Yes. It does seem quite clear that you do not. — Mapping the Medium

"Mapping the medium"...

Mapping the medium"...
21m — Heiko

So sorry, my previous post wasn't complete.

It seems like you're raising a couple of different points, so let me try to address them.

If I understand correctly, your first question might be asking whether restricting what can be communicated or consciously experienced is a solution. My perspective is that synechistic inquiry doesn't aim to restrict; rather, it seeks to expand understanding by emphasizing relationality and context. The example of 'living in cold places' might reflect how our perceptions are shaped by habit and environment (which ties to Peirce’s concept of Thirdness), but deprivation itself isn't a solution—it's merely a condition that can influence understanding.

Your second question about assuming we already know everything is a sharp observation. Yes, I would agree that assuming complete knowledge can lead to disaster. Peirce’s philosophy explicitly warns against this by emphasizing fallibilism—the idea that our understanding is always provisional and open to revision. That’s why phaneroscopy, as a method, doesn’t seek to impose limits on experience but to investigate its structure with humility and rigor.

I hope this addresses your perplexity.

So sorry, my previous post wasn't complete. — Mapping the Medium

No no no, you've mapped the medium. Have a nice day.

Have a nice day. — Heiko

And I certainly hope the same for you. :smile:

And calling me 'woman' is not an appropriate way to encourage quality dialogue. — Mapping the Medium

Fair enough, I take that back then (can I?). I'll just call you "Mapping the Medium" from now on. Does that sound fair?

The categories are exhaustive, not endlessly additive, because they describe the irreducible modes of being: possibility, interaction, and mediation. — Mapping the Medium

I don't think that those are the irreducible modes of being. That's what I'm saying. I think that Peirce just made that up, without any evidence or argument. And this is something that scholars of Peirce have pointed out in the literature. Why do you think that possibility, interaction and mediation are the irreducible modes of being? Why do you agree with Peirce on that topic? The concept of "possibility", the very notion of possibility, is a modal notion. It's one of the notions that are studied in modal logic. It also has its place in metaphysics. It has nothing to do with what Peirce understands by "modes of being".

Suggesting ‘Fourthness’, ect., overlooks the logic behind these distinctions. — Mapping the Medium

What is the logic behind these distinctions? It's just an ungrounded aesthetic choice that Peirce made, just as Hegel did: they liked the number 3, for aesthetic reasons. It has nothing to do with logic, not if by "logic" we mean the formal science that studies the logical form of arguments.

they reflect the foundational structure of reality as understood through relationality. — Mapping the Medium

And that's a wobbly, objectionable hypothesis, as far as metaphysics and science are concerned. Does Peirce or anyone else have any evidence for such metaphysically loaded claims?

I’m curious to know whether or not you’ve engaged directly with Peirce’s writings on this, such as The Categories in Detail or his Lectures on Pragmatism.” — Mapping the Medium

If by that you mean if I've read Peirce, then yes, of course I've read Peirce. I've listened to people explain their ideas about Peirce to me. I teach Peirce's ideas to my students at the Uni, when they have to study the classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James and Dewey. You seem to be suggesting that Peirce wasn't wrong about certain things, such as his triad of Categories. And all I'm saying is, that better intellectuals than me have argued, in print, that he was wrong.

I'm reading about him on Wikipedia and the SEP and it appears he just transposed firstness, secondness, and thirdness (terms he used when he was feeling appropriately abstract) onto a bunch of categories because he liked threes.

I think one could easily come up with some sort of relation that might justify more names. I mean, I read what he said about it, and he said that he just "thinks not" that we could endlessly perform hypostatic abstractions to derive more "intentions". So, I suppose that is the closest we might get to insight: he doesn't think it is useful to repeat the process past twice. For whatever reason.

I suppose in a concrete example of the type we talked about in this thread it would be useless to go past one or two applications of hypostatic abstraction, though. So I guess the examples might fit into the triad.

But I could be wrong on all of this, so take it with a grain of salt.

I'm reading about him on Wikipedia and the SEP and it appears he just transposed firstness, secondness, and thirdness (terms he used when he was feeling appropriately abstract) onto a bunch of categories because he liked threes. — ToothyMaw

Exactly, that's what I'm saying. Peirce is the North American equivalent to Hegel in that sense. Both of them "just liked" the number 3, for Aesthetic reasons.

I think one could easily come up with some sort of relation that might justify more names. I mean, I read what he said about it, and he said that he just "thinks not" that we could endlessly perform hypostatic abstractions to derive more "intentions". So, I suppose that is the closest we might get to insight: he doesn't think it is useful to repeat the process past twice. For whatever reason. — ToothyMaw

Hypostatic abstraction is indeed a "thing", it's not something that @Mapping the Medium just made up. This is why I'm following this Thread: I'm very curious about the things that Mapping the Medium is saying. I just don't think that she's using the most friendly language from the point of view of ordinary life.

EDIT: From the wiki:

Hypostatic abstraction in philosophy and mathematical logic, also known as hypostasis or subjectal abstraction, is a formal operation that transforms a predicate into a relation; for example "Honey is sweet" is transformed into "Honey has sweetness". The relation is created between the original subject and a new term that represents the property expressed by the original predicate. — Wikipedia

But it's like, I already told Mapping the Medium what I think about that. It's not that I don't believe in hypostatic abstraction, I just don't understand it. And I genuinely think that you have to be some sort of Real Life Mind Flayer to even have the biological brain to understand such a notion.

EDIT: In other words, mine is a Deweyian argument against Peirce here. Dewey had it right, Peirce had it wrong, at least in relation to hypostatic abstraction. Like, you have to think this from a Darwinian POV.

EDIT 2: And that's why I'm arguing with her, page after page, about A. I. The biological difference between A.I.s and human beings are just too unfathomable: they're not alive in the biological sense of the term. They have no genetic material (no DNA or RNA), they don't have cellular organization (they are not unicellular, nor multicellular), etc. They are not like us, the living beings of planet Earth. So this is not "just politics", this is ontology. It's political ontology, but no one believes me when I say that. We're debating ontology with a machine when we talk to someone like Claude the A. I. And I humbly think that Peirce does not provide us with the framework to do that. You have to think this one like Dewey: it's Darwinism, it's survival of the fittest, our natural intelligence (as opposed to a mere artificial intelligence) is the product of the entire history of Life on this Earth, from the microbe to the homo sapiens, this is a matter of survival as living beings, plain and simple.

I think that it might be useful to look at the examples @Mapping the Medium has provided.

In terms of the honey example, this is my understanding: you can say honey is sweet, and that may be regarded as true depending on the perception that honey is indeed sweet, as you are stating a simple predicate. When you perform the hypostatic abstraction, however, you take that predicate and turn it into a relation between honey and the object "sweetness" (honey has sweetness). The logical functioning of introducing "sweetness" consists solely in the truth values of those propositions that possess the property of being sweet. This last part indicates that there is a collection of propositions that might indicate certain things are sweet, including the one we started with, and they must possess sweetness if sweetness is itself a measure that exists on a continuum that entails the property of "sweet".

If you guys think there is something wrong in there just say so; I'm sure there is.

When you perform the hypostatic abstraction, however, you take that predicate and turn it into a relation — ToothyMaw

This is the part (one of many) that I don't understand. That just makes no sense to me. How can you "turn a predicate into a relation"? A predicate, in the context of any predicate logic (first order, second order, higher order, etc.) is literally a letter of the alphabet, typically instantiated by the letter "P". As such, it is neither a property nor a relation, it's just a predicate. A predicate cannot "turn into" a relation. You can use a two-place, three place, four place etc. predicate to represent relations, but the predicate itself cannot "turn into" a relation, because the predicate itself, in this context, is just a meaningless sing. It has no semantic import. It is purely syntactical. That is its "Nature", if you will. That is simply what it is. You cannot turn that into a relation. Arguably, it would be, at the very least, a category mistake, in Gilbert Ryle's technical sense of the term.

Seems to be much ado about not so much.

Any many-placed predicate is reducible to a monadic predicate. "The cat is on the mat" can be parsed as a binary predicate "Is on (cat, mat)" and so as a relation, or as a monadic predicate "On the mat(cat)". Relations are many-placed predicates.

But both "Honey is sweet" and "Honey has sweetness" are parsed as the monadic Sweet(honey).

The temptation is to hypostatize sweetness by treating it as an individual rather than as a predicate, by saying that "Honey has sweetness" is a relation between sweetness and honey. Best avoided. TO see why, try setting out what that relation - "has" - is.

While we can treat many-placed predicates as monadic, treating monadic predicates as relations is problematic.

treating monadic predicates as relations is problematic. — Banno

Exactly, that's what I'm saying. Maybe I didn't argue well for it, but what you just said there was my intent: how do you actually turn a predicate (i.e., a monadic predicate) into a relation? Like, syntactically. You can't. Not within the context of predicate logic, at least. And by that I mean all of them, all of the types of predicate logic: first-order, second-order, higher-order, etc.

So what's "the proposal" here, exactly? What's "the pitch"? Because it seems to me (and I could be wrong about this), that the proposal is to use something other than predicate logic. Right? It has to be something like, I dunno, set theory. But that's overkill, depending on your objective. If you want to use logic to analyze the validity of arguments, then first-order predicate logic is fine for that. You don't need fancy stuff like set theory just for that specific purpose. You use set theory for other things, it has other purposes. And what I'm saying about set theory here, I would say of every logic that is intended as something other than a formal language that allows us to analyze the validity of such arguments.

The temptation is to hypostatize — Banno

Yes, or i.e. to reify. Be realist about mere abstractions. The kind of error ('platonism') usually alleged by the nominalist, not of the nominalist.

The kind of error ('platonism') usually alleged by the nominalist, not of the nominalist. — bongo fury

Very true. This is why those who try to associate Peirce with Platonism are so off base. ... Don't even get me started on that. I have a major pet peeve about those who try to lump Peirce's realism in with Platonism. ... As I said before in another thread, abstraction is a can of worms.

Right, so we're curious (I think someone asked at some point) whence the anti-nominalism? If Goodman says,

The nominalist cancels out the property and treats the predicate as bearing a one-many relation directly to the several things it applies to or denotes. — Goodman

Shouldn't that align with your objection to hypostatisation?

Shouldn't that align with your objection to hypostatisation? — bongo fury

No.

What's interesting is in that warning about the temptation to hypostasize, that's exactly what Banno did.

Go on?

(Edit: this was when Mapping the Medium had said "he" instead of "Banno" and I thought she (MtM) was addressing the question of mine which she quoted, and which was about Goodman.)

He reifies the relation of reference or denotation?

I mean, I don't think he does, but I'm intrigued about this thirdness stuff if it's about that.

This is why those who try to associate Peirce with Platonism are so off base — Mapping the Medium

I'm going to say something extremely controversial about that, which I don't expect you (or anyone else) to endorse, or to even agree with me in what I'm about to say. Platonism, in all of its forms, in all of the areas where it spreads, is an intellectual epidemic. That's how I would describe it, trying to be as objective and respectful as possible. At the level of the individual, it's an "intellectual drug".

Go on? — bongo fury

The temptation is to hypostatize — Banno

'Haphazard' Hypostatic Abstraction... refers to the careless or uncritical process of reifying a quality, relation, or concept into a separate concrete entity or 'object' without sufficient consideration of its relational context, grounding or implications. This process often results in oversimplification or misrepresentation, where an abstracted concept is treated as if it possesses an independent, fixed existence, neglecting the dynamic interconnected nature of the phenomena being abstracted.

By framing hypostatization as something that exists as an isolated or universalized phenomenon, Banno risks oversimplifying a process that varies depending on context and intent.

Banno abstracts "the temptation" as if it is a monolithic or static property of thought rather than a contextual tendency shaped by specific frameworks or practices.

Banno concretizes hypostatization itself, treating it as a singular, inherently problematic act, rather than a tool that can be used skillfully or recklessly depending on the circumstances.

Banno glosses over relational emergence, assuming that hypostatization inherently leads to error without exploring how it may reveal insights when applied thoughtfully (e.g., in Peirce's work).

Who's "he"?

Who's "he" — Banno

I was referring to what I said previously about this quote......

The temptation is to hypostatize
— Banno

I apologize, as I didn't mean to refer to you as 'he'. I now realize you are engaged in the dialogue.

So... who is "he"?

So... who is "he"? — Banno

He is you. I will go back and edit. :wink:

I did not mean for my last posts to come across as overly critical. My intent was to just unpack this as succinctly as possible. It's a tricky subject, and I think we are all wrestling with it in different ways.

As I said, a can of worms.

Cheers. Suspected so. But I advocated none of those things you list. I'll go over what I said once again, with a slightly different approach.

Hypostatic Abstraction is taking a predicate and turning it into a relation. That works for some, but not all, predicates. So "The cat is on the mat" can be parsed using one individual, the cat, and saying that the cat is one of the things on the mat. Or it can, by Hypostatic Abstraction on "....on the mat", be parsed as a relation between two individuals, the cat and the mat. Roughly, we take "On the mat(cat)" and use Hypostatic Abstraction to change that to "On(cat, the mat)".

That works becasue we can treat the mat as an individual.

But if we take "Honey is sweet" and try the same thing, we end up with your has(honey, sweetness); a mess. What is the "has" here? And the reason it becomes a mess is...

Sweetness is not an individual.

To treat sweetness as an individual is to treat a group of things as if it were an individual - to hypostatise.

Perhaps now you are beginning to understand how I feel about nominalism and Platonism. They are both major societal problems because none of this is taught in our schools. Abstractions fly around on the internet and media sources, and it is an autopoietic nightmare that is now in our artificial intelligence, THAT is why I became AI certified and engage in the research that I do. We are living in an abstraction that is getting further and further away from what is real. ... So yes, call me passionate, call me 'extreme'. ... This is what is actually happening.

Perhaps this would be a good time to move on to 'precisive abstraction'.

I am going to calm my dog due to the fireworks in my neighborhood.

Happy New Year! :sparkle:

Not so much. Reminds me a bit of General Semantics.

Happy new year.