isn't talk of our "creating" the world just hyperbole or metaphor? — Ciceronianus

It could also be noted that the derivation of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meaning 'age or time of man.'

Do the minds of other other organisms "create" the world as well? Is there a human world, and also a cat world and bunny world, and on and on? — Ciceronianus

They create their world - meaning, they enact or bring forth a meaningful environment through their embodied activity. That is a fundamental point of enactivism, 'a theory of cognition that emphasizes the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment, positing that cognition arises from the organism's actions, not just from internal brain processes. It posits that the mind is not separate from the body but is fundamentally constituted by the brain, body, and environment interacting in dynamic ways, a concept known as the "embodied mind". Instead of passively representing the world, enactivism argues that organisms actively "enact" their world through their sensorimotor activity and that their subjective experience is shaped by these embodied actions.' (definition.)

The linked version of the essay on which the OP is based also mentions the 'lebenswelt' concept derived from phenomenology. Lebenswelt means life-world: the world as it is lived, experienced, and made meaningful by embodied, language-using beings like ourselves. Meaning is not a layer added on top of a neutral, value-free physical world, nor do words function by “corresponding” piece-by-piece to ready-made objects. Rather, meaning arises within the whole fabric of practices, situations, skills, expectations, and shared forms of life that constitute our lived world.

A word has meaning not because it mirrors a thing, but because it plays a role in this life-world — in the ways we perceive, act, communicate, and make sense of what matters to us. That’s why Husserl, and later Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, insist that understanding is rooted in our participation in the life-world, not in some point-for-point mapping between language and “objects out there.”

So, surely there are cat worlds and bunny worlds. This does not mean there are multiple separate physical universes, but that each kind of organism inhabits a differently structured field of significance (also known as a 'salience landscape'), determined by its embodied capacities. But 'if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand him' (Wittgenstein) and we'll never know what it's like to be a bat (Nagel.)

The point is, the OP wasn't generated by AI, on account of it having been published before AI went live (Nov 19th 2022) - but I felt that the AI review was positive. But, you're right, I'll move it offsite.

The original essay and OP were written prior to the advent of large language models - publication date was 4th November 2022, 15 days prior to the launch of ChatGPT. Just now, I copied it into Google Gemini for feedback, to wit.

Truths are statements that correspond to reality, These "defined rules for how we reason" consist of applying precise definitions to certain words. ....The concept of "true" seems perfectly straightforward - a recognition that a statement corresponds to (say) what is perceived, vs a statement that does not. — Relativist

Please notice what you are glossing over or assuming in saying this. Philosophers have spent millenia puzzling about the relationships between mind, world and meaning, here you present it as if it is all straightforward, that all of this can simply be assumed. Which is naive realism in a nutshell.

"Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object."

Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic

"Although it seems ... obvious to say, "Truth is correspondence of thought (belief, proposition) to what is actually the case", such an assertion nevertheless involves a metaphysical assumption - that there is a fact, object, or state of affairs, independent of our knowledge to which our knowledge corresponds. "How, on your principles, could you know you have a true proposition?" ... or ... "How can you use your definition of truth, it being the correspondence between a judgment and its object, as a criterion of truth? How can you know when such correspondence actually holds?" I cannot step outside my mind to compare a thought in it with something outside it."

Hospers, J.; An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, p116.

Mostly, your objections reflect either: a misunderstanding of physicalism (e.g. conflating with science), a lack of imagination (failing to figure out a physicalist account might address your issue), or an attempt to judge it from an incompatible framework (e.g.the way you treat abstractions). When I've addressed these, you do not respond directly, — Relativist

My argument is that physicalist philosophy of mind conflates physical causation with logical necessity. If you don't grasp that argument, you can't pose a counter.

A brain state does not have meaning. I never claimed it did. — Relativist

You said:

That language mirrors the mental processes involved with defining/learning the concept — Relativist

Are these 'mental processes' physical in nature? If they are, they can be described in terms of brain states. If they're not, then they're not physical, and you're no longer defending physicalism.

As for your 'pain' example:

You and I both feel pain when we grab a hot pan. We cognitively relate the word "pain" to this sensation, so it's irrelevant that our respective neural connections aren't physically identical (i.e. the "meaning" is multiply realizeable). — Relativist

It is an extremely basic account which attempts to equate intentional language with physical stimulus and response. A dog will yelp if it stands on a hot coal, but a dog yelp is not a word. And regardless, it fails to come to grips with the point about 'multiple realisability', against which it was made.

Hillary Putnam’s original point about multiple realisability is that a mental state like pain can be realised in many different physical ways. Different types of creatures could all feel pain, even though their nervous systems might be nothing alike; and even within one person, the neural pattern associated with “pain” can vary enormously depending on context, learning, or injury (including even psychosomatic pain). So there is no single physical configuration that corresponds with pain. And because the same mental state can be realised by indefinitely many different physical structures, the mental state cannot be identical with a physical state. (Hilary Putnam, “Psychological Predicates” (1967))

This allegory can be extended. The fact that a single meaning can be encoded in any number of radically different physical forms shows that meaning is not identical with those forms. You can express the same thought as spoken sound waves, as ink marks on paper, as binary code, as Braille dots, or as neural activity — and despite the heterogeniety of the media and symbolic form, the meaning is preserved. If meaning were nothing but its physical instantiation, then changing the physical medium would change the meaning.

'Pain' is also utterly inadequate as an example, because it completely fails to come to terms with the intentional and semantic structure of language.

All you've done is to to reify an abstraction ("logic") and assert that this reification cannot be reduced to "physical forces" — Relativist

The position you are attacking doesn't recognize the distinction you're making. — Apustimelogist

It is based on your not recognising a fundamental distinction going back to David Hume. There is a fundamental philosophical distinction between physical causation and logical necessity. Physical causation is that in which every sequence in a causal chain can be described in physical terms - gravity, energy, combustion, reaction, and so on.

Logical necessity, on the other hand, describes the relationship between statements or propositions, not events in time. It is that in which the conclusion is guaranteed or required to be true if the premises are true, based solely on the rules of logic and the definitions of the terms used. It operates in the realm of thought and abstract structures, not physical interaction. The connection is necessary (non-contingent): it holds true in all possible worlds where the definitions and laws of logic remain consistent.

The philosophical implication is that while physical causes explain physical events and processes, logical necessity defines the rules for how we can reason and establishes unavoidable truths (like 2+2=4 or geometric axioms) that hold regardless of any physical event.

This is not a reification. To reify is to make a concrete thing out of an abstraction. It is not reifying logic to correctly identify it.

That language mirrors the mental processes involved with defining/learning the concept. — Relativist

1. If language mirrors only the contingent physical process rather than the necessary logical content (the final, valid definition), the statement equates the psychological fact of concept acquisition with the logical structure of the concept itself.

2. To treat a brain state as having meaning (as representing a proposition) or logical order (as representing a valid step in an argument) is to already inject a non-physical, intentional, or normative element into the physical description to assign semantic content to to a physical state.

Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. — Edward Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism 1

It's notable that I countered 100% of your claims — Relativist

Only in your own mind.

Of course I accept science, you'd have to be a fool not to. What I don't accept is the attempt to subject philosophical questions to scientific criteria. Of course, that doesn't imply that one's philosphical principles can contravene those criteria, but that science can't be called on to provide the criteria by which philosophical principles should be assessed.

Here's an example of what I regard as an innappropriate appeal to science.



I think this is plainly wrong, as a matter of principle. Not because there is some mysterious thing called 'mind' which somehow always escapes scientific analysis, but because the mind is never an object of analysis in the same way that the objects of science are. It is, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, not something - but also not nothing. How this eludes so many people continues to surprise me.

I agree that in practice you can’t do neuroscience without maths, models of inference, and all the conceptual tools scientists rely upon. But that’s a point about method, not about ontology (i.e. what are the constituents of the neural systems).

The distinction I’m making is simply this:

Causal processes refer to neural and biochemical reactions

Normative relations refer to what makes causal inferences valid.

They belong to different explanatory levels.

A neuroscientist can model the brain as performing Bayesian updating, but the validity of Bayesian reasoning isn’t something you find by examining neural tissue. The neural story explains how we are able to reason (at least to some extent, although the detail is elusive); the logical story explains whether the reasoning is correct. These are not competing explanations — they are explanations of different kinds.

It’s the same with physics and mathematics. Physics relies on mathematics completely, but the maths isn’t identical to the objects being described. A differential equation can describe a falling apple, but the apple isn’t made of equations. Using inferential models to study the brain doesn’t make inference itself a neural process any more than aircraft wings “do calculus” because their behaviour can be simulated mathematically on a computer. The model and the actual mechanism aren’t the same kind of thing.

So my point isn’t that neuroscience is “unsuccessful,” nor that anyone is trying to derive axiom-systems from fMRI scans. It’s just that the norms scientists rely on to build their models — validity, consistency, justification — don’t themselves show up as physical properties. They’re the standards that are used to interpret the physical data in the first place.

That’s all I mean by saying the two can be separated conceptually. “Irreducible” doesn’t mean “supernatural” — it just means that different kinds of explanation are in play. And it's not a 'caricature', rather, a valid distinction between two kinds or levels of discourse.

On further thought, as you often say that I'm engaging in speculation or unthethered philosophizing uninformed by science, could you point exactly to where I'm doing that?

This distinction doesn't make sense because people use formal models of reasoning to understand what the brain does and then map aspects of that to physical architectur — Apustimelogist

The point is that norms of reasoning and causal processes belong to different explanatory orders. Physical processes unfold according to causes; reasoning unfolds according to grounds—the logical relations that make an inference valid or invalid.

A neuroscientist can (and must) use modus ponens, reductio, probabilistic inference, and mathematical formalism to interpret data. But the validity of those inferences isn’t something that can be read off an fMRI scan. You can’t derive logical necessity from neural activation patterns.

So yes, of course cognitive scientists model reasoning, and of course they look for neural implementation of various inferential capacities. But that research presupposes the very norms it’s trying to naturalise. You can’t turn around and say the norms just are the neural activity that was used to investigate them. This is the vicious circularity that haunts neurological reductionism.

We're going in circles here. Bottom line: logic is not physical nor can be reduced to physical forces and categories, but I'm not going to press the point further. We've been arguing since Nov 5th 2024 - I remember the date, because it was the eve of the US Presidential Election, I see no purpose being served by continuing.

I always value your contributions.

It is in Heraclitus that the theory of the Logos appears for the first time, and it is doubtless for this reason that, first among the Greek philosophers, Heraclitus was regarded by St. Justin (Apol. I, 46) as a Christian before Christ. For him the Logos, which he seems to identify with fire, is that universal principle which animates and rules the world. This conception could only find place in a materialistic monism. The philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ were dualists, and conceived of God as transcendent, so that neither in Plato (whatever may have been said on the subject) nor in Aristotle do we find the theory of the Logos.

It reappears in the writings of the Stoics, and it is especially by them that this theory is developed. God, according to them, "did not make the world as an artisan does his work, but it is by wholly penetrating all matter that He is the demiurge of the universe" (Galen, "De qual. incorp." in "Fr. Stoic.", ed. von Arnim, II, 6); He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly (Cleanthus, "Hymn to Zeus" in "Fr. Stoic." I, 527-cf. 537). Conformably to their exegetical habits, the Stoics made of the different gods personifications of the Logos, e.g. of Zeus and above all of Hermes. — New Advent Encylopedia

I've always liked that passage and its metaphors.

I think you're trying to argue that there's something magical about the fact that our minds can do what they do (where "magical"= not even possibly a consequence of material processes.) — Relativist

Not magical—just not the same kind of thing. My point is that the capacity to grasp reasons, recognise valid versus invalid inferences, and understand causal relations as relations is categorically different from the physical processes described by neuroscience. Physical causation can explain correlations and mechanisms, but it cannot be the normativity involved in reasoning.

That’s why I say neural states aren’t the “basis” of mental causation in the way you’re implying: whatever neural states enable reasoning, the content and validity of inferences aren’t reducible to their physical description. They belong to a different explanatory order.

Physicalism, naturalism, and materialism generally seek to naturalise cognition in terms of evolutionary theory and neuroscience. Which is OK as far as the science is concerned, but there's an implicit conviction, again. that science provides the court of adjutication for philosophy. What it actually does is change the terms in which philosophical questions should be asked and answered, so that they conform to what can be defended as scientifically respectable.

Furthermore even if human reason is not magical, it is extraordinarily uncanny. To think these 'featherless bipeds' descended from homonim species that evolved capturing prey on the savanahs over thousands of millenia are now able to weigh and measure the Universe.

Consider a concept that can be described verbally: this act of description could be parallel to the mental processes involved when we formulate or utilize the concept. You don't seem to have considered this. — Relativist

I have indeed considered it, and this is precisely where the argument from multiple realisability bites. Even if you can verbally describe a concept, the physical or neural realisation of that concept can vary enormously. This isn’t an incidental feature — it’s structurally unavoidable.

A single sentence can be expressed in English, Mandarin, Braille, Morse code, binary, or handwritten symbols, and the meaning is preserved across all of these radically different physical forms. That shows that meaning is not identical with any one physical instantiation.

Neuroscience faces the same issue. During the “Decade of the Brain,” researchers tried to identify specific, repeatable neural signatures for learning new concepts or words. What they found were broad regional activations but no consistent, fine-grained neural pattern that maps onto a specific meaning. That’s exactly what multiple realisability predicts: the same semantic content can be realised in indefinitely many different neural configurations.

So the fact that we can describe a concept verbally doesn’t help your claim — it actually illustrates why semantics and reasoning can’t be reduced to any one class of physical patterns. The level of explanation is simply different.

And this is precisely where the significance of universals shows up. Feser says 'A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.' Russell: 'if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them.'

The whole basis of language and abstraction is clearly reliant on these cognitive processes which are unique (at least in the way that humans are able to use them). So I'm arguing that trying to account for them in physical terms is categorically mistaken.

In short, physical processes are governed by causal relationships; reasoning is governed by norms of validity. The latter can't be reduced to the former.

I stand corrected but the basic point remains - the re-interpretation of the Greek 'logos' in theological terminology.

There's a through-line, so to speak. I've acquired a textbook on Husserl (David Bell) but haven't made a lot of headway with it. But Husserl's noesis and noema surely has Platonist roots. Kant adopted and modified both Plato and Aristotle, and Husserl adopted and modified Kant.

If order is posited as basic, it suggests a universal intelligence or God. — Janus

I suppose it's inevitable to see it in those terms. But bear in mind, there is another Axial-age term which has very similar functions, namely 'dharma'. Both logos and dharma refer to:

• the intrinsic order of reality
• the principle that makes the cosmos intelligible
• the way things ought to unfold, not merely how they do

In other words, each is at once descriptive and normative.

Logos (Heraclitus, the Stoics, Middle Platonism) is the rational structure, the measure, the reason, the intelligible order pervading nature.

Dharma is the law, the ordering principle, the truth of things — ranging from cosmic law to ethical duty to the basic structure of experience itself.

Both serve as the intelligible pattern through which beings have their roles and right relations.

But dharma is associated with non-theistic religions (Buddhism and Jaina). A big cultural factor is the absorption of Greek philosophy into Biblical theology and the subsequent identification of 'logos' with 'the word of God' or simply 'the Bible'. So it all tends to be rejected together with religion.

Is there one overarching foundation for nature itself? — Janus

That would have been what the ancients designate 'logos'.

One conundrum I have been puzzling over, is the distinction between mind-independent objects, and mind-independent principles.

Let me explain. The principle of objectivity revolves around the idea that things exist in a particular way irrespective of whatever you or I might do or not do. The objective sciences endeavour to discern 'the way things are' outside of or apart from any subjective biases or pre-suppositions that we bring to the study of them. This also extends into subjects other than science, insofar as disciplines like history and jurisprudence strive for objectivity.

But it's interesting to reflect that in earlier philosophy, it was not things or objects that were considered to be independently existing in this way. The Platonic ideals of goodness and beauty were by no means objects in the sense of being 'objects of scientific analysis'. in the classical philosophical tradition, what was regarded as independent of the individual mind were not objects but principles: the good, the beautiful, the just, the true. They were intelligible measures, realities that could be participated in but not possessed. Access to them was understood to require a transformation of the knower — metanoia, the philosophical “ascent,” the cultivation of detachment (the original meaning of 'apatheia').

This is the part that, I think, becomes almost invisible within the post-Enlightenment frame. Once the Enlightenment redefines mind-independence in exclusively objective terms, normative principles lose their perceived standing. They are no longer something we discover through moral-intellectual formation but something we construct, negotiate, or inherit. And so the communities of practice that once embodied those principles inevitably begin to weaken.

When principles cease to be experienced as realities that make a claim on us, they can no longer act as shared horizons. What remains is a plurality of individual perspectives, each valid “for me” or “for us,” but without a binding force that earlier cultures assumed. This is not moral collapse — it’s simply the logical outcome of shifting the locus of reality from intelligible principles to empiricism.

Seen this way, the Enlightenment tended to undermine the forms of life and communities of practice in which normative principles were embedded. It gave extraordinary intellectual freedoms, but it also left us without the structures of meaning that were grounded in a very different understanding of what “mind-independence” really means.

(This is very much the ballpark of Alisdair McIntyre ('After Virtue'), Charles Taylor ('A Secular Age'). And also Pierre Hadot ('Philosophy as a Way of Life'))

Thank you for that careful analysis. The comment about 'being ignored' was in response to posts by several contributors who predicted that I would ignore one entry challenging one of my responses, which I did not, and which was repeated even after I had responded. (I try and respond to challenges although it's inevitable there's going to be some 'talking past one another' going on considering the subject matter.)

Given that the world represents the manifold of all possible material things, those material things are necessarily presupposed if consciousness is claimed to be inseparable from them. One cannot deny that which he has already presupposed as necessary. From which follows denial of materialism as such, is self-contradictory given from its being the ground for the composition of the world of material things consciousness is said to be inseparable from. — Mww

The 'inseperability of self and world' is an underlying theme that I have been exploring through various perspectives. The original intuition behind it was the sense that reality itself is not something we're outside of or apart from. This insight was a consequence of having been immersed in the study of the perennial philosophies and the 'unitive vision' that they refer to in their different ways. At the time I was reading the American Transcendentalists ("The act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one" ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson). This gave me an awareness that the sense we usually have of being separate egos in a material world is actually a culturally-conditioned state of being. (This will be generally stereotyped as being 'religious'.)

….if materialism were true with respect to linguistic communication, — Mww

Lloyd Gerson's point was made in respect of Aristotle. The section quoted was about Aristotle's hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. According to Aristotelian philosophy, the form (idea, principle) of a particular thing is what the intellect knows, which makes it possible to say 'this particular is X'. The senses receive the material impression while the intellect receives the form. It is precisely that ability that underwrites reason, the faculty that differentiates humans from other animals. This is what Gerson was glossing when he said 'you could not think if materialism were true' - because rational thought relies on the abiility to grasp universal concepts and thereby understand what things are. (Aristotelianism has generally fallen out of favour in modern philosophy, although it still has plenty of defenders.)

:up:

I'm not sure what you mean by "empirical additions" but the capacities you refer to are, I'd suggest, the result of evolution--as you seemed to acknowledge in an earlier thread--and so are as much a result of our interaction with the rest of the world as are our thumbs (the evolution of which it seems played a role in the development of our intelligence). — Ciceronianus

Sure. I would never deny the facts of evolutionary theory, although I often question the significance that is attributed to it. I think if Plato had known what we now know he might have attributed his innate ideas to evolution instead of the soul having been re-born (and in fact Empedocles anticipated the idea of evolution, and even a form of natural selection.) But then, how different are the evolutionary and mythical accouts, really? H.sapiens evolved to the point of being language- and tool-using primates, capable of speech, philosophy, science and much more. As such, members of the species are born with innate capacities which other creatures lack, foremost among them language. To what extent can that be ascribed solely to evolution? Biologically, it can, but at some point, we escape the bonds, and bounds, of biological determination - we realise horizons of being that are not perceptible to other species. Hence the designation of humans as 'the rational animal' (a distinction which the current generation seems to have neglected.) By it, and through it, we are able to 'see' things which other animals cannot. Hence it was referred to in antiquity as 'the eye of reason'.

So I'd say our capacities, like our thumbs, are the products of experience. — Ciceronianus

It's the customary empiricist argument: look, we learn to count by being exposed to groups of things, and we pick up the idea.

Two points about that. Apes have thumbs, if not opposable thumbs, but no matter how much experience they have, they will not be able to master mathematical concepts (I'm not talking of shape recognition). Second, without the capacity to count, we couldn't recognise numbers in the first place, no matter what kind of experience we have. So I don't think Plato's belief in the innate capacity to reason is invalidated by the facts of evolution.

But I know that the customary sanguine acceptance of the facts of evolution will generally mitigate against mere philosophy.

It was, "what justified beliefs does it lead to?" — Relativist

The justified belief that knowledge cannot be solely objective.

If an insight leads to a dead-end, — Relativist

Then it's not an insight. But the fact that someone doesn't recognise an insight doesn't mean it's a dead end.

My view is that they exist immanently within objects- such as the 90 degree angle that exists between the walls of a room. This 90 degree relation between walls is a universal with no dependency on minds. — Relativist

That is what the Russell passage above I posted is about - the relationship 'north of'. It doesn't exist in the same sense that Edinburgh and London exist, even though Edinburgh is north of London. ' There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something. ...'

This is important, don't brush it aside.The reason it's not noticed is because we rely on the mind's ability to discern these relationships, without which we wouldn't be able to form an idea of the world. So that's the sense in which the world is 'mind-dependent' - not going in or out of existence, depending on whether you yourself see it, but because the whole idea of existence depends on the mind's ability to grasp these intelligible relations (which is elaborated in The Mind Created World op). Which we don't see because (as Russell says) they don't exist, they're not 'out there somewhere'. If there's a single insight that empiricism cannot grasp, it is this one and dare I say the apparent inability to grasp it, is an illustrative example.

This is becoming repetitive. If I fail to respond further, it won't be because I'm ignoring anyone's posts, but because they may not be presenting anything that hasn't alreafy been addressed.

He (Feser) is making a case for the reality of universals - justifying believing these exist. That's reasonable. It's also consistent with physicalism. — Relativist

Not according to Edward Feser, it isn't. The universals that he has in mind —geometricity, equality, necessity, logical relations—are not physical, and cannot be described in physical terms. For A-T (Aristotelian-Thomism):

• Universals are forms (ideas, principles), and are real but not material
• They are instantiated by particulars, but cannot be reduced to them.
• Their mode of being is intelligible, not physical
• They are grasped by the intellect, not the senses
• They are the basis for the intelligibility of physical things (by conferring identity)

You may be referring to “universals” in Armstrong’s naturalistic sense, but they are not universals in the Aristotelian (or real!) sense. According to Armstrong:

• Universals are physical properties instantiated in the world
• (colour, mass, charge, spin, fragility, etc.)
• They are wholly located in spacetime
• (not abstract, not non-physical)
• They are identical with physical properties that recur in multiple places
• They are “universals” only in the sense of being repeatable physical features

Armstrong rejects:

• Platonic universals (too abstract)
• Aristotelian forms (too metaphysical)
• Fregean abstracta (non naturalistic)

Armstrong is not a realist about universals in the classical sense at all. He is a nominalist who has scaled up the notion of “repeatable physical properties” (not too far distant from Galileo's primary attributes) and called the result a universal. In effect, he is trying to universalise nominalism.

At issue, is the sense or mode of existence that universals (and other intelligibles) possess, as Betrand Russell also explains:



Note well his distinction 'subsists in' and 'exists'. It is of utmost importance.

Thank you. But I don't see how the fact we possess intelligence indicates that our minds "bring" the form or concept of a triangle, or anything else for that matter, to experience. — Ciceronianus

You're welcome. But, my dear sir, those elements which the mind brings to experience are precisely what Kant called the a priori conditions of cognition. They are not empirical additions; they are the very capacities that allow us to recognise and classify something as a triangle (or as a cause, an object, a quantity, and so on).

In other words, the mind does not 'inject' triangles into experience — it contributes the conceptual structure that makes “this thing” recognisable as a triangle in the first place, and thus communicable, definable, and held in common with others. It is essential to the mechanisms of meaning.

I also think it would be a slight on Maritain to dismiss him as a mere apologist. Not many on this forum seem to mention him, but his was a towering intellect, also notable for his commitment to Christian humanism, and generally identified with the religious left, in political terms. (And no, I'm not Catholic.)

You wonder how they tie their shoes, really, those religious types.

You haven't suggested making any alteration, nor specific addition, to the set of (science based) beliefs about the world as a consequence of this insight. Instead, you just restate the same thing, about the role of our sensory/cognitive framework in developing these true, physical facts about the world. Other than being an interesting factoid that is folly to ignore, you haven't inferred any additional insights from it - not insights that can constitute justified beliefs — Relativist

Yes, I distinguish between factual knowledge and beliefs (justified or otherwise). No, I am not “opposed to science,” nor do I neglect the findings of science. What I am critical of is the appeal to science as the authoritative basis for philosophical justification.

My point about universals is simply that they are real but not physical; as Russell put it, they are not thoughts, but “when known they appear as thoughts.” Their reality is intelligible rather than phenomenal — they can be grasped by a rational mind, but they do not exist as physical particulars or states of affairs.

And recognising the role of the observing mind in the construction of knowledge is not a “factoid.” It is a philosophical insight. It does not produce new empirical claims — it clarifies the conditions that make empirical knowledge possible in the first place. It this seems a commonplace now, it is only because of the contributions of philosophers, such as Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi (and of course Immanuel Kant.) The whole subject of the relation of mind and world, is itself not a scientific one, as it cannot be sufficiently defined so as to constitute a scientific question.

Positivism is a philosophical approach that argues all genuine knowledge is based on scientific observation and sensory experience. It rejects metaphysical speculation, religious faith, and other forms of "knowing", asserting that truth is found only
in verifiable, empirical facts.

A lot of people hold to a basically positivist attitude although they’ll generally deny it if it’s called. out

Identify something you believe about "the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible", and provide your justification for believing it.
— Relativist

I wouldn't expect a response to this. — wonderer1

And the response was - in case it went past you - that the precondition is the capacity to grasp rational concepts, which is not something that needs to be explained in scientific terms, but without which there could be no scientific understanding.

Curious that it was said that I would likely ignore relativist's challenges, but then when I answer them, the response is ignored. Who is ignoring what, exactly?

it will be ignored — Janus

It was, in fact, addressed, point by point - but there's no use explaining that to someone who is not prepared to reckon with it. Hence Twain's adage, very suitable in the context.

Thompson sees reason as emerging from our everyday experience and the ways we engage with the world, not from a detached, universal viewpoint. We develop our thinking through action, conversation, and the practices we inherit. He rejects the notion that this makes him a relativist: being aware that reasoning is 'situated' doesn’t mean all ideas are equally valid or that anything goes. On the contrary, some ways of thinking are better than others, and we can test, refine, and improve our ideas through experience, dialogue, and careful reflection. Thompson would probably acknowledge that reasoning is grounded in context but this doesn’t weaken it, it makes it more honest, responsible, and connected to how we actually understand and navigate the world. — Tom Storm

Spot on. I had the idea of writing an OP on disembodied cognition. Why? To bring out what was important about embodied cognition in the first place - what it was critiquing. I think that was largely focussed on intellectual abstraction, functionalism, physicalism, and many of the other popular 'isms' of the academic philosophy. So, I agree with you, I don't think Thompson's project is relativist, but it's also //not// hanging off philosophical absolutes. It's threading the needle between those kinds of dilemmas which gave rise to the whole project. Which is why it is not co-incidental that the whole of The Embodied Mind is pervaded with references to the Buddhist 'middle way'.

I confess I don't understand the point of the exegesis on triangulation. I'm uncertain just what an imperfect triangle might be. My guess, however, is that it isn't a triangle. In which case a "perfect" triangle is, simply, a triangle. It should be unsurprising that when we think about a triangle, we think about a triangle. It's difficult to ascribe much significance to this fact. But it seems some do and I wonder why? — Ciceronianus

You’re able to grasp the concept of a triangle — “a flat plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines” — because you possess a rational intelligence capable of understanding what the word means. That capacity is fundamental to language and to rational thought itself.

It’s easy to take this for granted because you and I both possess it: the ability to apprehend abstract, intelligible forms. The triangle is merely a simple example. The same point applies to any number of concepts, principles, and relations that H. sapiens can grasp thanks to its fantastically elaborated forebrain.

Why does this matter? Because without universals, you can’t explain how any rule-governed thought is possible. You can’t explain how different people can understand the same concept, or why a mathematical truth holds regardless of who considers it, or how we recognise something as falling under a shared description. And, crucially, you can’t explain how we move from particular things to general claims — which is what every argument requires.

(And if that sounds like neural reductionism, it isn’t. You won’t find any of these forms or principles in neural data. The brain enables the grasp of concepts, but the concepts themselves aren’t hiding in the folds of the cortex. The way I think of it is that h.sapiens evolved to the point of being able to grasp universals, which affords them – us – with a capacity to grasp universal truths. I think this capacity is usually either assumed, explained away, or ignored. See Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism, Parts II - III.)

:ok:

Saying they are “immanent” does not reduce them to material particulars. Aristotle’s forms are not products of material processes; they are the preconditions for there being any particular thing at all. They are real as structures of intelligibility, not as material objects. The reality of triangles is not dependent on there being physical triangles — just as the reality of numbers, ratios, limits, and functions is not conditional on physical instantiation. Almost the entirety of pure mathematics would otherwise collapse into “idle fiction,” which is a reductio of your position, not mine.

And I think you already knew what I would say. — Mww

I still don't quite get it. My thoughts on it are that time and space are meaningless without there being a perspective. And perspective can only be provided by an observer. I think that goes back to the Transcendental Aesthetic.

You’re still treating the point I’m making as if it were an empirical claim about the contents of the world — something that could be justified the way a scientific hypothesis is. You invariably defer to the authority of science. But mine isn’t “untethered philosophising”: it’s philosophy. And I’m not dismissive of science; I’m pointing out that this is a philosophy forum, not physics.org (where, incidentally, philosophical questions about physics are often deleted by moderators). Yet whenever a philosophical question is raised here, you immediately transpose it into a scientific register and then fault it for not producing scientific evidence. That simply begs the question

Science does produce beliefs: scientific facts that are grasped and accepted by an individual are beliefs that the person holds. — Relativist

Scientific facts are not matters of belief. If you know something to be factually true, then belief is superfluous. “Belief” becomes relevant only where we are dealing with matters that science cannot settle: questions of meaning, interpretation, value, and conceptual understanding. That is precisely why, even in the most rigorously empirical of sciences — quantum physics — there are enduring and unresolved controversies over how to understand the theory. Everyone agrees on the equations and the experimental results; what is disputed is their meaning. If your view were correct, these interpretive disagreements could be resolved simply by “consulting the science.” But they can’t be — because the science gives us the data and the mathematical formalism, not the framework for interpreting what the data mean.

These resulting beliefs are better justified than philosophical speculations that produce a myriad of mutually exclusive, possibilities: — Relativist

Such as? Tell me what is "speculative" about this kind of observation:

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

Nothing in this argument is speculative. It is critical. These points are pre-scientific in the strict sense: they concern the capacities presupposed by scientific reasoning itself. To grasp that a geometrical construction is valid, or to reason inferentially from data to theory, you must already possess the conceptual capacities the argument is describing. Scientific method does not generate those capacities, and cannot analyse them into "neural firings" without presupposing exactly what it seeks to explain.

As Kant put it, empirical reasoning is only possible because the mind already brings certain forms and concepts to bear on experience.

The point of this example — and the others I’ve given — is simple:

Concepts are real, but not material.
They can only be grasped by a rational intelligence.
They do not exist as physical particulars or “states of affairs” in the world.
Yet science would be impossible without them.

This is the level at which philosophy operates.

Just to make clear, it isn’t space and time that is measured, so by this I understand you to mean measurement in general. I’m maybe over-thinking it. — Mww

But don’t rulers measure space, and clocks time?

https://youtu.be/SkEWWdDWDBg?si=oLwi5aFDaFs6fAKp

https://youtu.be/8FEYm8ehaTE?si=UGZHgVDvIEviIrG9

Yes unfortunately me too. It’s pitched to the academic profession with all the necessary armour-plating. But Evan Thompson is just one of the people in the academic world I really like. I listened to a couple of conversations with he and Vervaeke earlier this year. (Fun fact - both Uni of Toronto, Vervaeke covered for Thompson when the latter was over-booked and couldn’t deliver a lecture series.)

Better! I’m going through Mind in Life although finding it a difficult read. But my Christian cultural heritage has instilled in me a conviction that reason is somehow knitted into the grand scheme, not that there aren’t also things beyond it. Overall my orientation is nearer the rationalists than the empiricists.

Yeah shows :rofl:

Ever seen Soylent Green? Long before your time, but a chilling dystopian sci-fi.

It’s also worth noting the growing debate—both in physics and in philosophy of physics—about whether time and space themselves exist independently of measurement. Einstein always insisted they must: spacetime, for him, was the objective arena within which events unfold, regardless of whether anyone observes them. But in their famous 1922 debate, the philosopher Henri Bergson challenged this directly. Bergson argued that the very meaning of time depends on duration, and duration is something only a conscious observer can bring. Without the lived sense of temporal flow, “time” collapses into abstract coordinate labels on a graph.

This tension hasn’t gone away. Contemporary discussions about emergent spacetime, relational quantum mechanics, and the observer-dependence of temporal order show that Bergson’s challenge still resonates. The issue isn’t whether clocks tick; it’s whether clock-time exhausts what time is.

To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Clock Time contra Lived Time (Aeon)

But acknowlegement of the fact that we are dependent on our cognitive structure leads to no additional insights about the world: it's impossible to escape our inherent perspective. — Relativist

If you want a scientific context for the point I’m making, consider the most famous scientific dispute of the 20th century - the Einstein-Bohr debate.

The reason Einstein objected to the Copenhagen scientist's interpreration of quantum physics was because it challenged his assumption that physics describes a world “as it is in itself,” independent of observation. He said "I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance", and "I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it."

But Bohr (and Heisenberg, and Pauli) were not fringe thinkers, and they explicitly argued that physical quantities have no definite value prior to measurement, that the observing apparatus is inseparable from the observed phenomenon, and that descriptions of nature are constrained by the conditions of observation. That, in other words, that at the most fundamental level of reality, we're not seeing what is truly there when unobserved, and that furthermore, we may not even be able to say what it is (which was Bohr's view.)

And quantum experiments have continuously reinforced that point. Most recently, the 2022 Nobel Prize confirmed the empirical consequences of Bell’s theorem — precisely the kind of nonclassical correlations that Einstein derided as “spooky action at a distance.”

So when you say that my view implies “we can’t get the world as it is,” or that recognising our cognitive structure gives “no additional insight,” that’s simply out of step with the scientific history. The 20th century forced physics itself to confront the limits of the classical, observer-independent picture of the world. You can disagree with Copenhagen, but you can’t say the issue isn’t philosophically significant — physicists have spent decades wrestling with it (and it is still the predominant attitude).

More importantly: science produces justified beliefs about the world. What justified beliefs can be produced by these philosophical inquiries? It appears to me to do no more than generate possibilities. — Relativist

Science doesn’t “produce beliefs.” It produces models that organise and validate observations within a conceptual framework. But it does not — and cannot — investigate the preconditions that make observation, measurement, and intelligibility possible. That is where philosophical analysis is indispensable. Not everything about human existence, or about the structure of experience, is amenable to empirical methods — and ignoring that doesn’t make the questions go away.

The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of the experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there" independent of all acts of observation. In contrast, Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it gives us. In struggling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word "phenomenon". In today's words, Bohr's point - and the central point of quantum theory - can be put into a simple sentence: "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon". — Law without Law, John Wheeler

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Wiliam Egginton. NY Times Review (gift link).

I.e. ecological-embodied metacognition ... — 180 Proof

It is ecological-embodied metacognition. But in enactivism, it is more than 'discursive practices' i.e. verbal behaviours. It goes 'all the way down' into pre-verbal and primitive cognition - the organism 'brings forth' the environment as much as vice versa. And the aim is not to explain but to navigate and to thrive.

For instance, from Varela-Thompson-Rosch, Embodied Mind:

“The enactive approach does not seek to reduce mind to the mechanisms of biology but rather to show the continuity of mind and life as forms of autonomous, sense-making activity.”'

and

“Objectivism commits a category mistake: it treats the world disclosed through our embodied coping as if it were an observer-independent reality ‘out there’.”

They also refer to Buddhist philosophy in this respect:

"Mind and world arise together in mutual specification.”
“There is no mind without world and no world without mind.”

Also from Merleau Ponty: 'The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.'

If you mean this literally, it's absurd because it assumes the actual, external world depends on (human?) consciousness. — Relativist

You’re interpreting a transcendental argument as if it were a metaphysical claim. I’m not saying that mountains, stars, or dinosaurs depended on human consciousness to exist. That really would be absurd.

My point is that the actual world is never given “as it is in itself,” but only as disclosed through the structures of perception, embodiment, and understanding that are the conditions for any intelligible world at all.

This is not denying an external reality. It denies that we can meaningfully speak of a “mind-independent world” in the strong sense— i.e., a world that would exist in the way we understand it to exist even in the absence of any standpoint, any cognitive frame, any lived perspective.

That stronger claim is the hidden metaphysics of naturalism.

What naturalism calls “observer-independent states of affairs” isn’t a discovery about the world; it’s an idealization, a projection that abstracts away precisely the conditions that make any disclosure of a world possible.

Philosophy can inquire into what lies beyond the limits of objectivity in a way science cannot.

C’mon 180. Bertrand Russell and Lloyd Gerson. Middle-of-the-road classical philosophy.

Thank you for that.

Big piece of work! I’m impressed by it although have as always a large stack of ‘things I ought to read’. But anyway :pray: