I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say "correct" in describing a logic.

Just to be clear, this isn't my term, but the term employed through much of the literature on this topic, including the papers discussed earlier in this thread.

However, I suppose the response would be: Are there not inference rules that allow us to move from true premises to true conclusions, such that if our premises are true our conclusion will be as well? If so, then it seems there are "correct" logics. Unless we want to say that all inference rules lead to true conclusions, making the distinction meaningless (this seems hard to defend), or that no inference rules lead us from true premises to true conclusions (this also seems hard to defend, for how would one show that such an argument makes legitimate inferences?)



I'm not sure how this would be question begging. Logic deals with valid inference, how we get from true premises to true conclusions—truth preservation. Presumably, it doesn't define truth itself, so the criteria for determining which inference rules (if any) preserve truth in which contexts (if any) is external.

The question for logic, IMO, is not "How does one move from true premises to true conclusions?" -- I'd say that's a question for epistemology more broadly -- but rather logic is the study of validity. The big difference here from even introductory logic books is that the truth of the premises aren't relevant, which I'm sure you know already -- the moon being made of green cheese and all that.

So we don't care if the premises are true or not. We only care that if they are true, due to the form of inferences, that the conclusion must be true.

How would you define validity?

"A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid," is the textbook answer from IEP. The textbooks I've used give the same definition.

Stanford's open introduction to logic puts it thus: "Valid: an argument is valid if and only if it is necessary that if all of the premises are true, then the conclusion is true; if all the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true; it is impossible that all the premises are true and the conclusion is false."

I am aware that some scholars have tried to redefine validity in normative terms, e.g. that it is "what we should or shouldn't accept." The Clarke-Doane paper Banno shared is from this camp. However, I have never seen such a view presented that does not assume a deflationary account of truth, that "truth " as most people think of it, does not exist.

Well, that's a fine argument to have. But it gets to the point I tried to make to Banno and fdrake that one cannot retreat into formalism and ignore discussions of truth on this topic. If it would be question begging to assume that logic is about truth-preservation then it would be equally question begging to say that truth depends on / is defined by normative or formal contexts. If the latter is accepted, then of course nihilism is true (or rather true relative to some contexts and false relative to others, depending on our normative games.)

Now the arguments for deflation are abductive (what would it even mean to "prove" such a thesis?) But like I said before, it's hard to think of things it's easier to make a strong abductive argument for than: "in many cases what is true does not depend entirely on how we choose to speak or which formal system we use. It is true that if you dip your hand in boiling water you will be burned in a sense that transcends social practice or formalism." And if we take logic to be wholly normative, e.g. "you ought not stick your hand in boiling water if you don't want to be burned," it seems that we will still have the question "why ought we not do this?" The answer: "because it is true that boiling water causes burns," seems like the most plausible one, but then we are back to truth.

So we don't care if the premises are true or not. We only care that if they are true, due to the form of inferences, that the conclusion must be true.

Yes, this is soundness versus validity. However, this distinction need not (and normally isn't) taken to imply that logic isn't about truth-preservation. The debate is about the rules of truth preservation, not about the truth of any particular premises in an argument.

I'm not sure the entailment relationship ends up being any more stable than the LNC or the principle of explosion. Pick your hinge and flip it!

Well, that's at least normally how it has been defined and it's been defined that way because the mainstream view of logic is that it is (largely) the study of validity, with validity being about truth preservation—i.e., how one goes from true premises to necessarily true conclusions. Obviously if we redefine validity this might make less sense.

But I think there is maybe a misunderstanding here because if you remove LNC you are changing the logical consequence relationship. What follows from what (the logical consequence or entailment relationship) depends on LNC, LEM, relevance conditions for implication, etc. The nihilist claims this relationship is empty, nothing follows from anything else (in any correct sense, i.e. ensuring truth preservation).

Me too. However, I also think the sense of "contradiction" here is quite far from that invoked by religiously motivated dialetheism or those motivated largely by problems of self-reference. It's quite different. But to 's point, I am not sure how much this carries over to Marx. I have read a lot of Marxists but not much Marx, so I am not really in a position to have a strong opinion on that front.

At any rate, Hegel affirms LNC in its usual contexts, but I think it's fair to call him a monist if anyone is. The role he has for logic is deeply ontological.

Correct, although not everything in the Logic follows the formula of "thing" → "negation" → "negation of negation," some get a good deal more complex.

I think Pinkard is right that Hegel is in some sense very Aristotlean (even if I think Pinkard generally deflates Hegel for modern tastes). Hegel wants to track down the necessity in everything, the intelligibility of concepts. In his book on Hegel, Robert Wallace uses "red" as an example. We don't just have "red" implying "~red," but rather red implies the entire category of color and the things that can be colored (primarily light; nothing is red in total darkness).

Hegel describes the determinateness of quality as involving both “reality” and “negation.” These are the successors, within determinate being, of being and nothing (WL 5: 118/GW 21:98–99,29–35/111). What Hegel seems to have specifically in mind, in connection with “negation,” is that qualities are organized in what we might call a conceptual space, such that being one particular quality is not being the other qualities that are conceptually related to it. Being the quality, “red,” for example, is not just being a conceptually indeterminate “something or other,” knowable only by direct inspection; rather, it is being something that belongs in the conceptual space of color, and thus it is not being the color,“blue,”the color,“yellow,”and soon. In this way, the identity of the quality, “red,” essentially involves reference to what that quality is not:It essentially involves “negation.”6 Hegel sometimes refers to this dependence of quality on other qualities as “alteration” (WL 5:127/GW 21:106,8–9/118;EL§92,A), but it’s important to remember that in this initial context of quality as such, there is nothing analogous to time(or space) in which literal alteration could take place, so the term should be understood as referring to a relationship of logical dependency rather than to one of temporal sequence or transformation, as such.

Under the heading of “reality,”in contrast to“negation,”Hegel seems to want to capture a thought shared by philosophers such as John Duns Scotus, F. H. Jacobi, and C. S. Peirce, who stress an irreducible brute “this-ness,” or haecceitas, distinct from any relatedness or subsumption, as essential to reality. It seems to them that what a particular determinate being or quality is should just be a fact about it, rather than being a fact about how it relates to innumerable other determinate beings or qualities.7 Hegel’s introduction of “negation” alongside of “reality” makes it clear that “reality” (as something like “this-ness”) is not without problems, but that doesn’t cause him to abandon it. Working its problems out will, in effect, be the motor of the Logic as a whole.

If Hegel were asked: Why should we be concerned about this “reality” of determinate being? Why couldn’t we just accept the notion that all qualities are interdependent, defined by their relations to other qualities, “all the way down,” with no remainder (and that all of them are thereby equally “real” or equally “unreal”)?– his answer would be that if something could be what it is by virtue of itself, rather than solely by virtue of its relations to other things, it would clearly be more real, when taken by itself, than something that depends on its relations to other things to make it what it is. This is not to say that the thing that depends on other things is, in any sense, illusory– the “reality” that we’re talking about here is not contrasted with illusion, but with depending on others to determine what one is. Something that makes itself what it is has greater self-sufficiency than something that doesn’t do this, and this self-sufficiency is likely to be among the things that we think of when we think of “reality.” If it is among the things we think of, this could be because we’re aware that “reality”– like the word that Hegel uses, which is real, “realitat”– is derived from the Latin res, or “thing,” so that it contrasts not only with illusion but with anything that is less independent or self-sufficient than a thing.

Robert Wallace - Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God

You can see the strong Aristotelian bent in the last paragraph. But Hegel, living in a time where atomism is ascendant, cannot leave things as "unpacked" as Aristotle does with his vaguer concepts that cover more ground. However, maybe Big Heg should have listened to Slick A's advice in the Ethics re "don't demand that your explanations be more exact than your subject matter allows."

It's about the number of correct logics (i.e. logics that ensure true conclusions follow from true premises). In general, it's a position about applied logic, which is why monists and pluralists often justify their demarcation of correct logic(s) in terms of natural language, scientific discourse, etc. Nihlism would, by contrast, say there are no correct logics (and also no incorrect ones). This is not to say that reasoning is entirely arbitrary, presumably there are some standards for what constitutes appropriate reasoning. But there is no logical consequence relationship that is appropriate or correct for any particular topic. So, for instance, the intuitionist and his rival in mathematics are both wrong in that neither are "right."

You could think of this as similar to how there are very many geometries, and unfathomably many possible ones. One can identify what "follows" from their axioms according to whatever logical consequence relationship one cares to use, but this doesn't necessitate that the geometry of the physical world is infinitely variable or that it lacks any "correct" geometries. We tend to think that there would be just one geometry for physics (at least physicists normally do), or that, if there were many, there would be morphisms between them. The claims of the monist in particular are roughly analagous to the claims of the physicist re geometry. For instance, when Gisin recommends intuitionist mathematics for quantum mechanics, he does not mean to suggest that this is merely interesting or useful, but that it in some way better conforms to physics itself in ens reale, not just ens rationis.

Normally it gets framed in terms of the entailment relationship. This avoids unhelpful "counterexamples," like competing geometries that use some different axioms, but nonetheless have the same underlying entailment relationship. These are unhelpful because the question isn't about "what specifically is true/can be known to be true given different axioms" but rather "how does one move from true premises to true conclusions." This is why monists might also allow for multiple logics that are "correct," the "correct logic" being more a "weakest true logic."

So, is a fine example of the basic intuition at work in rejecting some logics for some contexts (pluralism) or holding to one logic as truth-preserving (monism) vis-á-vis natural language, a metaphysical notion of truth, etc.

And 's "a thing can't really be otherwise or not," would be a similar sort of reasoning. Dialetheism is normally argued for in the context of paradoxes related to self-reference (as has been the case in this thread). I think critics would argue that these are no more mysterious than our ability to say things that aren't true (which perhaps IS mysterious). At any rate, the "actual" true contradictions that get thrown out, in the SEP article for example, etc. tend to be far less convincing. For example, "you are either in a room or out, but when you are moving out of a room, at one point you will be in, out, both, or neither."

I don't think Hegel is really a good example here because the Absolute is the whole process of its coming into being, in which contradiction is resolved, and contradictions contain their own resolution. It's examples of contradiction, being's collapse into nothing, etc. are very much unlike the standard examples meant to define dialetheism.

Isn't the 'brute fact' at the end of this one a necessary being or a circularity

Not all necessary facts are brute facts and not all circles are vicious circles.

As for merit, no one accepts "it's a brute fact, some things simply are for no reason at all," if they have any sort of a good answer. We won't accept it in the vast majority of cases, an airplane crashing, our tire being flat, the death of a relative, etc. We might not be able to figure out why these things happened, but we don't thereby assume they happened "for no reason at all."

The proffering up of brute fact claims strikes me as primarily a manifestation of the inability to acknowledge mystery. Lots of things have been said to be brute facts. The Big Bang was said to be a brute fact, yet now we have a fairly popular theory of inflation that falls prior to it and explains many observations, so the brute fact view no longer looks acceptable. The extremely low entropy of the early universe gets thrown out often as a "brute fact," but no doubt if any of the theories that attempt to actually explain it bear out, hardly anyone will bother trying to assert that it is "simply is." It's the sort of explanation that always collapses as soon as a real explanation arrives on the scene. And people have an extremely bad track record of judging what will prove "absolutely inexplicable."

I mean, what are we to do if we do accept the brute explanation, cease all inquiry?

Yes. If they weren't, then all forms of naturalism would be false.

I am not sure of this. The Physics, from which we get the term "nature" and other early forms of naturalism focus on "things acting the way they do because of what they are, i.e. because of their 'nature.'" So there are no extrinsic laws governing things and their behaviors, there is merely the natures of beings (however defined—in the Aristotlean tradition "being a being" is said primarily of organic wholes and only analogously of artifacts or accidental wholes such as rocks) and the nature of the cosmos as an ordered whole. Neither is there any chance or randomness in the sense of something being undetermined or uncaused, rather chance is the confluence of different (relatively) discrete natures acting according to their ends (Etienne Gilson's book notes how losing this conception had major consequences for understanding natural selection).

And in Hegel, we see the same denial of extrinsic laws. But it seems to me that this is now a fairly popular conception of what underpins scientific "laws"—laws are just descriptions or approximations of how things behave according to what they are. The "laws of nature" can be located squarely in ens rationis; they are an abstraction of the intellect, whereas natures are ens reale.

Of course. But What's wrong with that?

Well, in a comparison of ontologies I suppose it might be considered question begging. Or on the question of "how might physicalism best be reconceived or reformed," it also seems to include problematic presuppositions.

What makes you think that? I'm referring to David Armstrong's ontology- which accounts for everything that (unarguaby) objectively exists.

The idea that intelligibility and truth can be placed squarely into our consideration of the human mind, and not the study of being qua being.

To me, it seems fair to question if the intelligibility of the world and the beings in it can be sui generis creation of minds. Rather, might it be that minds are simply able to access this intelligibility?

Please elaborate. I don't see how any sort of dualism fits into physicalism.

Physicalism is monist, yes. But representionalism makes it so that we have to always ask "what of our understanding of the world is 'really real' and what is just the creation of the mind? Is light of such and such a color really light of such and such a wavelength? But then does color, number, and even the concept of "wave" have any correspondence to "the world in itself?"

See Tom's post above: "I don't know what this means. I wonder if meaning and reason are human constructions or frameworks, how can we know that they are a part of 'reality' - whatever that might be." But of course, if all reason, cause, quiddity, intelligibility, etc. are only on the mind side of the mind-world ledger, then we don't know anything about this "physical world" "as it really is." (See Kant on knowledge of the noumena).

This is the problem that led the anti-metaphysical movement to simply abandon any metaphysics, to claim that we simply deal with "reasoning about empirical facts," and leave off any metaphysical notion attached to the "physical."

Representationalism wed to physicalism makes it such that phenomenal awareness is mere appearance, whereas reality is the "objective," requiring a "view from nowhere." No doubt there are various solutions proposed to this problem (I have yet to see one I'd consider successful that doesn't simply abandon representationalism), but this problem has probably been the dominant issue of modern philosophy.

This is an unresolved dualism to the extent that representationalism's epistemic challenges cannot be overcome, leaving a hard dividing line between the subjective "in here" and the objective "out there," despite the system ostensibly being monist. Being is one... yet it is cleaved distinctly in two.

:up:

I started a thread once on how Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument(s) seem like they could simply be dismissed as question begging by the "Language of Thought"/Augustinian folks, but I didn't get much interest.



Well, that certainly seems to be much of it. What is x and what is only x by analogy is a similar sort of question.

For instance, semiotics has been brought up here. But on the wider Augustinian/Peircrean view of semiotics, all sorts of things are semiotic, so that isn't all that informative on as to language.

I perceive as a phenomenal experience a red object, and believe that there is some unknown thing the other side of my senses that has caused this phenomenal experience. For convenience, I call this unknown thing a red object.

How unknown is it if you know what it causes and that it is red? What things do we not know through their effects/acts? How could we know anything immanent if not through its effects/acts? It seems a strange thing to me to say that knowing a thing's effects alone renders it unknowable.

I don't see how the assumption that our experiences are what we know, instead of how we know is anything but axiomatic here. But why assume such a thing? Certainly a good empirical case cannot be mustered for such a view, since it undercuts the very ability of experience to inform us on the topic in question.

I agree that information flows across these boundaries, but would add that the carrier of the information changes across such boundaries, meaning that there is a dividing line.

This just seems like question begging. The dividing line is at the eye because the mind/brain is assumed to be the dividing line between the world and the observer. Yet one could make the same sort of case for any dividing line one wants to defend. For example, when the mechanical energy of water turning a turbine is transformed into electrical current, or when the digital signal coming over some cable is transformed into light in a monitor. All physical action is mediated.

Nor do eyes see on their own or brains experience sight removed from bodies.

Yes, we cannot think about "being" without thoughts, but we can also think about "being" existing outside the mind. Otherwise we come to the conclusion that the Universe didn't begin 13 billion years ago, but only began 200,000 years ago when humans developed language.

This seems to be equivocating between different sorts of mind-independence. The early universe is not mind independent. There is an entire scientific field dedicated to studying it. People write books about it, watch movies about it, etc.

But you are shifting over to something like: "is dependent upon currently being experienced for its existence." These are not the same thing. To say being is in an importance sense one, and that thought is not separate from being is not to say "things only exist while being thought about."

C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, developed from his lectures on medieval literature. It's quite good. He does a good job capturing the sense in which manuscripts we to the medieval a bit like what mainstream science is to us (we might allow that the latter is a better means of discovering truth of course!)

"Lucan and Cicero said it, it must be true and we need to work it in somewhere."

Here is a particularly poignant passage.

The daemons are 'between' us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw Semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this class an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ' witness and guardian' through life (xvi).It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man's genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.

Lewis is a keen observer of the same phenomenon Charles Taylor looks at. Although, I think the move is more bi-polar than they let on. Man becomes the sui generis source of all meaning even as all reality (as opposed to appearance) is shifted over to the "world" side of the ledger and man reduced to a mechanistic automaton from the "perspective of the really real." Kant's attempt to save God and free will by casting them into the noumena at the end of the Prolegomena is a sort of rear-guard action on this front. So, man is aggrandized even as he is abased. He is finally freed by some 20th century thinkers, only to have this freedom debased into vacuous, indeterminant potency.

These are generally good, although some are certainly better than others. I particularly like the one on Wittgenstein A.C. Grayling (originally published outside the series) and the one on existentialism (Thomas Flynn). The one on objectivity is excellent and I wish many people were forced to read something like it in school. The ones on linguistics, systems theory, and nothing (really the physics of "void") are all good. The one on philosophical method was neat too, and I'd give high marks to the ones on analytical and continental philosophy. The ones of post-modernism and post-structuralism were more average.

Some are less good. I like Floridi, but I thought his introduction to information was fairly confusing and I'd definitely recommend the Great Courses lectures on them over it, or Caleb Scharf's The Ascent of Information, our even the more advanced Routledge Handbook to the Philosophy of Information (much better than the Blackwell version IMO). They got Rodger Scruton for beauty, but that was more "Scruton does beauty," then an introduction. I haven't read the Hegel one, but IIRC they got Singer to do it which is a baffling choice. The philosophy of physics and biology ones are good but less interesting than they should be (biology was better).

I dabbled into the Heidegger and Foucault ones and they seemed ok.

In general, if you really want to go in depth on an area of philosophy I think the Routledge Contemporary Introductions are better (but also like 300-400 pages instead of 80-120), although they have a strong analytical bias in most cases.

Springer Frontiers is another good source if you like the intersection of philosophy and science, particularly physics, but it is not entry level. Arthur's book on time through them is my favorite book on time.

If you are not aware of it already, you might be interested in the "received view" of scientific theories and some of the more mathematical responses to it. These seem to best represent what you are talking about in terms of a "shut up and calculate view."

On this view, a scientific theory should be thought of as a set of axioms or propositions (ideally expressed in formal logic), which is then divided into “empirical terms” related to observations” and strictly “theoretical terms,” which explain the observations. On such a view, theories are deductive systems where predictions about the world can be logically derived and then tested through observation and experimentation, but they are also purely formal, and avoid any "metaphysics" (i.e. discussions of what the world actually is).

Although this view has come under significant attack, many of the proposed alternatives are equally "anti-metaphysical." For instance, there are Bayesian models where all inquiry is reduced to statistical analysis, with observational data shuffled through models in order to maximize predictive power.

To be sure, scientists themselves often pay little attention to the “philosophy of science,” but we can see how this view of the sciences can bleed into the sciences themselves, and on into the popular imagination. For instance, there is the physicist Max Tegmark’s book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, which proposes the “Mathematical Universe Hypothesis,” the idea that the universe just is a mathematical object (some computational patterns produce consciousness) and things just are the math that describes them in models. Tegmark’s book is perhaps and extreme example, but many other physicists authoring popular science titles have embraced pancomputationalism, which tends to look at causation and nature as whole as a sort of step-wise logical process.*

"Science ONLY deals with description and not with explanation."

By way of contrast, we could consider the earlier distinction between different types of demonstration.

A prompter quid demonstration shows why something is the case (not just that it is the case). It explains the "why," "because," or "in virtue of which" of things. It seems fair to say that in the natural sciences, these are generally the types of explanations we are (naively?) hoping for, particularly vis-a-vis the productive sciences (e.g. medicine, "why do deformed elastin fibers cause glaucoma?" - the "why" answer here will help us to develop treatments).

In the contemporary context, we might be inclined to say that the sciences only focus on efficient and material causation. Yet this isn't quite right. Even if many biologists exclude teleology, they have some need for "function" or "teleonomy," and this would seem to introduce a notion of final cause (albeit in some cases significantly modified). And at any rate, the social sciences do include an explicit notion of final cause when explaining phenomena such as market externalities. Likewise, formal cause seems to show up in many cases, interdisciplinary studies focusing on information theory might be a prime example since they abstract away the concrete particulars.

But, are such explanations truly possible? Should we seek them?

I'd argue that we have such demonstrations in well understood areas on inquiry, and that we consider them "well-understood" precisely because we have these sorts of explanations.

Second, we have a second sort of demonstration, quia demonstrations. These reason from effect to cause. For example:

Premise: When the moon is eclipsed, the earth is interposed between the sun and the moon
Observation: The moon is now being eclipsed
Conclusion: The earth is now interposed between the sun and the moo

In this example, the person knows that things are such-and-such, but they don't know why.

The more controversial question is if there is any way to distinguish between these in logic? The closest thing I have seen is work in AI which try to create algorithms for causal reasoning, but I figured someone else might know more.


For a bit of background:

Knowledge of the fact (quia demonstration) differs from knowledge of the reasoned fact (propter quid demonstrations). [...] You might prove as follows that the planets are near because they do not twinkle: let C be the planets, B not twinkling, A proximity. Then B is predicable of C; for the planets do not twinkle. But A is also predicable of B, since that which does not twinkle is near--we must take this truth as having been reached by induction or sense-perception. Therefore A is a necessary predicate of C; so that we have demonstrated that the planets are near. This syllogism, then, proves not the reasoned fact (propter quid) but only the fact (quia); since they are not near because they do not twinkle, but, because they are near, do not twinkle.

The major and middle of the proof, however, may be reversed, and then the demonstration will be of the reasoned fact (propter quid). Thus: let C be the planets, B proximity, A not twinkling. Then B is an attribute of C, and A-not twinkling-of B. Consequently A is predicable of C, and the syllogism proves the reasoned fact (propter quid), since its middle term is the proximate cause.

From Aristotle's Posterior Analytics I.13:

I answer that it must be said that demonstration is twofold: One which is through the cause, and is called demonstration "propter quid" [lit., 'on account of which'] and this is [to argue] from what is prior simply speaking (simpliciter). The other is through the effect, and is called a demonstration "quia" [lit., 'that']; this is [to argue] from what is prior relatively only to us (quoad nos). When an effect is better known to us than its cause, from the effect we proceed to the knowledge of the cause. And from every effect the existence of its proper cause can be demonstrated, so long as its effects are better known to us (quoad nos); because since every effect depends upon its cause, if the effect exists, the cause must pre-exist.

From St. Thomas' Summa theologiae I.2.2c:

If anyone would like to go more in-depth on this, this is a good starting point: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/demonstration-medieval/#5


* Despite the critical framing here, I am a big fan of Tegmark's book. I disagree with the MUH and think the arguments for the multiverse from the Fine Tuning Problem are incredibly weak, but it's quite good otherwise. For other examples of pancomputationalism, there are the articles in Paul Davies’Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics To Metaphysics or Vlatko Vedral’s Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information.

Consciousness, like memories, is not a thing. It is a status that happens when our neurons get stimulated repeatedly. Our individual, unique memories, which we fondly call subjective are made possible by synapses.

On that view, wouldn't flight also not be a thing, since it is just "cells in wings responding to chemical signals." The same for "running," or "life" itself (and so also for each instance of living things?) Yet, since we have already successfully mastered heavier than air flight, we know that the principles of flight were not to be found in studying the organelles of cells in the wings of all flying animals, nor in their DNA, etc. (at least not most easily). Indeed, one can build a flying machine while being largely ignorant of the biology of flying animals so long as one understands the principles of lift, etc. that all those animals physiology takes advantage of. The same seems true of running and swimming, or even language production, and perhaps it is even so for conciousness.

I suppose we could define conciousness as a process and not a thing. But it seems to be a process carried out by and possessed by a thing. Of course, one could argue that life is also just a process, and living just an action, akin to running or swimming. Yet then this "processification" would seem to follow for all contingent being(s) since everything is always changing and only has the properties we attribute to it because of how it interacts with everything else.

But then we are at risk of dissolving all things and having only a single universal process. IMO, the solution here is to realize that things (substances) have relative degrees of unity. Break a rock in half and you have two rocks. Break a cat in half and one no longer has a live cat. Some things work to organize themselves and maintain their form, and these have a higher degree of unity. On this view, a unifying reflective self-awareness would be the highest measure of unity and thus thing-hood.

Also, physics seems to show us there are no truly isolated systems, and that energy, cause, information, etc. flow across the boundaries of discrete things as if they didn't exist. This being so, it would seem all there is is the frenetic seething of a few quantum fields (and perhaps even these might be unified eventually, as the electro-weak force, and we'd have just one thing). But then it seems that conciousness is the wellspring of all multiplicity and discrete identity, in which case, the mind seems to be the thingiest thing! The very principle of thinghood!

The million pulses that have to happen in order to retrieve an image of an apple or a tree is not magic.

Well, this is a problem in the literature on conciousness. Very few people state that the answer to the problem of understanding consciousness is that it is "magic." Yet I see no shortage of writers on this topic dragging out the battered corpse of Descartes fairly magical theory of substance dualism as the counter example that must be refuted to prove their own case (e.g., I just reread the Moral Landscape and Harris seems to think refuting the thought of a controversial thinker from the 1600s is the gold standard for supporting one's arguments).

In my reading, it seems that objections to physicalist theories of mind tend to largely center on the appeal to the physical being used to drag along other suppositions, e.g. a sort of reductionism (synapses for instance don't sustain conciousness on their own, nor do whole brains for that matter, or even heads removed from their bodies). For instance, Jaworski's survey text and the Routledge Contemporary Introduction introduce hylomorphism as a competitor to physicalism, but those theories certainly do not deny the connection between the mind and the body, neither does occasionalism for that matter.

Occasionalism is particularly interesting because representationalist versions of physicalism seem to undermine the case for rejecting it.

Are laws of nature natural? They’re never actually observed, only their effects can be discerned by measurement and observation. But the question why nature is lawful or what natural laws comprise, is not itself a question that naturalism has answers for. Naturalism assumes an order in nature, but it doesn’t explain it, nor does it need to explain it. That, I suppose, is what you’re getting at by saying that the existence of the world is ‘brute fact’ - which effectively forecloses any attempt to understand why things are the way they are, whether they are as they seem, and so on.

Well the Physics is a study of phúsis, "natures," by which things do what they do and are what they are. I think it's only a particular sort of naturalism that dispenses with natures.

On the one hand you have the tyranny of efficient causation, on the other atomism, which justifies that former, and on a third hand(!) you have representationalism which says that one cannot explain nature in terms of intelligible natures because the intelligibility of things must (axiomatically) by the constructions of minds, not intrinsic features of the things in question.

Yep. I had in mind that for those who argue that "all is consciousness" this is amounts to a brute fact -

It could be framed thus, but it need not be. Hegelianism has no brute facts for instance. Arguably, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a hallmark of many systems, seems to rule out brute facts.

Or as Kenneth Gallagher puts the metaphysical notion of causation: "that the order of becoming and existence must be intelligible; that no phase of the process of contingent existence is intelligible in itself; and that therefore contingent existence is always relative existence, essentially referred, qua existing to another.”

But yes, on the view that the universe is just "mental substance," as opposed to "physical substance," and where the "laws of nature," the "initial conditions of the universe," and the universes spontaneous generation are all inexplicable bare facts, the two would essentially be the same.

Intelligibility and quiddity strikes me as related to theories of mind and of truth. Something is "intelligible" if it is understood (i.e. it is describable by propositions that are known). Quiddity seems a subset of intelligibility. A complete metaphysical theory (whether physicalist or anything else) is a description of the way things actually are objectively (not merely what we perceive), albeit that we learn about the world phenomenologically.

This just strikes me as mapping the common presuppositions of physicalism onto "what a complete metaphysical theory should be." It seems to presuppose the subject - object dualism that a great deal of 20th and 21st century explicitly targets as the cardinal sin of early modern philosophy. That quiddity and truth have to do primarily with philosophy of mind would be another point of contention (e.g. the supposition that things are intelligible because of "what they are). So too would the framing that suggests representationalism (i.e. we know our ideas or mental representations, not the world). Likewise for the assertion that metaphysics deals with a knowledge of the "objective" as set over and against the subjective, as opposed say to the absolute (which covers both reality and appearances, since all appearances are really appearances.)

Such a definition surely defines subjective idealism out of contention from the get-go, no? But it seems like the assumptions in the definition would also knock out most pre-modern philosophy (and their various modernizations) and a good deal of contemporary Continental metaphysics, Hegelianism, neo-Thomism, etc.

But of course, probably the number one critique of (mainstream representationalist) physicalism is precisely that it axiomatically assumes an unresolvable dualism that makes skepticism insurmountable.

I know that I perceive the colour red and feel pain.

I believe that neither the colour red nor pain exist in the world.

This is exactly what is meant by "axiomatic dualism." Color and pain are "in the mind," thus they are not "in the world." I'd rather say the relationship between some red object and someone seeing that object as red is essentially of the same sort that exists between two meteors colliding in interstellar space.

I believe that sometimes my perceptions of red and pain have been caused by something this side of my senses, such as dreams and headaches, and sometimes have been caused by something the other side of my senses, such as the wavelength of 700nm or a thistle.

There is that hard dividing line again. Yet causation, information, energy, etc. seem to flow across the boundaries of animal bodies as if there was no boundary at all, so I see no reason to presuppose such a dividing line.

As I don't believe that pain exists in the thistle, I don't believe that the colour red exists in the wavelength of 700nm.

Well, presumably the number 700 doesn't exist outside minds either, right? Or discrete entities?

To quote an old paper of mine:

"Modern science paints a strange picture of the world. Our world is one of tremendous diversity. It includes many types of star and galaxy, a vast number of species, each with their own complex biology, a “zoo” of fundamental particles, etc. At the same time, it paints a picture of a word that is unified. There are no truly isolated systems. Causation, energy, and information flow across the boundaries of all seemingly discrete “things,” such that the universe appears to be not so much a “collection of things,” but rather a single continuous process. How do we reconcile this seeming multiplicity (the Many) with the equally apparent unity of being (the One)? How can we make true statements about the world given this problem?


Perhaps we might claim that the discrete things that populate our experience are in some way illusory, products “constructed by” our minds. “Out there,” in the world as it is “in-itself,” there is only endless frenetic change within universal quantum fields. Perhaps we cannot even say this much, since any conception of the world “out there” is inherently tainted by these
“mental constructs.”

Yet, it does not seem possible to eliminate all multiplicity. One of the most obvious facets of our world is that it is populated by minds, discrete phenomenological horizons, agents who experience the world and make choices. Once we acknowledge this initial multiplicity, we must also acknowledge the multiplicity that exists within phenomenal experience. Where does it come from? If it does not truly exist “out there,” why are we surrounded by it “in here?” Can we refer to things outside of our phenomenological horizon, or do our words only refer to our own ideas? Do our experiences give us knowledge of the world?
"

My main position is that "for no reason at all," is a poor answer to these questions.

Do you believe that the colour red and pain exist in a world outside a mind?

Well no, I don't think "nothing in particular," feels pain or sees red.

The question is, how is it logically possible to overcome the dualism between thought and being when life only knows about being through thought?

Well, again, this question assumes thought set over and against being. But thought is obviously something with being. Indeed, if we mean anything by being it seems to have to mean that which is thought, not "that of which it impossible to think."

As to "who wrote War and Peace," I don't think solipsism is good philosophy. However, I do think it's a difficulty when it becomes hard to avoid solipsism in a non-arbitrary or merely pragmatic manner.

My take would be that we experience the things we do for reasons, due to causes, etc. and such reasons do not bottom out in the inaccessible and unintelligible as soon as we leave the confines of our own discrete phenomenological horizon. Hence, I think Leo Tolstoy, another man with his own mind wrote War and Peace.

And I feel like there is a strong case for this. We might ask "why is experience this way instead of any other way at all?" Now, if mind is uncaused, springing forth from some shadow world beyond all reasons and causes, I can't think of any answer to this question. What occurs "for no reason at all," might be "any way at all." Yet I don't ever open my door into the void of space, or watch my son transform into a squid when I set him down in bed, or teleport to Paris upon biting into a cracker, etc. Of the very many ways experience could conceivably be, it only seems to actually be according to a rational pattern.

One way to look at it might be to ask, "was Artistotle a physicalist?" By many measures, we might say yes, given his focus on immanence and thinghood (substance). And yet I tend to agree with Paul Ricoeur that Artistotle's philosophy of nature is primarily a philosophy of quiddity. For him, the chief questions are:

-From whence intelligibility? Why are things what they are?

Whereas physicalism seems to me to generally focus primarily on questions of "how." We have observable phenomena, but how do they come to be and how are they best predicted and forecast? (Dawkins for instance defines "reality" in terms of prediction). The "physical" is just that which is required for this "how" explanation. But the physical itself is often said to lack any "why." It simply is, a brute fact. Intelligibility is a "construct" of minds and need not be sought in nature or the physical, or might even be said to be mere appearance (and quiddity/phenoenology is usually demoted to mere appearance as set over and against objective physical reality).

Ricoeur traces the focus on efficient beginnings and the cascade of efficient causes to the Old Testament, and this is no doubt partly an explanation, but it seems to me like this is a distinctly modern move.

turing complete

Is this adequate for generating a mind? Lots of extremely simple things are Turing complete: Conway's Game of Life, Rule 110, etc. Part of the open questions in the philosophy of information is how to define computation in physical systems because it seems possible the argue that practically everything is a computer (a not unpopular position in physics). But obviously this completely explodes the explanatory power of computational theories of mind, which is why you need something like IIT instead.

At any rate, I don't think physicalism re philosophy of mind has all that much to do with physicalism as an ontology. It seems perfectly possible to accept the former while rejecting the latter.

Panpsychism and participatory universe conceptions of quantum mechanics, or the Wigner-Von Neumann interpretation don't seem necessarily at odds with physicalism, but they do seem to stretch pretty far from what is normally intended by the term, and there are certainly models for these. There are models for dualism too, I just am not particularly familiar with them. They tend to posit the body as something like a "radio receiver." Whether they are convincing is another matter (technically Descartes has a model, it just bottoms out unconvincingly in the pineal gland).

I suppose your probably right, although rigid atomism and causal closure have the benefit of being a very clear thesis about what being is. And I wouldn't undersell how popular this conception remains.

In his the book he made from his lectures on medieval and renaissance literature (The Discarded Image), C.S. Lewis speaks of the "medieval model," a synchretic fusion of ancient philosophy and literature, and how it acted as a "backcloth" for all speculation about the world in that period (including literature).

It has occured to me that atomistic, reductive materialism remains a strong "backcloth" for our own era. One doesn't seem it so much in popular physics anymore, but it remains a sort of background assumption in the special sciences and particularly in popular science/philosophy (especially the blending of the two). Sam Harris seems like a fine example here. I didn't get through too much of Sapolsky's book because it seemed repetitive and I saw a number of poor reviews of it, but that seems to operate on similar background assumptions.

It has occured to me before if there might not even be a quasi-religious element here, in that this view does seem to make life quite absurd, and so if one embraces an existentialist philosophy of overcoming absurdity and freedom from essence it's an important set of background assumptions.

I put "physical laws" in scare quotes because many physical laws are simply close approximations of behavior. For instance, Newtons Laws are "good enough," but won't work even on the macro scale with multi-body problems. Nancy Cartwright's work on this would be the big example I can think of. Laws are symmetric because that's how the math used to describe them works, but nature doesn't necessarily correspond to such laws.

I say physics isn't time symmetric because there are several observed time asymmetries in physics, at both the smallest and the largest scales.

Arguing for time symmetry against all empirical evidence (no one has ever observed time running in anything but one direction, nor has anyone ever observed the defining elements of quantum mechanics, decoherence and collapse, running backwards, making for a very distinct observable asymmetry) seems to largely rely on the fact that the very mathematics used for descriptions assumes a sort of eternalism. This is the physicist Nicholas Gisin's argument for exploring intuitionist mathematics in physics, and against the tendency to paint our understanding of mathematics onto the natural world (Tegmark might be the most obvious example here). Arthur's "The Reality of Time Flow: Local Becoming in Modern Physics," makes a similar set of arguments. Plus, there are very many models of time in physics that are not symmetrical or eternalist (the crystalizing/growing block, Wheeler's Many Fingered Time and Participatory Universe, or retrocausality, objective collapse models, etc.)

Now, I don't think any of these arguments are decisive, although some are much better than others (e.g. arguments for eternalism based on the Twin Paradox and Andromeda Paradox are particularly weak and trade off equivocations between SR/GR and "common sense" understandings of time). However, it certainly seems to me that there are not strong grounds for dismissing causality with an appeal to "physics."

As to the problem of disentangling causes, I think this is a problem that only results if one takes a very narrow view of causality as a sort of granular efficient causation. But what we are most interested in causes are general/generating principles, not the infinite (or practically infinite) number of efficient causes at work in any event.

I guess another way to put it is that in many versions of representationalism the inability to tell if thought ever really corresponds to being is axiomatic. There is no resolving it. Once one steps into the box of ideas one is stuck in it.

There are indeed "scientific realist" versions of representationalism, but the ones I have encountered always leave this pocket of radical skepticism and paper over it on "pragmatic grounds."

The responses to representationalism by contrast seek to change the axioms. So, Plotinus rejects truth as the adequacy of thought to being on the grounds that one cannot conceivably "step outside thought" to *experience* being without experience. For him, thinking and being have to be two sides of the same coin, to suggest otherwise is incoherent since "being" must mean "that which is given to thought." I'd take the modern phenomenological position to largely follow Plotinus here, which is unsurprising since modern phenomenology was retrieved from Scholastic thinkers steeped in the Neoplatonic and Peripatetic synthesis.

Enactivism, by contrast, is focused on dissolving the strong subject-object dualism that is presupposed by the division of thought from being.

Radical empiricism and logical positivism "fix" the problem by refusing to discuss metaphysics and branding it meaningless. Pragmatists just accept the problem. And then you have theories that try to resolve it through various appeals to language and the linguistic turn (although arguably many of these re-create the same skeptical problem via the adequacy of language to the world).

And I suppose another option for the scientific realist crowd would be the Aristotlean option of claiming that causes are knowable through their effects and always intelligible. I might throw semiotic realism (in the tradition of St. Augustine, the Scholastics, CSP, and Deely) in this bucket, or at least it is similar.

But one might conceivably blend the phenomenological, enactivist, and semiotic responses, which would be my preferred approach. Thomism is interesting in that it already fits this bill, although it needs significant modernization. In particular, the central place of religion and particularly revealed religion seems sure to scare away many contemporary minds. This is why I think folks like Sokolowski are doing the community such a service by updating and translating.

Well the following:

Indirect Realism, aka Representationalism, holds the position that any world the other side of the senses is fully real. This is why it is called "Realism". However, what we perceive is only a representation of what exists in any world.

The properties we perceive are representations of the properties that exist in the world.

This doesn't mean that the properties in the world as less real, because if they were, we wouldn't have had any perceptions in the first place.

The mind perceives fully real properties, believed to have been caused by fully real properties in the world, which may or may not be the same as what we perceive.

Seems at odds with:

I perceive the colour red even though I believe that the colour red doesn't exist in the world. I perceive pain even though I believe that pain doesn't exist in the world. I perceive numbers even though I believe that numbers don't exist in the world.

If all the contents of experience cannot be said to "exist in the world" in virtue of "only existing in the mind," I don't see how that isn't denigrating the relationships that exist between things and thinking beings as in a way "less than fully real." As you say, the relationships are allegedly "unknowable," which seems to make the ethereal and unintelligible in themselves.

But this also gets us to Hegel's critique of Kant, that he begins by dogmatically assuming that perceptions are of objects. Is such a default assumption warranted given Kant's critical project? "Nothing can be known of X but X absolutely must be explaining Y." Why? If we're allowing the world to be unintelligible and unknowable why not simply allow that Y (the mind) generates itself as a brute fact? Ockham's Razor can shave off an entity.

They’re not real ‘from their own side’ is one of the ways it is expressed. That is quite different to the Platonist take on it but that’s enough for one post.

Well, the bolded might work in a (Neo)-Platonist, Aristotelian, Thomistic, etc. context, depending on how we define "real from their own side." The apple is a sort of organic unity, although it is ultimately a mere part of such a unity. Its seeds have to potential to become self-organizing wholes themselves. Such unities, proper beings are "real from their own side," to varying degrees. They are involved in "staying-at-work-being-themselves," according to their eidos (form/act).

Just to think about it intuitively, we think that when we leave a room another person remains "real from their own side," even infants. And we would tend to allow this for a dog, a bird, etc. To deny these their own sort of reality seems to entail a slide towards solipsism. I would just argue that what makes dog "real as itself" is present to a lesser degree in plants as well. But I suppose the big question, which Aristotle and St. Thomas answer in the affirmative, is if the cosmos itself is such an ordered whole? Does nature have a nature?

It seems to me that a defining feature of early modern thought is to deny this. All cause is efficient cause, which can be traced back to active, extrinsic natural laws (Hegel would be a strong example arguing against this consensus). Nowadays though, it really does seem that natural philosophy is moving away from this position and back towards the idea that nature acts as it does because of what it is.

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.


Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present - Robert M. Wallace

My belief is in Enactivism, in that life has evolved for about 3 billion years through a dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment.

Well, enactivism is generally presented as a counter to indirect realism and representationalism. It is meant to dissolve the difficulty you are describing. Sokolowski recommends dispensing with "mental image" talk and instead using the concept of a lens we "see through." Essentially, experience is how we know not what we know.

In other words, the "mind-independent word" is not the name of an unknown thing, but rather is the name for an unknown cause of known sensory experiences.

Is it "unknown?" It seems to me that a lot is known about this, e.g. how light produces sight. It seems to me that the way we get into trouble here is by positing knowledge of things "in-themselves" as the gold standard of knowledge, while at the same time denigrating any relational properties that actually involve us. I just don't see a strong case for doing this (see below).

I suppose another related issue lies in correspondence theories of truth. One can never "step outside experience," in order to confirm that one's experiences "map" to reality. But this to me simply seems to suggest something defective in the correspondence theory of truth. It has some significant metaphysical baggage if it has to claim the "truth" is correspondence to unintelligible noumena drained of all whatness or content.

On page 233 Sokolowski writes about the "categorial, syntactic activity, along with the intellection that accompanies it," that comes with our "neural lens." It seems to me like this facet of "the internal structure of our sensibility" is useful for elucidating how we can have intelligibilities and essences "present to us."

One of the claims that is often made by the representationalist position that Sokolowski critiques is that many of the properties of objects that we are aware of do not exist "in-themselves," and are thus less than fully real. For example: "nothing looks blue 'of-itself, things only look blue to a subject who sees." If the property of "being blue," or of "being recognizably a door" does not exist mind-independently, they argue, such properties must in some way be "constructed by the mind," and thus are less real.

What I'd like to point out is that this sort of relationality seems to be true for all properties. For example, we would tend to say that "being water soluble" is a property of table salt. However, table salt only ever dissolves in water when it is placed in water (in the same way that lemon peels only "taste bitter" when in someone's mouth). The property has to be described as a relation, a two-placed predicate, something like - dissolves(water, salt).

I think there is a good argument to be made that all properties are relational in this way, at least all the properties that we can ever know about. For how could we ever learn about a property that doesn't involve interaction?

So, "appearing blue" is a certain sort of relationship that involves an object, a person, and the environment. However, this in no way makes it a sort of "less real" relation. Salt's dissolving in water involves the same sort of relationality. The environment is always involved too. If it is cold enough, salt will not dissolve in water because water forms its own crystal at cold enough temperatures. Likewise, no physical process results in anything "looking blue" in a dark room, or in a room filled with an anesthetic that would render any observer unconscious.

Intelligibilities require syntax. They result from bringing many relations together in such a way that they can be "present" at once. They are a very special sort of relationship. This isn't just because they involve phenomenal awareness. "Looking blue" or "tasting bitter" is a relationship between some object and an observer, but these do not "actualize" an intelligibility. What an intelligibility does is it allows many of an object's relational properties to be present together, often in ways that are not possible otherwise.

For example, salt can dissolve in water. It can also do many other things as it interacts with other chemicals/environments. However, it cannot do all of these at once. Only within the lens of the rational agent are all these properties brought together. E.g., water can boil and it can freeze, but it can't do both simultaneously. Yet in the mind of the chemist, water's properties in myriad contexts can be brought together.

In a certain way then, things are most what they are when their intelligibility is grasped by a rational agent. For, over any given interval, a thing will only tend to manifest a small number of its properties — properties which make the thing "what it is." E.g., a given salt crystal over a given interval only interacts with one environment; all of its relational properties are not actualized. Yet in the mind of the rational agent who knows a thing well, a vast number of relational properties are brought together. If a thing "is what it does," then it is in the knowing mind that "what it does" is most fully actualized. And this is accomplished through syntax, which allows disparate relations to be combined, divided, and concatenated across time and space.

So, rather than the relationship between knower and known being a sort of "less real" relationship, I would argue it is the most real relationship because it is a relationship where all of a things disparate properties given different environments can be brough together.

IIRC, it's Metaphysics 7, about midway through the chapter to the end where he really gets into essence and identity. Unfortunately, it isn't super straight forward because he is actually building up a case which makes it look like he is contradicting himself, but really he is pursuing a reductio argument that takes a long time to pay off.

For me, the problem about objects existing in a world independent of any observer, is, what mechanism is there in such a world independent of any observer that relates atom A to atom B but doesn't relate atom A to atom C?

Well, a question here is what it means to be "independent from observers." In a certain sense, everything we think of is, in at least some sense, not independent of observers. We have thought of it, therefore it is not independent of our thought. It is in this very broad sense that Parmenides contends that "the same is for thinking as for being."

But what about some sort of ontological dependence relationship? I would say the weight of virtually all empirical evidence is that an apple being an apple doesn't depend on us specifically for its existence. When we leave a room, the apples don't vanish. We can tell they continue to exist because they are subject to corruption. being eaten by mice, etc. while we are gone. We don't crash our cars because once we can no longer see our tires they vanish. In an important sense, since everything is casually connected, we are never really "independent" of things we are not currently experiencing anyhow.

But in the modern context, we might assume that the intelligible whatness of things, their quiddity, is a "mental construct," such that even their position in space and time, along with all their describable qualities is "in our heads." I think modern phenomenology has done a good job recovering the ancient and medieval solution to this problem. Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person is a particularly good example. That "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," need not force us to conclude that the world is unknowable precisely because knowledge of things "in themselves" should never have been elevated over knowledge of "things as they interact with anything and everything else." "Act follows on being." If something doesn't interact with anything else, it might as well not be.

I also like Eric Perl's Thinking Being (which IIRC Wayfarer gave good reviews too) which gets at the premodern attitude on this issue. Far from being "naive realists" there was simply a refusal to accept intelligibility as the result of a sui generis act of the mind.

Articles on this topic generally refer to it as such at any rate. B&R is normally brought up as the landmark case for pluralism and it is fairly recent. Shapiro is from 2014.

Indeed, any logician will be aware that there are various logical systems.

Yes, which maybe should make you question if you have any clue what the debate is about.

It seems to me that the idea that there are specific logics (specific entailment relations) for specific areas would be pluralism (at least as they define it.) Nihilism would reject this and claim that, depending on our goals and uses, we might use any logic in any setting. That is, there is, strictly speaking, no correct or singularly appropriate logic for any subject. In particular, there is no correct logic for modeling entailment in natural language.

I haven't even advocated for a position here, I have tried to clarify the monist position and how some arguments are poor responses for it. And I'd argue that if you're unable to understand the dominant position here (i.e., if it seems trivial to dispatch) then you really don't understand the debate at all.

I personally wouldn't consider myself a monist because the formalisms they advance are wholly inadequate for capturing natural language reasoning, particularly in the dimension of analogous predication, while also flattening out truth.

I wonder if we might think of Hume and co. as a symptom of Taylor's "buffered self," to some degree. Over here is a thing in the world and I (or "my brain") creates a "representation" of it. And in turn I might use language to represent that representation, but I remain separate from the thing represented in a strong sense.

There is a sort of divorce between the mind and the world implicit here.

By contrast, we might consider a dry river bed, which contains information about rain that has fallen nearby over the years. I don't know if it makes sense to think of a dry riverbed as a "representation" of water, but nonetheless it is a sign of water (or a collection of signs). If we examine these signs closely enough we can actually discover a great deal about rain or even vegetation patterns from a very long time ago. And, although the rain and the riverbed are different things, they don't seem to be "divorced" in our usual way of thinking of them. Indeed the rain is what causes the riverbed to exist at all.

But for there to be a pair of apples, this presupposes a prior relation between the individual apples.

Quite right. This seems to me like a manifestation of the classic problem of the "One and the Many." That is, how can being be in one sense "one," i.e. everything interacts with everything else, there are no truly isolated systems, etc. yet at the same time "many" in that we experience very many types of things, and things like appels that are "one" in being the same sort of organic unity, while being "many" in being numerically distinct.

This question was sort of the question of early physics and metaphysics (Aristotle helpfully opens with what might be the first literature review in history on this topic in both the Physics and Metaphysics), and I'd argue that it still sits at the center of much philosophical debate today.

Can we speak of unifying generating principles (causes) producing (but also unifying) a multitude of diverse species? Maybe. For my own part, I think current work in interdisciplinary fields like complexity study, information theory, cybernetics, etc. do offer a sort of vindication of this way of resolving the problem (dominant for a good span of philosophical history) at least.

Physicalism is the conviction that empirical phenomenon are determined(not necessarily deterministically) by physical laws (what that means is not clear, granted). This may not be the case.

Well, I think many physicalists have abandoned the idea that phenomena are extrinsically "determined by" natural laws. Rather, natural laws are our descriptions (or approximations, e.g. Cartwright's work) of how "the world works." On the intrinsic view, law-like descriptions are possible because of what things are, which determines how they interact.

This is interesting in that it proposes a return of natures to naturalism. The earlier view you describe (which certainly still has many adherents and is probably the dominant view in the popular imagination to this day) has essentially disposed of natures, making naturalism more a thesis about the primacy of mechanism and efficient cause (Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," does a good job showing how this grows out of Reformation Era theology; often missed is the fact that the "new science" didn't actually lead to rapid economic or technological advancement until centuries later, so we can't just explain this all in terms of "usefulness.")

The problem, IMO, is that the return of natures hasn't necessarily come with a move away from smallism, so what exactly constitutes ordered wholes remains an unresolved issue. The most common answers in popular physics tend to be "the cosmos as a whole," or "the very smallest things, which are fundemental precisely because they are smallest." I say "problem" because I think a middle ground that finds relatively unified ordered wholes at other levels would be beneficial, particularly in reunifying the study of nature with that of ethics and the social sciences.

I really do like DBH but then I also get the sense he's mainly preaching to the choir a lot of the time

For the most part, although his book on universalism got some pretty firey criticism from the ol' infernalist crowd :rofl:

I skipped ahead in Taylor's book an I think he makes some very good points about the "authenticity" and "anti-conformist" movements' ultimate failings and co-option by market capitalism, or the essential emptiness at the center of Brooks' "bobos" (bohemian bourgeoisie). I know he is quite old now and probably enjoying retirement, but I do wonder how Taylor looks at the core bobo group, tech workers, increasingly coming to be a vocal element in the alt/nu-right and their embrace of "traditionalism."



You make a good point. I never felt that War and Peace quite fit the mold of "Russian literature," either. Anna Karenina and the Death of Ivan Iylich do more. Master and the Margarita is another one that, while dark in some ways, breaks the "mold" in being quite playful at times.

I am a big fan of Viktor Pelavin, a contemporary Russian author who writes a similarly playful yet serious "magical realism."

I'd add that collapsing these sorts of differences really makes Odysseus's taking 10 years to make it to Penelope inexcusable. :rofl:

The fact your cat can't be simultaneously be in Maryland and Paris is because you have chosen to define "Maryland" and "Paris" in ways that are mutually exclusive and so one is not the other.

We haven't chosen this arbitrarily though. The difference between North America and Europe is not something we simply stipulated. If there is good empirical evidence to believe anything at all then surely there is good warrant to believe that when one steps off the Metro at the Silver Springs station one is not likely to find oneself staring at the banks of the Seine.

But there is no need to do this for any physical things, whether in the trivial senses we talk about all the time or in more fundamental ways; for instance, some quantum interpretations will ascribe an ontological realism to the idea that a thing can be in two places at once in the sense suggested by traditional conceptions of quantum superposition.

Well, I suppose ones attitude towards reductionism and smallism will probably guide the extent to which one thinks quantum foundations is particularly relevant here. On the one hand, there seems to be increasing consensus around the idea that there is no hard dividing line between "quantum and classical worlds." On the other, there is strong consensus in physics that the same living cat cannot be simultaneously in College Park and strolling the the Champs-Élysées.

If we are unsure that being in Rome, New York differs from Rome, Italy, I think we have left empiricism and the natural sciences behind a long time ago.

Having not read the paper, what do they mean by "causal?" This seems a lot more plausible if they are making the common contemporary move or only considering efficient cause.

It seems to me that the distinction in play here is also between essence and existence. What something is does not explain that it is, but it may very well explain formal cause even from a purely mathematical frame.

Well to be clear, I don't think:

Which is not surprising, as the Logic Of All And Only Universal Principles would need to have its laws apply in complete generality, and thus talk about every other logical apparatus in existence.

this is what she is doing. To do this would be to ignore what the most popular pluralists (B&R) and what most monists say about their own positions. As fdrake says, if one is allowed to appeal to "every other logical apparatus in existence," and its self-defined capacity to produce valid inferences, then it is very easy to come up with "knock down arguments" demonstrating nihilism. But Russell is willing to admit that nihilism is a slim minority opinion that is often considered "absurd," which would be strange indeed if it was a position that is easily demonstrable. Hence the argument focuses on the plausibility and popularity of counterexamples, not their mere existence.

I don't really know what else to say here, SEP, IEP, the books I've referenced, and similar resources point out that this is not how the debate is defined; there is wide agreement that people have created logical systems that alternatively dispense with all of the "laws of logic" (or more accurately, would render the logical consequence relationship empty).

I feel like part of the confusion here is that this question is one of what holds for valid inference (true premises ensure a true conclusion) as a whole, across all logics, which in turn means that the common way of thinking of validity in a purely internal sense essentially begs the question here. (Russell doesn't do this BTW, although it seems this could have been made clear. Her intro on logical nihilism is clearer.)

Logical Monism holds that there is only one correct or true logic, meaning that a single set of logical rules or principles governs valid reasoning universally. Proponents believe that this one logic captures the essence of valid inference across all contexts. [Note, books making the case for monism I have seen generally focus on applied logic as the target for their argument. The analogy here would be the difference between trying to identify the physical geometry of the world versus the purely mathematical consideration of very many geometries.]

Logical Pluralism asserts that more than one logic can be correct, depending on the context or purpose. Different logical systems may be valid for different kinds of reasoning (e.g., classical logic for everyday reasoning, but other logics like intuitionistic or relevance logic in specialized cases). [The most common historical example here I can think of is the claim, arguably in Aristotle, that the Law of the Excluded Middle does not apply to statements about the future].

Logical Nihilism denies that there is any objective or true logic at all. It suggests that no logical system accurately captures reasoning or inference, and that the concept of "correct" logic may be meaningless or arbitrary. [Or, one way to put this more specifically, as Russell points out in a footnote, is idea that the logical consequence relationship in natural language (and so arguably scientific discourse as well) is actually empty. Of course, the nihilist may also recommended other ways to retrieve the concept of a "correct logic" as well.]

Part of the confusion is that just how one wants to define these might vary quite a bit, although they are generally not going to be defined in terms of "every logical apparatus in existence," since I think everyone is going to agree here making the debate a bit trivial.

Well, it seems like disavowals of reductionism are increasingly common. However, if the schema is not replaced by anything positive, it seems to leave a vacuum that sucks nominally "anti-reductionists," back into things like referring to people as "brains," defining the human good in terms of "dopamine," and attempting to explore the proper ordering of modern society in terms various hormone and neurotransmitter levels.:roll:

And this has crossed over into the "political right" as well. Jordan Peterson opens up his self-help book aimed at young men by defining the human good in terms of research on lobsters. From the first chapter, the human good is the cultivation of "feel good chemicals," the acquisition of resources, and access to sexual partners.

To be clear, I certainly wouldn't want to say that the human good has nothing to do with these things, or that studying them isn't relevant. Quite the opposite. However, it's seems to me that it's the residue of reductionism that sends authors like Sam Harris off looking for the explanation of societal and individual good in terms of hormone and neurotransmitter levels. To me, this seems a lot like trying to figure out how to build a plane, or how some animals fly, in terms of the chemistry at work in the organelles of flying animals' wings. No doubt, the animals need wings to fly and the wings are composed of cells, but this completely missed the idea of generating principles or unification as set over (or at least as a balance to) reduction.

I guess part of the problem is that unifications are often misunderstood as reductions in popular science.

If you understood the essential properties and context of what grue and bleen is, then yes

You can tell when things were created down to the year just by looking at them? When you drive through a neighborhood you know the year each house was built just as readily as the the color it is painted?

the case of grue and blue, we're not asking what the definitions should be, we already know what they mean. Our decision is then, "should we use grue or blue"? And I mentioned earlier, as long as both are accurate to the point they are not contradicted by reality, its really a personal choice. It may be as simple as, "I like one word more than another" or as complicated as, "Those dirty grueians are a stupid people that I find inferior. Blue is obviously superior and the 'right' way to identify a color."

This seems like "because difference is not a logical contradiction it is arbitrary."

"Personal preference," isn't uncaused anyhow, people prefer things because how the world is. Human languages distinguish between shape and color for reasons other than arbitrary social convention for instance. One can feel shape but not color.

There is variance in how disparate cultures that developed in relative isolation cut up the world. At the same time, there isn't nearly the variance we should expect if this was entirely arbitrary.

Likewise, it is not purely in virtue of arbitrary social convention that "leap year biology," "a chemistry of odd numbered days," and a physics for each sex are not used as divisions of the sciences. If someone argued that chemistry should be split into chemistry done by people with blue eyes and chemistry done by people with other colored eyes, or argued that we should divide chemistry into pre and post 1990 chemistries, or a chemistry of federally recognized holidays, they would be rebuffed for non-arbitrary reasons. This might be filtered through "personal preference," but personal preference doesn't spring from the aether uncaused and neither do our concepts and languages.

The "effectiveness" of beliefs is tied to the world on the one hand and our own nature on the other (and of course the separation here is not hard and fast).

Suppose bleen is "green and "first observed" during or before 2004," or "blue and 'first observed' after 2004." Could you go walk around where you live and determine what was grue or bleen? Suppose there is a famous green landmark in your town and it got flattened by a tornado in 2006. It was rebuilt with largely with materials salvaged from the original, but has a substantial amount of new material. Is it bleen or grue? What if only small parts of it were replaced each year since 2004?

In terms of what is useful, it seems that inquiry is (usually) going to be best organized according to per se prediction (predication of intrinsic and not accidental properties). See below:

One might push back on Aristotle's categories sure, but science certainly uses categories. The exact categories are less important than the derived insights about the organization of the sciences. And the organization of the sciences follows Artistotle's prescription that delineations should be based on per se predication (intrinsic) as opposed to per accidens down to this day.

This is why we have chemistry as the study of all chemicals, regardless of time, place, etc. and biology as the study of all living things as opposed to, say: "the study of life on the island of Jamaica on Tuesdays," and "the study of chemical reactions inside the bodies of cats or inside quartz crystals, occuring between the hours of 6:00am and 11:00pm," as distinct fields of inquiry. Certain sorts of predication (certain categories) are not useful for dividing the sciences or organizing investigations of phenomena (but note that all are equally empirical).

Of course, there have been challenges to this. The Nazis had "Jewish physics" versus "Aryan physics." The Soviets had "capitalist genetics" and "socialist genetics," for a time. There are occasionally appeals to feminist forms of various sciences. But I think the concept that the ethnicity, race, sex, etc. of the scientist, or the place and time of the investigation, is (generally) accidental to the thing studied and thus not a good way to organize the sciences remains an extremely strong one.

That said, if all categories are entirely arbitrary, the result of infinitely malleable social conventions, without relation to being, then what is the case against organizing a "socialist feminist biology," "astronomy for leap years," and a "biology for winter months," etc ?

They certainly wouldn't be as useful, but that simply leads to the question "why aren't they useful?" I can't think of a simpler answer than that some predicates are accidental and thus poor ways to organize inquiry. We could ground this in the structure of things but it seems it might be simpler to ground it in phenomenology and the quiddity (whatness) of things as experienced. We can think here if how Husserl imagines changes to the noema (object of thought) and considers which changes force it to become an entirely different sort of thing.

Maybe "it just is"? But isn't that super-convenient for us?

I mentioned this in another thread, but once you allow "it just is," for some explanations you lose the ability to exclude it for any other. If things can happen for "no reason at all," there is, by definition, no constraint on such things occurring at random.

For instance, it has been popular to say: "the Big Bang just happened, looking for reasons or caused is meaningless." Yet if we accepted this, we could never have developed the theory of cosmic inflation, now widely thought to be prior to and responsible for the Big Bang. People will say things like, "we have a sample size of one, who's to say the extreme low entropy of the universe is unlikely, it just is." Yet this same sort of argument could have been made for all the unexplainable observations that led to development of the Big Bang Theory as well. And almost certainly, if we had a good explanation for the early universe's low entropy or other elements of the Fine-Tuning Problem, it seems highly probable proponents of the "brute fact " view would abandon their position. In ways, its invocation seems very similar to the "God of the gaps."

To put it in simple terms (borrowed from Sider), are we really not in a position to say that the Bleen people have gotten something wrong?

Well, for one, color is readily phenomenologically accessible, something we experience directly, while the "creation date," of an object is not.

I feel like this is a topic where there is a pernicious tendency to prioritize potency over act. Yes, there are myriad ways in which people could categorize and conceptualize the world. We can dream up arbitrary categories all we'd like; yet the fact remains that no one actually uses them. This isn't "for no reason at all," or explicable only in terms of cultural inertia. There is a reason disparate cultures have terms for color or shape, as distinct, instead of blending some colors with shape in a single term, or some tastes with other colors, etc.

I also tend to have a somewhat Hegelian view here in that concepts simply do not evolve arbitrarily. We don't think of water as a "polar molecule" for reasons that have nothing to do with what water is. We can imagine arbitrary terms or categories; getting people to use them is another thing. The evolution of our concepts of things isn't just related to culture, it is in part determined by what those things are. And because our ends are furthered by the causal mastery that comes with techne, we are naturally oriented towards refining our understanding throughout history.

Hegel has it that social institutions "objective morality" for the individual. I'd argue that science and technology play the same role for the relevant concepts. These aren't absolute, technology evolves just as much as moral attitudes regarding slavery, but they also don't evolve at random.

We could also call on semiotics here. There is a reason why signs cause us to experience or think of anything as "that sort of thing and not any other" (the mode of causality particular to signs). Some signs are stipulated, and some are even largely arbitrary, but that doesn't negate the existence of natural signs (e.g. smoke as a sign of fire, dark clouds as a sign of rain, etc.)

A professor I had told me about a reading of Kant more in line with an Averroist "material intellect" shared by all men. That's another solution for the slide towards solipsism I suppose. And I believe it was also somewhat normative too, the constructive mind is the "mind of Europe," in which all participate and which has been so marked by Newton and modern science

Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of the person advancing it.

If two things are equivalent, A<->B, does that mean they represent the same math object?

Barry Mazur has a really neat paper on this question, and at least parts of it are quite accessible. He ends up advocating (maybe just "showing the benefits of" is a better term) of an approach grounded in category theory.

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=2ahUKEwjZhPfV0qCJAxW9vokEHYuQCMwQFnoECB4QAQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw0j1f7DfoQP7OKuvRZ37rIU

Mathematics thrives on going to extremes whenever it can. Since the “compromise” we sketched above has “mathematical objects determined by the network of relationships they enjoy with all the other objects of their species,” perhaps we can go to extremes within this compromise, by taking the following further step. Subjugate the role of the mathematical object to the role of its network of relationships—or, a
further extreme—simply replace the mathematical object by this network. This may seem like an impossible balancing act. But one of the elegant–and
surprising—accomplishments of category theory is that it performs this act, and does it with ease.

In a very loose sense, there is a neat parallel here to Roveli's Relational Quantum Mechanics or some forms of process metaphysics. I am less hot on those than I used to be, coming around to views that still include a role for the nature/essence of objects (e.g. Aristotle, or some interpretations of Hegel—things might be defined by their relations, but they are not just collections of atomic relations, rather relations are defined by what a thing is as a whole), or Deely's Scholastic-informed semiotic view of things existing in a "web of relations," which still holds on to "realist" intuitions re essence—a "balancing act." (Well, that's all vague I know, but the paper IS interesting!)

And there is also a neat parallel to St. Maximus the Confessor's philosophy and the Patristic philosophers' conception of number, which I will perhaps return to elucidate if I have more time. But basic idea is that things are not intelligible in themselves (although they do have intelligible natures, logoi). For instance, the idea "tree" is only fully intelligible in terms of other ideas such as the sun and water that are necessary for the tree, the soil it grows in, etc. You cannot explain what it is in isolation. Numbers and figures (following the old division between magnitude[discrete] and multitude[continuous]) are included here, in that they only exist where instantiated, in minds or things, and are not wholly intelligible on their own.

This makes even number dynamic in an important sense. To be fully intelligible, things must exist in the absolute unity of the Logos (Christ as Divine Word, but due to divine simplicity we might say God as a whole as well—on this view the entire cosmos is incarnational).

Anyhow, this sort of relates back to the OP. The idea is that, yes, there is a sense in which everything must be one (i.e. unity in the Doctrine of Transcedentals), but there is obviously also differentiation and intelligibility in the many (the old problem of the "One and the Many").

Another interesting thing is how this relates to knowledge. In Metaphysics, IX 10, Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge/truth:

-Asytheta: truth as the conformity of thought and speech to reality (whose opposite is falsity); and

-Adiareta, truth as the grasping of a whole, apprehension (whose opposite is simply ignorance).

Obviously, we follow relations discursively, through asytheta. But then it is by coming to grasp the whole (via adiareta), the principles by which these relations obtain, that we gain a more full understanding (St. Maximus gets at this in Ad Thalassium 60). Likewise, in the Arithmetic Diophantus*, although generally dealing with problems whose principles he cannot discover, makes the case that solutions are virtually present in the principles that will allow for solutions (the "many" contained in the "one," e.g. many shapes, with their own distinct quiddity/whatness, flowing from Euclid's postulates).

*Interesting bit of math trivia, Diophantus, living in the third century, seems aware of Lagrange's four-square theorem, and if he had an actual proof of it then it was effectively lost for 1,500 years (we only have some of his books).

I also have ulterior reasons for taking dialetheism seriously, namely Marx and Hegel. Marx's notion of contradiction I have a good feel for (but because it's more extensional it's easier to untangle Marx's notion of contradiction from the logical one by dividing wholes into parts that differ), but Hegel's continues to mystify me.

Hegel's contradiction is pretty far from most paraconsistent logics, given the unity and "development" of opposites. If you're interested though, formalization attempts have run through category theory and Lawvere is the big name here.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://philarchive.org/archive/CORMAA-3v1&ved=2ahUKEwjrxdPIz6CJAxURlIkEHUmyEkcQFnoECCEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3XxnDtBEih45jE5c2zfW2d

Nlab has some stuff on this too.

I have read many commentaries on the Logic at the point. Houlgate and Wallace are my favorites (Wallace isn't quite a commentary, but he does focus on the Logic), but Taylor was useful too. Despite this and now years of effort, I find the essence chapter largely impenetrable lol. But better minds then mine might have more success.

It's a book, so sadly not wholly available from what I can see. Google books sometimes has a decent number of pages. There is a review by Erik Stei though and his recent book would be another example for how monists frame their own case.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/one-true-logic-a-monist-manifesto/

I have to say, I love the cheekiness of the cover.





It's:

If you know something, there is no need to inquire about it because you already know it.

If you don’t know something, you wouldn’t know what to inquire about or how recognize the answer when you find it.

And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? (Plato, Meno, 80d1-4)

It sometimes gets brought up in discussions of systematic search.

It is sort of related to P = NP as well. You might be able to tell if you have a correct answer easily if you are provided with one, but finding that answer can be effectively impossible, even if you have a description of what you are looking for that is a ridged designator.