there's a grab-bag of entities which don't have as firm an answer as we'd like -- dreams, halucinations, mistaken worldviews, historical counter-factuals, hypothetical examples...

Right, or, to continue with the broadly Aristotlian view, we also have stuff like "humanity considered absolutely," "the notion of humanity in my mind," and "humanity as instantiated in Socrates." And we have stuff like "animal" and "animality." One might see animals everywhere, but one never sees just "an animal," but always "an animal of a particular species." And even if one accepts that species and genus are real distinctions, they are certainly not "real" in the way a horse or man is. You can touch and interact with both the horse or man, or point to them. But where in nature can one interact with a 'genus?' The universe is full of quantities, but one never stumbles across "just one" or "just two." This last part seems particularly relevant to the extent that chemistry and physics (and so H2O) are mathematized relationships.

The medievals turned this into a whole series of distinctions. There is ens reale, real existence, and ens rationis, things existing only in the mind. Then we also first intentions (our concepts about things like trees and dogs) and second intentions (our concepts about concepts, such as genus and species).

This becomes relevant when we want to speak of essences. A horse has an essence. What about a centaur though? Is it also an essence, because it seems it could possibly exist, or does it lack an essence because it is really just the mind concatenating two real essences? We might make a distinction here that the centaur represents a known essence, but not an actual essence (because it has no real act of existence). But this isn't quite the "real / unreal" distinction. I think the "real / unreal" distinction might actually reveal itself to be better thought of as many different sorts of distinction.

Water, having a real essence, doesn't change its essence when people learn about it. It has its own unique act of existence (actuality) that is prior to (and informs) cognition.

Hegel has the idea of essences unfolding in time. This is in earlier thinkers like Saint Maximus the Confessor and Eriugena too, although in a different way, since the particulars are just the realization of the universal (its becoming what it is as respects immanence), while things always already what they are in the fullness of the Logos. But then, some readers of Hegel take a similar approach to identify at "the end of history," (Wallace) and it's not clear that water would be the type of thing that is changing in Hegel.

My take, argued below from a past post, would be that it is in the relationship of being known by a rational agent that things most fully "are what they are." Hence, the evolution of human knowledge represents a sort of unfolding of essences in history. However, this unfolding is not arbitrary, although it is subject to contingencies (e.g., it did not need to be Cavendish who discovered that water is H2O for instance). This unfolding occurs according to prior actualities, and the prior actuality by which water is water (which determines its relationship with material knowers) is its form, which is unchanging.

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

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

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

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

Intelligibilities (form abstracted from the senses) require syntax to acquire (ratio). They result from bringing many relations together in such a way that they can be "present" at once and understood (intellectus). The grasping of a thing's intelligibility by a rational knower is a very special sort of relationship. This isn't just because it involves phenomenal awareness. "Looking blue" or "tasting bitter" is a relationship between some object and an observer, but these do not "actualize" an intelligibility. What the grasp of an intelligibility by the intellect does is it allows many of an object's relational properties to be present together, often in ways that are not possible otherwise (e.g. something cannot burn and not burn, dissolve and not be dissolved, be wet and not wet, etc. at the same time, but we can know how a thing responds to fire, acid, water, etc.)

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

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

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

I am reminded here that in Genesis God first speaks being into existence, but then presents being to Man to know and name himself. There is the being of things within infinite being, and then their unfolding in immanence, the two approaching each other (e.g. in the, admittedly suspect, idea of the "Omega Point").

I like Fisher for some things, but I'd rather say that we are surfing on the waves of Zygmunt Bauman's "liquid modernity." We haven't entered a "post-modern period," we're just doing modernity turned up to 11.

Maybe the post-modern period will come with some AI singularity, or maybe it will be Deely's vision of a semiotic age, a return to realism (or maybe both?).

Let's pretend unique musical forms aren't dead (nor history either) and 1000 years later, people are listening to Drock music. Why aren't we listening to Drock music now?

I'm not sure, technical and material limits seem to be fading away. We are able to make any sound wave that can be differentiated by the human ear. But AI will allow people to cycle through the possibility space way more rapidly than they could in the old days. Drock is already out there, potentially. It will now be extremely easy to actualize. You can even actualize the music videos to go along with the music easily.

The problem is that, because it is so easy to actualize Drock, and Brock, and Krock, and Zrock, it might simply come and go without market share, entertaining only a few ears. The sound waves will be actualized, but perhaps not the "movement" as a social force.

Here is the analogy I'd use: on a still pond, you can throw a few rocks in and get recognizable patterns of waves interacting. It's a good signal to noise ratio.

By contrast, the future, with AI media, is more like a pond in a torrential downpour. All surface tension is lost as billions of scattered drops hit the surface at all angles, making the effects of any one indiscernible. In such an environment, the only way to effect the overall ecosystem is to do something like hurl a meteor into the lake, or drive a large boat through the waters, or wait for the rains to pass.

As potential media becomes easier and easier to actualize, the actual space of media comes to resemble the potential space. What you get is the elevation of potency over actuality (already the hallmark of modern thought), but now this shift is becoming instantiated in the realm of entertainment media (which is itself the substrate for the realm of man's intellectual life). This brings forth the risk of what R. Scott Bakker calls the "semantic apocalypse." This risk is doubled if man begins to edit himself, his nature (through gene editing, cybernetics, tailored drug administration) such that we get a rupture in our shared cognitive ecology, a sort of divergent evolution.

The Logos might be envisioned as a sound wave, a song. But it is one of infinite amplitude and frequency, such that all waves cancel each other out in their antipode. The result is silence, but the pregnant silence of the Pleroma. It is intelligible act that must break this equilibrium, giving birth to something specific and historical through limitation. As the Kabbalahists say, God's first act had to be one of withdrawal to make space for the world, a withdrawal of actuality into potency.

In the Age of Actualization, we each become like the librarians of Borges' "Library of Babel." A harrowing thought. Basically, I really don't like "AI slop." :rofl:

Notice that there being a "Youth Culture" in general is something quite new.

And arguably something already vanishing, a product of a particular moment in history. I've seen a number of people observe how the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s had very distinct styles, new musical genres, etc. This seems to have stopped in the 00s. Today some kids dress like hippies, some in the 90s goth style, some as 80s punk rockers, etc. Certainly, styles still come and go, but fast fashion has made them so rapid and so multitudinous that they no longer have the global reach they once did.

It's a sort of balkanization of taste. It's the same with other forms of media. People used to watch the same shows because that's what was broadcast, read the same books, play the same video games. The internet, social media, and technological advances that have massively lowered the barriers to entry for producing media (e.g. single video game developers) have led to an acceleration of multiplicity. When Trent Reznor was a one man band with Nine Inch Nails in 1989, it was somewhat unique (at least for a chart topper); not so much anymore.

Interestingly, it's the very freedom to create and consume, the breaking down of barriers, that makes "everywhere becomes everywhere else." And this happens on the political stage too, e.g. the standardizations of the EU make different places similar. Huge influxes of immigrants make English increasingly common across city centers on the continent, and you even see a lot of English-language universities/programs. A sort of move to "monoculture through diversity" (although it might be called a sort of "anti-culture," since it isn't so much a "cultivation" that is occuring).

Of course, demographics have something to do with it too. The youth once made up the largest share of the population by far. Now they are the smallest. The youth were once themselves quite homogeneous, now they are the most likely to come from diffuse backgrounds. For the Baby Boomers in the US, the presidency came to their generation fairly early in life, and control of Congress shortly after. They kept it for 30+ years, becoming a huge supermajority after the Great Recession, when the average age of people in high office surged (cabinets also average about retirement age). And the share of society's wealth in the hands of the young has followed this trend. So, a more classical view might just be that money and political power drive the dominance of culture.

The idea that "some people are not perfected" by one's own presumably correct doctrine makes me smile, but I suppose it expresses the attitude you'd have to take if you saw philosophy as an attempt to make a single correct view triumph, and the failure to do so is down to the other guy, not the issue itself.

It's just an admittedly old-fashioned way of putting it. People have a potential for knowledge/understanding/good behavior, etc. The goal of education, law, etc. is to actualize this potential more fully ("bringing it to perfection.") One needn't think one's law is perfect or infallible to think that people are improved by doing the minimum to follow it (e.g. littering), and so to for philosophy.

But when it comes to philosophical views? I would have said that one of the key differences between thinking philosophically and our ordinary ways of thinking about the world is the recognition that we don't propose ignorance or bad faith as a plausible explanation for someone's disagreeing with us. And I have to admit how difficult it is for me even to imagine carrying on as you suggest.

How are you defining philosophy here? If philosophy encompasses the sciences, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and our most bedrock metaphysical assumptions—if it is the broadest study of human knowledge—I hardly see how it's the sort of thing than can be rendered a manner of taste without trivializing essentially everything

Note though that it would be a sort of strawman to tie an acknowledgment of first principles to a "one true description of being," or a "one true methodology." There might be many methodologies, useful for different things. A broad "realism" is not committed to, and in general does not proclaim, "a one true description of being or ethics." Rather, it claims that there are descriptions that are more or less correct and that all correct descriptions share morphisms and do not contradict one another. That's all that's needed.

I share your concerns, but like I said, I think there is a good philosophical argument for the idea that relativism will actually tend to make philosophy into more of a power struggle/matter of politics. I think one can even observe this happening in some cases. Scientific debate can always get heated, but things get particularly fraught when the unitary truth is abandoned in exchange for "different approaches" that are allowed to contradict one another. This is where you get "Aryan versus Jewish physics," "capitalist versus Marxist genetics," and claims to a sui generis but equally valid "feminist epistemology." How can one bridge the gap in the "culture wars" if different identity groups have different epistemologies?

Whereas I don't share the concern over being "rational" as a sort of limitation or source of unfreedom. This seems to me to only be a problem under more deflated notions of reason as something more akin to a mere calculator.

What would you think of the method that says, "Hmm, tell me more. Help me understand why you say this. Here's how I see it. Let's see what we can learn"?

Is this not open to people who deny a sort of pluralism or relativism? I don't think so. Again, when I think of which areas of philosophy seem most siloed, it seems that the exact opposite might be the case. The committed Nietzschean is, in my experience at least, the person least interested in understanding other ethical theories, instead waving them away with (normally unflattering) arguments from psychoanalysis. But this isn't incidental, it flows from their relativism.

When parts of philosophy become matters of taste or art, one is then able to dismiss broad areas on merely aesthetic grounds, to simply not take them seriously. Whereas more evangelical philosophies, while they might tend to be more dogmatic, also seem to have much more of an incentive to understand other positions, both out of fear that their own position might be wrong, or to convince others. One cannot fear error if it is not possible to be wrong.

Right, but there is a difference between methodological bracketing and simplifying assumptions and allowing that bracketing to become a sort of metaphysics that defines things like black holes, birds, and trees in terms of "usefulness."

And a lot of times these assumptions do lead to contradictory claims about reality; that's an ongoing tension in the sciences. The physics of atoms does not comport with the physics of relativistic scales. Explanations of biological function do not comport with "everything is blind mechanism." The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis controversy centers around this disconnect. Eliminitive materialism does not comport with pretty much the whole of the social sciences, which have a role for conscious agency. The "Hard Problem of Consciousness" centers around this seeming contradiction. A lot of contradictions arise from this bracketing, which is fine if it is just a methodological tool for simplifying models and predictions, but problematic if the model is inflated into a metaphysics.

It appears that it is a common way of thinking of "substance" as being something fundamental. According to the above descriptions, substance would not be fundamental but would simply be what we call a thing that consists of only type of atom or molecule, and atoms are not stuff but are excitations in fields. We abandoned this view of atoms being little billiard balls bouncing around in favor of quantum mechanics that talks about wave functions and superposition. So it appears that science at least has abandoned the idea that substance is something fundamental, in favor of a view that process appears to be fundamental and substances are just a type of process, or relation between certain types of atoms.

With the rejection of the "billiard ball model" has tended to come a rejection of "smallism" the claim that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. Prima facie, there is no reason why "smaller" should entail "more fundamental." Nor is it clear that wholes should always be definable in terms of their parts. The opposite appears to be the case in some instances.

But this can, and has, led to a flip to a sort of bigism. Only fields are fundamental because they are truly universal. Bigger is more fundamental.

Yet one might think that what is needed is a via media here between bigism and smallism. That's what the idea of substance (in some usages at least) is called in to do, to explain how there are wholes (nouns) and not just verbs (interactions), and to explain the intrinsic intelligibility by which things are things (as opposed to all things being a product of a sort of bare human will—"bare" because the will cannot be informed by the intellect re things if things' existence is itself a product of the will).

In discussions of emergence, it's often said that whatever is "strongly emergent" would have to also be "fundamental." After all, it isn't reducible. This means that a rejection of reductionism is a rejection of the idea that "fundamental = small."

However, "strong emergence" starts to look like sorcery in many framings. At the same time, reductionism has its own problems, not the least of which is a pretty terrible empirical track record. What's the big reduction outside of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics? Chemistry is not an immature field and yet a century on the basics of molecular structure have yet to be reduced. Unifications seem far more common than reductions (which suggests bigism more than smallism). Reductionism starts to look more like a hopeful metaphysical presupposition, a hunch, than an empirical theory (and no doubt, it is partly popular because it is such an intuition, since the basic idea is older than Socrates and crops up throughout history).

Hence, principles and their role in form (and defining beings-plural): :smile:

The epistemic issues raised by multiplicity and ceaseless change are addressed by Aristotle’s distinction between principles and causes. Aristotle presents this distinction early in the Physics through a criticism of Anaxagoras.1 Anaxagoras posits an infinite number of principles at work in the world. Were Anaxagoras correct, discursive knowledge would be impossible. For instance, if we wanted to know “how bows work,” we would have to come to know each individual instance of a bow shooting an arrow, since there would be no unifying principle through which all bows work. Yet we cannot come to know an infinite multitude in a finite time.2

However, an infinite (or practically infinite) number of causes does not preclude meaningful knowledge if we allow that many causes might be known through a single principle (a One), which manifests at many times and in many places (the Many). Further, such principles do seem to be knowable. For instance, the principle of lift allows us to explain many instances of flight, both as respects animals and flying machines. Moreover, a single unifying principle might be relevant to many distinct sciences, just as the principle of lift informs both our understanding of flying organisms (biology) and flying machines (engineering). 

For Aristotle, what are “better known to us” are the concrete particulars experienced directly by the senses. By contrast, what are “better known in themselves” are the more general principles at work in the world.3,i Since every effect is a sign of its causes, we can move from the unmanageable multiplicity of concrete particulars to a deeper understanding of the world.ii

For instance, individual insects are what are best known to us. In most parts of the world, we can directly experience vast multitudes of them simply by stepping outside our homes. However, there are 200 million insects for each human on the planet, and perhaps 30 million insect species.4 If knowledge could only be acquired through the experience of particulars, it seems that we could only ever come to know an infinitesimally small amount of what there is to know about insects. However, the entomologist is able to understand much about insects because they understand the principles that are unequally realized in individual species and particular members of those species.iii

Some principles are more general than others. For example, one of the most consequential paradigm shifts across the sciences in the past fifty years has been the broad application of the methods of information theory, complexity studies, and cybernetics to a wide array of sciences. This has allowed scientists to explain disparate phenomena across the natural and social sciences using the same principles. For instance, the same principles can be used to explain both how heart cells synchronize and why Asian fireflies blink in unison.1 The same is true for how the body’s production of lymphocytes (a white blood cell) takes advantage of the same goal-direct “parallel terraced scan” technique developed independently by computer programmers and used by ants in foraging.2

Notably, such unifications are not reductions. Clearly, firefly behavior is not reducible to heart cell behavior or vice versa. Indeed, such unifications tend to be “top-down” explanations, focusing on similarities between systems taken as wholes, as opposed to “bottom-up” explanations that attempts to explain wholes in terms of their parts.i...

At the outset of the second book of the Physics, Aristotle identifies proper beings as those things that are the source of their own production. (i.e. “possessing a nature”). Beings make up a whole—a whole which is oriented towards some end. This definition would seem to exclude mere parts of an organism. For example, a red blood cell is not the source of its own production, nor is it a self-governing whole.
On this view, living things would most fully represent “beings.” By contrast, something like a rock is not a proper being. A rock is a mere bundle of external causes. Moreover, if one breaks a rock in half, one simply has two smaller rocks (i.e., an accidental change). Whereas, if one cuts a cat in half, the cat—as a being—will lose its unity and cease to exist (i.e. death, a substantial change).

There are gradations in the level of unity something can have. Aristotle maintains that substantial change (i.e., the change by which one type of thing becomes another type of thing, e.g. a man becoming a corpse) involves contradictory opposition. That is, a thing is either man or not-man, fish or not-fish. It would not make sense for anything to be “half-man.”i

By contrast, unity involves contrary opposition.1 Things might be more or less unified, and more or less divisible. For instance, a volume of water in a jar is very easy to divide. A water molecule less so. We can think of the living organism as achieving a higher sort of unity, such that its diverse multitude of parts come to be truly unified into a whole through an aim.ii

For Aristotle, unity, “oneness” is the ground for saying that there are any discrete things at all. To say that there is “one duck” requires an ability to recognize a duck as a whole, to have “duck” as a measure. Likewise, to say that there are “three ducks” requires the measure “duck” by which a multitude of wholes is demarcated. Magnitude is likewise defined by unity, since it would not make sense to refer to a “half-foot” or a “quarter-note” without a measure by which a whole foot or note is known.2...


[Organisms are most properly wholes because they are unified by aims. Life is goal-directed.] What then can we say about the ways in which non-living things can be more or less unified? Here, the research on complexity and self-organizing, dissipative systems might be helpful. Consider very large objects such as, stars, nebulae, planets, and galaxies as an example. These are so large that the relatively weak force of gravity allows them to possess a sort of unity. Even if a planet is hit by another planet (our best hypothesis for how our own moon formed), it will reform due to the attractive power of gravity. Likewise, stars, galaxies, etc. have definable “life-cycles,” and represent a sort of “self-organizing system,” even though they are far less self-organizing than organisms. By contrast, a rock has a sort of arbitrary unity (although it does not lack all unity! We can clearly distinguish discrete rocks in a non-arbitrary fashion).

But isn't the goal of the kind of philosophy you espouse to resolve those disputes? More, to claim that in principle they must be resolvable? This would make the history of philosophy, taken in toto, a story of failure, since the disputes live on. That's the part that I have trouble recognizing as my own experience of doing philosophy with others.

I don't see how this is a problem. The fact that people still break the law is not an argument against good jurisprudence. The fact that people still sin is not an argument against theology. The fact that some students don't learn is not an argument against teaching. Even if one was committed to a very rigid, foundationalist philosophy (or theology, or theory of law, etc.) it would not follow that one's own doctrine is undermined by the fact that some people are not perfected by these. It's like how of the strictest ascetics, with a very strong position on the need to "uproot the passions" nonetheless maintain that most people will remain slaves to the passions.

Anyhow, as Gibbon says: "History…is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." :grin: Or, if there is some sort of progress in history, a telos, a dialectical unfolding, a transcendence of finitude...it ain't easy. Socrates has to die to make his point.

The worry here is that the foundationalist philosopher who believes that everything of importance can be demonstrated apodictically, thus resolving all disagreements in favor of a position they hold, will treat those who disagree as if they must be doing something wrong, whether due to ignorance, stupidity, stubbornness, or malice.

Wouldn't this just be true in general? If we think we know something, and people do not accept it, or affirm something contrary, we think they are ignorant in that matter (or I suppose acting in bad faith). The only way to avoid this is a sort of pluralism re truth or simply lacking conviction (the deflation of truth to a matter of taste).

Second, this suggests that philosophy based on first principles and rationalism will be particularly inflexible and prone to dogmatism, while pluralism or relativism will tend not to be. I've discussed philosophy a lot of places online and in person over the years. Do I think this is so?

No, not really. If anything, it might go in the other direction. I have seen a great many people be quite aggressive in asserting pluralism and relativism. Particularly, over the years, I have encountered a lot of Nietzsche fans who assert their particular flavor of pluralistic moral anti-realism with a great deal of vitriol.

Anywhere philosophy is discussed, there is a tendency for people to defend thinkers by claiming that anyone who disagrees with them simply lacks the ability to understand them. This happens with all sorts of philosophy. It's more common with difficult or abstruse thinkers, who are indeed easy to misunderstand (e.g. Kant), so the criticism is sometimes valid. But it seems to me that this happens less with say, analytic philosophy, with its heavy focus on argument, and the most with post-modern thinkers (and particularly with Nietzsche). But this is a sort of dogmatism rearing it's head precisely where relativism is strongest. Likewise, these are the areas where the "cult of personality" seems to become most dominant (we have had threads on this, so I know I'm not alone in this appraisal).

Is this just incidental? I don't think so. I had a thread before about the relationship between relativism, misology, emotivism, and dogmatism. In a philosophy that claims that knowledge claims come down to power relations, one that claims that moral claims are just expressions of emotion, or one where beliefs are just the result of being inculcated in a certain sort of social game, etc. the role of rational argument is necessarily limited. There is only so much it can do; we have stepped outside logocentrism, for better or worse. Whereas, while belief in accessible first principles might lead to dogmatism, I do not see why it might not also lead to greater faith in argument and the capacity to demonstrate one's position in good faith in the long run.

Third, while telling people they are wrong about closely held metaphysical or moral beliefs can produce friction, I don't see how other methods, i.e. explaining broad fields as pseudoproblems or declaring all sides of the debate "meaningless," claiming they involve merely relative truths, or that they deal in "fictions," etc. is necessarily any less so. Again, this is a case where sometimes it seems like the opposite is sometimes true.

I don't actually think that's true. Can you cite a relativist philosopher who says this, or who's been unable to respond to this criticism? If it were that simple to refute relativism, surely the position would be in the graveyard by now!

This wasn't meant as a refutation of relativism, it's just pointing out that it doesn't make people play nice or avoid disagreement. Indeed, relativists and pluralists can be plenty aggressive in arguing for their position (whether the relativist is contradicts themselves in this depends on the sort of relativism). They don't fall victim to this criticism because they don't use relativism as a way to avoid friction, but assert it explicitly at the expense of non-relativists (often as an "obvious truth").

That said, I have had this exact conversation with Joshs before (I think more than once), on truth being situated within metaphysical systems which are embraced based on a sort of "usefulness," and I definitely do think that such a position still has to call other positions wrong. I used Saint Augustine has an example in that discussion. If the relativistic view on truth is correct, then it has to say Augustine is wrong because Augustine doesn't think truth is relative in this way. To say he is "also correct" is to not take what he says seriously.

More broadly, I think this is somewhat related to an abuse of the principle of charity one sometimes sees, where pluralists translate monists into holding just "one position among many," to make their arguments more acceptable (more acceptable to the pluralists anyhow). Some (but not all) perennialists tend to do this with religious claims too.

But I'd put it in historicist terms -- we can imagine Kripke being transplanted to another time with different concepts being taken seriously,

So, for example: "Fire is the release of phlogiston."

I think the essentialist would tend to say the concept of fire (the understanding in the mind actualized by fire being experienced through the senses) stays the same, but our intentions towards it are clarified. Fire hasn't changed, but our intellects have become more adequate to it, and towards its relationship with other things. The identity of water as H2O clarifies a whole host of relations between water and other things (the way water acts in the world), and it is through those interactions that things are epistemically accessible at all.

I suppose one challenge to the essentialist lies in pursuing the primacy of interaction into something like a process metaphysics, dissolving the thing-ness (substance) of water into processes. Yet this has its own difficulties.

The framing of the infinite regress of justifications is in Posterior Analytics I.2, although I think it might show up elsewhere. Aristotle answers that justification does stop, but it stops in a different form of knowing (of which he actually has many in his anthropology). This is covered in Posterior Analytics II but I hesitate to say that this is "the argument" because its plausibility is greatly enhanced by the work done in De Anima, the Physics, and the Metaphysics.

The beauty of this solution is that it is very broad, and can largely be argued as flowing from the primacy of actuality over potency (without which, arguably, being would be incoherent and wisdom a lost cause anyhow). But, I think a difficulty here, when one reads a work like De Anima is the desire to see it as some sort of contemporary empirical theory, which it sort of is, but this isn't really where its value lies. The basic notion of potential in the mind being actualized by the form (act) by which anything interacts with it in this way and not that way is perhaps more important that the exact typology/psychology of the senses (the faculties) that Aristotle develops. I think that one can accept that things like "the common sense" and the "cogitative faculty" get "something right" without having to be overly committed to them (similar to Plato's parts of the soul, which are useful as a psychology, but less so if they become as sort of ridged description). In terms of connecting this broad framework to the contemporary sciences of physics, perception, and information, you'd need to look to contemporary Aristotlians and Thomists.

On a side note, a while back I came across this interesting dissertation on the more Platonic/Plotinian/Augustinian conception of noesis: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/2741/

No, that would be ruled out, so the opposite would indeed be irrational. That's why indisputably foundational premises might be abandoned in favor of something closer to epistemic stance voluntarism

And in virtue of what is a stance adopted? Reason? Sentiment? Aesthetic taste? Sheer impulse?

If stances are adopted according to reason, then you have the same problem. If they are adopted according to some standard that is irrational, you seem to have an irrational relativism.

This may not be a worry for you, but many philosophers, myself included, are concerned about the consequences of rational obligation which do seem to follow, as you correctly show, from allegedly indisputable premises. The idea that there is only one right way to see the world, and only one view to take about disagreements, seems counter to how philosophy actually proceeds, in practice,

If they are disputable they will certainly be disputed, hence "how philosophy actually proceeds." That someone claims that a premise is indisputable does not make it so.

and also morally questionable.

I don't get this one. How so?

I'm getting confused by "rational nature" and "finite nature" and "transcend their finitude". Could you rephrase in more ordinary terms? Are you talking about objectivity and subjectivity?

A rational nature, as in "possessing a rational soul," or a will and intellect. But we need not accept those exact distinctions, just that man has an intellectual appetite for truth (including knowing the truth about what is truly best). For Plato, and a great deal of thinkers following him, it is the desire to know what is "really true" and "truly good" that moves us beyond the given of what we already are, taking us out beyond current beliefs and desires (what we already are).

If we did not have a desire for truth itself (the "love of wisdom"), if "all men do [not] by nature desire to know," then we would only ever learn things accidentally as we uncritically and unquestioningly followed our sensible appetites (a sort of slavish unfreedom). In this psychology, rationality is a prerequisite for freedom. Freedom is not constrained by "being 'forced' to do what is rational," but rather, because reason always relates to the whole (it is "catholic") it draws us out beyond ourselves (there is an ecstasis in knowing, "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," but the knower is also changed by knowledge). Because knowledge changes the knower (knowing by becoming), the freedom to become is deeply bound up in rationality, whilst ignorance is a limit on freedom.

And would a strong epistemology of rational obligation mean that we were wrong in doing this?

Wrong in doing what exactly, not affirming truth? That truth is preferable to falsity seems like a prerequisite assumption for even concerning oneself with epistemology. One ought to seek truth because truth is more desirable.

Yet we might suppose that people have a right to make mistakes, or to be wrong. This is often part of the learning process. Wisdom, knowledge, these involve understanding, so it would not make sense to "force people to affirm what they do not understand." Yet neither would it make sense to deny that they can be wrong.

One of the problems with relativism as a nice solution to disagreements is that it doesn't actually allow "everyone to be right" anyhow. It says that everyone who isn't a relativist (most thinkers) is wrong. If you tell the non-relativist, "no, you can be right too, it's just that it's simply 'true for you'" they shall just reply: "but I maintain that it is true for everyone, not that it is 'true for me.'"

You seem to be hung up on the idea that every property of an object is essential to that object's identity. If not, then two distinct objects could have the same identity. Why is this difficult for you to accept?

This is what haecceity is called in to do (although, a lot of philosophy of quantum mechanics denies particles' haecceity, e.g. Wheeler's idea of there just being one electron in the whole universe that is in many places at once).

It's a tough issue. What individuates things is a matter of much discussion, and ties into the difference between "what they are" and "that they are."

It leads to implausible claims. Joe has the property of being awake at T1, and the property of being asleep at T2.

Indeed. The same sort of thing happens when all properties are said to be accidental (which seems to be the much more common claim in contemporary philosophy and on TFP). I will give credit for embracing the more unique formulation. It sort of reminds me of Parmenides in a way.

But surely , there is a way to do counterfactual reasoning, right? So, "if this plant was not watered, it would not have grown." But the plant in question has to be, at least in some sense, the same plant, or else we would just be saying that if the plant was a different plant it might not have grown.

On this point:

What I have been complaining about is the way that modal logic is interpreted and applied. To avoid determinism, (fatalism), we must allow that any spoken about object has no existence, or true identity, in the future, and therefore the fundamental laws are inapplicable. It is a possible object, and this means that it cannot have a true identity. But in the past, the object had existence, therefore identity, and the laws are applicable. If we do not respect this difference, that modal logic can be applied consistently with the three laws toward the past, but it cannot be applied consistently with the three laws toward the future, equivocation of different senses of "possible" is implied, along with significant misunderstanding

Maybe you would be more amenable to this framing:

Now, in the present, certain things have certain potentials. Joe might potentially be asleep at 10 PM or be awake then. A rock, by contrast, cannot be asleep or awake. So, we can speak about possibilities in the future according to the ways in which things in the present possess potentiality.

Likewise, in counterfactual reasoning, we speak to the potencies that some thing possessed in the past, and then discuss what would be true if they were actualized differently. IDK if this works without at least some differentiation between substance and accidents, but it might at least resolve some of the concerns.

The past is, in some sense, necessary, having already become actual. But when we speak to "possible worlds" with a different past, we are simply talking about different potentialities becoming actualized.

In short, if you start from premises you believe you can show to be foundational, does that commit you to also saying that everything that follows is rationally obligatory?

What would the opposite of this be? You start with premises that are foundational and then refuse to affirm what follows from them?

So:
P
P→Q

But then we affirm:
~Q, or refuse to affirm Q.

Yes, this is what most people would call "irrational." No?

That you are caused to so reason?

[/quote]

It seems obvious that people can contradict themselves, no? So there is a sort of arbitrary freedom here. But this seems to make reason extrinsic to the rational nature, a source of constraint rather than the very means by which finite natures can transcend their finitude by questioning current belief and desire. So, I might simply disagree with the anthropology that makes this "causing" problematic. Such a causation isn't even determinant though, since people can simply act inconsistently if they chose to .

To be clear, when I say he has reductionist tendencies, I don't mean "materialist reductionism." That substantial form is built up from other "regularities" can seem reductionist, without implying anything about materialism. Maybe it isn't though; this might just be an expression of something like Thomistic virtual quantity (qualitative intensity). His thought is sort of opaque at times, so I am not confident in that judgement.

As noted in the other thread, PA just lays out the challenge to scientific knowledge and demonstration. The full justification of the solution spans a good deal of the corpus because it involves the way man comes to know, and a sort of "metaphysics of knowledge."



The problem with this sort of "argument from psychoanalysis" is that they are very easy to develop. One could create the same sort of argument re attacks on teleology. Moderns come to define freedom in terms of potency. Determinant telos is a threat to man's unlimited freedom. Hence, they set out to develop a philosophy where everything is ultimately grounded in the human will, in "pragmatism," etc. (and so appetite and choice—will). Pace arguments to the effect that people "cling to teleology because it makes them feel good," Nietzsche is by far and away the best selling philosopher of our era it would seem. He dominates bookstore shelves and popular discussions of philosophy. Far from being "terrified" of such views, the masses have been inclined towards them (Nietzsche no doubt is spinning in his grave). Likewise, far from facing despair from his "universe devoid of meaning and purpose," Bertrand Russell, despite his sorted personal life, sometimes seems to elevate himself above famous saints in moral standing by having the courage to accept this.

Afterall, if there is psychological comfort in teleology, there is no doubt also psychological comfort in: "nothing one does is ever truly good or bad," or "we decide," etc.

Such arguments might be plausible, or even true to varying degrees, but they don't actually address the real issue at hand.

Good stuff, but here is the thing: the bolded conclusion isn't justified. It begs the question. From the fact that we impose artificial boundaries on hurricanes it doesn't follow that hurricanes don't exist apart from those boundaries.

:up:

Right, and common objections to this tend to rely on the assumption that any such systems must be defined according to some sort of rigid binary. But if unity (by which anything is one thing) and multiplicity represent a sort of contrariety (and so to for relative degrees of self-organization, self-government, self-determination), then we shouldn't expect the distinctions to be distinct. The storm need not have exact boundaries to be a storm. If the boundaries are "artificial" they nonetheless do not spring from the aether uncaused, but unfold for reasons (per Hegel at least).

In particular, rigid "building block" ontologies have a problem with defining systems or things. You can see this in the "Problem of the Many." Which molecules exactly make up a cloud? Which atoms exactly make up a cat?

But this is a demand that the higher order be explained in terms of, and ordered to, the lower, i.e. a cat is already assumed to be a mere concatenation lower constituents, as opposed to the higher, unifying principle itself.

Whereas, the focus on the principle of unity would seem to be a focus on "yes-saying," on actuality and form. An idealism? I suppose that depends on how one looks at such an actuality. But an actuality also determines potencies and powers, so it is always not just a "yes-saying," and specifically not a static yes-saying if this is kept in view, because the actuality of things is directed towards change/becoming, towards a potency to be actualized.

Actually, movement towards any goal assumes that the goal hasn't yet been reached, so there is a sort of bracketed priority of potency and difference in this. If a thing were not different from its perfection, it would have no impetus to change.

Facing East in Winter by Rowan Williams. It's a philosophical treatment of the doctrines in Orthodox Christianity, primarily those in the Philokalia, as read through its most cited contributor, Saint Maximus the Confessor.

I have been looking for a book like this to recommend for a while, one that can lay out the philosophical aspects of Eastern thought in a clear and accessible manner. Von Balthasar's Cosmic Liturgy on Maximus is fantastic, but it is quite technical, and at times abstruse, and doesn't do as much to connect the theoretical to the practical as it might. But one of the defining features of Eastern thought is the way the practical deeply informs the theoretical.

Edit: only the introduction of this book is accessible and it is actually quite challenging and presupposes as a depth of knowledge in Orthodox thought and contemporary Continental philosophy to really get it all.

Doesn't it depend on what the current goal is? Is it useful to think of all living and non-living things as part of one group? If so, when is that the case? Is it useful to think of living things as separate from non-living things? If so, when is that the case?

Try applying this logic to other questions. Does Iraq really have or not have WMD, or does it depend on what is useful to us? Are there truly substances, things, or does the existence of any thing at all (even the human person) merely depend on our goals? How can we have goals if our existence is itself a question of usefulness?

Basically, are there facts about the world (e.g. that something is living or not), or do these just depend on what our goals are?

Here is the problem with trying to ground epistemology in "usefulness:" either there are facts about what is useful or there aren't. If nothing is "truly useful," but instead is "useful because we feel it is so," then we have relativism. For the fundamentalist, it is useful to deny evolution for instance. In 1984, it is useful for both citizens and the Party to live by "whatever Big Brother says is true is true."

Whereas, if things are truly useful or not, then such usefulness has a cause. It can be explained. But then this explanation will lead back to questions like "are living things truly (relatively) discrete substances, organic wholes?"

So, while I am all for a constrained form of pragmatism, I think pragmatism is incoherent as a basic epistemic principle and leads towards an infinite regress: See the OP: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15308/pragmatism-without-goodness/p1

This does not mean that all correct descriptions of reality have to be "one way," or that such distinction involve discrete binaries (contradictory opposition). Many will involve contrary opposition (a sliding scale) and analogy. But I don't think "cats are real or not depending on what we are trying to do," leads anywhere good (granted that it may make sense to bracket such questions at times, or make simplifying assumptions). It ultimately ends up putting the will before the intellect, potency before actuality.

not that the universe is contradictory or ill-defined.

Exactly. The reduction of reality to quantity was originally a sort of methodological bracketing. I guess the difficulty is that, when such a bracketing is useful, this usefulness is then used as justification for inflating it into a full blown metaphysics.

All physical beings are changing and so arguably they all are processes, yes. Mark Bickhard had a good (if flawed) article on this that I've posted parts of before (since it's in one of those $250 academic tomes no one without library access will ever get to read).

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826617

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619

Terrance Deacon makes a similar appeal to a metaphysics of process as resolving key issues in our understanding of emergence (he also uses Aristotle a lot):

House of Cards?

The most influential critiques of ontological emergence theories target these notions of downward causality and the role that the emergent whole plays with respect to its parts. To the extent that the emergence of a supposedly novel higher - level phenomenon is thought to exert causal influence on the component processes that gave rise to it, we might worry that we risk double - counting the same causal influence, or even falling into a vicious regress error — with properties of parts explaining properties of wholes explaining properties of parts. Probably the most devastating critique of the emergentist enterprise explores these logical problems. This critique was provided by the contemporary American philosopher Jaegwon Kim in a series of articles and monographs in the 1980s and 1990s, and is often considered to be a refutation of ontological (or strong) emergence theories in general, that is, theories that argue that the causal properties of higher - order phenomena cannot be attributed to lower - level components and their interactions. However, as Kim himself points out, it is rather only a challenge to emergence theories that are based on the particular metaphysical assumptions of substance metaphysics (roughly, that the properties of things inhere in their material constitution), and as such it forces us to find another footing for a coherent conception of emergence.

The critique is subtle and complicated, and I would agree that it is devastating for the conception of emergence that it targets. It can be simplified and boiled down to something like this: Assuming that we live in a world without magic (i.e., the causal closure principle, discussed in chapter 1), and that all composite entities like organisms are made of simpler components without residue, down to some ultimate elementary particles, and assuming that physical interactions ultimately require that these constituents and their causal powers (i.e., physical properties) are the necessary substrate for any physical interaction, then whatever causal powers we ascribe to higher - order composite entities must ultimately be realized by these most basic physical interactions. If this is true, then to claim that the cause of some state or event arises at an emergent higher - order level is redundant. If all higher - order causal interactions are between objects constituted by relationships among these ultimate building blocks of matter, then assigning causal power to various higher - order relations is to do redundant bookkeeping. It’s all just quarks and gluons — or pick your favorite ultimate smallest unit — and everything else is a gloss or descriptive simplification of what goes on at that level. As Jerry Fodor describes it, Kim’s challenge to emergentists is: “why is there anything except physics?” 16

The concept at the center of this critique has been a core issue for emergentism since the British emergentists’ first efforts to precisely articulate it. This is the concept of supervenience...

Effectively, Kim’s critique utilizes one of the principal guidelines for mereological analysis: defining parts and wholes in such a way as to exclude the possibility of double - counting. Carefully mapping all causal powers to distinctive non - overlapping parts of things leaves no room to find them uniquely emergent in aggregates of these parts, no matter how they are organized...

Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature

[But there is a powerful argument against mereological substance metaphysics: such discrete parts only appear at the quantum scale through large scale statistical smoothing. In many cases, fundamental parts with static properties don't seem to exist and even those that are put forth can form into new, fundamental entities (e.g., Humphrey's notion of fusion).]

This is not meant to suggest that we should appeal to quantum strangeness in order to explain emergent properties, nor would I suggest that we draw quantum implications for processes at human scales. However, it does reflect a problem with simple mereological accounts of matter and causality that is relevant to the problem of emergence.

A straightforward framing of this challenge to a mereological conception of emergence is provided by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Mark Bickhard. His response to this critique of emergence is that the substance metaphysics assumption requires that at base, “particles participate in organization, but do not themselves have organization.” But, he argues, point particles without organization do not exist (and in any case would lead to other absurd consequences) because real particles are the somewhat indeterminate loci of inherently oscillatory quantum fields. These are irreducibly processlike and thus are by definition organized. But if process organization is the irreducible source of the causal properties at this level, then it “cannot be delegitimated as a potential locus of causal power without eliminating causality from the world.” 20 It follows that if the organization of a process is the fundamental source of its causal power, then fundamental reorganizations of process, at whatever level this occurs, should be associated with a reorganization of causal power as well.

Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature

The problem though, is that the old issue of the One and the Many rears its head here. If everything is a process, in virtue of what is anything also a discrete thing? How is anything any thing at all? Process metaphysics tends towards a singular universal monoprocess.

Anyhow, these sorts of questions remain important to a number areas in science. Science isn't presuppositionless. In many areas, it has tended to carry on with a 19th century metaphysics of "everything is little balls of stuff touching and arranged such and such." I used to think this was just inertia, that this view stuck around (with children continuing to be indoctrinated in it for the first decades of their lives) merely because it was "good enough." However, I have come around to the conclusion that such a metaphysics is still embraced, despite good evidence to the contrary (and it no longer being popular in physics itself) because it helps to support a number of ethical and political positions, and "personal philosophies" popular in the academy/middle class (philosophies which fulfill something like the role of religion for their adherents). The old metaphysics makes the world either properly absurd for existentialist or properly inscrutable for both volanturist theology and a "pragmatic" hedonism. It makes man's telos inaccessible/non-existent ("science says this"), which is useful for liberal political theory, since it justifies entirely privatizing concerns about ultimate goods.


Every age has its own dogmas and older eras helpfully shed light on them while suggesting alternative paths.

Sometimes. At times, theoretical work needs to take a more philosophical look at what is mean by change and motion, and so "process." This comes up a lot in work on time. I really like Richard Arthur's "The Reality of Time Flow: Local Becoming in Modern Physics," which spends a lot of time defining process.

Some physicists, like David Bohm, carry out these sorts of primitive analyses (another example would be similarity and difference).



The soul is just the form by which living things are the sort of self-organizing, self-determining, self-generating proper wholes that they are. Some (philosophical) conceptions of science do away with any real distinction between living and non-living things (e.g. "everything is just collocations of atoms"), but most do not. "Soul" is broadly consistent with those that do not, and include some sort of principle of life. "Soul" is another one of those terms with tons of baggage though. Hardly any scientist is going to use "soul" because it tends to get associated with some sort of ontological dualism due to later uses, or, because the soul is said to be "immaterial" this is taken to mean something like "existing in a discrete spirit realm," instead of simply "being act/form."

Yes, that's a provisional definition. Sach's translation/commentary, which is fairly widely used, is quoted in the post you are quoting from:

Aristotle identifies nature as an "innate impulse of change" that not only sets things in motion but governs the course of those motions and brings them to rest. Only certain things have such inner sources of motion. A tentative list of natural beings is given in the first sentence of Book II, but it is corrected in the second paragraph. The parts of animals are not independent things, so while blood, say, or bone is natural, neither of them is that to which an inner source of motion belongs primarily, in virtue of itself. It is only the whole animal that has a nature, or a whole plant. Similarly, fire cannot properly be said to have a nature, since it is incapable of being a whole [though is can be said to be "natural"]. Like blood and bone, fire, along with earth, air, and water, is only part of the whole being that has a nature.The ordered whole of the cosmos is the one independent thing in nature that is not an animal or plant.

I bolded the relevant part this time. This distinction is developed throughout the corpus. Aristotle is here begining with two prior definitions of nature. Things "are what they are made of," or "things are their form." He will, in a sense, reject both of these to some degree, while retaining elements of them.

"Man generates man," a bed does not generate a bed, but neither does a rock generate a rock. Some nonliving phenomena are more or less self-organizing, but Aristotle was not particularly familiar with these. These aren't really a challenge to his thought though, because it doesn't suppose a binary distinction.

Of course, Aristotle does have a distinction between artifacts and non-artifacts. Fire acts according to a prior actuality. Then again, so does a bronze ball, which rolls (moves/acts) on account of its artificial form, not on account of being made of bronze.

Here is a similar example: Aristotle offers "two-legged" as a definition of man in a number of places (e.g. the Categories , the Metaphysics). This does not mean he thinks this is a good definition of man or that the statement of the definition is the final word on the matter. Rocks possessing principles of motion and generation in the same way that things with souls do leads towards the caricature of Aristotlian physics as a sort of naive animism.

What we discussed in that thread isn't Aristotle's answer to the question Wittgenstein took up, just an ancillary point that the positive skeptic's position is self-undermining.

You seemed to think the conclusion of his argument is skepticism

No, Kripke is driven to a "skeptical solution" (his term) which learns to live with the paradox, as opposed to a "straight solution" which dissolves the paradox. Quine is similarly led to several skeptical solutions by arguments from underdetermination. My point is that people used to think perfectly good straight solutions to these arguments existed. This is because they had a different anthropology and understanding of rationality, different epistemic presuppositions about what could be used as evidence in philosophical argument, and different metaphysical presuppositions.

Which starting points are more correct is a complex question. My point is merely that the need for skeptical solutions doesn't come from some space of presuppositionless thought. It becomes acute in the 20th century in the analytic tradition because of certain presuppositions. Continentals often reject these, although it seems they are also often quite happy to give Anglo-Americans "the rope they use to hang themselves with" on these points.

Wittgenstein's theory of hinge propositions in On Certainty might also be considered a skeptical solution. Wittgenstein is unknowingly retreading the ground of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics re "justification must end somewhere," and Aristotle himself suggests this is an old problem by the time he is writing about it.

Aristotle considers Wittgenstein's solution (very broadly), and arguably considers switching to a coherence definition of truth (the circle of syllogisms), but is able to reject both for a straight solution. But this is because he has different starting points, not because he is better or worse at logical argumentation.

The distinction is not supposed to be merely natural versus artificial. This would severely truncate the role of aims as a principle of unity by which anything is truly anything at all, and the role of wholeness (unity) itself.

Book II or the Physics is where this is probably best laid out (and Sachs commentary and translation is good here). Aristotle progresses dialecticaly, so I could see how one might be left with this impression, since he opens with a fairly inclusive definition of those things that might exist by nature, and then throws out artifacts as the opposite extreme:

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes. "By nature' the animals and their parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water)-for we say that these and the like exist 'by nature'.

Here is Sachs' commentary from his translation:

Aristotle identifies nature as an "innate impulse of change" that not only sets things in motion but governs the course of those motions and brings them to rest. Only certain things have such inner sources of motion. A tentative list of natural beings is given in the first sentence of Book II, but it is corrected in the second paragraph. The parts of animals are not independent things, so while blood, say, or bone is natural, neither of them is that to which an inner source of motion belongs primarily, in virtue of itself. It is only the whole animal that has a nature, or a whole plant. Similarly, fire cannot properly be said to have a nature, since it is incapable of being a whole. Like blood and bone, fire, along with earth, air, and water, is only part of the whole being that has a nature.The ordered whole of the cosmos is the one independent thing in nature that is not an animal or plant.

Now, something like fire can still be said to act according to nature when it rises, because it is acting according to some prior actuality that determines its motion (change). Anything that is anything has some prior act shaping both its actions and its potency vis-á-vis its reception of interaction. This is true of artifacts as well. But they fail to meet the definition for sources of their own organization.

The view of nature as simply substratum (elements) or form (e.g. the bed example) are taken up because these are the dominant prior explanations of nature with which Aristotle has to contend. But he rejects both of them. The bed example is also there to reject the materialist position.

The rule following argument is an argument from underdetermination. These arguments have been made for millennia. That's the relation. If you or at @Banno want to explain how it doesn't rely on underdetermination, be my guest. It does. Try at least offering more that: "that's not right!" with absolutely zero elaboration and defense of the objection.

My other point was that Wittgenstein and Kripke both come from a tradition deeply shaped by Hume. Hume read, and specifically followed up on the ancient tradition. That's a well-documented historical fact. The idea that: "nope, the two traditions are not related because the number zero didn't exist back then," is supposed to be ... what exactly? Something like: "Actually, that specific historical fact and intellectual connection doesn't matter because:

A. "Logic has changed since ancient times (no, I won't lay out the slightest argument on how this applies to anything you've written, even though I am replying to a statement that has nothing to do with logic)" (a complete non sequitur)

B. "Ha, they didn't even have the number zero!" (another complete non sequitur)?

I'll help you and Banno actually try to respond to content instead of just making unrelated, contentless snipes (and bizarrely challenging factual historical claims about intellectual history). Here is a summary of Wittgenstein's rule following argument:

"Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox challenges the idea that we can understand and consistently apply rules because any action can be made to seem to conform to multiple, even contradictory, rules. It raises questions about whether there's an objective fact of the matter about what rule someone is following, and how we can be certain we're following the rule we think we are."

"This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule"."

Explain how the summary is wildly inaccurate or not an argument from underdetermination. Particularly, explain how Kripke's interpretation vis-á-vis the quaddition example isn't about underdetermination.

It is though. That's the whole point, that an infinite number of rules are always consistent with any previous set of observations/actions. Kripke calls this something like "one of the most original paradoxes in the history of skepticism." It isn't. This shows an almost all encompassing ignorance of the history of skepticism. It has been made in various forms for thousands of years. The application to rule following in particular is original (although Hume's argument covers rule-like descriptions of nature in the same way), but earlier blanket attacks on induction would cover rule following on almost identical grounds.

These arguments were not previously taken as particularly serious. That has to do with different starting assumptions by which they are vetted, and assumptions about what counts as evidence. That's my point. Analytic philosophy is not uniquely presuppositionless. It's presuppositions are what make arguments for underdetermination undefeatable, whereas they were considered straightforwardly defeatable in previous epochs.

The question is whether they would have warrant, not us. Would they?

Are they?

Yes, that's the idea behind equipollence. Phyrronean skepticism relies on a sort of underdetermination and Hume is specifically riffing off this, although he takes it in the direction of hedonism instead of seeking ataraxia. They aren't just similar, they're directly historically related.

The empirical tradition begins in ancient skepticism (where it gets its name). That the modern reformulation tends towards skepticism is not surprising.

For Aristotle, every individual, every particular, (what we call an object), consists of matter and form. The composite is an instance of primary substance. You'll notice that he doesn't only talk about living beings, but also things like bronze statues. I think you are applying unwarranted restrictions to Aristotle's hylomorphism

It's a bit confusing because Aristotle seems to say different things in different places, and because "ousia" might get translated as "substance," "being," or "essence" in different places. What anything is, the type of thing it is, is substance as logical category (in the Categories). However, Aristotle kicks off the Physics by narrowing down those things that exist according to their own nature (an intrinsic principle of self-determination and self-organizing) to organisms. This is in contrast to things that "exist according to causes," like a rock, which is largely just a heap of external causes with no (strong) principle of unity (e.g. if you break a rock in half you get two rocks, if you break a dog in half you don't have a dog anymore). But unity and multiplicity are contrary, not contradictory opposites, and substance (in the sense of being—verb—"a being") sort of exists on a sliding scale, with different things being more or less truly one and discrete (self-determing), just as man can be more or less unified and directed towards the Good. Aristotle, in a very clever way, is extending Plato's psychology into a metaphysical principle here.

I think it's fairly confusing. It's confusing because logic involves univocal predication and substance as a logical category is "the type of thing." But science involves analogical predication and we get this sort of sliding scale that gets turned by the great Muslim interpreters of Aristotle into the (often caricatured, rarely well presented) Great Chain of Being.



These terms definitely still get used in the philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, complexity studies, etc., but they are often used confusedly in different senses, with all the baggage they have accumulated. Of course, you're more likely to see them in theory heavy, conceptual work in the sciences. You see these employed very often in conversations of emergence (but here "substance metaphysics" uses substance more as "building block"). In their original usage, their so general that they don't really fit into any specific science, but more the prior categories for framing scientific theories.

"Species" is another similar one (still used, having acquired different senses over time), or "information" from "form," such that in complexity studies you sometimes see the etymological full circle where people claim that information is the ground of form (in something like the old sense of eidos).

One cannot logically follow Book XII of the Metaphysics because it talks about God? Aquinas doesn't use arguments from common experience?

On this account, the picture below should be some sort of absurd joke Photoshop, not a scholarly publication...

"Reasons" seem entirely divorced from causes because "causes" in mechanistic philosophy of nature are reduced to bare, inscrutable brute facts. When causes are intelligible, there is no unbridgeable gap between the two.

David Bentley Hart has a good section on this from "Everything is Full of Gods:"

Actually, I’m not even sure that the modern picture yields a cogent notion of causation, let alone mentality. Once the whole concept of cause had been reduced from an integral system of rationales to single instances of local physical efficiency, causality became a mere brute fact—something of a logical black box. As is so very much a part of the peculiar genius of the modern sciences, description flourishes precisely because explanation has been left to wither. Hume certainly understood this. Once the supposedly spectral causal agencies of the old system had been chased away, he found causality itself now to be imponderable, logically nothing more than an arbitrary sequence of regular phenomenal juxtapositions. It presumed no abiding substrate of continuity—no prime matter—and no formal or final laws of intrinsic order. It had lost the rational necessity of an equation or syntactically coherent predicative sentence. The earlier understanding of causal relations faded into the obscurity of an occult principle whose only discernible logic is “it happens.”

So now we’re presented with the experience of a mind “in here” in each of us, which seems to function by a series of rational connections, and a mechanical world “out there,” which seems to function by accidental concatenations of unthinking material forces; and we’re asked to adopt a unified theory that collapses the former into the latter, however implausible that seems.

By contrast, there was at least a logic of change in the Aristotelian model—the integral logic of potentiality and actuality. It was a basic principle that, in any finite causal relation, change occurs in the effect, not in the cause itself. But, of course, in the realm of the finite, agent and patient functions are impossible to confine each to a single pole of any causal relationship. When two finite substances are involved in a causal relation, that is, each undergoes some change, because each is limited and lacking in some property the other can supply, and so each functions as both a cause and an effect in that relation. Each actualizes some potential latent in the other. Ice melts upon a burning coal but also cools the coal; and neither can affect the other without also being affected in turn.

Each—to use a term slowly gaining more credence in the philosophy of science—has a disposition to a state that the other has a faculty for making active. But, of course, “disposition” here is just another word for "potential.” Causality in that way of seeing things isn’t just the extrinsic application of efficient force, merely randomly inducing a reaction, but an equation reached by addition and subtraction, so to speak: an intricate harmony of intrinsic dispositions and extrinsic occasions, one event
awakening and being awakened by another.

I'm not clear on the purpose of this. It seems clear that some premises are more plausible than others, and the premise that all others are conspiring against one would count as one of the least plausible imaginable. I've already said that reason consists in conclusions being consistent with premises, and also that premises should be consistent with human experience taken as whole, since that is the condition into which we are inducted in growing up.

Just pointing out that consistency is not enough for rationality. Also, the madman's premises are consistent with his experience of human life. But you seem to be appealing to some sort of democratization here. I am not sure if that works either.

For instance, in the Beyond the Pale thread, you said racism was beyond the pale because it was irrational. Yet you hold science up as a paradigm here. But modern science, peer review and all, affirmed racism in many respects into the middle of the 20th century. This position passed the test of consistency and popularity.

The vagueness here just seems like it might make it easy to paint positions one doesn't like as either "irrational" or as just "faith-based" matters of taste (thus privatizing them and rendering them irrelevant if they can be barred from public life, education, or political influence on these grounds), no?

I would just as soon not have to argue that the racist is being irrational (although in some cases they might be), but simply that they are wrong. Indeed, if they were always irrational, it wouldn't do much good to try to argue the point.

To my eye it misrepresents that argument.

It doesn't even represent them lol, aside from pointing out that they are arguments from underdetermination, which they are. Such arguments are very old. Plotinus levels one that might fit in with modern Anglo-empiricist thought against Sextus Empiricus (although as a reductio). Such arguments have been known for ages, but they were never considered serious threats to knowledge, whereas they play a dominant role in 20th century Anglo-American thought.

Why is this? Because of very different starting points about what what can constitute evidence. But the bull in a china shop destructiveness of arguments from underdetermination seem like they should be enough to disqualify epistemic standards that let them run rampant.

I wouldn't frame it in terms of some sort of dialectical of caused action versus free action. I think libertarian free will is incoherent, but that's neither here nor there. The point is not that the symbols on the paper somehow force you to add them, merely that when you add sums on a paper those signs determine which numbers you add. If you didn't want to add them and didn't need to, presumably you wouldn't. The intellect is informed by the senses, which carry the signs. The will is informed by the intellect (but informed by ≠ determined by).

It's just like how a stop light is casually involved in bringing your car to a halt. If the light (a physical thing) wasn't red, you wouldn't have stopped. But people intentionally run red lights all the time. The mechanism here is that the red light informs the habituated driver in a specific way, making them think one thing (applying the brakes in order to avoid an accident or ticket) versus simply driving through. Obviously, such informing can be subconscious as well.

There has to be some sort of "physical-ish causality," right? Else how could ink in a paper book (a physical object) lead you to have the very specific thoughts of War and Peace, or a light reliably make people apply their brakes?

Granted, this is a very hard thing for old school mechanistic, dualistic corpuscular materialism to handle, but information theory and semiotics offer ways to explain the transmission of intelligible content in ways that need not reduce to "little balls of stuff forcing other little balls to move by bumping into them."

you have to consider this in terms of the earlier, moral global assertion of skepticism:

Likewise we have no way of determining whether our beliefs about the reliability of others' judgements, or our scientific theories are correct, even though it seems reasonable to think we have a better idea about the veracity of those based on whether the predictions they yield are observed.

The only certainties would seem to be the logical, including mathematics, and the directly observable.

The question then for me for @Janus would be, regarding this:

I have the utmost respect for others' faiths. provided they don't seek to indoctrinate others. I have my own beliefs which are based on pure faith, but I don't want to argue for them because I see that it is pointless given that no intersubjectively determinate corroboration is possible in respect of them.

Shouldn't this apply as well to scientific or historical claims, for instance, claims of the superior intelligence of the "Aryan race," the natural perfidy of woman, whether or not the Holocaust or Holodomor occured, etc? Or all sorts of moral claims, e.g. about consent and sex, about abortion, theft, etc., or even claims about the value of tolerance and "avoiding indoctrination" themselves? That is, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and no one should try to indoctrinate anyone else re what is unknowable?

For, if being reasonable is just being consistent, then surely the Nazi can be reasonable.

Now if the response is that those things do fit the criteria for "intersubjectively determinate corroboration," then why don't religious claims? After all, if justifications for religious claims are not intersubjectively available, how do we explain the massive phenomenon of millions upon millions of conversions, the capacity of religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to convince disparate peoples and cultures of their truth, or that most people, for most of history, lived in communities that largely agreed on religious matters?

Yes, that's a useful distinction, although I don't think the two are unrelated. The numbers you are adding up play a role in the second sense of "reasons." They are the reason you add those numbers and not any other. The signs on the paper are the content determining cause of some of your thoughts. That's the causality unique to signs, to make us think one thing instead of any other.

The priority of metaphysics over language is the priority of being (more general) over signs (specifying). Not all signs are stipulated (e.g., smoke as a sign of fire). This is metaphysical priority, but there is also a causal historical priority here to.

Consider the question above about what is prior, language or metaphysics? Even if we say that the stipulation, "this counts as an ant" is prior to there being any ants (although we can say that there is evidence that "what counts as an ant" has been around for millions of years) we will still have the problem of determining why there is a stipulation of this (the ant) instead of any other thing. Why are all ants grouped together? Why this instead of any other of the infinite combinations of sense ensembles we could stipulate things of? This gets to the problem of ordinary objects. Why did all cultures create names for organisms in their environment but absolutely none created names for the bizarre objects of 20th century philosophers (e.g. 'flouts' as discontinuous fox and trout halves)?

If we say it comes down to use, this just leads to the question, "why was "any" useful everywhere but never "flout?" The most obvious answer though is that "ant" is useful because ants, wolves, etc. are organic wholes prior to stipulation, and appear phenomenologicaly as such (which also explains why teaching children the name of a new animal is easy, while the "flout" is likely to be met with blank states).

Historically then, being is prior to phenomenal experience, which is prior to stipulation. Phenomenal experience must come first, or else there is nothing to stipulate about.

Now, in modern thought, we have the wrinkle you suggested in the form of a dualism between subject and object, mental and physical. Of this CSP writes:

"The question, therefore, is whether man, horse, and other names of natural classes, correspond with anything which all men, or all horses, really have in common, independently of our thought, or whether these classes are constituted simply by a likeness in the way in which our minds are affected by individual objects which have in themselves no resemblance or relationship whatsoever."

Peirce thought this was a false dichotomy. Act follows on being. The way things interact with us reveal something determinant about their being. They cause us to think "this" and not anything else. That's enough to ground realism. Realism, afterall, doesn't declare thought about being infallible. It doesn't say the mind has access to everything knowable. Indeed, in a Pentecost homily, St. Thomas says all the efforts of human thought will never exhaust the essence of a single fly. It just says that things' actions upon the mind cannot be arbitrary, cannot emerge from sheer potency, but must correspond to prior actuality.

The problem with this is that it seems to believe that we individuals spring into life fully formed, ready to make choices. But that is not the case. We are born, we grow up and learn what we need to know about our environment, including our society; only then are we capable of exercising the freedoms that our situation affords us.

Roughly, my view starts from understanding an individual as a member of society, which not only defines the freedoms and restrictions that individuals live with, but educates and trains them to do so. What counts as flourishing depends on the options enabled by the environment and the society in which one lives

:up:

In particular, the influence of a sort of Humean anthropology, which is extremely dominant in economics (and thus has huge influence on liberal governance) leads to a view where passions and appetites "just are." Reason exists to help us satisfy them. It's just a tool.

Such an anthropology cuts the legs out from under any coherent second-order volitions, the desire to have or not have different desires. But classically, virtue involved desiring the right things. We are virtuous when we enjoy doing what is right. We flourish more when we have desires conducive to human flourishing rather than self-destructive desires. Harmony and proper ordering must be cultivated, they aren't a given (or irrelevant).

Freud only increased this tendency, since his pseudoscience suggested that the root cause of all mental illness was the repression of desire, and tended to suggest that we not try to shape our desires (they are anarchic primitives) but instead simply channel them.

Liberalism has got one thing right - the point (telos?) of society is the welfare (flourishing) of the individuals who are its members. But the idea that the social context in which we live is some sort or imposition on us is a misunderstanding.

I actually think this is an area where liberalism is wrong, although it is almost right. The liberal state’s final cause would be the good of its citizens, yes. Yet this is where controversy arises. Is the good in question here the common good of all citizens (the lower ordered to the higher), or is it the individual good of each citizen (the higher ordered to the lower, as in reductionism)? Classical political theory suggests the former, but modern liberal theory suggests the latter, i.e. that the state exists primarily for the good of individuals qua individuals.

A second issue crops up in defining the “good of man,” whether as an individual or as a corporate body. Liberalism tends to declare that such talk of natural or ultimate ends is beyond the scope of liberalism, and thus beyond the scope of the state. Rather, individuals each have a right to decide such things “for themselves.” However, this open-endedness essentially forecloses on any conception of the human good that cannot be privatized and individualized. There is a tension here where “trying to avoid giving an answer” still very much results in the state weighing in on the human good, and in a quite totalizing manner because it demands excluding all sorts of things from education and public life (e.g. notions of virtue and telos).

I would say this tension exists in both conservative and progressive liberalism. Conservatives tend to want
a small state, but this tends to exclude (and thus perhaps undermine) the cultural and religious institutions they want to conserve. Progressives have the difficulty of trying to justify very large scale corporate projects (e.g. the welfare state) solely in terms of a collocation of atomized individuals' very loosely (and often privately) defined good, while also doing so without being able to rely on any notion of "just desert" (because such a notion requires a standard of excellence, which requires a human telos).

To sum up, the issue for the liberal state is that it has difficulty understanding its own final cause. It “promotes the good of individuals,” but then leaves the nature of this “individual good” as a privatized open question that it will not weigh in on. This creates a sort of ongoing tension in political life, as good governance often requires a more expansive notion of the common good.

A counter-example would help.

Plenty of Marxist theory and traditionalists allow that they do not promote the liberal version of individual liberty to the same degree as liberalism. There is a reflective awareness that they are open to both internal and external critiques on this front. Traditionalism will generally allow that its preferred structures will not perform as highly vis-á-vis fostering consumption, it just tends to deny that greater consumption is all that important.

Perhaps this is because they are minority positions instead of the hegemon. By contrast, as I said, liberal critiques of liberalism tend to only focus on whether current forms of liberalism are living up to liberalism's own standards. There is a sort of blindness to the possibility of external critique. This leads to the phenomenon that Deneen observes, that the "solution to the problems of liberalism is always more liberalism."

I think this thread is great evidence of this. To criticism, the response has often been: "so you want theocracy or Stalinism then?" This is a response Fisher documents as well. It's a blindness to other conceptualizations of freedom, such that rejecting liberalism's version of freedom is equivalent with simply embracing tyranny. The vision is absolutized.

This is where I think you misunderstand liberalism, or the Rawlsian version, at any rate. You apparently have the idea of a government that can "give answers" on matters such as human telos, or avoid doing so. But what would this mean in practice? How does a state "give an answer"? The liberal replies: by imposing authority, by precluding or impeding the realization of answers that disagree with the state position.

Misunderstand, or just don't agree with?

And this it must not do, if a reasonable degree of individual freedom is to be preserved.

What sort of individual freedom is being preserved though? Only if freedom is defined in terms of potency/absence of restraint is the state's imposition of a certain understanding of human telos always a check on freedom. Put another away, the state is only always in error when it strays from liberalism if liberalism is always in accord with prudence and justice. Liberalism is only necessarily prudent if man has no telos or if his telos is unknowable, otherwise it represents unwarranted skepticism.

By contrast, if freedom is not "the ability to choose anything," but rather "the self-determining capacity to actualize the good" then it is not clear that the state always infringes on liberty when it answers such questions.

Anyhow, consider two justifications for gun control and making recreational drugs illegal. The liberal might say:

"We must control access to firearms because irresponsible or violent use of firearms by some individuals constrains the liberty of other individuals. Kids should be free to go to school without getting shot. Likewise, the abuse of recreational drugs by some individuals unduly constrains the liberty of other people through traffic accidents, poor parenting, etc."

By contrast, it's clear that either of these legal constraints could also be justified (perhaps better) in terms of a more definitive vision of the human good. The constraint might be the same in either case though, but in the aggregate liberal states will often have difficulty fostering certain goods because of their ideology.

Take education. Education is increasingly justified in terms of workforce preparation (and future individual consumption), and this justification has been used to drastically reduce any focus in civics, the liberal arts, philosophy, ethics, or any physical training. Education was, across the globe, not just in the West, originally conceived as training/habituation in virtue, excellence. This isn't open to the liberal society because, lacking any conception of man's telos, it lacks any standard of excellence for man. What is left as a standard of excellence comes from culture, religious institutions, etc., which provide this standard for as long as they exist, but liberalism and capitalism erode these institutions and standards by excluding them from public life. What is left is a sort of "democratization of excellence," which in capitalist economies tends towards a fetishization of wealth and "market value" (hence why the problems of eldercare and childcare get framed in the market terms of "uncompensated labor").

Education becomes primarily a means of "making more money" and "getting to do what you want," not of "cultivating excellence." This is problematic for any anthropology where self-determination and self-governance (both individual and collective) require positive cultivation, and where there is some definitive human purpose outside of the satisfaction of irrational sentiments and appetites (the latter being a popular conceit of the Anglo-empiricist tradition due to its impoverished psychology).

Or, if by "give an answer," you simply mean that a state can name founding principles while ensuring that active, legitimate opposition is respected ... well, that is liberal democracy!

There were many pluralistic societies that existed as pluralistic societies for centuries prior to liberalism. While it is true that a more positive notion of the human good might be used to constrain opposition, it need not. "Being respected and protected for being wrong" might itself be conducive to human flourishing.

Liberalism allows pluralism by making different competing positions equally meaningless and irrelevant to public life (bourgeois metaphysics).

Also, as I've noted before, to say "what is important is . . ." implies that it's the only important thing. But Rawls considers many factors to be important, not least of which is finding a just balance between "enabling private exploration" and gumming up the works for everybody.

But this is a consideration in terms of individual liberty. One person's individual liberty can be justly constrained only because it "gums up the works for everyone else," i.e. because it infringes on other's individual liberty. That's a hallmark of liberal theory and the way it justifies rights and law.

It seems clear to me that of all our kinds of beliefs those based on religious and mystical experiences are the least grounded, are in fact groundless, and are thus purely matters of faith. I understand that it may be hard for some to admit this―however I don't see this as a bug, but rather a feature. If people generally understood this, there would be no evangelism, no religious indoctrination and no fundamentalism, and I think we would then have a better world.

Do you think witness testimony should be admissable in trials? Or, because it might be based on one person's perceptual experiences, should witness reports and unrecorded confessions be thrown out as lacking in epistemic warrant?

Assuming the events of Exodus happened as recorded, would the Hebrews, who saw the sea split for them, the sky raining blood, a pillar of fire following them every night, water come from a stone, etc. still lack any epistemic warrant for believing God exists?

The "rule following argument," like the many other empiricist arguments from underdetermination, relies on presupposing empiricism's epistemic presuppositions and its impoverished anthropology (which denies intellectus from the outset). Since these arguments lead to all sorts of radical conclusions: that words do not have meanings in anything like the classical realist sense, that they cannot refer to things, that induction—and thus natural science—is not rationally justifiable, that we cannot know if the sun will rise tomorrow, that we don't know when we are performing addition instead of an infinite number of other operations, that nothing like knowledge as classically understood can exist, etc., one might suppose that the original premises should be challenged. Indeed, epistemic presuppositions that lead to this sort of skepticism would seem to be self-refuting; they cannot secure even the most basic, bedrock knowledge we possess.

That is, the rule following argument is itself a consequence of the reduction of reason to ratio.

Likewise, Kripke's queerness argument just assumes nominalism, and then points out that one cannot have access to universals because nominalism is true. I don't think these are instances of intentional questions begging, but they are nonetheless question begging.

If your first point is that rule-following alone does not equate to content, then we might agree. I'd answer this problem by again pointing out that one's understanding of any rule is to be found in the actions seen in following it or going against it. And here we might add that the action is what you call "content".

Action is not the content of thought; that's behaviorism.



Protagoras was consistent. Whatever anyone thinks is true is true for that person. Arguments from underdetermination against the possibility of virtually all knowledge are consistent. Arguably, if one starts from empiricist epistemic presuppositions, one is more consistent than most philosophers if one just commits to epistemic nihilism. That's fine though. Radical skepticism is also consistent. Whether it is wise or reasonable is another question.

Here, it might be helpful turn to G.K. Chesterton’s discussion of the “madman." As Chesterton points out, the madman, can always make any observation consistent with his delusions “If [the] man says… that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny [it]; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.” Expressing the man’s error is not easy; his thoughts are consistent. They run in a “perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle… though… it is not so large.” The man’s account “explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.”

For Chesterton, the mark of madness is this combination of “logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are. Rather it runs in tight, isolated circles. On such a view, reason represents not a bridge, the ground of the mind’s nuptial union with being, but is instead the walls of a perfect but hermetically sealed cell.

Good recommendation. From the introduction:

A philosopher may wonder whether true statements are true because they faithfully represent the world as it is or merely because they cohere with a vast range of other accepted statements. Charles S. Peirce was the philosopher who realized that that dilemma was badly misconceived because it induces us to think that truth is either a relation between a statement and an independent, extra-mental fact or else a relation between a statement and other statements. The dilemma seduces us into thinking, on the epistemological plane, that truth is either a matter of evidence-transcendent facts about correspondence or else a matter of mere acceptability (or rational acceptability), and on the ontological plane, that reality is either absolutely independent of how we experience it and conceive of it or else is a mere construct of our experience and discourse.

Peirce thought that the dilemma is deceptive on both planes. He also thought that he knew a good way out of this dilemma and, generally, out of the grand controversy between realism and idealism. In fact, he attempted a breakout twice, and it was the second time, I believe, that he was quite successful.

Of course, the author strangely spends a lot of time arguing that Peirce is not a scholastic realist, even though he allows that this is how Peirce himself saw himself. I am not totally sure from the parts of the book I've read what he thought scholastic realism is, because he seems to be ascribing to it positions I've never seen in scholastic realists (who tend to be very positive on CSP). At any rate, he also spends a lot of time trying to prove that Peirce is not an idealist, but I think (and he does allow this at times) that it would be better to say that Peirce dissolves the idealist/materialist distinction (which makes sense since the distinction didn't exist in scholasticism itself).

This is precisely why Aristotle can be plausibly claimed as an "idealist" while he might also plausibly be claimed as the father of empiricism and "objective science." It's really both and neither because the distinction makes no sense for him. The world cannot be made of either physical or mental substance because for Aristotle substances are just things, unities.

BTW, I don't know if I would wholeheartedly endorse CSP. He is very concerned to make his thought consistent with science, which is indeed important, but 19th century science tended pretty hard towards reductionism and smallism, and sometimes his moves seem to be in line with this (perhaps because of the quite dominant idea that to be "scientific" is to be reductive. He has a reductive account of essence and substantial form, or of natural kinds, but I don't think one actually needs to be reductive here and loses much if one is. This perhaps has to do with his sources (mostly late-medievals) who had begun to badly misunderstand and then start excising the Neoplatonist elements in high-scholasticism, which are what allowed for a non-reductive account of the logoi of changing beings and their relation to Logos.

So it remains quite problematic to attempt to ground logic on an intuition. Much clearer to ground it on practice.

I am not sure if any philosopher has ever tried to ground logic in "intuition" in the sense you are using the term. This would make logic simply a matter of habit or sentiment.

When people want to "ground logic in intuition" I would presume they are referring to "intuition" as an imperfect translation of noesis/intellectus, or "intellectual consideration." That was, at least, how I was introducing the term.

Without intellectus, reason seems to become mere contentless rule following, with no intelligible content. There are perhaps two distinct issues here. The first is the absence of intelligible content re discursive knowledge if it is all ratio (rule following) no understanding. This shows up in examples like Mary's Room, the Chinese Room, the symbol grounding problem, etc.

The second issue involves first principles. Without first principles, or some form of apprehension/intellectual consideration, the rules of discursive reasoning (as rule following) become arbitrary, based on what is not known. Hence, the elevation of "use," which is really just the old elevation of the will as prior to the intellect that the denial of first principles has always caused, since days of yore. This also leads to a self-refuting relativism.

Intellectus is the faculty of intuitive understanding; it is contemplative, receptive, and rooted in insight. The idea is that reasoning must begin with this sort of understanding, otherwise it would simply be a sort of rule following divorced from intelligible content. Ratio is
the means by which we move from truth to truth and come to “encircle” new truths. The acquisition of human
knowledge begins and ends in intellectus, but proceeds by discursive ratio. The difference between ratio and
intellectus is thus the difference between motion towards some end and rest in that end between acquisition and possession (as St. Thomas and Ibn Rushd put it), or as “time is to eternity” and “circumference is to center" (as Boethius puts it in the Consolation, or as Dionysius the Areopagite puts it in De Divinis Nominibus). It is not equivalent with habit.

Anyhow, that might be the discrepancy.

But does this principle also mean that everything you and I think and do is similarly poised between "determined by prior actuality" and "having no reasons at all"?

Sure. Thinking is an act, a change. It either occurs for some reason or it doesn't. Thinking is a move from potentially thinking something to actually thinking it. If something is thought (or perceived) for no reason, there is no reason why it should be any one thought instead of any other.

Apart from the metaphysical difficulties around causes versus reasons

Here is a potential confusion. We might say we think or do something "for no reason at all," when what we really mean is "we acted without any rational deliberation." These aren't the same thing. While we might affirm something because we are angry, hungry, or to curry favor, etc., and call this irrational, yet it would not be acting for no reason at all. Acting according to one's appetites is still acting for a reason. Just because there is a reason that someone does something (e.g. stealing because one is a kleptomaniac due to one's personal history, chemical imbalances, etc.) doesn't make it "reasonable."

Causes and reasons are fairly synonymous is some senses. If by "reasons" you have "rational justifications" in mind, these two wouldn't occur spontaneously either.

As Kenneth Gallagher puts it for mobile, changing being:

"For no being insofar as it is changing is its own ground of being. Every state of a changing being is contingent: it was not a moment ago and will not be a moment from now. Therefore the grasping of a being as changing is the grasping of it as not intelligible in itself-as essentially referred to something other than itself."

it also raises the unpleasant specter of there being only one reasonable way to think and do.

I am not sure how it directly relates to this. A metaphysics of act wouldn't, in general, tend to suggest this in any rigid sense. What it would suggest is that there are unreasonable ways to think.

All reasonable ways of thinking either share something in common or they don't. If they share nothing in common, in virtue of what would they all be called reasonable? More to the point, what would these multiple, sui generis "types of rationality" look like? How do they relate differentially to truth?

On the other hand, if all ways of thinking and acting are reasonable, then being unreasonable (or incorrect) is impossible, and being "reasonable" doesn't seem to mean much of anything. To think of act is to be reasonable.

It's important for building up a coherent ethics and moving to a "metaphysics of goodness." From a practical perspective, I don't think it's necessary to go that deep (indeed, most people will find it annoying or impossible). That's sort of the great thing about it, it's useful even if you don't want to go all the way into the Doctrine of Transcendentals and the ultimate grounding of value.

But prima facie it's quite hard to attack virtue ethics as at least a solid set of principles for self-development and moral action. To provide a strong rebuttal of virtue ethics requires demonstrating that, ceteris paribus (and not just in bizarre counter examples), it isn't more desirable to be courageous instead of cowardly or rash, that prudence isn't better on average than being impulsive or indecisive, that having fortitude isn't better than being weak willed, etc.




One of MacIntyre's points is that any notion of "just desert" or human excellence requires some notion of man's telos. Otherwise, there is no standard by which to judge excellence.

Contemporary liberal political theory tends to focus on rights instead of just rewards/punishments. It doesn't turn to just desert because liberalism makes man's telos a "private," individual question. This is at odds with politicians and citizens in liberal states (on the left and right), as well as most lay philosophers here. They constantly appeal to just desert and excellence. It's very hard not to. Even fatalists do this. Denying excellence and any human telos seems to be almost as difficult a feat to carry off as radical skepticism.

Anyhow, even if we are skeptical of our knowledge of man's "natural ends," it will still be the case that at least some virtues will be a prerequisite for even discovering these ends (or discovering that no such ends exist). Hence, we can at least say that: "the virtues important to the good life of man are those virtues necessary for discovering the good life of man" (a catch phrase of MacIntyre's). Here is a paper sort of walking through this step by step. Plato's "being ruled by the rational part of the soul," turns out to be a fairly ideal metavirtue (a virtue required for the attainment of any other virtues, regardless of what they turn out to be). Also, because moral virtue is also epistemic virtue, even the relativist cannot simply write it off. They will also need some virtues in order to become confirmed in their relativism or anti-realism.

The leap from "no determinate causes" to "no reason at all" in particular still eludes me.

"Act follows on being." What a thing does, how it interacts with other things or parts of itself depends upon what it is. Otherwise, anything could be essentially be (and act as) anything else.

For something to have no determinant cause would mean that it is caused by "nothing in particular" as opposed to some determinant being that acts in a determinant way. But nothing in particular doesn't act in any determinant way for any reason. Being nothing, it cannot act according to its being, but must act for "no reason at all."

This doesn't rule out stochastic action (e.g. some interpretations of quantum mechanics), but it does rule out action that is not determined by prior actuality. Defaulting on this would be defaulting on things having causes and the world being intelligible. If potency can move to act for no reason at all, then there is no limit on how much this can occur, since it is completely undetermined. This gets at the whole: "what if we and our memories just popped into existence randomly 5 seconds ago and will vanish the same way in another five seconds," concern of the radical skeptic. If potency moves itself, the skeptic has reason to be concerned.

It's also the case that things are only knowable through their interactions. If interactions are not determinant, then neither is knowledge. The being itself being unintelligible implies epistemic nihilism.

There are hierarchies of distinctions. Distinctions like act/potency or part/whole are more general than any particular science (e.g. physics, logic, mathematics, etc.). It seems to me that nothing could be more general than being/existence.

What is true for the higher level must be true for the lower. What is true of parts and wholes in mathematics cannot be distinct from physics, or physics from biology. If it were, we wouldn't have "science" but a great multitude of unrelated sciences, and no rational way to demarcate different sciences.

"Tie back" raises the problem once again. Why does it do so? In what way? The priority of existence to human experience wouldn't guarantee the fidelity of our descriptions of that existence. Why does the key fit?

See the post above. Just think through what it means to say that thought is not determined by being in any determinant way. You would be posting a distinction between thought and "objective reality," but then be saying "but maybe objective reality has no determinant effect on thought." This undercuts the distinction itself, rendering it contentless.

A realm of thought alone with random causes would be identical to a realm of thought influenced randomly and indeterminately by some extrinsic "realm of reality." Nothing would connect the two.

How is it the case that the world, and our experience of it, is so structured? Does the PNC and its cousins represent spade-turning principles about both thinking and being, in the same way, and for the same reasons?

I don't think there is any spade turning at all. All that is required is to affirm the priority of actuality over potency. Something actual (determinant) must move the mind from potency to actuality—must move it so that thought is one way and not any other. To deny this would be to say that thought occurs "for no determinant reason at all." This severes any real connection to a "being prior to thought," while also rendering the world unintelligible and philosophy ultimately pointless.

But the world doesn't seem unintelligible. At any rate, at the end of the day being is either intelligible, and things do happen for reasons (act is prior to potency) or it isn't. If it isn't, all philosophy is wrong. Things can be any way at all.

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A bent key is no longer a key? And if you can bend it back it becomes a key again I suppose? Come on, the analogy doesn't make any sense.

Oh, I agree. I don't want it to be aporetic at all. It's just a hard question to answer, when the analogy is extended to logical primitives.

It's hard because it isn't a good analogy.

Why does my key turn my lock? Because it fits in, lifts the pins, and gives me leverage to turn the deadbolt.

And again. Why puff it up in this way? No one, least of all me, is saying anything like this.

Because this is what the denial of the primacy of actuality (the priority of determinant being) to potency entails. It means that potency moves itself to actuality "for no reason at all," due to no prior actuality. This means things do not have causes or reasons.

Either the mind is moved to actuality by prior actuality (by determinant properties of being) or it isn't. If it isn't, then it is moved by "nothing at all" (by nothing actual). Epistemic PNC follows from metaphysical PNC.

Now I think what I'm supposed to imagine next is that both questions get an explanation or a deconstructive answer that can resolve my puzzlement. To the first question, the reply is, "Because that's what 'your housekey' means. You can't have 'your housekey' without it having both those attributes: it fits your lock, and only your lock. So if you understand 'your housekey', there is no further question to be asked about it." To the second question, the reply is, "Because that's how an object comes to be yours: you possess it, it's been made for you and given to you. Also, since it's an important object in your life, you'll have it to hand, and shouldn't be surprised that this is the case. Are you still puzzled about why you live in a world in which all people fortunate enough to be housed have keys? You just do; that is your world; there's nothing special about you."

But that isn't what "your house key" means. If someone changes the locks on my door while I'm out, my key doesn't cease to be mine. And if I bend the key, it won't turn the lock, even though it is still the same key and the same lock. Nor do we possess keys "because we just do." The fact that you have a key in your pocket and whether or not it fits your door has intelligible causes. If we allow "why does my key turn my lock?" to become an aporia, then what won't be?

This is, IMO, simply a bad analogy. Chess is not a good analogy for logic and truth. House keys aren't either. Not all analogies are appropriate. This is all I mean by "deflecting," the move into seemingly only tangentially related and wholly unjustified analogies.

They resemble each other so closely yet have such different objects? Or am I wrong about that? Must I simply accept that the "key" of logic fits the "lock" of the world? Is it the case that, just as you can't have "my housekey" without understanding "my uniquely fitting key", you can't have (p v ~p) without understanding "our description of the world" or perhaps "what we do, talking about the world"?

What would it mean for them to have different objects? It would mean that thought is arbitrarily related to reality as far as I can tell. How could anyone, ever, justify such a claim? A reality versus appearance distinction can only have content if there is something more than appearances. If there are only appearances (thought), then appearances are reality. Whereas, if reality is arbitrarily, randomly related to appearances then you don't really have one sort of being that encompasses both sides of the reality/appearance distinction, but two sui generis, unrelated "types of being." Appearances would be their own, discrete sort of being.

Now let me ask, why should we posit any sort of unique, sui generis being that is unrelated to any thought or experience anyone has ever had, or could ever have?

If reality, the actuality of things, does not determinantly affect thought, it isn't worthy of the name. It's just some irrelevant, arguably incoherent bare posit.

PNC can be formulated as a metaphysical, epistemic, or semantic principle. Ultimately, the latter will tie back to the former if the former is affirmed because being (existence) is prior to being experienced and being spoken about.

As a purely logical principle, it might be considered normative, in that it would not be rational to affirm what is necessarily impossible, though no doubt people can affirm all sorts of things (whether they can actually believe them is another matter).

As a metaphysical principle, it might boil down to the idea that being and not-being, existence and non-existence (in any determinant form we might signify or think about anything) are exclusive. They are exclusive because if being and non-being could be the same, things could both have and not have determinant existence, be both something and nothing, collapsing the most basic of all distinctions that allow anything to be any particular thing at all.

The metaphysical principle is not primarily about truth then, nor affirmation and negation. Truth has to do with the relationship between the intellect and being. We do not say of a rock or tree that it is "true." Rather, things said or thought about rocks or trees are true. The metaphysical principle is about being (which obviously has a close relationship to truth since anything that is truly is).

I'd suggest it is a law about use of language which is truth preserving.

If nothing truly is and is-not, then this is necessarily so. One cannot preserve truth while affirming something that is never true. But it is never true that something is also nothing, that existence is non-existence, that being is non-being, etc.

The difficulty here is that it is absolutely true that we might think we have identified contradictions where there are none. There might be qualifications and distinctions that dissolve apparent contradiction. But no qualification or distinction can dissolve "something is also nothing" and "existence is also non-existence." This is basic.