So Un says construction is about things that are actively built as opposed to things that just sort of passively appeared due to erosion or continental collision. — Mongrel

A point about that. A metaphysical strength distinction does rest on a fundamental opposition. Or to be more precise, not merely an act of negation but an actual inverse or reciprocality.

So yes, the distinction could be between active and passive. But more strongly, the dichotomy would be construction vs constraint. That is bottom-up efficient causality vs top-down finality. That is then the systems frame of meaning that brings value and intentionality naturally into the picture.

Even an eroding mountain is a semiotic relation. The laws of thermodynamics act as a constraint on material constructions. They are a universal desire that is the cause of a generalised tendency towards an equilibrium state. Mountains get worn down and valleys filled up over time just by "accident". Or rather, by the fact of a global balancing drive which limits the scope of acts of construction.

Social constructionism - first best explained by the symbolic interactionism that arose out of Peirce's semiotics - is then about how language can socially construct the perceptual constraints by which we experience reality. Habits of words can organise our thoughts at a very deep level. They regulate what we see or distinguish.

So this is where the confusion starts. There is both construction and constraint in play (as natural partners, being the necessary pairing in any systems understanding of causality). It is not that individuals ever had a choice that they were modelling reality in pragmatic fashion and so their experience was constrained by some natural or evolved intent. But with the development of a new level of semiotic mechanism - articulate and grammatical speech - a new social way of constructing constraints could get going.

Biological minds could be social minds - still in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world, but now from an expanded social point of view which could incorporate social level final causes, or intents and values.

The elements of a triadic semiotic modelling relation are there. You have an intent. It exists to organise the world. And it is mediated by signs.

So you come to want the long term thing of a hedgehog house. A particular pile of leaves has come to stand for that. You have an informational model in that you have both a theory of a hedgehog house and a measurement, a perceptual sign, of its existence. Where I see wind blown leaves, you experience a hedgehog house. And if I happen to kick through the leaves, you will tell me off then push the leaves back into their proper place. So it is more than just an idea. It is a semiotic relation that is physically constraining the world in a particular way now.

As I say, all life and mind can be explained in these terms - what theoretical biologist Howard Pattee called the epistemic cut. Rate independent information exerting constraint on rate dependent physical dynamics. Like the way DNA manages cellular metabolism in a "knowing" fashion.

So social constructionism is just a rather uncontroversial example of a semiotic relation - a high-level linguistically-anchored version of a basic natural mechanism.

One thing this looks to miss is that what you are socially constructing is a constraint. And so any distinction remains irreducibly vague in practice. It does carve the world up into differences that make a difference. It does impose informational boundaries around the world and its physical dynamics. But a constraint only narrows the scope of a meaning or intent to the degree it is considered (socially or organismically) useful.

So talking about stuff is vague. It has vast scope in language when it comes to bounding the world with a meaningful distinction. But a combination of words, said in this particular context, then should narrow the scope of an intent with great precision.

Your kids should understand that the intent they are meant to mirror - the constraint they should place on their own physical or dissipative degrees of freedom - don't involve tidying up dead spiders or doing something about the chairs.

The very fact you can imagine labelled boxes - physical constraints of the most literal kind! - for all this loosely referenced "stuff", shows how socially constructed this real world landscape really is.

By the by, all this is precisely what Peircean semiotics and modelling relations approaches make clear.

Spencer-Brown is only half getting it in talking about the triadic nature of the informational side of a model's epistemic cut. He talks about the symmetry breaking that creates the three things of the two domains distinguished and then the third thing which is the boundary or act of division imposed.

The full semiotic view emphasises that the modelling relation is between an informational model and an energetic physical world. There is an ontological duality, a self/world, that is being constructed. But this is triadic in that the self forms signs of the world. It is the whole point of modelling not to represent reality in some veridical way - leaving no gap or epistemic cut between self and world - but to instead form a habitual relation of signs that comes to be our understanding of the thing in itself.

So biologically, the physical energies of the world are experienced by us in a perceptually constructed fashion. We see red and not green as a striking difference when the physical wavelengths may be only fractionally different in reality (and in reality, not at all coloured in any sense).

This is of course where SX goes particularly astray. If you conflate self and world, ignore the epistemic cut, then you start to talk about hues as "the real" and you don't assign them the proper ontic status of being our mediating signs of physical energies - a translation of the material world into the information that habitually constructs a state of mental constraint on our intentionality. Seeing red or green can mean something ... because they are in fact never real. We can then impose whatever intepretation or habit of meaning we like as they are just symbols.

Anyway, this semiotic game is then repeated at the social or linguistically mediated level of experience. We carve the physical world with useful concepts like boxes, kinds of toy, tidiness, parent-child dominance relations, etc.

So going to the OP, semiotics would take it as obvious that our relations with the world are constructed. That is the definition of life and mind - to be a modelling relation where information forms a self in fruitful control of a physical world.

And the typical reaction to this realisation - that conscious awareness is indirect or constructed - is negative. It seems an epistemic problem rather than the necessary basis of an epistemic relation. Most folk are naive realists and want philosophy to get them back to that happy position somehow. But the whole point of awareness is to simplify the complexity of any physical environment and to take advantage of its entropic gradients - tap the flows for useful purposes. So the world has to be replaced by a system of signs. Constructing "our world", our umwelt, is the same as constructing our selves, our own individuated being and meaning.

Humans depend on social construction to be human. It is not a bug but the feature.

The only issue then is whether there is a natural story of progression. Is this a pluralistic free for all where anyone can make up their own valid worldview, or is there a real world out there and so the world construction must converge on some optimal mental model?

Again the answer seems obvious. The scientific view of reality has arisen as a modelling discipline which is most effective at constructing the constraints which can harness material flows. Science is the most life giving way of construing the world.

Of course then you can look around and protest at the state of a scientific society. But any biologist will tell you how out of kilter with nature we have allowed things to get. Modern society is not being rational on the long term view.

But again, the bottom lines are that any relation with the world is a process of triadic mediation. We have to form the signs that become our world and so form our strongly individuated selves along with that. That is the essential epistemic relation.

And then there can be many ways of setting up that self-world point of view. The social constructionist arguement becomes about which socially encouraged stance is evolutionarily optimal. And that question can't be answered without recognising that the relation is between the information that constructs constraints and a world of physical potential that is being thus usefully constrained.

So any epistemology has to be grounded in a natural ontology. And people know that. It is why social construction is treated as such a danger - this idea that folk can construct their own realities rather too freely.

But in fact, against naive realism, it also had to be understood that what constitutes our psychic reality is the third thing of the modelling relation. We shouldn't mourn the impossibility of knowing the thing in itself. The whole point philosophically should be attending instead to forming the healthiest system of signs - the correct mediated view. What would it be to optimise the modelling relation (in some given environmental context)?

That's backwards. Memory as a technical term can mean all sorts of things just applied to humans. There is long term memory, short term memory, iconic memory, autobiographical recollection, recognition or perceptual memory, etc.

And then likewise, there is memory in the most general technical sense as a systems theorist or semiotician most especially would use it. And there memory describes any form of information capture that serves to constrain future system dynamics.

Metal for instance can be fabricated to have a,memory - a form it wants to snap back into.

So you are making a loose use of language - one not really scientific or philosophical. I am talking about memory in a generic yet fully technical sense.

Are you serious? What's the problem with a genetic memory that can capture useful random changes? There is no logical or metaphysical hole in this as a basic story.

Its a joke. A rock just wouldn't get it would it?

No. The universe is a dumb as a rock. Which is what requires life to evolve and entropifiy what the universe itself cannot.

So it is not a positive relation in that the physical realm has the intellligence to decide to make life. Instead the physical realm is limited by its dumbness in a fashion that makes a drive towards intelligence inevitable, if such intelligence is possible.

So a case of creative dumbness?

Thanks. My background is in neuroscience and theoretical biology. But that thread is many pages long.

A brief answer is that biologists now understand life as a manifestation of the laws of thermodynamics. So evolution (and progress) would now be placed securely on that particular branch of physics. Life exists to accelerate the entropification of the universe.

This naturalises life, giving it a purpose. The universe wants something. Life arises not as some wild accident but because it is the kind of complex, energy dissipating, heat producing, process that is meant to be.

This is a big change from the old Darwinian mechanical picture. And the same ontological shift is happening in physics too. The universe itself is a Big Bang, etc. Existence is the evolution of maximalised simplicity - the search for a physical heat death.

Then life and mind arise as the fleetingly complex structure which help with this generalised cause. Where there are undissipated energy stores, we insert ourselves as structure that finds clever ways to dissipate it to waste heat.

So one general physical imperative to rule them all.

Yes, I do see appeals to the supernatural as ontologically vacuous. Transcendence can't work as causal explanation. So I am happy starting with a rational position. Holism has to be about immanence - system style causality.

I don't think I've ever been roundabout on the point. :)

I myself and Bergson consider the unconscious just a form of memory. — Rich

Memory is a better way to look at it. But also everything about the brain is memory.

A snappy way of putting it is that the unconscious or habitual part of brain activity could be called a memory of what can be forgotten, while the conscious or attentional part is our memory of the future.

What I mean is that we form a machinery of adaptive habits by learning what to ignore about the world. We learn what we can afford to forget to make things happen in a way that demands least conscious attention.

And then attention is about noticing what predicts the near future. It is forming the mental picture of what counts and needs to guide our coming behaviour. So it is a (working) memory of the expectable future.

So the unconscious is everything that at the moment we can afford to forget about. The conscious is everything we need to be remembering as context for the moment we are going through so as to smoothly integrate ourselves in the world just about to happen.

The two faces of what we call the faculty of memory. And what people typically think of as memory - recall of past events - is the linguistically structured art of talking ourselves back in time, imagining or recreating an anticipatory image of what it would be like to be back in some moment, doing the Janus thing of ignoring as much as possible via habit, forming a working memory as context for some next moment.

But you've changed the subject by bringing in Jung. At least Freud was trying to be materialistic and scientific. Now you are appealing to the supernatural. And that is just peddling the romantic myth of the wrongfully constrained human individual from a flakier ontological basis. Instead of Freud's naturalist story of a secret driver of conscious action, you have shifted to a secret supernatural driver of natural action in general.

So you are again recognising a division, but then jumping to a transcendent ontology which puts the second source of action outside the level of action to be explained. It is not the integrated view I am taking. Holism is about immanence. It is about the two way interaction that can result because there is a symmetry breaking or dichotomy that forms, allowing the third thing of dynamical integration.

Even if a subject has a neuronal abnormality, such as a developing tumour, which might cause behavioural changes, then that is an unconscious determinant of behaviours. — Wayfarer

But it is also pretty materialist to be seeking the hidden subconscious determinants of behaviour. Freud's own model is straight out of the industrial era with its hydraulic steam engine metaphors. Watch out, that thar id is a pressure about to blow! Got to protect the ego system by finding harmless release in Freudian slips!

So that is why I would stress flipping the story. The unconscious is just that dynamical vague mass of everything we might ever think or do. Then the moment to moment consciousness is what becomes our usefully adapted state having constrained all the meaningless variety to form some fleetingly useful mental picture.

The determination of the indeterminate is a top down thing. We are actually in control in the sense that the evolution of a state of mind is holistically organised via a competivite process, a generalised filtering.

So to escape materialism - the standard bottom up story - it is important not to try to pin the blame on our instinctual animal id. That itself is a romantic myth by which society - as a higher scale of mind - is seeking to regulate or constrain individual humans in a holistic and top down fashion.

At least Freud got he super ego story right. But he was essentially speaking to materialist science and romantic ideology.

A better neuroscientific division than conscious vs unconscious is attentional vs habitual. And in humans, both would have then have the extra feature of being linguistically structured.

So an important point is that habit and attention operate on different timescales - a fifth of a second vs half a second. And connected to that, all clear thoughts have to start out vague and tentative, becoming focused and strongly conscious by neural competition and selective attention - unless they are, by exact contrast, highly routinised thoughts that can be emitted "without thought" as rapid habits.

So what we are dealing with here is a natural dichotomy of brain activity towards either dealing with life in a rapid, learnt, unthinking way, or a more deliberative, attentive, and learning way. And this is a dynamical balancing act. We have to be doing both at once all the time.

If you apply this neurological model to Freudian slips for example, you can see that speech acts have to bubble up from vague beginnings where there is some general intended thought to be expressed, but multiple choices about how to turn that into an articulated sentence. So the brain has to be in a state of competition where many things could be said - including stuff you don't want to say, or stuff vaguely associated - and all that possibility has to be suppressed just to let some actual formula of words win through to be said.

Nothing nefarious is going on when slips occur. It just reflects the fact that thought has to start with a net cast wide, then speech itself forces a dramatic narrowing of possible sayings to arrive at a string of particular words that then count as what you wanted to say.

And the timing comes into it because you can be conscious of your general intended speech act, but stringing the actual words together happens at subconscious speeds. So it is only after the final speaking you discover how this little process of competitive filtering played out.

So my complaint against Freudian style views is that they kind of paint a picture of two kinds of selves in competition - like the instinctual id and socially constrained super ego. It is a one dimensional tale of repression and betrayal.

But while competition definitely exists, the ability to smoothly integrate the various levels of processing is what is more relevant to an understanding of brain function. The neural architecture may be founded on dichotomies. But the dynamics are then about the fruitful integration of the useful division of labour.

The idea of being at secret war with your own self is a nice romantic myth. It speaks to the real fact of division. But what completes the story of the self is focusing on its actual goal of arriving at an integrated and adaptive state of understanding and action. The unconscious then becomes, in this light, all the dynamic and lively variety that has become constrained for just a moment to form the highly focal state of mind we happen to be in right now, at this time, for some good reason.

I'm speaking for the scientific research. If you want to believe something else, it won't change that.

The simplest answer is that being conscious of the world itself demands a constant process of anticipatory imagery. We have to forward model the sensations of what are about to happen so as to reduce the amount of things that are surprising. Even as you reach for a door knob, you are forming all kinds of expectancies about how the knob will feel as it turns in your hand and what will be the generality of what will be seen beyond.

In a state of sensory deprivation, these kinds of anticipatory images will develop into highly detailed - but fleeting and disconnected - states of perception themselves. At a rate of every half second, one image will replace another, with a loose associative knowledge.

That is why dreams seem a constant chase after meaning. You are still trying to make some kind of narrative sense of what is going on - fitting some tale to it. But as MU points out, Fred is never Fred as every passing image throws up a new scene.

On this view, vivid R.E.M. dreams serve no great psychic purpose. R.E.M. exists to stir up the brain to near waking state so you will be ready to go if something does wake you up. The images are just what the brain has to do - fill in the blanks - because it is designed to generate a constant flow of anticipations and those become vivid when actually answering sensation is absent.

You can catch that happen when you first fall asleep - hypnagogic imagery. The brain cuts off from the outside world and you immediately plunge into the bright light of some fantastical vision. But it lacks the narrative structure of a R.E.M. dream. That scrabble after explanation takes time to build its own confused history.

So your claim is that we can imagine a class of things, such that we cannot imagine any element of that class? — Banno

Well yes, as you just did. :)

The point is rather that the meanings of words aren't exhaustible. You could always contrive to find more. But then there also has to be some point to it. Meaning involves a triangulation between the world, the sign and a purpose.

Imagination couldn't function unless vagueness was its basic feature. That is how we can be impressed when by contrast it seems we are pretty definitely conceiving of various things in "exhaustive enough to be useful" fashion.

So in terms of your OP, the question would be whether this civilisation a million years hence is still using language in much the same way (as well as being neurologically much the same in the way in which they are biologically conscious of the world).

Already - because we can use the language of maths - we do conceive of the infinite and nothing in ways that constrain their meaning in more definite fashion.

So the question may be how much more could language evolve as a tool of precise thought in the next million years? Maybe not a lot if we just extrapolate from the speech and math we have - could their grammar or syntax become much more flexible or universal?

So in some ways, the answer to your OP is trivial. We already know - from basic epistemological argument - that we should expect there to be known unknowns and unknown unknowns. But my point is that then - for speech acts - speech has the further power of counterfactuality. We can speak even of the unknown unknowns and say something about them in a way that is humanly meaningful. We can talk in ways that constrain them in ways we regard as useful.

Yep, the complementary limits on the knowable. And as usual, limits are what knowledge may approach with asymptotic closeness, but - by definition, in being the absolute limit - never completely reach.

Banno needs to make up his mind whether he believes in epistemological absolutism or not. He hankers after some form of pragmatism or knowledge relativism but keeps getting in his own way with experience-transcending claims.

Rubbish. Even imaginable things are to some degree uncertain, vague or indeterminate in our mind. So we can talk about that which is by the same token the most radically vague, uncertain or indeterminate in regards to our imagining.

We can imagine a zero, a big fat nothing. Yes, that imagining may be rather fuzzy on closer examination, but so is our conception of everything, or even something.

It is simply the constraints-based logic of speech and thought that means all acts of imagining are in the same boat. What we take as enumerately imagined - some set of concrete objects conceived - is never in fact as concrete as we pretend. So whatever hasn't or couldn't be imagined is merely the same general thing, just at the other end of the spectrum in terms of it apparent (in)definiteness.

Why are you suggesting I said there was an opposition or a contradiction? My point was that there is a filtering or constraint that is core to the method.

Indeed, philosophy requires sophistry as a contrast. — Mariner

Yes indeedy. As I said, we can see the difference in arguing for a belief and arguing to a belief. It is not as hard as you make out.

I could give an answer of my own to this problem, but the core of philosophy involves finding one's own answer and, as it were, picking sides between philosophers and sophists. — Mariner

That is the mistake. You say it is all about the personal when it is about the collective. Academia can promote individual intellectual freedom because there is then the collective judgement of the communal mind.

You are promoting a romantic individual journey of discovery, but the core to philosophical method is that arguments get made and people remember those that seem the most worth considering. Just think of the way Plato and Aristotle spent so much time analysing what others had said.

it is much more like the attention of a lover to the object of his love. — Mariner

Hmm. But love is blind they say. Some believe we are meant to look past the loved one's flaws.

And indeed, much of what passes for philosophical debate in these parts is a sophistic argument in favour of a desired belief.

So how is philosophical method meant to distinguish between the use of argumentation as a sophistical prop vs as a true means of inquiry?

And if you have "never" come across the advocation of scientific style reasoning before in philosophy - the triadic arc of abductive hypothesis, deduction consequence and inductive validation - then its pretty explicit in Peircean Pragmatism at least.

On those two points, as you say, the idea that truth is socially constructed is a very acceptable and modern understanding. But where Pomo can go wrong is then in being too PC (or Marxist - the earlier incarnation of utopian egalitarianism).

So yes, our world is socially constructed. But then in recognising this fundamental subjectivity, the philosophical project can be to discover the most objective point of view. Pomo argues instinctively for plurality and thus loses sight of the possibility that there is indeed a rational unity to be found.

On the second point - opaqueness - I have no objection to jargon and difficulty. But I agree that Pomo often uses language in a way that suggest cleverness rather than actually delivering substance.

The key trick is to employ familiar dichotomies - like love and strife or potential and actual - and treat them as self-contradictory paradox that radically undermines any possibility of unifying certainty. So because neither can be right, yet both are right, everything becomes just a poetic dance around the subject designed to make the writer look clever and the subject matter forever elusive. It can be talked about endlessly, and nothing settled can emerge - which is good if you want to dazzle the impressionable.

So Pomo - not all of it of course, just the general tendency - is opaque because it has institutionalised a fundamental abuse of good philosophical reasoning. It's game is to tease with paradox rather than account via dialectical analysis.

Then the other associated stylistic fault is that it resists giving concrete examples of the abstract arguments it pretends to spin.

AP is clear as it is scientific in this respect. Here is the general theory, now here is the commonsense illustration that makes precise what I might mean. This is an example of a sound method of thought being institutionalised (even if AP can be just as wordy, muddled or trite at times).

So writing skills vary tremendously. But well structured thought will always shine through. And rigour means developing a theory that is systematic (not a toying with contradiction to prove the impossibility of systematisation). And then that system of thought might be true or false - but that isn't a problem if you also argue your case using concrete examples. That is the evidence by which readers can test the strength of the intellectual edifice you wish to present.

This examination (which is the core of the Socratic "know thyself"), on the other hand, also follows rules. Closeness to the experiential basis. Sincerity with self. And reason, which is often taken as the core but which is mostly a method. — Mariner

I think this is a bit too feelgood. I would argue - pragmatically - that philosophical reasoning is just like scientific reasoning in being a method of theory and measurement. Or the stepping back (from the self, from the world) into an abstraction from where observation (of "the self" and "the world") is then concretely made. We form some idea that is philosophically general, then we test how well it seems to apply in our particular case.

So a reasoning method - which gives an articulate basis to the self examination - is indeed the core. We step back in a formalised manner, one taught as Socratic method, so that we can return to the thing in itself, our own experience, with some clear hypothesis about what that experience should actually be (or how it should function pragmatically as a sign relating our formal constructs to the measureables we articulate - the factual results we then claim as what is the case).

Philosophy is not a poetic free for all. It is a scientific method of inquiry. The difference with science is that it is not so demanding of the notion of empirical validation.

As a discipline, it does not seek to close down "wrong avenues" of inquiry. What counts as acceptable measurement - like poetry, feelings, values - is as relaxed as possible to encourage the habit of speculation.

And also, conventionally, the emphasis is on working out every possible formal variation of a possible theory. Like maths, there is value seen even in "abstract nonsense" as again dumb ideas might turn out to be fruitful after all. Crazy lines of thought are good if they are an exercise in experimenting with what sets of logical rules might produce.

So philosophy is a science in depending on the same essential method - formalising constructs and then seeing what results from particularising our experience of the world, of ourselves, from within that constructed framework. It is then different from science in also seeing the value of giving human invention free range.

It becomes a storehouse of every possible way of thinking about things - because who knows when junk might be useful. And who could know what junk looks like unless there was some place you could go an check out its vast variety. ;)

Given that human descriptions generally reduce to a dichotomy, or complementary opposites, what could be the psychological cause of this? — Galuchat

I'm not sure I understand your question. But we reason in this fashion as it is effective. Reducing our choices to a pair of polar opposites means we can act with counterfactual definiteness. There is simple clarity.

Certainly anxiety cannot just simply be reduced to physical processes like a churning stomach, an elevated internal temperature, shifty eyes, etc, for these are simply symptoms used to diagnose an emotional state, behaviorist black-box style. — darthbarracuda

In this case, the social narrative - understanding this variety of symptoms as a single feeling - is fairly accurate of the biology. We are naturally organised to respond to the demands and opportunities of the world in a dichotomous fashion - either relaxing or tensing in some appropriate holistically orienting and prepatory fashion. There is a sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic one. And we can be aware of all the telltale sensations of switching between the two - if we learn to pay attention to them.

Of course we would need to know when we feel scared or hungry. Biologically we need sensations about out own state, as well as the state of the world. But then in the same way, a modern psychological take would want to get away from the resulting "passive representational dualism" of talking about the "us" that experiences "feelings and precepts" to an active or ecological framing of the way minds model worlds.

So the OP sets everything up in the usual dualistic fashion - as if we are naturally observers of our own experiences. But biologically, we simply react to life with appropriate feeling. No mystery. And then humans have language with which they can socially construct a secondary narrative state of being. We can start to talk about "being scared" - and thus raise the counterfactual possibility of "being brave".

That is, we can be quivering in our boots and yet choosing to act according to some different behavioural script - as if fear is what we over-ride in favour of a tougher socially-approved course of action.

So the power of narrative is indeed to inject this "self" into the middle of our biological reacting. Counterfactual thinking becomes a new layer of response for socialised humans.

I understand this to mean that language defines our ontological commitments. And that would be a social constructionist position on emotions that I would agree with.

When we are talking about feelings like fear or bravery, we are talking about our notions of "some thing" that exists with real substantiality. So already there are all kinds of grounding presumptions made by such talk. And higher human feelings like bravery are clearly more social scripts of proper ways to think and behave. So to the degree we believe in their existence, it is an act of creation in that sense.

Obviously the game is to maximise the one and minimise the other. But given the future can only be guessed, we can't usually know the true risk-reward return and so we have to model some notion of our tolerance for risk vs reward.

If you are rich, that might make you risk adverse. Or if you are acquisitive, then even being rich, that might make you risk embracing.

So pain and pleasure seem a simple and direct dichotomisation of biological value. But from that simple basis, a complex world of Bayesian reasoning can arise. One could quite reasonably be young and foolish, or old and cautious. Our answer to the OP can be both founded on the same evaluative principles and yet also reflect the great variety in our individuated state of being.

And that is just nature at work, doing its thing.

You are talking about every triangle in realationship to having four sides. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yep. So we can talk about the intersection of sets - {triangles} and {four sided polygons} - that then result in empty sets. It fits one view of set logic. But then more realistic is the thought that triangles are a subset of the polygons. And the particular constraint is that they have just three sides. Or even more importantly - in being maximally generic - they are the least sides a polygon can have in a two dimensional plane.

So an apparently simple logical operation is in fact a flattening of the hierarchical complexity of an actual world (even the actuality represented by the idea of spaces enclosed by edges on a plane).

A subsumptive hierarchy notation would make the point plainer - {n-gon {3-gon}}. Or putting it the other way around, given the world of a plane - constraint in two dimensions - the minimum constraint that has to be added to close those two degrees of freedom is 1 further. Or a rotation of 180 degrees. The n-gon, effectively a circle or 360 degree rotation, is then the maximum number of sides that can be used to enclose a space.

So four sided triangles sound a logical nonsense because they are understood as a particular of set theoretic operation. But set theory is itself a metaphysically impoverished language for doing real metaphysics. Logical atomism's spectacular crash and burn was surely enough to demonstrate that. And perhaps you can forgive the survivors for walking away muttering, metaphysics, never again! :)

Now one might point out the unrestricted "everything" is talking about possibilities, saying that our language may talk of anything. This is true, but what does it mean? Well, it isolates the specific possibility of what our language can say. In the sense that it talks about anything, it's restricted to a specific possibility. It not about an unrestricted "everything" at all. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again yep. This is why a metaphysical strength logic wants to employ the further notion of vagueness, or the distinction between the radically indeterminate and the crisply individuated.

Vagueness can never be exhausted by inquiry. And the good thing about that is it means inquiry doesn't have to exhaust itself trying.

Theories of truth break themselves on the rocks because they believe the world is something definite and therefore every possible proposition has some true or false value. It's that AP disease. But as soon as you take the pragmatic view, everything changes. Truth only needs determining to the degree that a difference could make a difference.

So that is a real economising move. Truth is only in question to the degree it might actually matter in terms of a purpose or finality. We can lighten up. That was Witti's Peircean point.

On the other hand, we then need an objective model of finality - the purpose that determines what counts as meaningful. So that is the extra work that philosophy of language types never really got going on because they retreated into a commonsense realism about speech acts, thus completely avoiding the metaphysical issues which semiotics had already addressed.

Still promising the satisfaction you never could or intended to deliver? Life is too short for those coy games.

I would like a full answer. Not interested in cock-teasing.

In what way was it not correct?

I think retrocausality of some kind has to be the case. But TI does the usual physics thing of treating the transactions as a simple reversible symmetry. So the going forward in time is mirrored by a going backwards in time. It is talking of a material/efficient cause that simply swaps its direction in time.

That kind of makes sense as it feels holistic - like seeing an emission/absorption even as a single "handshaking" agreement across time. The event is now a thermal relation like a length of string with two ends.

But it isn't going to be holistic enough - which is why TI has probably languished. I think you need an interpretation which makes use of an actual asymmetry between efficient and final cause. So now what can act from the distant future to constrain the flight of a photon is the finality of a context. The experimenter, in setting up his quantum eraser experiment, is creating the finality which can then work backwards in time to have been constraining the photons flowing from that distant star the past billion years in the statistical wavefunction way so familiar from twin slit empiricism.

So short answer: we have to accept retrocausality in some form, but really that just means accepting quantum contextuality or holism in the broadest sense. The bigger shift in interpretation is giving up on a world made purely of efficient causes (moving either forward or backward in time). Our idea of the world has to embrace the holism of downward acting contextuality or finality.

Yep, we are certainly limited by our humanness. But it is now a metaphysically general argument that existence is limited by the resources it has to "compute itself". So your commonsense point can be cashed out as an ultimate ontological restriction on existence.

Of course, the actual physics still leaves plenty of questions unanswered as yet. Can the Planckscale itself vary? What is the source of the dark energy that in fact ensures that the cosmological event horizons can achieve a maximum entropy state?

But physics now can calculate real things by understanding computation - logical possibility - to be constrained by hard material limits. You can imagine a superbrain. But we also now know what it's ultimate physically realisable limits are.

Surely a utilitarian would agree? — Banno

Are you a utilitarian? I'm a pragmatist - and Peircean not Jamesian. So different in essential ways.

Ramsey was getting it - and whispering it in Witti's ear in a way that inspired PI. So AP could have gone down a very different road after its failed project of logical atomism. You might have had a very different philosophical indoctrination as a result. Life is so full of paths not taken.

By logical possibility, you mean counterfactuality. Things are definite in that they must either be the case, or not. So we can only count possibilities in terms of what we imagine as determinate outcomes. Logical possibility is constrained by its rules - the laws of thought - of which the law of non-contradiction is central here.

Material potential is a larger state in that it is ultimately vague or indeterminate. Logically, non-contradiction does not apply to this pure definition of "the posible".

But on the other hand, logical possibility - as semiotic variety, all that we could speak about - is larger than physical potential as physical potential only "speaks to" the actually materially realisable. And the logically possible lets us speak about eveything that is also in fact the impossible. We are doing that already - raising the ficticious, the alternative, the contradictory - just in the act of speaking.

So each kind of possibility exceeds the other. Hence the air of dualism that hangs forever over any serious Metaphysical debate. Physical existence is founded on a vague potentiality that exceeds any hope of us being able to list its contents in counterfactual manner. But then our ability to dream up counterfactual worlds is just as limitless seeming.

To resolve this dualism is tricky. But physics has discovered that information is in fact holographically bounded. You can't physically speculate about alternative worlds in a fashion that exceeds the Planck limits on energy density. A brain or computer eventually will cram so much effort into a region of spacetime that it will collapse under its own gravitational force to become a black hole.

So a unifying principle has emerged where potential - either epistemic or ontic, physical or symbolic - can be measured in a single coin, the Planckscale information bit, or canonical material degree of freedom.

f it's true that I'm never going to drop the ball, what is the resistance? — Mongrel

You are posing this as an instance of the unmovable object and the irresistible force. And that is a paradoxical framing as it claims the existence of a potential that can't be actualised.

In fact a ball blocked by your hand is some equilibrium balance between different species of force or potential energy. The attraction of a gravitational potential is in balance with the repulsion of the electrostatic forces that bind the ball and make your hand a barrier.

So the resistance - the threshold that must be topped to break this particular symmetry state - is whatever endurance you can muster given a ball of some variable weight. Are we talking ping pong balls or cannonballs? Are we talking about you as Pee Wee Herman or Superman?

In the real world, a ball in the hand is going to have to be a more materially specified state - more symmetries will be already broken. And if we then want to employ the generality of some thought experiment - as we would metaphysically - then it is important that we recognise that the notion of a potential does include the idea of a threshold not yet breached. And then that symmetry breaking can take two general forms - the accidental or the deliberate. Either material spontaneity or the necessity of finality may be the reason for a potential becoming actualised.

With your "ball that I won't let drop", you are playing with the paradoxical seeming contrast between these two limit notions of contingent vs necessary. Your decision to hold the ball is turning its gravitational potential into an "impossibility" - and so apparently making it a species of possibilty in that its desire to fall has been thwarted.

Language use is confused here. But potential usually is taken to refer to a general power that is then localised in its expression. So it is predicated of a thing and expresses some finality. The ball wants to fall.

Possibility is then dichotomous to that in speaking instead of what might happen spontaneously or contingently. It is something that global context or constraint is indifferent to, and so has no especial desire either to forbid or desire.

So both potential and possible talk about the particularity of some change - some breaking of a symmetry or state of suspension. And if we are talking about an already complexly developed world with rich structure, then goal-directed potential and possibility as undirected chance are clearly quite different kinds things.

But if we wind back existence to its simplest state, then the situation is going to become ... vague. An atom waiting to decay seems to be expressing both an extremely definite desire to thermalise (as captured in its wavefunction) and also the total spontaneity of possibility in that its actual decay is an instant of utter material accident.

So the metaphysical distinction that is easy to make in a complexly developed world becomes an indistinct or vague one in a state of maximum Metaphysical simplicity. Potentiality and possibility become one "thing" yet to be separated.

Physically a potential (for change) is a symmetry, a state of equilibrium balance, not yet broken.

Yep. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Or syntax is not semantics. The capacity to be meaningless or false is why language appears to have unlimited capacity to be meaningful or true.