Keeping in mind you have ruled out adequacy

I did?:chin:

Pretty sure that's the definition I gave. What exactly is the counterpoint, that thought cannot be adequate to being? Epistemic nihilism?

Would you allow an edit to, "Truth is the seeming adequacy of thought to apparent being"?

No, because it seems obvious that there is a difference between what is true and what merely appears to be true. Indeed, one cannot have a coherent appearance/reality distinction if there is "nothing but appearances." In that case, appearances just are reality, and we have something like Protagorean relativism.

But I would want to lay a lot at the feet of democratic culture. I think most people like pluralism because they like democracy, and truth is always a threat to democracy insofar as we accept the modern notion of liberty as liberty to follow one's passions.

On the other hand is the idea that truth brings with it coercive imposition, which threatens the dignity of each human to choose for themselves. Either way, I tend to view the motive as moral more than speculative, especially for the non-academic masses

I'm replying to this comment in this thread because my thoughts are more on topic here.

I think the above is largely correct. However, the question then is: "why do people now think truth is incompatible with democracy?" A very robust appreciation for democracy existed in the United States in the early 20th century without an embrace of this sort of pluralism, without any apparent conflict.

Superman fights for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," a phrase which could be delivered back then without any undercurrent of irony. In 1948, even "the world is essentially meaningless and purposeless" types like William Stace could espouse faith in logos and man's capacity to follow it. There is, up through the early Cold War, a "cult of the Founding Fathers" that tends to present them in terms not unlike how the ancient Greeks saw figures like Solon. And then there is stuff like the broad success of The Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia in the earlier context, versus the sorts of stories that are popular today, like A Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games. The latter two are considered "more realistic," in part, precisely because of uninspiring, more cynical endings.

I think post-modern skepticism re grand narratives, and a more general skepticism of logos's capacity for leading human life, has a larger impact on popular culture that is often acknowledged (through a variety of pathways, particularly its effect on the liberal arts). I'd argue that it is this skepticism that makes truth threating (rather than empowering) for democracy. That is, truth and reason should make democracy more secure, but in this climate the two come into conflict.

Also, the fact that logos is no longer fit to lead human life redoubles the modern liberal phobia of thymos (spiritedness, honor culture, etc.) sparked by the World Wars. So what you get is a society focused on epithumia (sensible pleasure and, in particular, safety) and "reasonableness" (which seems to often tie back procedurally to safety). This is, pointedly, not unlike how Juvenal and Tacitus saw their own society as its citizenry allowed the Roman Republic to die.

Now, I'll catch some flak for this, but for historians and theorists who use something like the epithumia, thymos, logos distinction, there are two types of "societies of epithumia:" the primitive, which must struggle to meet basic needs, and the decadent. Ibn Khaldun might be an example here. Or as William Durant puts it: "every civilization is born a Stoic, and dies an Epicurean."

To bring this back to Rawls:

A common critique of Rawls is that his "reasonableness" isn't enough to motivate citizens to attain arduous goods. It's procedural, and motivated by safety. Other liberals tend to draw on a similar sort of motivation (e.g. Stephen Pinker, Sam Harris, etc., i.e. "it's safest to prefer the progressive liberal social order; it's most likely to get you 'good enough' circumstances"). Hence, it doesn't really address Fukuyama's point about the inherent human drive towards megalothymia. More to the point, people are unlikely to want to storm beaches or resist sieges in the name of "reasonableness," i.e., to take the sorts of personal and collective risks that civilization requires.

I think those are fair critiques, but I would add that "reasonableness" also isn't a strong enough motivator to keep societies' leaders and elites honest. When faced with tensions between duty and personal pleasure or self-aggrandizement, reasonableness is not the sort of principle that gets people to do the hard thing, especially not when that means taking on significant risks. For that, you need a sense of thymos, arete, and pietas, all the old civic virtues. Hamilton for instance, wasn't willing to storm trenches because he thought his system would be a reasonable maximization of the self-directed pursuit of utility, but because he (like many Founders) self-reflectively thought of himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus or Cocles.

Certainly, thymos can lead to great evils, but it also leads to great goods. That's Plato's whole point. Logos needs to rule through thymos. Liberalism tends to cut out thymos because it will not allow any standard for human greatness or just desert to enter the public sphere (Rawls explicitly bans just desert from consideration). More to the point, in its contemporary form, it tends to preclude the "rule of reason" because reason, once deflated and deprived of proper authority as logos, only speaks to "how to get what we all want," and not "what should we want."

So, as Rawls might put it in his deontological contractarian terms:

Human beings have a desire to express their nature as free and equal moral persons, and this they do most adequately by acting from the principles that they would acknowledge in the original position. When all strive to comply with these principles and each succeeds, then individually and collectively their nature as moral persons is most fully realized, and with it their individual and collective good” (1971, 528; 1999, 462–3, emphasis added).

Yet we face the same sort of challenges one sees in criticisms of Hume:

Such a common end or desire, however, and the common flourishing in which this desire is fulfilled are simply not possible as such if we accept one key premise that Rawls himself has articulated and indeed started out from in the first part of his theory of justice: namely, that the good of each individual is essentially whatever he or she desires, that each individual determines (not discovers or discerns) his or her own life plan comprised of a “separate system of ends.” Recall Rawls’s famous example of the person who dedicates his life to counting blades of grass (1971, 432–3; 1999, 379–80). If this person does not affirm the principles of justice, or the social union of a well-ordered society, or the excellences of others enjoyed in that society as parts of his individual good, so be it; if after attempts at friendly persuasion he remains unconvinced, we have no theoretical or anthropological grounds to conclude that he has misunderstood who he really is and what makes for his truest personal and social happiness. He is simply different from us. On Rawls’s own terms, therefore, we cannot convincingly maintain that justice is congruent with the good for all persons; Rawls himself admits this towards the end of TJ (cf. 1971, 575–6; cf. 528–9; 1999, 504–5; cf.) Because “goodness as rationality” hinges on individuals’ separate systems of ends, a fully common good and ultimately the (ontological) “common or matching [moral] nature” (1971, 523; cf. 528; 1999, 459; cf. 463) on which it must be founded cannot be said to exist within Rawls’s liberal paradigm.

Mary Keys - Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good

Rawls has a "thick" theory in some respects, but this conception of the common good is thin. I don't think it's thick enough to support the demands of civilization in the long run, although it might work well enough for a while, especially for a civilization with economic and martial hegemony already in place and an existing culture it can draw on for values. But we're now seeing both of those factors evaporate.

Not to mention that Rawls himself is undermined by the advance of skepticism since the 1970s. Even his instrumental, Kantian reasonableness starts looks shaky in the face of today's logos skepticism.

To call these "post-modern" is a stretch. Or is it? Is pragmatism related to post-modernism? "Do what works" could be seen as a pretty pluralistic position.

People have always been pragmatic, engaged in bracketing, put more fundamental questions aside to focus on more pressing concerns, etc. I think the shift I am referring to is much more distinct, i.e. the claim that truth itself is "pragmatism all the way down." That "true = what gets me what I currently want."

This is quite distinct from recognizing the benefits of pragmatic approaches to problem-solving. Plato, for instance, has a tremendous respect for techne, as does Aristotle. However, they do not think techne (arts for achieving ends) exhausts the human capacity for knowledge. That might be one way to frame the question ontological truth: "does episteme, sophia, and gnosis exist?" And, if sophia (wisdom, theoria) doesn't exist, what exactly is the philosopher, the lover of wisdom?

A question that rears its head when we define truth in terms of usefulness is: "but is anything truly useful?" Obviously, we very often do things that we think are to our benefit, or are a path to some end we seek, but they actually aren't, or we discover that the ends we pursue aren't truly choiceworthy. There are obvious examples, like Newton drinking mercury for his health, and less obvious examples where it seems more crucial to have a clear distinction between what is believed to be useful and what is truly best.

A lot of what is said by advocates of the pragmatic theory of truth is a helpful medicine for people who have grown overly committed to a calcified, doctrinal view of metaphysics. Nonetheless, on versions where there is some truth about what is actually useful, the new theory seems to actually not be that different from earlier theories, whereas otherwise, the result will tend towards a thoroughgoing relativism. There is a pretty big gulf between C.S. Peirce and Rorty for instance.

My understanding of metaphysics grows directly out of my reading and contemplation of the works of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and related works

Like other great thinkers of the Axial Age, these thinkers are skeptical of doctrines and the capacity of language to convey truth. But I do think this is quite a bit different from something along the lines of: "there is no Tao," and so "by Tao, we just mean what is in accordance with what we think works." I do not understand from these thinkers that there is truly no way to be more or less in line with nature—that wu wei can be consistent with whatever we currently think is beneficial.

It's intended to demonstrate that methods are not true or false, they are effective or not.

Ok, but are they truly effective or ineffective? I think the ontological question is going to worm its way back in with more complex cases.

Even if conflicting political approaches to metaphysics and epistemology maintain high standards for establishment of truth, it is often decisions about what questions to ask that demonstrate where political differences lie.

Indeed, but without a clear notion of truth, I don't get how one questions this sort of political influence. Yet I think it's obvious that it can be more or less pernicious. The point is, of course, not that we can step outside of political or historical influence, but that we can make judgements based on something that is not politics and history "all the way down." Otherwise, it becomes difficult to articulate what is wrong with an "Aryan physics."

If we claim it "isn't useful," we will just be faced with the question about the truth of usefulness. Surely, it was useful for the Nazis. Fiction presents us with a good extreme here. In 1984, it is useful, both for the Party, and for the citizens, to affirm "Big Brother is always right." It's so useful in fact, that the story closes on Winston having been tortured into loving Big Brother. Yet, just because society can be set up such that it is eminently useful to affirm:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Or that "Oceania has always been allied with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia," even though the reverse was true just minutes earlier—does the fact that denying these will result in double-plus ungood consequences make them so?

That's pretty much the point. Institutions brought them fortune, power and fame and they're busily attacking and tearing down those institutions, in order to deprive other people of the protection they offer.

On their view, they are saving those institutions. That's pretty clear from the rhetoric. I don't think they are entirely wrong here, at least on the need to save those institutions from opposing forces, even if the counterattack is equally disastrous.

An interesting thing is that if you look at hit pieces on Peterson, the things he is being criticized for (e.g. obscurantistism) are precisely the things that made him a successful academic and could easily make him a "brilliant theorist" if he held more orthodoxly (in the context of the academy) left wing positions.

So maybe, a symptom of the "post-modernization of the right," although Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, etc. are better figures representing that phenomenon.

<Science pertains to knowledge of the natural world, and where our knowledge of the natural world is more certain and reliable, there science is more present>

Science is also generally thought of as universal knowledge. But in complex systems, it is often the case that what seems like a universal relationship is subject to change after passing various tipping points. We deal in "moving landscapes" in more complex fields. For instance, several "laws of economics," revealed themselves to be merely tendencies which existed within the economic, political, and technological environments that existed in the first half of the 20th century. We discovered that they were not truly universal towards the end of the century—that sort of thing.

For another example, with biology, we have to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life, life based on a molecule other than DNA, perhaps even non-carbon-based life. This throws a wrench into claims to universality.

This is a problem, although I think information theoretic approaches shed light on a solution by way of returning to the conception of science primarily in terms of unifying principles that explain (and virtually contain) many particular causes.

But, my particular opinion is that these issues, and the motivation for scientific anti-realism, or pluralism, are driven by a self-reinforcing constellation of philosophical positions—representationalism, positivism, nominalism and key assumptions about philosophical anthropology—nominalism being the most relevant. Because of these presuppositions, the problems posed by fallibilism, the possibility of scientific revision, of one theory superceding another, or of paradigm shifts, seem to necessitate anti-realism or pluralism, even up to an abandonment of the principle of non-contradiction (e.g. Latin Averroism or "hermetically sealed magisterium"). Indeed, I don't think people are wrong to think that, given those presuppositions, this is where they will be led, to a choice between nihilism and pluralism (whether the two end up being all that different is another question).

What I find particularly interesting is how this sets up a new dialectical of the "reasonable" and the "unreasonable" as opposed to the old dialectic of the rational and irrational. Rawls conception of the "reasonable" individual might be a good example here. The rational is too bound up in its new straightjacket to be of much use, but the reasonable is allowed to rely on a certain je ne sais pas to delimit the vast expanses left open by nihilism or pluralism.

:up:

Funny enough, I think the rise of information theoretic/complexity studies approaches to the physical sciences make a good case for a sort of "immanent realism" as opposed to a thoroughgoing nominalism (which opens up a number of epistemic challenges).

There is, a sort of definiteness to something like an ant. That is, ants were around as organic wholes organized around aims (life being "goal-directed") long before there were men to say "this counts as an ant." The ant is not an arbitrary ensemble; at least that's my position.

I also think this goes with Aristotle's idea that it is organism who are most properly beings (things like rocks or puddles being more nexuses of external causes). But of course, unity, self-organization, and self-governance occur on a sliding scale. Being a "whole" is not a binary distinction. Unity and multiplicity are contrary opposites, not contradictory. Some things are more unified as wholes than others, organisms being the best example (but dissipative systems with "life cycles" are interesting cases too).

To my mind at least, the opens up a via media for explaining why there are such things as trees, men, ants, etc. in a non-arbitrary way, instead of "just universal quantum fields" or "just a sea of particles," which we then "give names to." Afterall, if we give things names because it is "useful" to make such distinctions, we will next have to ask: "but why are these distinction useful and not others? Why did disparate linguistic groups all come to speak of ants, trees, etc., and have the idea of species?" Some prior cause seems necessary to explain the distinction. To my mind, the most obvious cause is that ants and the like already represented organic wholes.

But then the informational pattern by which something is an ant, even though it is defined by a relation to the entire cosmic order (i.e. not wholly intelligible in itself) is, nonetheless, abstractable, and so has a sort of unchanging being in abstraction.

I think one of the difficulties here is that the obsession with logic in late medieval/early modern thought led to a sort of calcification of realism, such that it became a real life strawman of itself. "Ant" had to be an eternal, unchanging univocal form, rather than being a certain sort of principle instantiated in all ants. Evolution is fatal to the calcification, but not really to more nuanced formulations that existed earlier.

There is at least an interesting etiology here, when you think about "information" defining thought (even in steam pipes perhaps!). Because the term "information" comes from the old "form," eidos (from whence we also get idea). Well, if computational theory of mind or integrated information theory are correct in some key respects, then there definitely is a link between "idea" and "(in)form(action)."

Interesting article, I still have to finish it.

I would question the figures being focused on to some degree, because I think it obscures how the issues raised here are topics of open debate within the Right. These aren't really intellectuals we would expect to have coherent platforms. Two of the figures have had quite public struggles with drug addiction and difficulties coping with wealth and fame, of the sort that obviously tends to lead to incoherence. They also interact heavily through social media, and I have found that social media tends to make even otherwise quite sensible figures say very silly things on a regular basis.

I think the tension that arises from the modern tendency to define freedom in terms of power/potency (the ability to choose or be anything), as opposed to in terms of actuality (the ability to actualize the Good) actually has a much wider reach than the focus of this article. It leads to deep tensions in progressive liberalism and modern communitarianism as well (actually, maybe this article does get at the tensions in right-wing communitarianism in some ways, since it cannot take over from Neoliberalism precisely because this ideal of freedom is so fixed).

I think it also may be missing the way in which the general movement represented by these figures often explicitly appeals to tradition and communitarian identity, not just individualism. Is there a contradiction here? Perhaps, and the article does a good job on some of that. But I think there are other figures who represent more serious efforts to overcome these tensions.

Liberalism, in its battles with its ideological opponents, ended up sublating key elements of socialism and nationalism. The Right certainly focuses heavily on individualism, but it does incorporate elements of both the aforementioned (normally the former being justified in terms of the later, a conception of a "people" who are deserving of membership in the welfare state, which tends to exclude migrants). Note that progressive liberalism also focuses heavily on the individual. The reason given for why we need more progressive redistribution, and the reason we need to focus on biological markers of identity (sex, race, etc. instead of class, religion, etc.) is because progressivism is ultimately still justified in terms of the individual getting to decide and achieve their own good.

I think the article misses how appeals to pre-modern tradition also figure into this though. The crowd around Trump really likes their ancient Rome memes. So does Musk. There is "Red Caesarism," etc. These elements tend to be far more communitarian, and are openly critical of libertarianism, and even sometimes critical of capitalism. Tariffs are and a push for autotarky are actually not out of line with this way of thinking. This is a tension within the Right that is out in the open, not something that is ignored.

Movements like Generation Identity in Europe are in some ways more grounded in national epics like the Nibelungenlied, the Poetic Edda, the Iliad, and ancient political theory than in modern liberalism/libertarian ideology. More Beowulf, less Ayn Rand. Certainly, they rely heavily on these sources for aesthetics, and these are romantic movements where aesthetics is given a very important role (e.g., a film like 300 might have more currency than many political dissertations).

It is certainly true that these movements often cannot abandon certain classical liberal precepts, and that this arguably makes them incoherent, or at the very least opens them up to grifters and abuse. But I do think there is more there than simple opportunism.

Go look at popular right wing spaces and I think you're far more likely to find discussion of Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed," than Nozick. "Neoliberal" has become a sort of slur in these spaces. "Zombie Reaganism" and the "Boomerism" of the classically liberal GOP is almost as much of a punching bag as the Left. Wagner, particularly his epic Ring Cycle, starts to eclipse his friend Nietzsche in popularity, and names like Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling push out Hamilton, Locke, and Mill.

Which is just to say maybe that this internal contradiction actually seems to me to be more of an open civil war in the Right (also one that tends to pit the young communitarian traditionalists against the older individualistic liberals), and these figures, being broadly popular, are just nexus points for this conflict.

I'd also add that I don't think these sources are necessarily problematic. What is problematic is that liberalism, in its phobia of thymos, as so utterly starved young people (particularly young men) of any "education of the chest," that, in their desperation to find some source of thymos, the fall easy prey to the simplicity of "might makes right," and the "super individual," the "alpha Chad." But funny enough, Homer, Virgil, etc. are actually full of warnings against this sort of thing.

They are also taught to be skeptical of logos, the effects of post-modernism come home to roost, which removes the idea that thymos must be in service to logos (pietas), leaving only the sort of cannibalistic energy of Achilles (or ultimately, in his failings, Aeneas') thymotic rage (furor). Not to put too fine a point on it, but without logos leading, the parallels to Hitlerism seem fairly robust.

I am sure that most would agree that the individual is sovereign and institutions are suspect. Institutions were created for the benefit of the individual. The individual is not there for the benefit of the Institution.

Who is "most?" I think Marxism, most pre-modern political thought, most Eastern thought, a lot of Continental thought, and post-modernism would all reject this to some extent, although for very different reasons. However, this is certainly the view of neoliberalism, which is currently the hegemonic ideology, but it's not like neoliberalism is without significant critics.

This is, for instance, not what one gets even looking at the old heroic epics. There is no Aeneas without the Trojans and future Romans. He is an exceptional individual. A hero. The son of a god. Yet his desires are continually subservient to the needs of the whole, and shaped by the destiny of the whole. Without the whole, he wouldn't be a hero.

Greek drama, likewise, tends to pivot around conflicting duties (e.g. to family versus polis), not on duty versus individual desire. There, the answer is (to them) too obvious. The individual cannot conflict with the polis absolutely because there is no individual without the polis. It's Christianity and Platonism, with their focus on a justice beyond the particularities of any one culture, social role, or historical moment that allows the individual to absolutely oppose the polis, but even here it is not the individual, but their ultimate duty (to principles) which is at question.

From what I’ve seen of your posts, I don’t think you really think this is a very interesting idea.

Quite the contrary, I'm quite interested on a number of fronts. First, I'm interested to see if such views can avoid essentially democratizing truth or, more to the point, reducing it towards something like "might (physical or political) makes right."

I'm also interested in such views' rise in popularity as a historical phenomena. When the positivists began attacking metaphysics, I hardly think post-modern pluralism was the goal they had in mind.

Nor is this a view of truth that would be embraced by classical liberal theorists, nor by most influential 20th century liberals. Rawls, Popper, or Berlin, for instance, cannot embrace the sort of "aletheiatic pluralism" often advocated for on TPF and other places without radically undermining their own claims; yet these voices are often called upon go support liberalism and pluralism.

Hence, I do wonder if it is a sort of progression from the 1970s that has gone underappreciated, i.e., that "modern liberalism" has been abandoned for "post-modern liberalism" without people paying much attention. That's certainly the claim of some theorists, and that the dangers herein only began to become apparent to many when the political right also adopted the post-modern stance, leading to all sorts of concerns about a "post-truth" world. So, with the Fuenteses of the world we advance from "my body, my choice," to "your body, my choice," and from "my truth, my choice," to "your truth, my choice." But, if the (language) community decides truth and justice, then he who asserts his rule over the community does make such decisions, and does so justly.

Of course, ideas like "we decide what is true" are likely to be much more appealing when one feels that one is part of the empowered majority, and that "history" is on one's side, which is certainly how progressive vanguard intellectuals tended to see themselves. I do suspect that the bloom will continue to fall off the rose in this respect, particularly as the forces of reaction have finally begun raising siege works around the Ivory Tower in a gambit to enforce their truth. Notably, as this has happened, appeals to Madame Reason, and Truth (capital!) from those quarters have suddenly grown much louder than they have been in decades.

To answer your question, I can boil water in a kettle or I can put it in a cup and heat it in a microwave. Is one of those methods true and the other false?

I'm not sure what this example is supposed to demonstrate. Surely one can explain how both heat water. Is the idea that truth is just getting the result you want?

How does this play out for the assertion of a distinct "Aryan physics" as set against a degenerate "Jewish physics?" Or a "socialist genetics" as set against "capitalist genetics?"

That sounds like one reality.

Right, if all realities (plural) intersect and are accessible to us, then they are, in some way, one reality. Whereas, if we are each locked in our own reality, the result is solipsism.

Now, for a reality versus appearance distinction to make sense, to have any real content, there has to be something other than appearance. If we face nothing other than a pleroma of appearances, then it would seem that appearance must simply be reality. But if multiform appearances are reality, then I don't see how this doesn't lead to the Protagorean conclusion that whatever we think is true, is.

There are many problems here, not least that, as Plato has Socrates point out in the Theatetus, this makes it impossible to be wrong, which makes philosophy worthless.

If change is all there is and is absolute, whatever we say about the many things changing before our many eyes will be burned up and lost to the change. So if “reality” is whatever we say about changing things, there are so many realities there may as well be none (and you may as well hold that “what we encounter instead are multiple realities.”) But if that really is the case, if as Heraclitus says, “all is change”, I find the concept “multiple realities” to be an equivocation on the word “reality” and that what is really meant and distinguished here is that “the one reality is change, always changing.”

If all things are mutable and subject to change then the proposition: "all things are mutable' is itself subject to
becoming false.

Note that Heraclitus himself avoids this with an appeal to the Logos.

I would make the claim that philosophy is concerned with the nature of being, rather than reality

Yes, good point.

Thanks everyone for the kind words. I will try to respond in more detail later.



Well, the bridge between the two is that our understanding of mathematics, at least initially, comes from our sense experiences of the common sensibles. This is true developmentally (we teach kids to count with beans, we teach them geometry with wooden triangles, etc.), but it is also true historically that this is how mathematics was conceived (as magnitude and multitude). Shifts, like the redefinition of mathematics in terms of "games" is a relatively recent development.

Essence versus existence seems like another reason. The ontic structural realist still needs to give some account of why some math 'exists' and some doesn't, or else seemingly be committed to an incredibly bloated ontology where Boltzmann Brains (or some variant) and "random universes" would vastly outnumber people with coherent lives (as opposed to randomly generated memories).

...or not. "Every Thing Must Go" seemed comfortable with just leaving this unexplained:

What makes the structure physical and not mathematical? That is a question that we refuse to answer. In our view, there is nothing more to be said about this that doesn’t amount to empty words and venture beyond what the PNC allows. The ‘world-structure’ just is and exists independently of us and we represent it mathematico-physically via our theories.

This makes sense to me. It set me thinking... Don't tell anyone else I said this, but I wonder if there are really no true ontological positions, only methodological ones. It's not what is real, it's where and how do we look.

If there are no true ontological positions, in virtue of what are some methodological positions true (or false)?

Goodman argues that "reduction" is basically a myth, with no known exemplars

There is thermodynamics → statistical mechanics, often offered up as the paradigmatic example, but there are very few examples that even fit that standard. Reductionism does not have a sterling track record, that's for sure, but it's also unfalsifiable, so it hasn't been "ruled out" either.

The alternative is to believe that there is only ever one thing to say, and anyone not saying that is wrong. But rather than see divergence as disagreement, it's possible in many cases to realize that it's only another perspective being offered. "But look at it this way ..." doesn't have to imply disagreement. Knowledge production is a communal enterprise.

I don't think this is true. Actually, I think bolded is generally a strawman of objections to pluralism (and it is one that gets hauled out on this site with extreme regularity). A rejection of pluralism re metaphysical foundations and ontological truth (we could say, a refusal to jettison to principle of non-contradiction), is not a blanket refusal to countenance some degree of relativism, contextualism, perspectivism, pluralism in descriptions, etc. Indeed, I think virtually every philosopher allows for some degree of cultural/historical relativism, some degree of contextualism (e.g. the truth value of "it is raining right now") etc.

Varieties of "aletheiatic monism" need not (and normally do not) need to claim that there "is only ever one thing to say," or appeal to the "One True..." (always in caps!). There can be many ways to express truth from many disparate angles. Different true descriptions might be more or less useful in different contexts.

Rather, what the monist says is that not every description is correct, that not all "things to say" are true, and that truth does not contradict truth (barring unclear terms, equivocation, or a lack of proper distinctions). That is, something cannot be both true and not-true, correct and not-correct, without qualification. All truthful descriptions then, will share some sort of morphism.

The monist can agree that "but look at it this way..." need not imply disagreement. However, they can also recognize substantial disagreement. Such disagreements might deal in matters of fact, and thus have reason as their arbiter (as opposed to power relations).



Right, given "we encounter... multiple realities," as a starting premises, "the pursuit of a single, foundational, unifying reality" would be superfluous. Perhaps? Do the different realities share anything in common? Or are there as many realities as possible assertions?

I want to say, because people don’t appreciate Aristotle.

The reason for so very, very many problems in modern philosophy... :rofl:

It's not that hard to give a definition. Truth is the adequacy of thought to being. Being a transcendental, "true" is "said many ways," as it is predicated analogously. For instance, we can think of an utterance in terms of it being a sign of truth in the intellect of the speaker (true versus false knowledge claims) or in terms of the utterance accurately reflecting the beliefs of a speaker ("telling the truth" versus lying).

In terms of logical truth:

To judge that things are what they are is to judge truly. Every judgment comprises certain ideas which are referred to, or denied of, reality. But it is not these ideas that are the objects of our judgment. They are merely the instruments by means of which we judge. The object about which we judge is reality itself — either concrete existing things, their attributes, and their relations, or else entities the existence of which is merely conceptual or imaginary, as in drama, poetry, or fiction, but in any case entities which are real in the sense that their being is other than our present thought about them. Reality, therefore, is one thing, and the ideas and judgments by means of which we think about reality, another; the one objective, and the other subjective. Yet, diverse as they are, reality is somehow present to, if not present in consciousness when we think, and somehow by means of thought the nature of reality is revealed. This being the case, the only term adequate to describe the relation that exists between thought and reality, when our judgments about the latter are true judgments, would seem to be conformity or correspondence. "Veritas logica est adaequatio intellectus et rei" (Summa, I:21:2). Whenever truth is predicable of a judgment, that judgment corresponds to, or resembles, the reality, the nature or attributes of which it reveals. Every judgment is, however, as we have said, made up of ideas, and may be logically analyzed into a subject and a predicate, which are either united by the copula is, or disjoined by the expression is not. If the judgment be true, therefore, these ideas must also be true, i.e. must correspond with the realities which they signify. As, however, this objective reference or significance of ideas is not recognized or asserted except in the judgment, ideas as such are said to be only "materially" true. It is the judgment alone that is formally true, since in the judgment alone is a reference to reality formally made, and truth as such recognized or claimed.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15073a.htm

See also: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1016.htm
https://isidore.co/aquinas/QDdeVer1.htm

My thoughts were that they are ultimately connected. Mathematics is, at least initially, based on abstracting the common sensibles from any underlying matter and other qualities, including from time. So you get a timeless, changeless "platonic," intelligible subject that is nonetheless based on what is common to the senses (i.e. the experience of magnitude and multitude through shape, number, extension, etc.).

So, I'd argue that mathematization is sort of a blending of the two. It is materialism pulled back up into the intelligible realm, or the intelligible truncated down to just what is abstracted from the common sensibles.

It's obviously also intuitive in much the same way, which is why it is almost as old (e.g., Pythaogreanism).

But, aside from the objection that this cuts out far too much, I think there is also a good argument to be made that a recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a measure (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes (virtual, as opposed to dimension/bulk quantity, i.e. intensity of participation in form). That puts some recognition of whole, and so intelligible form, prior to dimensive quantity.

Second , mathematization struggles with existence. Even if one accepts that "what everything is" can be described by mathematics, this does not seem to explain "that it is." Hence, mathematization still tends to either tend back towards materialism (e.g. "these particular mathematical objects really exist just because, for no reason—which essentially puts potency before act or potency as actualizing itself) or towards extremely crowded and inflated multiverse ontologies. For instance, Tegmark cannot fathom how mathematics can explain existence (fair enough) so he had to suppose that every mathematical object exists (and that some just happen to have experiences).

I suppose empiricism leans towards the materialist side, rationalism towards the platonist side. Either way though, they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity).

This paper argues that ungrounded certainties enable knowledge, rather than undermining it, and that hinges and Gödel's unprovable statements serve a similar purpose."

If only all philosophy writing was as clearly written as this essay

I did very much like the paper, but this statement of the thesis (which occurs a few times) actually strikes me as somewhat ambiguous.

The point could be either:

A. That actually, fully self-justifying, air tight foundational systems would be somehow deficient (e.g. if logicism re mathematics could be decisively demonstrated it would somehow actually undermine knowledge); or

B. Because a fully self-justifying system is impossible, ungrounded certainties are essential for knowledge.

I assume from the paper that B is meant though, since it does not give any indication of why A should be the case.

The problem I see, which @Joshs gets at, is that B seems to risk equivocating re many common and classical definitions of "knowledge." A critic could say that knowledge is about the possession of truth simpliciter. It is not about possession or assent to "what is true given some foundational/hinge belief" (which itself may be true or untrue). This redefinition seems to open the door on "knowing" things that are false.

Hence, I think someone holding to a classical notion of knowledge as the possession of truth, and truth as "the adequacy of the intellect to being," might be inclined to say that the solution here is actually radically skeptical. All that is "known" is based on that which is not known. "Knowledge" ceases to be knowledge. Further, all demonstration from first principles would flow, ultimately, from premises that could be said to be less well known than their conclusions (making them bunk demonstrations from the Aristotleian point of view).

This would arguably be one of Kripke's "skeptical solutions" (as opposed to a straight solution), redefining "knowledge" in a fairly radical way (although perhaps not as radical as some moves, e.g. Quine).


An unrelated comment on that thesis statement: might the axiom not be more analogous to the hinge propositions than the unprovable statement? No doubt, the unprovable statement (as the existence of uncomputable or inexpressible statements) seems relevant, but I'm not sure if it fills the same role.

But this shifts focus on to why axioms are chosen. Certainly, it is sometimes "because they produce interesting results," particularly as mathematicians tinker with existing, established systems. Yet in general, they are selected because they are considered true, and indeed they are ideally indubitable. However, this is not "true given some prior axioms," but, hopefully, "true absolutely." For instance, Euclid's postulates held up so well because it seemed fair to dismiss someone who denied them as insane or acting in bad faith. "Take out paper, a pencil, ruler, and protractor and see for yourself." An ideal axiom hits that level, although obviously they do not always.

Great post. I have brought up this issue many times. One neat historical point here is that Plato's last (and best) argument in the Phaedo against the Pythagorean view of soul as simply being akin to a tuning on a lyre (i.e. an emergent epiphenomena) closely mirrors a lot of modern discussions here. This isn't totally surprising since the Pythaogrean view that being somehow is mathematics is quite popular today (e.g. ontic structural realism, Max Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, etc.).

Let's take the first option. I, like many other materialists, believe consciousness to be a higher-order, emergent informational property of some kind. There is nothing particularly special about the matter that composes the brain; instead, what is special about it is how one part interacts and relates to another. It suggests that consciousness is not related to the actual substance in and of itself, but is instead an interactional/relational/informational property that is neutral to whatever substrate it happens to occupy. The only way I can see mental causation, in this case, happening without violating or massively changing our understanding of physics is via some sort of top-down, constraint-based causation.

So would a carefully constructed neural network made from pipes and water wheels that is set up to process inputs and outputs like a human brain be conscious? Could we carefully set up toilet paper rolls to be conscious?

My take is that, while I think the computational theory of mind view gets something right, I am not sure it gets everything right. For one thing, the reduction of thought to computation (essentially discursive ratio without intellectus/noesis in medieval thought) seems to open up a host of epistemic challenges that undermine our very faith in reason or science itself.

Also, if one adopts the popular view in physics that the universe itself is essentially a computer (endorsed to varying degrees by a veritable whose who of physicists: Tegmark, Lloyd, Davies, Landauer, Vedral, etc.) then the brain's "being a computer" is nothing special and cannot explain its uniqueness: But it actually turns out to be very hard to define computation in physical systems. Tight definitions are hard to justify and loose ones make it so that anything with enough informational complexity can be said to be computing anything else.

Perhaps one easy way out here is to say that contemporary neuroscience simply makes too many simplifying assumptions. Steam pipes cannot become conscious by being set up as neural networks because human bodies do way more than our neural networks. Perhaps all the very small actions of cellular metabolism, glial cells, quantum scale behaviors, etc. all play a role such that substrate is important because pipes and toilet paper rolls cannot actually do what the human body does. That quantum behavior has been found in phenomena like photosynthesis seems to me to indicate that it would be more surprising than not if life didn't take advantage of it in some ways in the nervous system.

In this view, mental states are not pushing particles around like little ghostly levers, but rather they emerge from and constrain the lower-level dynamics. Just as the macroscopic structure of a dam constrains the flow of water without being “extra” to the laws of hydrodynamics, so too might conscious informational states constrain the behavior of underlying physical systems without overriding physical laws. This allows for a kind of causal relevance without direct physical intervention—more like shaping and filtering what’s already happening. Consciousness, then, would be a structural property with real organizational consequences, operating within physical law but not reducible to any single local interaction.

Are you familiar with Terrance Deacon's "Incomplete Nature" or his other work?

You might be interested in this introduction . His theory works similar to this but brings in semiotics to help, although I recall that it didn't seem to totally lean into the triadic semiotic view (as opposed to dyadic mechanism, which is so dominant). John Deely is another interesting guy here. Deacon also ties his constraint-based absential influence back to Aristotle's notion of formal causality.

As Deacon notes, Jaegwon Kim has some very strong arguments against any sort of emergence from the perspective of a substance metaphysics of supervenience (i.e. one where "things are what they are made of," a building block/bundle ontology). However, process metaphysics avoids this issue (Mark Bickhard has a good article on this, although it simplifies a bit too much). So, again, Aristotle is a nice example of a process metaphysics that doesn't run into the problem of collapsing all being into a single monoprocess and making all predication accidental (a particular vice of process metaphysics that is sort of the mirror image of the excesses of reductionism, a sort of "bigism," e.g. "only quantum fields exist, and they are unified, so only the field of fields—just one thing—exists"). One nice thing about process metaphysics is that it also seemingly incorporates information theory better in some ways (instead of having it reduced to mechanism).

Actually, I think Aristotle can be more useful here through the later development of his thought in Neoplatonism, Islamic thought, and Scholasticism, but those are sort of a dark zone in contemporary thought.

Although, I'm also partial to the idea, advanced by David Bentley Hart in "All Things are Full of Gods," D.C. Schindler, and others, that the problem also one of framing. Mechanistic philosophy is essentially a giant inversion, orienting higher levels towards the lower, act to potency, form to matter, etc. Historically, one can see how this shift was motivated by a number of theological and political concerns, as a sort of reaction against the existing model (e.g. describing nature in terms of "laws and obedience" isn't any less anthropomorphic than speaking of "desires and inclinations," it's just motivated by a particular sort of theology). Smallism and reductionism grow out of this moment and they seem to make a number of phenomena impossible to explain.

Alternatively, we could consider anthropic selection. Perhaps there are many possible physical-informational configurations in the universe, and only some give rise to conscious experiences. Of those, only a tiny subset might produce systems where consciousness is psychophysically harmonious—where experiences like pain and pleasure are meaningfully aligned with behavior. From this perspective, we happen to find ourselves in such a system precisely because only those systems would contain observers capable of reflecting on this harmony. But while this may explain *why* we observe harmony, it doesn’t explain *how* such a configuration comes to be. It risks treating consciousness as an unexplained brute feature of certain arrangements rather than something that follows naturally from the structure of the system.

Right, this seems very unpalatable. It's almost a non-answer. It seems similar to some responses to the Fine Tuning Problem. These sorts of answers are only accepted so long as better answers don't exist.

I think the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the most famous part of the book. Also the least accessible, which is really saying something. Apparently it was written in a hurried draft as Napoleon was bearing down on the city.

I wonder how many it has scared away (of course, it's not like the introduction is that much easier). I think a lot of lecturers actually have classes read it last though.

Delightful. I really like the pictures too.

Everything makes itself known by something it is not.

Indeed, just as old Denys said. The ranks of angels are ever joyously active, their gazes eternally fixed upwards by eros, as each communicates what they see downwards to the rank below them—agape cascading down. The world is theurgy, the descent of illumination and the ascent of theosis—exitus et reditus. Each being gives being, a gift, the present of the present, even as it receives it. Freedom, in its fullest sense, is a sort of perfect communication. From the seraphim and cherubim to the whales and crows, there is the cascading gift of the communication of Logos.

That all said, the bird is clearly more wrong. :rofl:

Funny enough, I think presentism might actually deny the reality of becoming as much as eternalism. For there is nothing to engage in becoming in presentism. There is just the present, just being.

Agreed, excellent work.

But from a psychic and qualitative point of view, the situation is not so straightforward. While disparate cultures conflict in their values, sometimes violently so, and homogenising them might therefore seem superficially desirable, values are the subject’s fulcrum of meaning and, beyond the dictats of pure survival, meaning is ultimately what lends quality to life.

:up: I am seeing a similarity to the thread of Schiller here.

From a social constructivist perspective, subjects simultaneously imply and ground each other.

And, interestingly, its a conclusion that follows from some quite different perspectives as well (a sign of rigor/resilience, the philosophical equivalent of a robustness check?). That things aren't wholly intelligible in themselves, and that they "give being to one another," through their interactions is an insight people seem to come to from many different angles (e.g. process metaphysics, systems biology, even elements of Islamic and scholastic "Neo-Platonism").

So, to this point:

But culture does not replicate itself with full fidelity because its subjects are not entirely defined culturally. And because of this, it can mutate quickly, especially when under stress

...I wonder if there is a useful analogy to biology, with both species' populations/lineages and individual organisms' ongoing struggle to maintain/achieve their form (entelecheia, "staying-at-work-being-itself"). But then there is an obvious difference in some ways as well. Societies are not organisms. Men are more members than parts. An arm or a liver does not decide to drop off a body and the. go on to flourish more in isolation, but this may happen with a man.

That is, though social systems operate on the basis of “structural couplings” with agentic subjects, they can be considered semantically operative without minds or agency [ibid]. In this scaling up of the subject to the interoperative group, freedom, even if we grant it as implied by what we know as culture, is secondary to the functioning of communicative code and not something that society seeks to protect. It may offer adaptability advantages and that may be what has preserved it up until now, but that does not mean culture cannot theoretically leave freedom behind to a large or even total degree even if that ultimately means culture becoming so rigid it destroys itself as recognizably cultural and reverts to something more akin to insect sociality along the lines of Star Trek's “Borg”.

There are those that argue that liberalism, through spurring on increased economic and technological growth, makes itself more immune to internal revolt (through the provision of goods and services) and more resilient in the face of external threats (e.g. economic production and technology wins wars). Some consequential actions have been based on this idea. For example, some authoritarian states, e.g. the PRC, have liberalized specifically because they see it as a path to greater military and economic strength (and thus state/cultural survival).

This is a sort of "Whig history meets natural selection" (oftentimes Hegelian) narrative. I am not sure how well it will hold up in the face of history though. China only liberalized so much, but has grown plenty powerful. The liberal erosion of culture seems to offer some serious challenges for its own survival. So, it's an open question if the needs of survival push societies towards freedom.

But for Hegel at least, the mature state is different from what you've described. While the promotion of freedom and happiness are merely implicit in other institutions — an emergent phenomenon — Hegel’s state is a rational, self-conscious, entity — one which “acts in accordance with known ends,” and which, “knows what it wills.” Perhaps, even on some readings, a "group mind."

Arguably for Hegel, and for Solovyov later, or Dante as a precursor to Hegel, a key element of freedom is the freedom of societies, as a whole, to become the sort of societies they want to be (fullfilling their own idealization/form). This would, I would assume, mean not falling into dystopian "high level equilibrium traps" à la A Brave New World, the Borg, etc., but instead would feature a sort of moral and aesthetic freedom at the corporate level (which for Hegel, individuals positively identify with qua individuals). Basically, the social welfare function is shaped by the state and culture (which are shaped by history and reason at work in history) such that people prefer social states where each other's individual and corporate freedom is maximized. But how exactly this works is another question. The "natural selection + Whig history" narrative," to my mind, seems fully capable of producing dystopia instead (which, for a Hegelian, might just mean it is incomplete!).

Other theorists (e.g. Seth Lloyd [5]) have extended this “code primacy” further down through biology into physics to position communication as fundamental to reality. They posit a code-based metaphysics whereby the transfer, overlap, reconfiguring and layering of code is at the root of what manifests as physical, mental and social reality. Everything becomes reducible, in theory, to code-based systems which, while they ultimately manifest a form of human agency, again can’t be said to “need” it.

In this pan-semiotic ontology whereby matter in its observable form emerges from code and reality consists of layers of autopoietic coding systems, free subjectivity is just another layer that emerges when technics (in Simondon and Stiegler’s sense of symbolic affordances, especially language) appears in humans. But whether or not code goes “all the way down”, if human subjectivity is nested between code-based biological and social systems, which potentialize meaning without freedom, then agency is always contingent and precarious and should be recognized as such rather than accepted as humanity's biological and social given.

I used to be very taken with this sort of view, but it seems to me that it can be taken in two very different directions depending on whether or not we are talking about a "reduction" to information or not. "Code all the way down," can come to mean something based in a sort of computational mechanism, or it can mean something like "intelligibility from to top all the way down." There is a reducibility to information (the bit or qbit), but then also a context-dependence that always points outside itself. These point in different directions. The picture can be turned either way I guess (that's David Bentley Hart's point in All Things Are Made of Gods, although he things the picture only actually makes sense when the "lower/smaller/material" is ordered to the "higher/greater/intelligible.")

But whether or not code goes “all the way down”, if human subjectivity is nested between code-based biological and social systems, which potentialize meaning without freedom, then agency is always contingent and precarious and should be recognized as such rather than accepted as humanity's biological and social given.

:up: Although if freedom is at least partially defined in terms of a relative capacity for self-organization, self-determination, and self-governance, it would seem that the human individual is always a locus of these to some degree (as even the ant or fern is). But another level to self-determination would be the capacity of the individual to transcend the relative constraints of both the higher cultural level and the lower biological level, and to shape both. This seems to vary dramatically in different lives.

This goes back to the prior point about the reductive versus the global, bigism versus smallism, the world as a colocation of bits (symbols), versus as a single, universal code. There are a lot of interesting dialectical oppositions here, this being just one. It might be that a via media is needed to explain human freedom, and freedom for the whole might require the freedom of the member (as opposed to part) to mature first (as attainment to true personhood, hypostasis), as in Solovyov.

I suppose the exact nature and ontological foundation of personhood is important here.

They are, in Stieglers sense, “pharmacological” in nature; both a curative and a toxin [9]. As a curative, they offer us knowledge and contexts in which to creatively utilize them, marking us as unique individuals in so doing. This is what Stiegler, following Simondon, refers to as “individuation” [8][9]. But as a toxin, they “consume” subjectivity as a substrate and dissolve it, making us passive, conforming, and reliant (“disindividuation”) [ibid].

Very interesting.

, a society of individuals who cannot see themselves beyond how society sees them and define themselves limitedly as such

An apt description of the research I've seen on the mental illness/social media nexus.

This creative activity, or ethic, amounts to subjectivity taking a stand as a system in the hierarchy of systems by consciously situating itself as a locus around which other systems ought revolve rather than submitting fully to their pull.

Also interesting. "The Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). Although here, there is perhaps a tension, in that higher systems often fulfill the role of trying to reduce friction between individuals (including frictions over which individuals higher systems should revolve around). One of the defining features of late capitalism is that the state and technology must constantly expand into every corner of human life to fulfill this role because other institutions, norms, practices, etc. have atrophied away.

This underlines again the point that freedom has never been at the core of social organization, but has only ever been epiphenomenal. There has been freedom through organization but not freedom-based organization. Only an exceptional minority of individuals have ever acted as perturbations in systems and helped to reconfigure them through thinking against their sociocultural milieux. The norm has always been conformity whether or not socially recognized as such. That is, there has yet to be a society that directly arranges itself around the development of free subjectivity, its spectrum of affordances and capacities, and, above all, its essential creativity.

I wonder about this. Is the bolded, even if it is true, evidence of the preceding sentences? What is the relationship between freedom in society and the rejection of a society by its members? If conformity is a sign of unfreedom, would freedom necessarily be exemplified in the anarchic?

Not only are we as far as ever from a society where subjectivity comes first, where economic growth is the incidental outcome of the fostering of free and healthy subjectivities rather than vice versa, we seem to be intent on destroying the social and environmental grounds of subjectivity’s ongoing development in a blind effort at eternal expansion. In this respect, society itself seems to be suffering from the same irrational self-defeating compulsivity it inflicts on its members.

:up:

"My particular end should become identified with the universal end… otherwise the state is left in the air. The state is actual only when its members have a feeling of their own self-hood and it is stable only when public and private ends are identical. It has often been said that the end of the state is the happiness of the citizens. That is perfectly true. If all is not well with them, if their subjective aims are not satisfied, if they do not find that the state as such is the means to their satisfaction, then the footing of the state itself is insecure.” (G.W.F. Hegel - The Philosophy of Right)

This necessitates a form of ironic self-awareness whereby the theory acknowledges its transient symbolic situatedness in and dependence on the very structures it seeks to change. Theory must preach but also mock itself as an “idiot” in the church of the sacred—never a denizen but always a refugee

I do wonder if this sort of thing works against something like Schiller's notion of "play" though. There is always a sort of distancing, like the adolescent who is no longer sure they can embrace the vigorous play of their younger friend for fear of seeming foolish. Yet I also recall Pope Benedict invoking Schiller's same notion of play for the most serious of all things (from his perspective), the liturgy.

The theory of an EKM, by its nature, cannot be the theoria of the gnostikos, just as Virgil knows his Aeneas cannot be pietas itself. But Aeneas does try, even if he fails. The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. The Logos that has begining and end, is not the Logos. Or something like that. :cool:

Really great. I'll have a lot to say later.

First and foremost,

In conclusion, any idealisation of liberty expressed within a state lies exposed to the slippery slope of utopian engineering. Therefore, true individual liberty, through Schiller’s aesthetic sensibility, provides a mediating association that can inculcate necessary changes to institutions and prevent them from stagnating by facilitating a means of universal discourse between a plurality of ideas expressed within the public sphere.

...I think this makes a lot of sense given your sources. I do wonder if we might not now be facing the opposite risk though (although one Schiller might still help with), a sort of "fear of the utopian and principled," a "lack of faith in logos (the life of reason)" paired with an outright fear of thymos (the life of spirit/honor/excellence). It seems that everywhere these days one can hear the call to "pragmatism" and suspicion about "narratives" and "values." Here, I think the aesthetic also can help to carry us out of a sort of politicized form of what Hegel called "the fear of error become fear of truth." Indeed, maybe precisely by mediating the allure of the totalizing and utopian, we can recover what late-modernity has tended to cast off.

The aesthetic also helps sharpen to tools of "universal discourse," such that they do not decay into irrelevant abstraction.

---

More broadly, this is actually on a topic similar to the one I meant to write about, primarily using Virgil's Aeneid, but didn't have time to finish. The initial idea I had there is that the "meaning of life" (and thus society) laid out in the vision of the thymotic "honor/virtue (arete, or "excellence") societies" in the Iliad (and Beowulf) already display a sort of hollowness in these texts themselves. Thymos degenerates into cannibalistic appetite at the limit and everyone loses in the long run. For example, in Book XI of the Odyssey, the now dead Achilles tells Odysseus: "“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than to lord it over all the exhausted dead." All glory dies out in death.

Virgil has a much more political view he wants to put forth. Aeneas represents thymos (spirtedness and honor) in service to logos (to principles, e.g. mercy, justice, in a word, pietas). But on this point:

Many utopian ideals are presented and all of them are left wanting either in the justification of their aims, the responsibility given or taken, or in viewing some form of enforced equality. As Popper remarks, this predicament has been with us since the birth of civilization in our move away from the state of nature—closed society—toward the state of reason—open society (Popper, 1962).

...Virgil agrees in some ways. The utopian view is dangerous because it is never fully realized. Notably, after Aeneas gets his commission to found a civilization of virtue from his father in the land of dead, he ascends back to the land of the living through the Ivory Gate (as opposed to the Horn Gate), the gate through which lying, deceptive dreams go out into the world. And of course, the story ends not with "mercy and justice for the vanquished," but with Aeneas committing the vengeful murder of a surrendered foe. An epic about perpetual unity (in Book I: the "Gates of War" are locked and Frenzy bound in "a hundred brazen shackles") ends instead with:

His limbs went limp in the chill of death.
His life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below

But I don't think Virgil's point is about a hollowness in logos, but rather the fact that it is never fully realized. That is precisely why we need pietas. We do not reach some abstract end, some political equilibrium point, at which point thymos and pietas become irrelevant. All beings struggle to fulfill their form. Natural, changing beings (man and his civilizations) only are what they are in virtue of this struggle of matter to fulfill form. Spenser realizes this in the Mutabilitie cantos of his epic, the Faerie Queene. Nature (change) is not an imperfection. On the Christian view embodied in Dante's own epic, it is only this mutability and open-endedness that allows man to transcend his own finitude and become more than what he is (a view of the relation of nature to logos embedded deep in the Patristic tradition).

Epic poetry, of course, targets the aesthetic. Given its enduring appeal and salience, we might suppose it does this better than any other art form. They have an element of Schiller's play, and they inspire the heart, not just the head. As Plato says, the head must rule through its natural ally in the chest (a fact as true for society as for individual men).

Today, we don't have epics. But we do have the fantasy genre. I think it's telling that modern epics must first bracket away the modern world before telling their story. The modern world, perhaps because of its fetishization of the mathematical and abstract, or perhaps because of its skepticism (enshrined in liberalism), seems to be hostile to epic, or, more importantly, to having anything properly aesthetic have the same sort of impact that epic once had on society and politics (Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen might be the closest thing we've seen in recent centuries).

What Schiller lends to Habermas’s idea here is a means to loosen up rational discourse and prevent ossification within the abstracted realm of the public sphere through the introduction of the playful impulse.

One risk counteracted here is the tendency to conflate the intelligible principles by which man lives and rules with the material institutions themselves. The latter only imperfectly represents the former. Commitment to ideals, logos, is not commitment to specific historical institutions or "systems." Systems and traditions are particular instantiations of logos, not logos itself (which is why the obsession with systems and the "one true system" is unhelpful). The late 19th and early 20th century saw a fanatical commitment to systems and parties as if they were the very principles themselves (Hegel's state as God walking through history). Our own era seems to have the opposite problem. Having become properly skeptical of systems, parties, etc., it has also become skeptical or principles and logos itself, as well as thymos and the aesthetic. The latter, it tries to make safely "matters of taste," keeping it quarantined from the abstract and mathematical realm of politics as technocratic science.

Yet man is both body and spirit, and the "End of History" cannot be one in which man is happy if it is bereft of play and aesthetic virtue. The End of History cannot be some abstract end of equilibrium and satisfaction (logos in service of epithumia, sensible pleasure and safety), but rather must be the fullness of history, including the aesthetic and thymotic. If it isn't, men will be dissatisfied with it, and thus they will rebel. Such a rebellion will bring an end to the "End of History," revealing it to be a false end.

Beauty has naught to say about morality nor rationality. What is beautiful is beautiful. All the moralising and reasoning in the world cannot change the impression of beauty on the individual taste. We cannot fool ourselves about beauty. Where beauty appears in our lives, we acknowledge it without the necessity of moral or rational judgment.

I find myself completely disagreeing with this though. This places aesthetic reason forever at odds with practical and theoretical reason, whereas I would tend to say they are three facets of the same Logos. The problem here is that beauty becomes mere sentiment, which risks completely internalizing it, making it a matter of mere individual inclination. Yet if it is so, it cannot fulfill its role in leading and unifying men.

If the bolded were true, education would be a dreary business indeed. This is the contemporary liberal view of education as largely serving the function of empowering the individual to be able to fulfill whatever inborn, unchangable (and so immune to cultivation) irrational sentiments they just so happen to have, so that they can best pursue their satisfaction (avoiding friction with others perhaps, but only if this is in line with satisfaction).

Certainty, there is particularity in tastes. But tastes are also taught. A view that internalizes the aesthetic doesn't thereby stop "teaching taste," it just tends to educate tastes poorly.

My pitch would be: Beauty relates to the whole. Intelligible beauty is higher than sensible beauty. Beauty is that which "pleases when known." No doubt, completely clear ponds high up in the Adirondacks are quite beautiful. Who could deny it? But when one comes to know their role in the whole, and one comes to know that these are, in fact, sick ponds, ulcers on the eco-system, only "crystal clear" because acid rain has denuded them of life, they become less beautiful. That is the nature of beauty.

Or as Plato says:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

But I still think Schiller gets something very right about the unity of the aesthetic and moral. Aeneas embodies pietas not because he is conditioned to like a machine, but because it wells up from the fullness of his being. This is what makes him heroic. All the great heros has an element of play in their heroism, even if it sometimes is what makes them tragic (e.g. Beowulf taking on the dragon at age seventy).

Actually, I think the play drive as mediator of the sense and form shares a lot in common with earlier investigations of Beauty as a transcendental, which tended to see it as the going out in appearance of Goodness and Truth.

Very nicely done. It's an interesting topic!

While our relationship to hinges involves unquestioning acceptance,

This would make hinges quite a bit different from many axioms. But must hinges involve unquestioning acceptance? Isn't that the whole history of skepticism, questioning such foundations? And for most of the ancient skeptics at least, this questioning wasn't an epistemic exercise, so much as a practical one. One questioned one's bedrock beliefs so as to attain equipollence, a sort of detached equilibrium between beliefs such that one was not concerned about anything and could attain apatheia.

Anyhow, I figured this might have relevance for reason as such (as opposed to any one system), since, as Hegel says, to have ever recognized a limit is to have already stepped over it. The fish doesn't know where the water ends; it's only the frog, who has actually broken the surface, who sees it as a limit. The sorts of hinges we accept unquestioningly would seem to have to be ones we could never even be aware of. It would have to be something more akin to the blindspot in the visual field (although even that example fails, since one can become aware of that with careful experiment).

Why is it we presume that foundational ('hinge') propositions can be or need to be justified by further analysis, and what are the implications of their not being so justified?

Indeed. And it's perhaps somewhat of a historical question because plenty of thinkers prior to the heyday of foundationalist aspirations take it as somewhat obvious (to them) that some truths (and really the more important, "foundational" ones) cannot even be expressed in human language, let alone subjected to something like a mathematical proof. For example, Saint John of Damascus says this in matter of fact terms at the outset of the Exact Exposition, Plato inveighs against the inadequacy of words and justificatory dissertations in his seventh letter, and then there is Saint Paul's famous mention of being "caught up to the third heaven" and hearing "inexpressible words, which a human being is not allowed to speak."

I would guess the Cartesian dream of a world reducible to mathematics is a major impetus here. Timothy Shutt has an interesting lecture where he suggests that the decline in epics is in part due to the fact that they lost their place as authoritative sources to mathematics (and this is a problem Milton is grappling with as he tries to write a new Protestant epic in an environment where epic and scripture is losing this authority).

it's not usually enough to have the information; one also should be able to act on that information.

It is enough for "knowing that." Someone who wakes up during an operation, but finds themselves immobilized , is obviously aware of the fact that their anesthesia is not working and that they are in pain regardless of their ability to do much of anything.

At the end of Braveheart, the prince's wife tells evil old King Longshanks, who has just had a stroke and is immobilized, that she plans on deposing his weak son and that the child she is pregnant with was sired by another man and that his line ends with him. But he can't really do anything about it, because of the stroke.

It can hardly be that he has to act in order to know though. For one, this would imply that we don't know things until we act on them, and yet why would we act on things we don't yet know? This would place the uninformed will prior to the intellect. We would "know by doing."

Knowing is an act of thinking though and thought does not necessitate any particular outward action.

So what do we conclude?

That not all knowledge is of arts. Knowledge of sculpting is revealed in sculpting. Knowledge of sailing is revealed in the art of sailing. Knowledge of shipbuilding is exercised in building ships. But this is not true of all forms of knowledge.

Knowing how to use a faucet is not the same thing as knowing that any particular faucet is working. A person demonstrates that they know how to use a faucet and that they believe a given faucet is working when they try to fill a cup with it. Whether or not they know that this particular faucet is working prior to filling their cup is a different question.

For instance, wolfing down horse dewormer to prevent yourself from getting COVID-19 is not the same thing as knowing that horse dewormer is a good treatment for that disease. Knowing that something is true is not equivalent with knowing how to behave as if something were true.

A priest having a crisis of faith about the Eucharist and one who isn't might behave in identical ways during the Mass, yet they have different beliefs. Further, their beliefs are one thing and the truth of transubstantiation, the existence of God, and other related questions, are yet another thing.

Of course, with a very broad definition of "doing" or "behavior," we can accommodate all sorts of knowledge to "knowing how," since we can simply refer to "knowing" or "thinking," or even "experiencing" as "things we do" or "behaviors/acts." But praying does not demonstrate knowledge of God in the way that riding a bike demonstrates knowledge of bike riding. Not all knowledge is of an art; some is speculative.

Knowledge would be justified beliefs, and beliefs are justified by both observation AND logic. Beliefs would only be justified by one or the other, or neither. Knowledge requires confirmation from both.

Can you explain in virtue of what a belief would be "justified" without any reference to truth? How does logic "justify" a belief without reference to logic's relationship to truth in particular?

It seems to me that this will be difficult.



Can you define "information" here? It seems to me that you are presenting something like: "knowledge is truth's presence in the mind?"

Presumably information can be false, right? So in virtue of what is "true information" true?



Funny, I thought it sounded similar to classical formulations of knowledge, which imply understanding. I guess it depends on what "information" is supposed to mean.

Direct realist asserts that our perceptions give us direct access to the external world in itself and we can know how the world is independent on the mental representations.

Or, as seems to be more common in my experience, "direct realism" denies a metaphysics of "representation" as well as knowledge of things "in-themselves" as a coherent "gold standard" of knowledge. They often favor the triadic semiotic relationship over a diadic notion of representation, and to the extent they embrace some form of "mental representation," these are not, primarily, "what we know," but rather "how we know."

In high scholastic terminology for instance, the idea is more "how things exist in us in the manner of an art," (i.e., our capacity for reproduction, as the form of a statue is in a sculptor before he sculpts) as opposed to being primarily objects or principles of knowledge.

Aristotle would say that sensation is "of" the interaction between the environmental medium (which interacts with the object perceived) and the sense organs, but that it carries the intelligible form of what is perceived. Sensation is always, in a sense, immediate, not in the imagination. This leads to very different conclusions.

Two scholastic adages are influential here:

A. "Everything is received in the mode of the receiver" (and this is as true for how salt interacts with water as for how we interact with an apple when seeing it)—this dictum becomes totalizing and absolutized in modern "critical philosophy" in a way that direct realists tend to find problematic and indirect realists tend to find unavoidable.

B. "Act follows on being." Only natural things' interactions with other things make them epistemically accessible (or at all interesting). Hence, the gold standard of knowledge is not knowledge of things "as they are in themselves,' (which would be sterile and useless) but rather "things as they interact with everything any anything else."

So, the Neo-Scholastic view tends to be to reject the underlying assumptions that lead to "critical philosophy," but it's worth noting that these principles have also influenced (or been rediscovered by) other camps. The semiotic camp grows out of scholasticism but is, in some outgrowths, quite estranged from its original heritage. Process philosophy tends to lean heavily on B, but this seems to me to be largely a case of convergent evolution in ideas.

The "metaphysics of appearance" are probably key here to. If act always comes before potency, i.e. if some prior actuality must always activate some power (e.g. sight), then any sensible appearance (i.e. the activation of a sense power) must correspond to some prior actuality. Hence, appearances, while they might be deceiving, are never arbitrarily related to reality. All appearances reveal something of being (they are really the way it appears).

Perhaps this is a bigger point than direct versus indirect. I am not sure if mediation really matters that much. Lots of pre-critical philosophy of perception and "metaphysics of knowledge" involves mediation. But it's a "direct" mediation in that it ties back to some determinant prior actuality (form). A thing's eidos is its form which is also its image, its interactions vis-á-vis everything else.

So how is it achieved?

A bajillion theories of reference (or supposition) have developed over the years; apparently it's a tough question.

Some of the "problems" that crop up seem to be tied to particular metaphysical assumptions though, e.g.:

Concerns of this sort are hardly new. W.V.O. Quine (1960), for instance, famously claims that reference is ‘inscrutable’, or that there is simply no matter of fact what a given referential term refers to. His arguments, however, depend on certain methodological constraints that many would now be inclined to reject. Not so with the related ‘problem of the many’, popularized at roughly the same time by Peter Unger (1980) and Geach (1980). To see the issue, consider someone using an utterance of ‘that’ to refer to a cloud in the sky. What exactly is this cloud? The obvious answer would seem to be: a set of water droplets suspended in the air in such-and-such region. But what about some droplet right on the edge of that region? Should it be counted or not? In fact, there will be innumerable such droplets, and we seem to have no systematic way of answering this question: if we say ‘yes’, we face a continuous march outwards; if we say ‘no’, we face a continuous retreat. Neither option seems even remotely satisfactory, and yet if we cannot provide an answer to the question of what exactly the cloud is then it might well seem that we have equally well failed to answer the question of what the relevant use of ‘that’ refers to.[19]

The "problem of the many" strikes me as only particularly problematic for a certain sort of supervenience metaphysics for instance.

An older question was: "what do our words signify, our own concepts, or things?" I suppose that if one goes with the first, some problems of reference (including the above) disappear, but you get new ones.

It seems obvious that people have things in mind that they intend to refer to in most cases. However, what about a stop light? It signifies "apply your breaks" to drivers, but not to pedestrians, and then reverses who it signifies "go" to with nary a thought.

Although "99.9%" probably undersells things. Do ants, or trees, or ducks, or men every give birth to tigers? Has anything but a tiger ever given birth to a tiger?

Even in hybrids, the hybrid's traits are an admixture. Horses and donkeys give birth to mules, not cats and frogs, etc.

Note that this also defines what humans find "useful." If one tries to breed one's male pigs to one's female sheep, the family will starve.

Good points there. I am not particularly sure if it makes sense to have more faith in recent scientific theories, as opposed to our bedrock understanding of the human experience, for these very reasons. Given the history of caloric, phlogiston, N rays, absolute space and time, vital substance, and the corpuscular view of the atom and molecule, it seems that more recent theories are more likely to be proven wrong.

Yet what would it take to convince us that our ancestors, in crossing streams or standing out in the rain, experienced an essentially different water from us? Or how would we be convinced that people did not *really* experience our modern tigers or trees?

I would maintain that if one had reason to doubt that the "water" and "rain" of Homer, the Aeneid, Chaucer, or Genesis is essentially what we still mean by "water," or that their "horse" is not what we mean by "horse," etc., this would be vastly more surprising then finding out that, though the periodic table was useful, it is superceded by some other formulation. Indeed, if Homer and Charles Dickens (and so Charles Darwin as well) could be speaking of essentially different forms of "water" and "horse" and "tiger," this would cast doubt on any grasp of human history, which in turn should cast doubt on any faith in scientific institutions.

As John Ioannidis points out in his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," a lot of scientific findings turn out to be the result of bias and statistical noise. We should have far less faith in recent peer reviewed papers, even those based on experiments, then on many non-experimentally verifiable claims such as "the Boston Celtics won the last NBA championship," or "the US Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776." If the former can be false, we have no reason to have faith in science. Yet our understanding of the former relies on things not essentially changing from age to age or moment to moment.

On a view where knowledge is entirely propositional (or even linguistic), "justified true belief," it makes sense to ascribe a sort of priority to the propositions of science. Personally, I find such a view problematic for a variety of reasons. Yet this cannot lead to the supposition that our ancestors "didn't know water" absolutely, without courting absurdity.

We establish "natural kinds" because we as humans can agree on definition and judgment as it is applied to our natural surroundings, not because we identified some essence that exists in all possible worlds.

And how do we do that? Why do we do that? What's the causal explanation? If natural kinds such as "ants" do not exist until man comes along and says "this counts as an ant," how does he decide on "ant" as a particular type of thing, instead of infinitely many other combinations he could have specified?

Further, why did disparate linguistic groups developing in relative isolation all come up with words to denote "ant" and other different animals? Why did all peoples develop words to denote different members of the same animal species if kinds did not exist until they were positively "established?" (Or did they already exist?)

To my mind, the most plausible explanation as to "why did disparate peoples develop names for the ant and identify different types of ants as ants," is "because ants already existed before man named them." Biology agrees on this point. But then there was something that made ants ants that existed prior to man calling them such. Organisms existed as organic wholes (the fern , the dinosaur, etc.) prior to language. Yet this is all the "essence" is originally called in to do in the first place, to explain how different sorts of things are (as opposed to merely being called) different sorts of things.



Also good points.

"Essence" and "substance" have been subject to profound mutations and many formulations, but this doesn't mean that there aren't well developed definitions for each individual different traditions. We actually have multiple well developed definitions that contradict one another.

The same applies to all sorts of important terms such as "true," "real," "physical," "matter," "virtual," "reason," "intellect," "form," "idea," etc.

So, such terms need to be understood in their context.

A key distinction was between "ens rationis" (beings of reason/mind) and "ens reale" (real being). "Ens = being" ("esse" is the verb form of "being") and reale comes from "res," which is often translated as "thing." Although "realis" can mean "true" as well (the unity of truth and being in the Doctrine of Transcendentals on display).

Funny enough, "ens" can sometimes be translated as "thing" too, so we could be distinguishing between "things of reason" and "thing things." :rofl: But "things of reason" and "true things" might be misleading, since the ens rationis are not illusions.

The best example I can think of are second intentions, which include things like genus. Animals truly exist, but one never will find just "an animal" out in the world. It is always a particular species of the genus. There is also a medieval distinction between the virtual and real. The virtual is contained in things as power (hence sharing a root with virtue/strength), but in the form of a potency that has not yet been actualized.

In "cogito ergo sum," "sum"—I am—is a form of "ens."

If philosophy becomes merely a matter of keeping our language games internally consistent, then it risks becoming a kind of syntax-policing—about saying what can or can't be said, not about what is or must be. That’s a long way from asking what is real and how it might be known.

I would have thought that the existence of necessary truth, and questions as to what that implies, or why they are necessary, are fundamental philosophical questions, about more than simply 'what we can say'.

:up:

The most direct way of responding would be that truth can be distinguished from delusion or falsehood.

Yes, and also what stays the same through mutability, since it does no good to speak only of what has since passed out of being.

Aside from Hume vs. Dante's Virgil, this is another really good example:

...What though the field be lost?
All is not lost—the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power...

A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Of course, many moderns have taken Milton's Satan as a sort of hero (surely, he has all the best lines), but the devout Milton is, although he wants to make Satan enticing, ascribing this sort of thinking to the Devil at the end of the day.

In Christianity Jesus talks about opening your heart to him to find God, not to "use your brain and think it through".

True, but "heart" had a much different meaning in both the Hebrew and Greek context (see below). The heart is often referred to as the "eye of the nous," the inner-most part of the mind that receives the highest forms of intelligible illumination in the Patristics (gnosis). It is not primarily a symbol for "emotion" or "sentiment," but often instead of the deepest possible sort of knowledge. Early Christianity is very much a religion of Logos in a way perhaps at odds with some contemporary sentimentalism.

I mention this not only because it's an interesting facet of changing language, but because it actually seems to have a lot to do with the rest of your post and this general topic. Knowledge used to be conceived of in very personal terms. It is also not for nothing that the path of knowledge in Plato, Saint Augustine, Boethius, etc. is called "the Erotic Ascent; Plato for his part speaks of the philosopher's desire for knowledge of the Good in terms of an ardor to "couple with the Good." The removal of these personal and erotic elements helps to explain the development of current notions of "objectivity," including the amazing shift whereby questions of goodness vanish from the "objective" frame.

The emergence of positivism is situated within a larger shift in anthropology, and particularly the anthropology of reason, so these changes all sort of tie together, there being a lot of interesting threads to explore.

I find it interesting that you mention computers' inability to motivate themselves. Reason has often been reduced to computation in modern thought (computational theories of mind might play a role here, although the shift predates them by centuries). On this view, the computer is sort of an idealization of rationality. But if it cannot act, does that mean all action comes down to a sort of non-rational sentiment? Something else?

Things are obviously quite different when "reason" or "the rational soul," has its own strong desires, which also tended to personalize knowledge.

Here is an interesting related quote:

But, having so defined [reason, as merely the power by which one goes from premises to conclusions], he gives as his first example, from Hooker, 'Reason is the director of man's will, discovering in action what is good'. There would seem to be a startling discrepancy between the example and the definition. No doubt, if A is good for its own sake, we may discover by reasoning that, since B is the means to A, therefore B would be a good thing to do. But by what sort of deduction, and from what sort of premises, could we reach the proposition 'A is good for its own sake' ?

This must be accepted from some other source before the reasoning can begin; a source which has been variously identified-with 'conscience' (conceived as the Voice of God), with some moral 'sense' or 'taste', with an emotion ('a good heart'), with the standards of one's social group, with the super-ego.Yet nearly all moralists before the eighteenth century regarded Reason as the organ of morality. The moral conflict was depicted as one between Passion and Reason, not between Passion and 'conscience', or ' duty', or ' goodness'. Prospero, in forgiving his enemies, declares that he is siding, not with his charity or mercy, but with'his nobler reason' (Tempest, v, i, 26). The explanation is that nearly all of them believed the fundamental moral maxims were intellectually grasped. If they had been using the strict medieval distinction, they would have made morality an affair not of ratio but of intellectus.

...The belief that to recognise a duty was to perceive a truth-not because you had a good heart but because you were an intellectual being-had roots in antiquity. Plato preserved the Socratic idea that morality was an affair of knowledge; bad men were bad because they did not know what was good. Aristotle, while attacking this view and giving an important place to upbringing and habituation, still made 'right reason' ( 6p6os Myos) essential to good conduct. The Stoics believed in a Natural Law which all rational men, in virtue of their rationality, saw to be binding on them. St Paul has a curious function in this story. His statement in Romans (ii. 14 sq.) that there is a law ' written in the hearts' even of Gentiles who do not know 'the law', is in full conformity with the Stoic conception, and would for centuries be so understood.

Nor, during those centuries, would the word hearts have had merely emotional associations. The Hebrew word which St Paul represents by Kap5ia would be more nearly translated ' Mind' ; and in Latin, one who is cordatus is not a man of feeling but a man of sense. But later, when fewer people thought in Latin, and the new ethics of feeling were corning into fashion, this Pauline use of hearts may well have seemed to support the novelty.

The Discarded Image - C.S. Lewis

Virgil's Aeneas is meant to be a man of "heart," but when he kills Turnus at the end in a fit of thymotic rage he is failing to live up to this archetype (just to include my own example :cool: ). What's interesting is that this does overlap the modern view to some degree (the exclusion of rage from reason), but not completely (i.e. doing the 'good thing' and living up to one's values being necessarily 'reasonable' is not such a strong connection today.)

This is a pretty dogmatic response, stating that the reason we can write such equations at all is that their effectiveness is dependent on or justified by the logic of identity, that accepting your argument would be tantamount to claiming that identity signs in physics are ambiguous and equivocal. Pretty harsh. My response to ↪J suffered from something like this, and perhaps Tim might say something similar. Are physical equations really that precise?

There are a lot of questions there, the relation of the equations of the current discipline of physics to physical reality, the indeterminacy of measurement, etc. Yet even on the mathematical side we might allow that:

6+7 = 13 = 13 - 3, and yet these are not the same computations, and this becomes obvious when one considers something like a large input Hamiltonian path problem where it might take until every star in the sky has burned out for the fastest super computer to finish processing the computation, and yet the input is said to "be the same thing" as its output.

Barry Mazur has an interesting paper on "When One Thing is Equal to Some Other Thing". However, one has to also consider what mathematics is and its application to the "material world" it has been abstracted from. The Scandal of Deduction, for instance, comes because no distinction is made between the virtual, potential, and actual, and the way in which physical computation always involves communications (which occurs over some interval).

:rofl:

I was going to say, "I guess my point (not poon) is that the "empirical" part of positivism has a sort of fuzzy definition that can be used, intentionally or not, to smuggle in a lot of assumptions.

John Locke, who was the emblematic British empiricist, was of the view that the mind is a blank slate, tabula rasa, on which impressions are made by objects.

Right, but it was Aristotle who first wrote in De Anima:

Haven't we already disposed of the difficulty about interaction involving a common element, when we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind.

And the Peripatetic Axiom is "there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses." Likewise, with representationalism, there is first the adage that "whatever is received is received in the mode of the receiver."

I don't mean to complicate things, just to point out that the very broad definition of "empiricism" (often employed by empiricists themselves in arguments meant to justify empiricism) lets in a great deal of non-empiricist philosophy. Locke is a fine example. He actually has a quite particular anthropology and view of how perception and reason must work that is essential to why he is considered properly an "empiricist." He ends up with problems (if you consider them such) like the circularity between real and nominal essences because of these assumptions.

I bring it up because I used to think: "who possibly couldn't be an empiricist?" But as your quote describes quite well, there is more to it than simply a philosophy that involves the senses, experience, and experimentation. What will constitute valid "experience" is itself defined by a prior anthropology and metaphysics.

With positivism, I find a similar problem. It's often framed that rejecting positivism is rejecting observation-based modeling, etc. But really, what tends to differentiate positivism is not accepting such things, but rather refusing to accept anything else.

I guess my poon

That’s precisely what Adorno will not accept. For him, the actual is the site of reason's failure, not its fulfillment.

Indeed, and I think this makes sense given his starting point in Kant, Hegel, and the broader framework of Enlightenment philosophy, which tends towards "philosophy as a system," and a distinct totalizing tendency within these "systems." This tendency is particularly acute in Hegel's philosophy of history.

Maritain is similarly motivated in his claim that philosophy can never be a system, and can never be closed, but is rather man's openess to being. It's a problem a lot of people seemed to be grappling with during this time period.

The common appeals to the Holocaust in these discussions, now the better part of a century later, start to strike one as properly historical in particular. If reason must lose its luster, or even its authority after the Holocaust, then it should have already shed these in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the conquistador conquests, the Mongol sweep across Asia, the aftermath of the sack that gave us the Book of Lamentations, etc. Wiesel, for his part, picks the 17th century's pogroms, as opposed to the 20th's, as the setting for his Trial of God," and while Enlightenment, "rational," Dr. Pangloss style metaphysical optimism ends up being the tool of Satan, neither does the play end up seeming to exclude the Logos of the generation of Jews who saw Masada fall. In this aspect, these debates sometimes remind me of Dostoevsky's Pro and Contra section of the Brothers Karamazov, that is, there is a "I humbly return my ticket," element.

My thoughts have tended more towards rejecting the particular Enlightenment notion of reason and systematicity tout court, but I can see why, within that tradition, Adorno's proposals make sense. There has to be an irrationality in consciousness because "rationality" has become so bound up in rules and systematicity (ratio) that it seems incapable of providing its own content and impetus. It is far from the old "infinite fecundity" and the erotic. Indeed, it's downright sterile. Other thinkers of this period also had to look for "new sources" in consciousness, Jung being a good example.

This may have no appeal for you, but I was quite pleased with the papers cited (by Chakravartty and Pincock) in the "Epistemic Stances . . . " thread. I thought those two philosophers did an excellent job making big issues clear within a smaller, manageable discussion. Would you be willing to read them, perhaps guided by some of the comments in the thread? At the very least, you'd see that the "either it's foundationally true or it's merely useful" binary is not the only stance available.

That makes sense. I think the problems brought up there are more serious than they might seem. Just for one example, an anti-realism that makes science a matter of sociology seems to be able to keep the door open on any attempt to specify "natural" good or a human telos. Indeed, a sort of anti-realism often underpins calls for major social engineering projects. If man has no nature, he can be molded to fit any ideal system (the Baconian mastery/engineering of nature). The popularity of transhumanism with today's oligarchs suggests this sort of thinking might make a comeback.

In particular, I think appeals to reasonableness outside the confines of reason per se tend to actually be relying on a sort of shared tradition and backcloth, a shared moral paradigm. But I think we are seeing such a shared paradigm collapse in real time these days. It's only held up so well because it was around for two millennia and had time to work its way into every aspect of culture and even into our very vocabulary, but other paradigms exist, and there is no reason to think the one undergirding the West will overcome the forces of decay through sheer inertia.

I think what bothers some people is that "true in a context" is seen as some inferior species of being Truly True. It's hard, perhaps, to take on board the idea that context is what allows a sentence to be true at all. If a Truly True sentence is supposed to be one that is uttered without a context, I don't know what that would be.

Well, the idea that 'truth' is primarily a property of sentences appears to be a core step in the path that leads towards deflationism and relativism. I would imagine rejecting this premise itself is more common. Utterances are signs of truth in the intellect, but truth is primarily in the intellect.

We might ask, what is the "context" you refer to? A "game?" A formal system? I would argue that the primary context of truth is the intellect (granted we can speak of secondary contexts). My take would be that analytic philosophy has gravitated towards "truth is a property of sentences," and "justified true belief" precisely because they are analytically tractable and open to more formal solutions. But to my mind, this is a bit like looking for the keys under the streetlight because "that's where the light is." When these assumptions lead to paradox, we get "skeptical solutions" that learn to live with paradox, but I'd be more inclined to challenge the premises that lead to paradox.

I think Borges story the Library of Babel is an excellent vehicle for thinking through the implications of the idea that truth is primarily "in" strings of symbols, although the idea of a truly random text generator that outputs every finite string of text over a long enough time works well too. The fact is that these outputs are never "about" anything from the frame of communications.

To see why meaning cannot be contained within external signals, consider a program that randomly generates any possible 3,000 character page of text. If this program is allowed to run long enough, it will eventually produce every page of this length that will ever be written by a person (plus a vastly larger share of gibberish). Its outputs might include all the pages of a paper on a cure for cancer published in a medical journal in the year 2123, the pages a proof that P ≠ NP, a page accurately listing future winning lottery numbers, etc.¹¹

Would it make sense to mine the outputs of such a program, looking for a cure to cancer? Absolutely not. Not only is such an output unfathomably unlikely, but any paper produced by such a program that appears to be describing a cure for cancers is highly unlikely to actually be useful.

Why? Because there are far more ways to give coherent descriptions of plausible, but ineffective treatments for cancer than there are descriptions of effective treatments, just as there are more ways to arrange the text in this article into gibberish than into English sentences.¹²

The point of our illustration is simply this: in an important sense, the outputs of such a program do not contain semantic information. The outputs of the program can only tell us about the randomization process at work for producing said outputs. Semantic information is constructed by the mind. The many definitions of information based on Shannon’s theory are essentially about physical correlations between outcomes for random variables. The text of War and Peace might have the same semantic content for us, regardless of whether it is produced by a random text generator or by Leo Tolstoy, but the information theoretic and computational processes undergirding either message are entirely different.

A funny thing happens here. The totally random process is always informative. Nothing about past outputs every tells you anything about future ones. It is informative as to outcomes, and wholly uninformative as to prediction. Nothing that comes before dictates what comes after. Whereas the string that simply repeats itself forever is also uninformative, although one always knows what future measurements will be (it is perfectly informative vis-a-vis the future). There is a very Hegelian collapse into oppositional contradiction here, a sort of self-negating. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form have a lot of neat stuff like this too. Big Heg has a funny relationship to electrical engineering :rofl: .

I enjoyed your response, plenty to look up. Can I ask you why you are drawn to medieval philosophy? Not an area I know much about. Feel free to recommend any 'essential' texts, I got a lot out of reading your last one!

Totally by accident. I started with Nietzsche, the existentialists, and post-modern thinkers. I read a decent amount, but wasn't a huge student of philosophy. What got my into philosophy was studying the natural sciences, particularly biology and physics and the role of information theory, complexity studies, and computation in those fields. Most of my early threads on that sort of thing. I was of the opinion that useful philosophy stayed close to the contemporary sciences.

It was through studying information theory and semiotics that I got introduced to Aristotle and the Scholastics. I came to discover that, not only were their ideas applicable to "natural philosophy/science," but they also tied it together with metaphysics, ethics, politics, etc. I had sort of written those other disciplines off as interminable, adopting the popular liberal skepticism towards them (liberalism is very much justified through skepticism and a fear of "fanaticism.")

Unfortunately, medieval thought tends to be quite complex. I don't know if philosophy got to that level of specialization again until the mid-20th century (for better or worse, the printing press really "democratized" and deprofessionalized philosophy of a while). I have become a great admirer of Thomas Aquinas, but it's hard to say where to start with him because it takes a very long time to "get" it and see how it is relevant and applies broadly. I find a lot of the Patristics more accessible, but they tend to be more spiritual, theological, and practical (big focus on asceticism, meditation, and contemplation), and less straightforwardly philosophical and systematic.

One book I really like is Robert M. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present because I think he explains the relationship between reason, self-determination, freedom, happiness, and "being like God," very well. Once one understands that, one can see how Aristotle turned these deep psychological insights into even deeper metaphysical insights. I don't know a great introduction to Aristotle though, although Sachs' commentary on the Physics is very good.

Another one I like is Fr. Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person, which does a lot with Husserl, modern philosophy of language, and modern cognitive science, but is grounded in Aristotle and St. Thomas. Jensen's The Human Person: A Beginner's Thomistic Psychology is pretty good too, but still feels a bit "historical." Fr. W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics is good too, I just feel like I didn't totally get it on the first pass. I got the ideas, but not their power or applicability.

Or, from another direction, Fr. William Harmless has a really good book called Mystics that delves into medieval mystical thought, and he also wrote probably my favorite introduction to the Augustinian corpus Augustine in His Own Words. Pretty sure hard copies are out of print for the former unfortunately though, although you can probably find it online somewhere.

Or, for a third direction, you could start with Dante (which is more fun!). Both the Great Courses and the Modern Scholar have excellent lectures on them (on Audible and elsewhere). Mahfood's commentary is good too, as is Teodolinda Barolini's commentary.. I feel like a close read of the Commedia gets you pretty far into the ethical, political, historical, and even some of the metaphysical dimensions of medieval thought, because Dante was a great synthesizer and weaves it into his narrative. Granted, given its subject matter, it also tends to be heavy on theology.

This might be a dumb question, but how is it a given that moral virtue is an epistemic virtue?

I think the following covers this pretty well. The "rule of reason," in at least some form, is required for good faith inquiry. A person can just write off good faith inquiry from the beginning, but they certainly won't have any good reasons for doing so. The end of the paper I mentioned talks about the anti-realist and their particular objections. Their problem is that they end up like Protagoras, unable to say why philosophy is worthwhile or why anyone should listen to them if they don't already like what they hear.

Knowledge plays an essential role in ethics. It seems obvious that human beings often fail to act morally. Yet just as importantly, we often disagree about moral issues, or are uncertain about what we ought to do. As Plato puts it: “[we have] a hunch that the good is something, but [are] puzzled and cannot adequately grasp just what it is or acquire… stable belief about it.”1 In light of this, it seems clear that we cannot simply assume that whatever we happen to do will be good. At the very least, we cannot know if we are acting morally unless we have some knowledge of what moral action consists in. Indeed, we cannot act with any semblance of rational intent unless we have some way of deciding which acts are choiceworthy.2 Thus, knowledge of the Good seems to be an essential element of living a moral life, regardless of what the Good ultimately reveals itself to be.

Yet consider the sorts of answers we would get if we were to ask a random sample of people “what makes someone a good person?” or “what makes an action just or good?” Likely, we would encounter a great deal of disagreement on these issues. Some would probably even argue that these terms cannot be meaningly defined, or that our question cannot be given anything like an “objective answer.”

Now consider what would happen if instead we asked: “what makes someone a good doctor?” “ a good teacher?” or “ a good scientist?” Here, we are likely to find far more agreement. In part, this has to do with normative measure, the standard by which some technê (art or skill) is judged vis-à-vis an established practice.3 However, the existence of normative measure is not the only factor that makes these questions easier to answer. Being a good doctor, teacher, or scientist requires epistemic virtues, habits or tendencies that enable us to learn and discover the truth. The doctor must learn what is causing an ailment and how it can be treated. The teacher must understand what they are teaching and be able to discover why their students fail to grasp it. For the scientist, her entire career revolves around coming to know the causes of various phenomena—how and why they occur.

When it comes to epistemic virtues, it seems like it is easier for people to agree. What allows someone to uncover the truth? What will be true of all “good learners?” A few things seem obvious. They must have an honest desire to know the truth. Otherwise, they will be satisfied with falsehoods whenever embracing falsehood will allow them to achieve another good that they hold in higher esteem than truth.i For Plato, the person ruled over by reason loves and has an overriding passion for truth.1 Learning also requires that we be able to step back from our current beliefs, examine them with some level of objectivity, and be willing to consider that we might be wrong. Here, the transcendence of rationality is key. It is reason that allows us to transcend current belief and desire, reaching out for what is truly good. As we shall see, this transcendent aspect of reason will also have serious implications for how reason relates to freedom.

Learning and the discovery of truth is often a social endeavor. All scholars build on the work of past thinkers; arts are easier to learn when one has a teacher. We benefit from other’s advice and teaching. Yet, as Plato points out in his sketch of “the tyrannical man” in Book IX of the Republic, a person ruled over by the “lower parts of the soul,” is likely to disregard advice that they find disagreeable, since they are not motivated by a desire for truth.1 Good learners can cooperate, something that generally requires not being ruled over by appetites and emotions. They take time to understand others’ opinions and can consider them without undue bias.

By contrast, consider the doctor who ignores the good advice of a nurse because the nurse lacks his credentials. The doctor is allowing honor — the prerogative of the spirited part of the soul — to get in the way of discovering the truth. Likewise, consider the scientist who falsifies her data in order to support her thesis. She cares more about the honor of being seen to be right than actuallybeing right, or perhaps she is more motivated by book sales, which allow her to satisfy her appetites, than she is in producing good scholarship. It is not enough that reason is merely engaged in learning. Engagement is certainly necessary, as the rational part of the soul is the part responsible for all learning and the employment of knowledge. Yet the rational part of the soul must also rule over the other parts, blocking out inclinations that would hinder the the search for truth.

Prior to reading "After Virtue", I don't think I could have defined 'telos'. How does one land on the premise of a human telos, today? Is it simply moral pragmatism? Is 'excellence' fundamental to the premise of telos?

It could be, but it's normally grounded in the philosophy of nature and metaphysics.

I think Adorno would agree that reason needs to broken free of rigid frameworks, but this is reason's way of correcting itself, not an irrationalist rebellion.

Right, and if you combine this with something like MacIntyre's view of traditions it could be the traditions themselves that are "rigid frameworks," but not necessarily! Calcified historical frameworks can also be the "matter" of such traditions, perhaps even a sort of material sickness frustrating the actualization of form (i.e. the tradition's attainment of rationality), sort of in the way that all animals are different and yet they all strive for life and form, and yet can be frustrated in this by material deficits.

One would be led to this view though only if one actually accepted the adage in PR that "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" (Hegel at his more Aristotlelian).

The discussion re keeping particularity and difference in focus came to mind when I came across this G.K. Chesterton quote again recently (from Orthodoxy):

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

IIRC he is here reflecting on Saint Augustine's reflection re miracles that the rising of the sun is quite miraculous and that if it has only occured once in a generation we would still be talking about it generations later. I thought it was an interesting celebration of sameness in difference, and of repetition as repetition in particulars.

The philosophy of history is interesting in that it is always particular, and yet it is the particular in which all universals are instantiated if they are instantiated at all (e.g. cosmic or natural history), and so represents the individualization of all universals in their larger context. That is, "materialism" is one way to focus on difference and particulars, favoring a sort of "smallism," but one also reaches maximal particularity through a sort of "bigism," the frame of history.

Right, but that's precisely where the conflation can occur. Are things (e.g. cats, trees, clouds, etc.) "in the senses" or are they "projected onto the senses," or "downstream abstractions?" Empiricism has tended to deny the quiddity of things as "unobservable," but a critic might reply that nothing seems more observable than that when one walks through a forest they sees trees and squirrels and not patches of sense data. Indeed, experiencing "patches of sense data without quiddity," is what people report during strokes, after brain damage, or under the influence of high doses of disassociate anesthetics—that is, the experience of the impaired and not the healthy.

But this is obviously going to trickle down across the sciences. Is zoology the study of discrete organic wholes and their natural kinds of is it the study of relatively arbitrary fuzzy "systems?" The entire organization of the special sciences seems to rely on allowing something of quiddities to play a role in defining them. The denial of quiddities plays a pretty large role in a number of classic empiricist arguments that lead to indeterminacy as well.

If empiricism refers just to experience, it starts to cover essentially all philosophy, whereas if it refers to some narrowed down "sense experience" there are still difficulties disambiguating this. The wider definitions of "sense experience" open the door to a very large number of thinkers outside the empirical tradition. Hence, I would say that the "method" has to be expanded to excluding specific sorts of judgements, experiences, and intuitions, which tends to mean supposing some metaphysics to justify such an exclusion.

This sort of goes with Hegel's quip that: "gossip is abstract, my philosophy is not." To already assume that the higher level and intelligible is "more abstract" is to have made a very consequential metaphysical judgement.



Yes, but sadly they became Pragmatists and not Pragmaticists :cool:

That is, if you can show how psychological or economic models (for example) fail to offer consistently, predictable results, then that counts for me as a substantive blow against positivism as opposed to just an analytic attack on the self consistency of the theory.

It seems to me that this would still be consistent with opposing philosophies though, since many of them hardly deny the techniques in question or their potential predictive power. For example, a Neo-Scholastic like C.S. Peirce is hardly denying the usefulness of predictive models and experimentation, he is just asserting a robust metaphysical realism that supposedly augments, makes sense of, and improves this.

The broadly positivist position would be better justified by somehow showing that explorations of metaphysics, or causes in the classical sense, tend to retard scientific, technological, and economic progress, or at least that they add nothing to them. I think this will tend to be difficult though, as a lot of more theoretical work (which tends to be paradigm defining and influential) is also the place where that sort of thing often plays a large role.

Of course, the positivist can also claim that such explorations are only useful because of defective quirks in human psychology. However, this seems like a thesis that it would be extremely hard to justify empirically, although certainly you can "fit the evidence to it." But that's true of a lot of things.

There is a pretty massive conflation common in this area of thought re "science" and "empiricism." This is pivotal in how different varieties of empiricism often justify themselves. They present themselves as responsible for the scientific and technological revolution that led to the "Great Divergence" between Asia and Europe in the 19th century, and this allows for claims to the effect that a rejection of "empiricism" is a rejection of science and technology, or, in some versions, that empiricism is destined to triumph through a sort of process of natural selection, since it will empower its users through greater technological and economic advances.

But this narrative equivocates on two different usages of "empiricism," one extremely broad, the other extremely narrow. In the broad usage, empiricism covers any philosophy making use of "experience" and any philosophy that suggests the benefits of experimentation and the scientific method. By this definition though, even the backwards Scholastics were "empiricists." Hell, one even sees Aristotle claimed as an empiricist in this sense, or even claims that Plotinus was an empiricist because his thought deals with experience. By contrast, the narrow usage tends to mean something more like positivism, particularly its later evolutions.

I have written about this before, but suffice to say, I think empirical evidence for this connection is actually quite weak. As I wrote earlier:

However, historically, the "new Baconian science," the new mechanistic view of nature, and nominalism pre-date the "Great Divergence" in technological and economic development between the West and India and China by centuries. If the "new science," mechanistic view, and nominalism led to the explosion in technological and economic development, it didn't do it quickly. The supposed effect spread quite rapidly when it finally showed up, but this was long after the initial cause that is asserted to explain it.

Nor was there a similar "great divergence," in technological progress between areas dominated by rationalism as opposed to empiricism within the West itself. Nor does it seem that refusing to embrace the empiricist tradition's epistemology and (anti)metaphysics has stopped people from becoming influential scientific figures or inventors. I do think there is obviously some sort of connection between the "new science" and the methods used for technological development, but I don't think it's nearly as straightforward as the empiricist version of their own "Whig history" likes to think.

In particular, I think one could argue that technology progressed in spite of (and was hampered by) materialism. Some of the paradigm shifting insights of information theory and complexity studies didn't require digital computers to come about, rather they had been precluded (held up) by the dominant metaphysics (and indeed the people who kicked off these revolutions faced a lot of persecution for this reason).

By its own standards, if empiricism wants to justify itself, it should do so through something like a peer reviewed study showing that holding to logical positivism, eliminativism, or some similar view, tends to make people more successful scientists or inventors. The tradition should remain skeptical of its own "scientific merits" until this evidence is produced, right? :joke:


I suppose it doesn't much matter because it seems like the endgame of the empiricist tradition has bifurcated into two main streams. One denies that much of anything can be known, or that knowledge in anything like the traditional sense even exists (and yet it holds on to the epistemic assumptions that lead to this conclusion!) and the other embraces behaviorism/eliminativism, a sort of extreme commitment to materialist scientism, that tends towards a sort of anti-philosophy where philosophies are themselves just information patterns undergoing natural selection. The latter tends to collapse into the former due to extreme nominalism though.

I suppose I should qualify that though in that there seems to be a third, "common sense" approach that brackets out any systematic thinking and focuses on particular areas of philosophy, particularly in the sciences, and a lot of interesting work is done here.