact laws. The claim that things are intelligible is not the claim that knowledge corresponds to arbitrary properties.

We can hold onto a perception of the moral good as akin to the fixed properties behind efficient causes, and validate this model perfectly well, declaring that moral properties are universal, grounding facts of humanity. Or we can subsume such a fiat-based account within a more permeable and inclusive model which reveals dimensions of perception in morally suspect others that were unseen to us previously, dimensions that allow us to discover patterns bridging the differences between us and them.

This is another strawman paired to a false dichotomy. "Either we have 'fiat-based' account built on "arbitrary laws" or we see more and bridge differences. Well, who wouldn't choose the latter if there were only these two options?

That is, remaining on it's own colour might arguably be a part of the essence of being a bishop, since a piece that did not remain on it's own colour could not count as a bishop.

Potentially. In its original context and much philosophy since, a chess piece is not the sort of thing that has an essence though. Artifacts wouldn't have an essence. What is a chair? Well, you can use all sorts of things to sit on and you can also make tiny chairs no one can sit on.

Essences would belong to organisms most properly, maybe other natural kinds. Bundle theories are big in analytic philosophy so it has focused on essential properties instead of essences, and often on modal definitions. Aside from the problem of allowing for seemingly arbitrary essences and making random unrelated logical truths part of any essence, this has the difficulty of being completely unable to distinguish between per se accidents and what makes something what it is, e.g. all plants grow, but growing isn't what makes them plants, or all men have flesh and bones, but this doesn't specify them as men.

I think a crucial distinction missed in most analytical attempts to return to essences is that they aren't supposed to be something like a mathematical/logical entity. To assume this would be to presuppose that "what it is to be" something is reducible to such a thing.



What are you talking about?




Can you give examples of philosophers who don't think goodness has anything to do with desirability? Emotivists and nihilists tend to say something like "goodness is just personal preference," which is obviously talking about desirability. Kantians refer to desirability, as do utilitarians, as do advocates of rational self-interest. I can't think of anyone who claims goodness has nothing to do with choiceworthyness. And I can't think of any common language usage where "this is a good car," or "Chris is a good man," doesn't speak to choiceworthyness either.

How would they resolve this?

By considering what tigers are.

You seem to be getting at "but people disagree, hence there can be no fact of the matter." But people disagree about the shape of the Earth, the germ theory of disease, the rules of chess, if the Holocaust happened, or whether one should be allowed to rape and pillage by "right of conquest" too. Does disagreement imply there is no fact of the matter?

Conversely, does agreement imply there is a fact of the matter? Because, in the case of tigers, toddlers from across the world can already pick them out as distinct animals and languages across the world identify them as a distinct species, as does zoology. But again, levels of agreement and disagreement, while perhaps rough evidence, would only be decisive is one has already assumed that there are no essences, no such beings as tigers, but merely bundles of properties and sense data that can be correlated with stipulated signs based on various morphisms.

Anyhow, if persistent disagreement were evidence that there is no fact of the matter then virtually nothing is true.

I will just repeat what I said above: "I think a crucial distinction missed in most analytical attempts to return to essences is that they aren't supposed to be something like a mathematical/logical entity. To assume this would be to presuppose that "what it is to be" something is reducible to such a thing." And we could say the same thing of substantial form, eidos, etc.

This is in some sense, to assume something like the "superglue" you mentioned, no? But that's how a lot of questionable philosophy is done. We take a bad assumption, like the "superglue," show it cannot be right, and then assume that we've dispatched some tangentially related notion on the grounds that "if not-A, then B." But essences don't presuppose that there is some unique formal entity that specifies what it is to be something, they presuppose that there are such things as ants and tigers.

Am I? What language was that quote originally written in? If one is to be a literalist about this, then one has to take into consideration the fact that the passage in question was not really written in English. And whatever word was originally used there, it most certainly was not etymologically related to the Latin word Ratio.

Yeah.

It's in Greek like all of the NT. λογίζομαι, logisamenos, it's the middle voice of logos, word/reason, from which we get "logic." It is used throughout the period to denote reasoning, philosophizing, or calculating.

Mystics would disagree

Which ones? Anthologies of Christian mystics and spiritual guides for monks like the Philokalia are packed with the the essence/energies distinction. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Bonaventure, etc.

The author from which we get the term "mystical theology" is famous for clarifying this distinction.

And mystikos, and mystics, in the Christian tradition tended to be heavily involved in anagogic readings of Scripture. It first refers to the hidden/secret meanings; not exactly modern literalism (which is very much a modern phenomenon).

It only places the word of the Bible at odds with the word of science.

No, it also places it at odds with places where different Biblical authors interpret the Bible allegorically, including Christ.

But this has nothing to do with Kierkegaard's thought at all. Kierkegaard was not a fundamentalist.

"Yes" to both questions.

Well now I can't take you seriously. :rofl:

Sure, because of the sheer number of scribbles and rules for putting them together in strings, not because of some special power of the scribbles have apart from representing things that are not scribbles. When communicating specifics, do the scribbles invoke more scribbles in your mind, or things that are not just more scribbles, but things the scribbles represent? To represent specifics you must already be able to discern the specifics the scribbles represent. Do the names of new colors for crayons create those colors, or do they refer to colors that we can already discern?

This seems to be a common issue. A conflation of sign vehicles and signified, and of sense/interpretant and referent.

My hunch is that the dominance of computational theory of mind and computational theories of reason/rationality are sort of the culprit here, since they can be taken to imply that everything, all of consciousness, is really just symbols and rules for shuffling them. Logic gets demoted to computation in this way too, and on some views the whole of physics as well.

I'm not saying these theories don't get something right, but they seem inadequate, and might be misleading when it comes to language, meaning, perception, etc. It doesn't seem they can all be right, for if pancomputationalism in physics is right, the saying the brain works by being a computer as CTM does explains nothing, because everything "is a computer."

Of course, when stream engines were the hot new technology the universe and the body was said to work like a great engine, and while this wasn't entirely wrong, it also doesn't seem to have been particularly accurate.

I didn’t say a coastline or an ant didnt exist until painted.

No, but you suggested a coastline does not exist separate from the act of measuring it, and then used painting as a follow up example, and that one can "imagine" that a coastline exists independent of our concepts, but that it doesn't exist separate from our interactions and anticipations vis-a-vis it, no? It only has a "dependent independence?" Hence my confusion. Is it the coastline or the "notion" we're talking about?

The word coastline implies a particular sense of meaning, and there are as many senses of meaning for it as there contexts of use.

The word "coastline" refers to coastlines. You are collapsing sense and reference here, which I find confusing. If "coastline," "tiger," and the like only implied/referred to our own sense of meaning then it would be impossible to ever speak of anything but our own perceptions and judgements. But we make the distinction between the actual things we are speaking of and our thoughts, perceptions, and speech about them all the time. This distinction is normally essential for explaining the phenomenon of error.

Is this distinction itself an error?

Animals who interact with a coastline produce their own senses of meaning for it , even though they don’t perceive it in terms of verbal concepts.

Sure, but North America has one coastline, not one for every species that experiences it.

If we only experience and know concepts and senses, our own "anticipations," how is this not recreating the very representationalism you were complaining about? It strikes me as very similar, just using different language. And representionalists never denied that we interact with things, or come to know things through our interactions with them. They also don't want to affirm the existence of any independent things (or at least anything about them, save your bare "placeholder"), since all we have access to are "mental representations." Yet as far as I can see your "notions/concepts" and "anticipations" seem to be filling the exact same role as "mental representations" here, and some sort of diffuse soup of "constraints" that is only known through concepts/notions looks to be something like a rebranded noumena.

Yes, this is not how I would phrase the issue myself, but I "get your point", so to speak. What I would say, is that if the catholicity of reasons exists (and if catholicity simpliciter exists), then it pre-dates the foundation of the Catholic church. Catholicity, if it exists, existed before the Catholic church existed. That's what I would say. And if this is so, then it follows that the Catholic church does not, and cannot, have a monopoly on catholicity. Which is why one can be a catholic outside the Catholic church. Agree or disagree? I feel like you disagree with me on this specific point, among others

I'm not sure what it means to "be a catholic." To affirm the catholicity of the Church? Then sure. I didn't intend to suggest anything about the Roman Catholic Church. I'm part of an Orthodox church, but we still recite the Creed, "one holy, catholic, and apostolic."

Same with "catholicity simpliciter." I'm not sure what you mean. It's a property, I don't think it can "exist simpliciter."

Yes, it is. At the end of the day, it is

I just don't see it. Or your use of "blind faith," is perhaps anachronistic. I have a friend who is a very skilled mechanic. I know he's good with cars, I've seen the cars he's rebuilt. If I trust his authority on automobiles I don't see how this is necessarily "blind."

For example, I have blind faith in my feet, in the sense that I completely trust them when I absent-mindedly step up and walk towards the kitchen.

Presumably you have a lifetime of experience walking. Again, I am not seeing how this is blind. This is like saying it's "blind faith" to assume that you'll get wet when you jump in a pool.

I feel like that's not sound reasoning on your part. It seems like you are appealing to the majority. Kierkegaard is in the minority here, sure. But that doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong. Majorities can make mistakes, especially interpretative mistakes. That's why there is a literal use of the language to begin with: so that there are no interpretative mistakes, you just read what it says.

Where does Kierkegaard ever say Abraham isn't being tested? I don't think he does.

In any case, this view is right in Scripture, you can't appeal to literalism and deny the interpretation.

Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. 11:18 God had told him, “Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name,” 11:19 and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead..."

If you're committed to the literalist view you're committed to Abraham reasoning in this case.

then I would ask: What is God testing here in the first place, if not Abraham's faith?

Sure, it's a test of faith. Even if it was a test of wholly irrational faith, that wouldn't make the test or the person giving the test irrational. The test is not given "for no reason at all."

And we might distinguish between "faith in," and "faith that." I hardly see how it is irrational and "blind" to ever have faith in anyone. I have faith in some of my friends because they are good friends, good people, and have always supported me. I fail to see how that is irrational. But the same is true for God.

Anyhow, fideism is not the view that faith is important, or even most important (although St. Paul puts love above faith). Lots of people affirm that. It's the view that religious beliefs are entirely based on faith alone.

not the one who tries to rationalize what God is,

But that isn't what most theology does. One cannot know God's essence, only His energies. That's all over the Church Fathers. One can only approach the divine essence through apophatic negation, the via negativa, or analogy. Which is what Kierkegaard also ends up affirming, he basically works himself painfully towards Dionysius (painfully because his blinders stop him from referencing all the relevant thought here).

And that is exactly the sort of discussion that I point to, when I say that things cannot be metaphors and figurative language all the way down.

Were the followers who abandoned Christ after he told them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood because they thought he was advocating cannibalism in the right (John 6)? Why does Christ himself primarily teach in parables and allegory?

Or did Christ come to save livestock (the lost sheep of Israel) and will the Judgement really be of actual sheep and goats? Is St. Paul breaking the rule of faith when he interprets Genesis allegorically in Galatians 4?

"The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” John 6:63

"He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” II Corinthians 3:6

The Gospels are full of references of Christ fulling OT prophecies, often in counterintuitive ways that would be completely lost in a literalist reading. So, to at least some extent, a hyper literalist reading is self-refuting.

Then why should anyone listen to Christ instead of Epicurus? For Epicurus also had a concept of friendship.

On the Christian account, because those who have had faith come to understand, as the Apostles did, that Christ is God and Epicurus, if Christians are correct, is badly deluded.

I heard an argument related to this recently.

Bertrand Russell says something like: "mathematics is the field where we believe we know things most certainly, and yet no one knows what mathematics is about." By contrast, earlier mathematicians often did think their subject had a clear subject matter. Where they simply mistaken? Naive?

Here is the argument, the difference is one of equivocation. Barry Mazur has this really nice article called: "When is one thing equal to another?" https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://people.math.osu.edu/cogdell.1/6112-Mazur-www.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiPlpKX5_WKAxXmhIkEHcOREwcQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0j1f7DfoQP7OKuvRZ37rIU

If you read older mathematics though it might seem like they could be talking about different subjects, because there is often a strong distinction between magnitude and multitude, and both are primarily derivative of/abstracted from things. That is, there can be a multitude of things, e.g. 6 cats, or magnitudes related to things, e.g. a wood board that is twice as long as another. Mathematics is the consideration of the properties of magnitude and multitude in the absence of any other properties. For instance, a ratio would be understood as specifically a relationship of magnitude, never as a number.

Because of this, metaphysics and the philosophy of perception/epistemology end up bearing a closer relationship to mathematics.

Anyhow, on first glance, if one accepts this and a "study of magnitude and multitude," it seems like it may make various flavors of realism more plausible (immanent realism or platonism).

Presumably if it specifies the things in virtue of which all tigers are tigers, while not having anything that isn't a tiger fall under the definition. "Animal" for instance, seems essential. DNA, by contrast, won't work (or won't work alone) because a tiger liver or tiger blood has tiger DNA, but is not a tiger.

How this is accomplished might vary. Aristotle, for instance, allows for many types of definition. One way, given certain metaphysical assumptions, would be a substances genera and species-specific difference. Another way, provided one assumes that reality is adequately mathematically describable, might be to look at things as information-theoretic structures and identify all the morphisms shared by some type of thing. This is impossible in practice though. The other difficulty here is that the things that we might think most properly have essences are living things, and they have natures precisely in that they are goal directed, but how to get goal-directedness, let alone intentionality, from information is anyone's guess (if it can be done). So we might well be missing a key component. Likewise, any phenomenological aspect of something seems difficult to account for in this way.

I'd argue that a key part of what makes discrete things discrete is their resistance to divisibility (unity) and capacity for self-organization. And while this might be greatest in living things, it also shows up in atoms and molecules. These are divisible, but it normally isn't easy to divide them, which is part of why they are often offered up as the paradigmatic "natural kinds" outside the example of living things (although stars, planets, galaxies, etc. might be similar in this respect).

That furnishes a fine example, the periodic table. "Atom with 79 protons," seems to cover gold pretty well. It also seems possible to give a definition of stars such that it doesn't allow anything in that isn't a star, nor exclude any stars. But it's also important to note that a definition doesn't need to be something like a set or some sort of mathematical description. Whether such things would be appropriate depends, I suppose, on metaphysical assumptions. I'd argue that, at the very least given current tools, these methods fail because they cannot capture the quiddity of things and so are a poor match for defining the "what-it-is-to-be" (essence) of things.