Sure, those are all things that clearly are mutable. What about paths or time? What about process? Are these stable? To be sure, our intentions vis-a-vis them may change, but does what it mean to be a path constantly shift, or to have a location? Or to be "two" or "binary?" To be true? To exist?

The problem doesn't show up with mountains, which clearly do change, but with metaphysics. If what it means to be a "process" or "tangle" is shifting, that seems more difficult. It's more difficult still if time and stability are also changing, for then what does it mean to say "don't worry about these issues, they are stable over long periods of time?" But every term in that sentence is liable to shift, and if time and stability are both unstable, then that sentence is no guarantee of anything. Likewise if "knowledge" and "true" are liable to shifts.

being's arbitrary propensity for interaction makes the ontology flat — fdrake

Okay, thanks for the clarifications.

An event is something which happens.
A process is a sequence of interrelated events.
A behaviour is a type in a process, or a type of process.
An assemblage is a network of events, processes and behaviours.

If you want entity too:

An entity is an process with a slow rate of progression relative to a background. — fdrake

"Interrelated" and "type" are doing heavy lifting here, to put it mildly. You can try to shift the ground to "arbitrary propensity for interaction," but once those two terms get cashed out I think the propensities for interaction will be anything but arbitrary.* To bring it back to that simple point, the differences between nouns and verbs do not seem to be arbitrary, and if being's propensity for interaction were truly arbitrary, then there would not be verbs and nouns. Once we agree that being's propensity for interaction isn't altogether arbitrary or undifferentiated, then we must ask how non-arbitrary it really is. ...Of course one could detach from the universe in the same way that one detaches from the street level when one takes off in an airplane. From that perspective cars and people look like ants, and from that vantage point everything is plausibly arbitrary. But if we want to understand the street level we don't want to hold it at a 3,000 foot distance. It might look like arbitrary relations from that altitude, but only because we've obscured our view.

Or to put it differently, it seems like you want to emphasize relations. That's fine up to a point, but I don't see how an emphasis on relations can so thoroughly ignore relata, and this seems particularly true when it comes to assemblage theory.


* What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). He ends up using different language to say the same essential thing.

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being. If, as Heraclitus says, we “cannot step twice into the same river,” then it also seems we cannot speak of the same river twice either. — Count Timothy von Icarus

↪Number2018

This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within.

What would be an example of such a philosophy? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Foucault's philosophy of language provides a compelling example of this idea. Let me begin with @frank quote:

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out — frank

The assumed, precise meaning of each word in this context evolves throughout the unfolding sentence. @franknoted that "the purpose of the whole" implicitly guides the flow of the event, yet "even the author may not know how it ends until it does." Foucault offers a detailed conceptual framework for understanding the immanent principles that organize our discursive practices. According to this framework, the coherence of a discursive construction, a 'statement,' does not arise from the logical consistency of its elements nor the a priori presence of a transcendental subject. Instead, he introduced the concept of 'regularity in dispersion.'
But how can dispersion itself serve as a principle of unity? Let's explore this thread. It is in a state of continuous unfolding, but is there an explicit rule governing its development? We might assume that our understanding of the thread's progression—its unfolding meaning, and the role of each post, —is not predetermined. Also, there is always the risk of the discussion's ceasing, becoming dull or unproductive. The precarity and unpredictability of the process expresses the dimension of 'dispersion.' At the same time, we reiterate our philosophical positions, knowledge, understandings. There is an evident repetition—the constancy of references, styles, themes, and vocabularies. It can be referred to a manifestation of 'regularity.' All in all, depending on the overall unfolding context of the thread, the meaning of our posts may shift. The modification of the evolving whole of a 'statement' and the continuous reconfiguration of its parts mutually influence one another. The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves.

My apologies, my question should have been phrased: "what would be an example of a philosophy that does "need an external, transcendent organizing principle," to explain beings? I wasn't really sure what the counterexample was supposed to be.

The thread example is interesting. Our threads involve the intersection of many actors with different aims, and this is precisely how some philosophers define "chance/fortune." However, I am not sure if this works as well for something like say, my replacing my mother-in-law's side view mirror or assembling some IKEA furniture for here, or the development of a duck to maturity, etc.

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves. — Number2018

I think that coherence comes first from emotions. You don't grieve the death of an assemblage. It's that unique person you miss.

time? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Proper time? Seems to be dependent upon motion and vice versa. And nothing like ye olde absolute time exists right.

paths — Count Timothy von Icarus

Seems an ambiguous reference. A mountain path can change.

but does what it mean to be a path constantly shift, — Count Timothy von Icarus

I know very well what you intend with the question, but I don't want to play ball with the assumptions regarding concepts and essences it comes with. If you could flesh out what it means for you for a meaning to be fixed I'll play ball though.

then that sentence is no guarantee of anything — Count Timothy von Icarus

Willing to bite the bullet in your terms. I don't believe there is an "absolute" guarantee of anything, the fundament is always relative to the task. The fundament of our life is Earth, everything on it depends upon the Earth's existence in plenty of small ways. A meteor is irrelevant. Unless that meteor will collide with it. In which case the fundament shifts.

But I'd also disagree in my terms, relative fixity is more than enough of a guarantee. It works for the mountain and the mountain trail, and it works for our word meanings. Even though we know they change over time we can still speak and understand each other, partly because the word meanings change slower than the speech acts which use them.

Okay, thanks for the clarifications. — Leontiskos

No bother. I try to be as direct as possible so that people can disagree with me substantively.

What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). — Leontiskos

Yeah. My impression is that you're imagining infinite semiosis, coupled with the idea that material stuff can count as signs? I think assemblage theory is a bit like that, but it also departs very strongly from it. To my knowledge, signification in assemblage theory is a particular flavour of process, there are others. Lots of processes contain signifiers, which can link in with others {smoke => fire, when someone may infer it}, they are signifying to begin with {like a conversation}, or alternatively they're mixed {like a conversation to manage the development on a building site, which contains various things to fix which signify required actions...}.

Another big departure from Aristotle's view of the world - at least on assemblage theory's own terms - is Aristotle's habit of hierarchically organising categories into genus, species and differentia through conceptual distinctions. The equivalent of categories in assemblage theory are fungible, and the hierarchical organisation principles aren't strictly based on type-subtype relations {or they don't have to be}, it's more based around functional parts arranged in a modular fashion. An indicative phenomenon for that perspective might be a kidney transplant, which takes two entities {damaged kidney to be replaced, replacement kidney} with material differences {they're not the same kidney} but equivalent functions {what kidneys do} on the level of the body's self regulation. No material substratum is needed to reconcile, or render compatible, that manipulation, only a check of functional equivalence - or really, functional substitutability. Does the new kidney work in the old one's place.

Which is probably very unintuitive if you're not used to thinking of it in that way - the new kidney is clearly not identical to the old kidney, but it's equivalent to the old kidney's old function as part of the body as an assemblage, even if there are material differences involved in all the constituent parts and those differences might even make a real difference in the real functioning of the process. Like the new kidney might be rejected.

Parsing that would be that the entity - the kidney - isn't exhausted by its current set of interactions, it also has a field of potential interactions. Above and beyond that it's singular, it's this or that kidney, and it will only ever be that one as it's the only one which was individuated as that one. It has its own entire history.

Another difference is that assemblages tend to be organised in networks rather than trees. The entities corresponding to abstractions loop around in terms of their causal flows. A worked example with addiction - the substance behaves more addictively if you've had adverse childhood experiences or a history of mental illness, both of those latter contexts are societally mediated or outright social phenomena. The consumption is also socially mediated - ritualised, consumed with friends or at parties, when the dealer's got good the best smack. The social stuff is also drug mediated, as it depends upon the addicts being repeat customers and being the demand for the business.

Complex systems of mediation are the paradigmatic object in that metaphysics. They don't "nest" very neatly at all, as soon as you start talking about one concept you tend to need to start talking about another. Because the events tend to propagate that way through the different registers of concepts. Different registers brought together into the same event sequence, a tangle. And they need to be thought together "in their own plane", in a manner true to them.

You can enter paroxysms about the sheer degree of mediation in an assemblage, and focus on mediation so hard you forget about causes entirely - and that's IMO an all too common pitfall of the approach. But "a deaf ear for context" induced by "flatness" it does not have. Its emphasis is on engineering ontologies for situations based on how they behave, a kind of descriptive metaphysics.

But it does have general themes and concepts in it, you just don't ever think "oh yeah the world is made of assemblages" like you might with a substance, or ideas. "made?", nah, "behaves like".

Some concepts are clearly so broad and so implicated in assemblages that they're worth extracting as general abstract patterns with their own principles - like matter and signification, or as generic principles that assemblages seem to work with - coupling, decoupling, dissipation , structuring into a context . There are also relevant meta principles, like you might want a word for the sort of... thingybob... matter and signification are in terms of assemblages, a "stratum".

So yes. This is an odd mix of being profoundly anti-systems building but also profoundly for systems building - yes, make arbitrary systems, go nuts, so long as they describe what's there.

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves. — Number2018

Yes. An assemblage doesn't have to make sense at all does it? It just has to work together. A "law" is a durable regularity. Some are so durable that they appear immutable, and may as well be.

How should ontological concepts work? Presumably given the complexity of reality, top-level concepts should be wide and general, and yet because of this there will be significant limitations on their explanatory power. So for Aristotle you "begin" with the concepts of act and potency (and already you have a tension between two principles rather than a unitary atom). Being broad, they explain everything and nothing. Or taken individually, half of everything and half of nothing. But then the diverse kinds of act and potency flower within each concept; the appearances do not force us outside of the basic, broad concepts (unless one wants to see the interaction of act and potency as a third sort of thing, which apokrisis may be able to speak to). If not everything is a nail, then the top-level explanations must be able to generically accommodate a large variety of diverse phenomena. — Leontiskos

Aristotle is a systems guy and the systems answer is always triadic. This thread seems another example of how everyone arrives at some dichotomy – as symmetries must be broken to create realities – and then either tries to be reductionist and treat only one arm of the dichotomy as "the fundamental reality", or instead knows how to go on and see how that which gets forcefully separated is then also that which gets freely mixed. From the duality of the dichotomy flows the triadicity of the hierarchy. You get some pair of complementary limits on Being, and then the space of concrete possibility that those limits create.

It is like how black and white are the extremes of luminance that then bring with them all the possible shades of grey. You don't have anything until you have that possibility of a symmetry-breaking contrast – the first action of being a little lighter and so equally, a little less dark. And then from there, you have a division that can grow in scalefree fashion. You can keep going towards a state of absolute brightness ... to the degree you are continuing to go away from the counter-possibility of absolute darkness.

Neither black nor white are primary. Indeed, as absolute bounds, neither is realisable as a state of being as to arrive at either destination would mean losing all contact with the other that must be being measurably left behind in the rear view mirror. So an actual reduction to one or other state is impossible. It is the antithetical relation between the two – the actualisation of a world with this particular structure of contrast - which is what a reality is founded upon. It is the emergence of a concrete middle of all the possible shades of grey which winds up as the place we all want to talk about.

This is clearer in Aristotle's hylomorphism than being~becoming as we have the hierarchical sandwich of potential, actual and necessary. There is "material" possibility that interacts with the formal cause of structural necessity. What physics now calls the interaction of quantum indeterminacy and topological order. And out of that interaction between the randomness of action, and the need for it to become at least statistically organised as a global attractor, you get the substantiality that ontology seeks. You get a system where global constraints emerge and a free potential is shaped into some set of concrete "degrees of freedom". All the shades of grey that white and black paint can mix. All the fundamental particles that can exist as localised excitations under the constraints of gauge symmetry breaking.

So always our inquiry into the nature of Nature is going to arrive at the central logic of symmetry-breaking. Some kind of dialectical divide where the "everythingness" of an unformed potential begins to grow a self-grounding split. It will start to head in one direction – the apparent "primal act" or fluctuation – and that in itself is already the co-creation of whatever can count as the other direction it is then leaving behind. Thesis and antithesis is revealed as soon as there is any "act" at all.

So the symmetry that gets broken is the potential. The act that breaks it is already in fact a self-grounding relation. The background on which the mark is being made is being made along with the mark. And then the broken symmetry is where all this has got past being just a fluctuation and become the wholeness of a growing system, kept alive by its own capacity for a persistent dynamical balance.

A whorl of turbulence spins up into existence and wants to keep growing. It turns a laminar flow into a rotational flow. If it keeps growing, it both gets larger and also starts to break up into the scalefree complexity of a chaotic turbulence. There is a phase transition where all the smooth laminar flow is lost and the stream is just every shade of vortical motion. The action achieves its most extreme state of asymmetry. Not just a little bit different as one passing knot of turbulence but as much difference as the world of the flow can contain.

This is the fractal distribution of matter and energy that best characterises Nature. We see it in the Cosmic Web. It is the new "better" explanation for dark energy. Symmetry gets broken. Potency gives expression to its primal act - a Planck-scale fluctuation. But then that act isn't complete until it has grown to be expressed across all possible scales of being. As a division of figure and ground, it has to become a universalised motif – the gravitationally swirling structure that is vortexes of material dissipation over all scales from spinning stars and black holes out to galactic clusters and beyond.

So actuality arises out of the interaction between material potential – the possibility of an action with a direction – and structural necessity. The constraints that must emerge once every kind of action is trying to actualise itself and so cancelling away most of the other available possibilities. There is a contest and some statistically-constrained regime emerges as the global state of the system. All that remains in terms of the local action are the shades of grey or fundamental particles that are permitted by the self-grounding system. The world that has grown itself in a free way that expresses its central organising dichotomy over a hierarchy of all dimensional scales.

What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). He ends up using different language to say the same essential thing. — Leontiskos

A key difference would be that Peirce makes formal cause clearly immanent rather than leaving it sounding transcendent. You don't need an outside mind imposing a design that is "good". The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. There is an optimising principle at work. But it is self-grounding. It is whatever is left after all else has got cancelled away because it didn't really work.

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

Assemblage theory is another way of talking about dissipative structure theory – the naturalness of fractal or scalefree hierarchical organisation. It is for good reason the flattest ontology as it just is the simplest statistical pattern that Nature could be organised by.

Nature – as a flow of entropy – is organised by its information, its boundary constraints. And the simplest state of such a flow – the one requiring the least information to be stored – is one of open log/log fractal growth. Mountains and coastlines are fractal structures as they represent a dynamical balance of accumulation and erosion over a wide hierarchy of spatiotemporal scales.

Every point of a landscape is either a little more built up or a little more broken down than its immediate neighbourhood. From there, it can either become a little more like or unlike that local context. Revert to the norm or become more exceptional. Repeat that easy to remember/low information distinction over all scales – from minutes and inches to eons and continents – and you get a fractally-organised world.

Clouds and ducks don't look much alike, so you have to show how they can both be accounted for ("generated" perhaps), how using the same underlying mechanisms can produce endless forms most beautiful. — Srap Tasmaner

If dissipative structure is the flat ontology of Nature – one based on the ur-dichotomy of entropy~information – then we can account for life and mind as another step on top of that where the information regulating the dissipation is moved to be inside an organism rather than standing out at the global boundaries of the physics as a whole.

So organisms arose when they stumbled across the further trick of encoding information using genes, neurons, words and numbers. Organisms could form semiotic models of their world as they might wish it to be. They could mechanically switch the entropy flows to construct their bodies and even their local environments. Bacteria brought about the Gaian revolution of a world with a carbon cycle, steady temperature and a high oxygen level simply by being able to encode the right metabolic algorithms. So even a little coding power could completely remake the chemistry of a whole planet, bringing it under the control of the desires of its biology to have its optimum growth conditions.

Does metaphysics get this fact? Well, it seems to lag well behind the science. In principle, life and mind just are expressions of the generalised cosmic desire to optimise dissipation. The Cosmos does its best but is hampered by the fact that all the information handling the dissipation is as distributed about the environment as it can get. The Cosmos operates at its simplest level - the flatness of assemblage theory (as another name for the Prigogine's dissipative structure science). But life and mind arose to take advantage of that flat ground to become its own hierarchy of semiosis – of encoded dissipation regulation – that could grow vastly more complex.

So the same dichotomy is at the root. Entropy~information. But information moved from the generality of some statistical erosion~accumulation pattern formation to an organismic self-model which started making things happen in an agential goal-oriented sense.

Disorder only ever existed in the context of order. And biology is part of Nature because it applies more order to the business of disordering. In some ways it is causally very different. In the larger way, it is more of the same, just a way to put some greater distance between sources and sinks. The information is packaged and its resulting waste more widely dispersed.

From the duality of the dichotomy flows the triadicity of the hierarchy. You — apokrisis

What a Beautiful statement. I mean that Aesthetically, and only in that sense (the aesthetic sense of the term, not the Aesthetic sense of the "word"). I just love the musicality that those words have. I would, of course, add a fourth element there (just as a hypothetical suggestion):

From the triadicity of the hierarchy, flows the fourthness of the transfinite landscape.

That phrase, though dubious from a semantic standpoint, sounds rather "pleasing" to the ear, objectively speaking. Why? Because it combines a "modern" tone, that of "transfinite sets", as in the work of Cantor. Yet, the former part (the antecedent) sounds more "ancient", somehow. Well, of course, triadic thinking is essential to both Christianity as well as Taoism. But you see, that duplicity, -Christianity and Taoism -does not drain the "metaphysical Well", so to speak, in the manner of a poet. There is Freedom in Subjectivity, is there Freedom in Objectivity? If so, in what sense?

And the answer to that question, my friend, is the following:

In an absolute sense. The "intent" of it, if you want to call it that, is both "realist" and "royalist". Such matters cannot be avoided, for they are the literal semantics of the very word, "absolute". Yet, -and please don't laugh-, millions of people worldwide, everyday, get drunk on some cheep alcohol called "Absolute Vodka". How funny, right mate? That's the kind of joke that Zizek would make.

Except he wouldn't. He doesn't dare to. People, generally speaking, think he is extremely provocative. He isn't. Real Wars are provocative. Except that they are not. War is not something to be Glorified: there is no Honor in Violence. That does not mean that violence should be committed: it should, under the just circumstances. Otherwise, you aren't speaking of justice, but of something else, and that is where, through the process of Dialectical Analysis, not Dialectical Synthesis (as a Hegelian would), you arrive at the reductionist (and false) dichotomy of only two options at this juncture. And if you pursue that road, you end up, again, by analysis, at solipsism. Proceed one more step, and now you are about as aware as a rock: you have removed Firstness, you have removed your Physical First Person Perspective on the world, and it just seems like "A Thing, In Itself".

But it just seems that way, mate. That is no indication of what it actually is. Want to call it something? Call it "Tao", like Lao Tzu did. Who cares? Call it Nature, call it Absolute Spirit: It is there, and it is not you. And now, Understand that fact.

One of the side issues with seeing entities as aggregates is the way we pick out what it is that "contains' the parts. It could be:

1. innate (since we know navigation capability is innate to some extent, maybe the ability to divide the world up in a certain way is also innate).

2. Socially mediated (for some things maybe)

3. Because Plato was right and we're perceiving particular manifestations of Forms :grimace: )


Other possibilities? @apokrisis is right that this is a thesis, antithesis, synthesis situation.

One of the side issues with seeing entities as aggregates is the way we pick out what it is that "contains' the parts. It could be: — frank

But are "parts" really any different from the "part" that contains those "parts"? Does this question really need an answer? Is there even any definitive sense into how "parts" are divided or aggregate into more "parts" that we uphold all the time or even any of the time? I am not sure I think so. We notice distinctions and similarities in our sensory landscape which are multiplicitious, overlapping, redundant.

Does this question really need an answer? — Apustimelogist

YES DAMMIT! Just kidding. It probably doesn't need an answer.

But are "parts" really any different from the "part" that contains those "parts"? Does this question really need an answer? Is there even any definitive sense into how "parts" are divided or aggregate into more "parts" that we uphold all the time or even any of the time? I am not sure I think so. We notice distinctions and similarities in our sensory landscape which are multiplicitious, overlapping, redundant. — Apustimelogist

Hi, allow me to say something about that: there is a sense in which we should not mix up two very different meaning of the very word "part", for it has a mereological sense, as well as a metaphysical sense. In the former case, you are debating mereology: the domain of philosophy that studies the part-whole relation. In the latter case, you are debating metaphysics of ordinary objects: the domain of metaphysics in the Analytic Tradition that is concerned with the being and the existence of ordinary objects and extra-ordinary objects.

I'm not sure I see where you're going with this.

↪Arcane Sandwich

I'm not sure I see where you're going with this. — Apustimelogist

I'm not going anywhere with it, I'm just trying to see if we can reach a common understanding, by slightly enforcing the rules of language. If not, then I will stop.

Thanks for that. I am short on time and I actually don't know that much about assemblage theory, so let's look at your example:

An indicative phenomenon for that perspective might be a kidney transplant, which takes two entities {damaged kidney to be replaced, replacement kidney} with material differences {they're not the same kidney} but equivalent functions {what kidneys do} on the level of the body's self regulation. No material substratum is needed to reconcile, or render compatible, that manipulation, only a check of functional equivalence - or really, functional substitutability. Does the new kidney work in the old one's place.

Which is probably very unintuitive if you're not used to thinking of it in that way - the new kidney is clearly not identical to the old kidney, but it's equivalent to the old kidney's old function as part of the body as an assemblage, even if there are material differences involved in all the constituent parts and those differences might even make a real difference in the real functioning of the process. Like the new kidney might be rejected. — fdrake

This strikes me as an odd example, because if a duck is not a substance then I don't think organ transplants make sense. Organ transplants exemplify the part/whole relation of organisms, which is different from the part-whole relation of aggregates.

Regarding the bolded, the material substratum that is needed seems to be the living body that the kidney is regulating. This is the thing that it "might be rejected" by. Without that substratum an organ transplant is a non-starter.

Another big departure from Aristotle's view of the world - at least on assemblage theory's own terms - is Aristotle's habit of hierarchically organising categories into genus, species and differentia through conceptual distinctions. The equivalent of categories in assemblage theory are fungible, and the hierarchical organisation principles aren't strictly based on type-subtype relations {or they don't have to be}, it's more based around functional parts arranged in a modular fashion. — fdrake

I think genus/species is plenty fungible, but the key for Aristotle is that without the form of intermediation represented by such a thing, one would be incapable of identification or categorization. So if Aristotle is right then the assemblage theorist will be as indebted to genus/species orderings as anyone else.

As demonstrates, Aristotle can be quite flexible. Hearkening back to the OP, I think we are asking whether behavior-modeling is sufficient to account for things like ducks. And the foil of the OP is "questions of being," the meaning of which we haven't tried to mete out. How do we reorient the discussion back to that original topic? It sounds like you want to say that the difference between a noun and a verb is accidental or a matter of degree. Everything is in a state of irretrievable change, it's just that some things are decaying/corrupting more quickly than other things? Substance-identity is ephemeral?

(If so, I think the particular part of Aristotle you're concerned with is the distinction between organic wholes and accidental wholes, or the idea that the most proper substances are biological organisms.)

---

A key difference would be that Peirce makes formal cause clearly immanent rather than leaving it sounding transcendent. You don't need an outside mind imposing a design that is "good". The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. There is an optimising principle at work. But it is self-grounding. It is whatever is left after all else has got cancelled away because it didn't really work. — apokrisis

Thanks for this and for the generous post. I hope to come back to some of these points.

Proper time? Seems to be dependent upon motion and vice versa. And nothing like ye olde absolute time exists right.

The same issue applies to "motion" and "change."

If you could flesh out what it means for you for a meaning to be fixed I'll play ball though.

Lets not jump to "meaning is fixed," I'm just saying something must stay the same.

But I'd also disagree in my terms, relative fixity is more than enough of a guarantee. It works for the mountain and the mountain trail, and it works for our word meanings. Even though we know they change over time we can still speak and understand each other, partly because the word meanings change slower than the speech acts which use them.

But what's backing this aside from blind faith or assertion of "usefulness"? And fixity relative to what? Because, in the "pragmatism all the way down" camp you also have plenty of ideas like the "cognitive relativism" reading of Wittgenstein, where translation between different cultures, cognitive communities, etc. is essentially impossible. On some views, this basically amounts to people living in different worlds (strangely, pretty much recreating the Cartesian skepticism Wittgenstein was trying to avoid, only now on the level of "language communities" - which one can never really tell if they are actually a part of). This isn't even the most radical of these sorts of claims either.

IDK, it strikes me as a weird sort of double standard. We cannot have metaphysics because it must be held to standards of "absolute certainty," as if it isn't possible to question essentially anything (sincerely or not), but then once you take the leap into "pragmatism all the way down," it's fine to stop at whatever is "useful." But of course the advocates of sui generis "Aryan physics" or "feminist epistemologies" claim their categorization is extremely useful. If there is no truth of the matter, then you just have a slide into plurality. Aryan physics and socialist genetics are plenty useful by the terms of their own advocates.

To my mind, the key issue here is that you have to ask: "is it really useful?" Or "really most useful?" Because, it seems fairly obvious that we can believe that something is useful, choiceworthy, etc. and then later discover that we have been mistaken. This is a ubiquitous human experience. And presumably, there is some truth of the matter about what we shall immanently regret prior to the moment we start to regret it. Likewise, it does not seem that all ways of describing the world are equally correct.

This is an odd mix of being profoundly anti-systems building but also profoundly for systems building - yes, make arbitrary systems, go nuts, so long as they describe what's there.

That's pretty much saying "make arbitrary systems, so long as they aren't actually arbitrary."

Another big departure from Aristotle's view of the world - at least on assemblage theory's own terms - is Aristotle's habit of hierarchically organising categories into genus, species and differentia through conceptual distinctions. The equivalent of categories in assemblage theory are fungible, and the hierarchical organisation principles aren't strictly based on type-subtype relations {or they don't have to be}, it's more based around functional parts arranged in a modular fashion.

This seems to be looking at species and genera more as the later "calcified logical entities."

IDK, it strikes me as a weird sort of double standard. We cannot have metaphysics — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't believe that. Instead I believe avoiding metaphysics is a great hypocrisy, as every philosophy has metaphysical commitments - the question is whether they're explicit about it or not.

That's pretty much saying "make arbitrary systems, so long as they aren't actually arbitrary." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why?

But what's backing this aside from blind faith or assertion of "usefulness"? And fixity relative to what? — Count Timothy von Icarus

A background? Like a mountain is fixed relative to a path on it. I don't mean this facetiously, what type of ground do you think is required of a philosophy? And why is it required to be that?

I don't think any unique ground is necessary, even if some grounding is necessary for each context. Do you believe there is a unique, correct ground to do philosophy from? Or a metaphysical structure of the universe? Why, and what is it?

I don't mean these facetiously either. I can understand disagreeing with my points, but we're currently disputing whether fixity relative to X makes sense, I gave you an example where it did. It seems to me you're saying that there needs to be a unique ground of things in order to provide a satisfying answer to your question - am I right in that?

To my mind, the key issue here is that you have to ask: "is it really useful?" Or "really most useful?" Because, it seems fairly obvious that we can believe that something is useful, choiceworthy, etc. and then later discover that we have been mistaken. This is a ubiquitous human experience. And presumably, there is some truth of the matter about what we shall immanently regret prior to the moment we start to regret it. Likewise, it does not seem that all ways of describing the world are equally correct. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. I agree.

This seems to be looking at species and genera more as the later "calcified logical entities." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Ex-post-facto logical entities that have good explanatory and descriptive power, but are not baked into the structure of the universe. Though they may be characteristic features of some assemblages. Like the flow of organisms organised into a cladistic tree, splitting based on presence or absence of traits.

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it really the preservation of pure identity over time that we need in order to benefit from a concept of truth, or is it inferential compatibility, the understandability of something on the basis of recognizability, likeness and harmony with respect to something else?

Is it really the preservation of pure identity over time that we need in order to benefit from a concept of truth, or is it inferential compatibility, the understandability of something on the basis of recognizability, likeness and harmony with respect to something else? — Joshs

Predication handles recognition, likeness, etc. The way predication works is that the potentially transient properties of an object are specified. The object has to be held as unchanging relative to the properties.

For instance when I say the wax has melted, the wax has to be temporally stable. If it's not, then the wax has ceased to exist. Therefore it can't have melted.

Why?

I'll follow up on the rest later, but your original remark was: "This is an odd mix of being profoundly anti-systems building but also profoundly for systems building - yes, make arbitrary systems, go nuts, so long as they describe what's there."

Now, to my mind, this denotes one of two things:

A. You have to accurately (perhaps more or less so) describe "what's there." This, by definition, isn't arbitrary. The model, description, etc. has to be, in some sense, adequate. Presumably it can be more or less adequate. But this to me seems right in line with the idea of truth as "the adequacy of intellect to being."

B. A. doesn't hold if any system qualifies for "describing what's there," and all do so equally well. I assume this is not what you intended, but correct me if I am wrong. I think a host of issues crop up with B.

To my mind, this is a bit like Tolstoy's remark at the opening of Anna Karenina, that: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." One might allow that there are "many ways to be right," while still allowing that there appears to be "always very many more ways to be wrong."

Now, the issue of "fixity" shows up if there is nothing at all stable about what constitutes being "more or less adequate." Perhaps adequacy can vary (although, personally, I think that in an important sense it does not), but it cannot vary without any rhyme or reason (i.e. some regularity that "stays the same") to it, else we are essentially in scenario B above, since what constitutes "adequacy" is inaccessible.

Yes. Ex-post-facto logical entities that have good explanatory and descriptive power, but are not baked into the structure of the universe

Yes, but genera aren't supposed to be ex-post-facto logical entities. Genera are the result of their being principles. If there are no principles, then I am not sure how there can be knowledge.

From the Aristotle thread J started:

A second interesting point is that falsity, and knowledge, need to involve universals. If we just invented a sui generis term for each particular, we could never be wrong about our predication. If I say, particular102939940204 is term24828920299202, and term24828920299202 only applies to that particular (perhaps in that moment), then I cannot be wrong about it. Falsity only shows up when we judge that x is y, but x can fail to actually be y. Borges' short story "Funes the Memorious" plays around with the problems, and ultimate incoherence, of seeing all particulars as only particulars.

This is closely related to the epistemic issues related to the One and the Many. One cannot come to know any % of an (effectively) infinite number of causes/particulars in a finite time. We're dividing by infinity here. So here too, knowledge has to deal with overarching principles, Ones that apply to a Many.

But I think we do have discursive knowledge. Therefore principles must exist. Whereas, the skeptic, who thinks we never have knowledge, faces a number of issues. First, they cannot know that their claim is true, or even that their reasoning about the issue is good. However, I think the larger issue is that one cannot have an appearance/reality distinction without having both appearances and reality. So, on the view that "everything is just appearances," then appearances are just reality.

Yet, as we both seem to agree, we can, and often are, wrong about things. There appears to be "facts of the matter" outside belief and appearance.

if there is nothing at all stable — Count Timothy von Icarus

At the very beginning of this thread, I suggested that if you asked a "deflationist" "What is the being of a duck?", he would find the question incomprehensible, and if you asked it of a "model-builder", he would describe various duck behaviors, in a very broad sense, including how duck tastes. If you insisted you didn't mean any of that, he would stare blankly at you.

I think, @Count Timothy von Icarus, you've landed in a similar place. When it is suggested that the world may only exhibit relative and local stability, you find this unimaginable, incomprehensible. Yes, you're giving arguments in support of your view, but the point of those arguments is only that something else you find unimaginable and incomprehensible would be the case.

Now, if no one could imagine such a thing, we might feel ourselves on safer ground claiming, this just doesn't make sense, or this is against all reason. But in this case, you are disputing @fdrake's view, things he is actually saying. That might give you pause. Your position would have to be that @fdrake does not actually understand the position he claims to and claims to advocate, but not by arguing from a position of superior knowledge, that is, that this is something you understand and that's how you know he doesn't ― you don't have direct knowledge that he doesn't; you believe no one can, from which you infer that @fdrake can't, and finally that he doesn't. Okay. But how will you manage the inference from "I haven't make sense of this" to "No one can make sense of this"?

Predication handles recognition, likeness, etc. The way predication works is that the potentially transient properties of an object are specified.

The object has to be held as unchanging relative to the properties.

For instance when I say the wax has melted, the wax has to be temporally stable. If it's not, then the wax has ceased to exist. Therefore it can't have melted — frank

But prior to the use of predication, perception handles recognition and likeness. Predication is just an abstractive invention tacked onto perception. Just because predication may require an unchanging nature relative to properties, this does not mean that perception does. Perception recognizes ‘unchanging’ objected all the time, even though built into the recognition is that this self-persistence is only relative self-persistence, a way of continuing to be the same slightly differently. Recognizing sameness over time as inferential compatibility is optimally useful, whereas the propositional requirement of absolute unchangingness leads to confusions and the appearance of contradictions and incompatibilities.

Words are meaningful only when we put them to work. Repeat a word over and over again and it gradually loses all sense of meaning. We understand propositions as meaningful not because of but in spite of our presupposing them to be dealing with an unchanging identity. Wittgenstein describes the notion of changeless repetition as language on holiday or an engine idling.

“..the very attempt to achieve a clear view of matters by suspending usage renders them opaque, like shining light on a developing picture. This is what Wittgenstein means by his famous claim that “the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.”

“…detaching a phenomenon from absorbed activity drains it of the meaning that flows through it while knitted into its language-game. It is this shriveled, barren husk of meaning that seems strikingly incapable of generating vibrant communication. Instead of a profound discovery about language or meaning or thought, however, this is just an odd fact about us, like the way repeating a word over and over again (“noodle, noodle, noodle . . .”) reduces it to a thick senseless sound. It offers no secret insight into the profound workings of anything, except the folly of philosophy. (Lee Braver on Wittgenstein)

But prior to the use of predication, perception handles recognition and likeness. — Joshs

Just to make sure we're on the same page, I'd like to relate a story:

I draw and paint, so I'm used to surveying my visual field without judgement about what the objects are. Those judgments interfere because it's like my brain already knows what a tree looks like, and it wants my hand to draw that stock image instead of what's actually in front of me. I divorce identity from perception and all I see is shapes, light and dark, a cascade of colors.

Once while doing this, it occurred to me to wonder what in my visual field tells me that this is a tree. It was one of the biggest philosophical moments of my life when I realized the answer was: nothing. There is nothing in those sights and sounds that says: "tree." I realized that tree is an organizing idea. It's not something I learned about through sense data. The idea of the tree is like an invisible nucleus with orbiting properties. This is all phenomenology. I'm not explaining how the world really is, but just how I experience it. So all I can say is that I don't recognize, detect likeness, etc. through sensation, but maybe you do? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "perception"?

I think what you're saying is that we choose a frame of reference and declare a certain spot to be unchanging (like the horizon). I agree that we do this reflexively, but the awareness that fiat is involved is purely intellectual. There's nothing in perception that lets us know that the horizon isn't really stationary.

A. You have to accurately (perhaps more or less so) describe "what's there." This, by definition, isn't arbitrary. The model, description, etc. has to be, in some sense, adequate. Presumably it can be more or less adequate. But this to me seems right in line with the idea of truth as "the adequacy of intellect to being." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're right. The state of things isn't arbitrary. It's very flexible. There are lots of things with lots of structures. Assemblage is a generic term for such a structure. Any particular assemblage will have a structure. Even if assemblages in general have no general laws.

A description of how things are can be more or less adequate. We agree that there are more or less adequate accounts of how stuff is, and we agree that metaphysics is alright. Shouldn't that give you pause? You're arguing against a perspective I don't hold, nor have I advocated for.

Now, the issue of "fixity" shows up if there is nothing at all stable about what constitutes being "more or less adequate." Perhaps adequacy can vary (although, personally, I think that in an important sense it does not), but it cannot vary without any rhyme or reason (i.e. some regularity that "stays the same") to it, else we are essentially in scenario B above, since what constitutes "adequacy" is inaccessible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you're interpreting me as committed to a relativist "everything goes all the time" approach. I am not. I doubt any sensible person is. Connecting "absolute" fixity to the possibility of adequate descriptions is something you're positing, not me. And that needs to be argued for on its own terms. Why is it the case?

Compare that to a model of discursive knowledge based on something closer to an equilibrium of truth seeking norms - negotiated conditions of correct assertibility. If you want me to put it in metaphysical terms, you can describe an assemblage adequately when an assemblage of knowledge production can couple with the other assemblage in a discursive fashion that satisfies the norms of correct assertibility.

I think where you're coming from has a certain alignment of One Methodology and One Metaphysics. "Functionalism all the way down" has a similar alignment - of a methodological pluralism and a circumscription of ontologies to contexts. Even if some contexts are really expansive.

So when you're reading me as performatively contradicting myself, or committed myself to logical contradictions, I'm just going to read that as you projecting your own presuppositions onto me. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to make that move so long as you're following One Methodology One Metaphysics.

And I think the views and criticisms you've made have merit, of course. But allow me to make a similar move - I can see that your views and criticisms have merit, and a scope of application, because the philosophical paradigm {as it were} I'm sympathetic to has a great deal of room in it for alterity. Whereas your instinct seems to be to rebuke this. Even though we both agree {act as if there is} on there being a structural symmetry between the metaphysics stuff we're saying and the methodology stuff we're saying. The father's house has many rooms.

So yes. Of course you're going to read me as contradicting myself, and maybe I am, but the ones I've seen you point out are contradictions based on your presuppositions of how things work. And not mine.

The father's house has many rooms. — fdrake

Hi, @fdrake, can I ask for some clarification here, please? That's a biblical phrase (it's John 14:2), specifically. What did you mean by that, when you used that phrase in the context of your latest post? Thanks in advance, and please feel free to ignore this comment if what I'm asking is trivial.

Now, if no one could imagine such a thing, we might feel ourselves on safer ground claiming, this just doesn't make sense, or this is against all reason. But in this case, you are disputing @fdrake's view, things he is actually saying. That might give you pause. Your position would have to be that @fdrake does not actually understand the position he claims to and claims to advocate, but not by arguing from a position of superior knowledge, that is, that this is something you understand and that's how you know he doesn't ― you don't have direct knowledge that he doesn't; you believe no one can, from which you infer that @fdrake can't, and finally that he doesn't. Okay. But how will you manage the inference from "I haven't make sense of this" to "No one can make sense of this"?

But that isn't what I've claimed at all. I understand what is speaking to with the idea of mountains and paths. That's all well and good. What I am pointing out is that if everything is mutable, and there are no regularities or anything which "stays the same" by which to judge things, then what follows is that theses like "cognitive relativism," radical misology, claims that no description of reality can be more or less accurate/adequate and that we can essentially never be wrong about our beliefs all follow.

I think is on pretty solid ground with his naturalistic examples. That only makes sense. Philosophy of nature, physics, is the study of mobile/changing being. The whole point of positing "natures" is to explain change.

But a blanket rejection of all stability is essentially a rejection of reason tout court, since there is nothing stable about what counts as good reason. For instance, someone of a more post-modern persuasion might want to take 's account a good deal further.

They might, for the moment, grant that mountains are relatively stable. But, anything said about them is said in language, using concepts. And they will say that these are not stable. Aren't there various, differing indigenous notions of time?The cyclical and spiritual times of the ancients and medievals, etc. And aren't language and concepts constantly changing, and not like mountains, but rapidly, varying from era to era, culture to culture, and person to person. So too, what counts as a "good model" or "adequacy" will be subject to all this variability.

And from this we reach the conclusion of B above, that it there is no sense in which any description of or beliefs about reality can be more or less correct than any other. At best, they can be more or less correct relative to some arbitrary frame (perhaps as defined by cultural values, but it could just as well be the individual).

No doubt, we might want to reject this. On what grounds? Barring an appeal to something in virtue of which we can be more or less correct, we simply are making our own disparate, parallel claims to "usefulness." These claims end up being bare assertions however, with no way to decide between them, hence the reduction of all of philosophy and politics to power relations. That or we end up with "bourgeois metaphysics," where tolerance is the only virtue. Anything can be "true" so long as it allows anything else to be.

We had a thread on this earlier back: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15023/the-unity-of-dogmatism-and-relativism/p1

My position would be that extreme forms of relativism (for no doubt, relativism is quite supportable in less extreme forms) essentially reduce to a sort of dogmatism, and sort of misology.

But, if one does think there are standards of good reasoning, then the fact that extreme sorts of relativism are straight-forwardly self-refuting is indeed a problem. They can be, at best, "true" relative to the speakers own relative context.

Hi, fdrake, can I ask for some clarification here, please? That's a biblical phrase (it's John 14:2), specifically. What did you mean by that, when you used that phrase in the context of your latest post? Thanks in advance, and please feel free to ignore this comment if what I'm asking is trivial. — Arcane Sandwich

Mostly I'm needling {what I see as} @Count Timothy von Icarus''s insistence on a single way of doing philosophy as clearly, but unstatedly, Christian. And I'm needling with that phrase as it's sometimes used as biblical support for Christian religious pluralism. Considering the underlying dispute between our dear Count and I in this thread, as I see it, is between an expansive form of pluralism in metaphysics and epistemology {me} and a thoroughly singular Aristotelian+Christian worldview {the Count}, it seemed appropriate.

Mostly I'm needling {what I see as} Count Timothy von Icarus''s insistence on a single way of doing philosophy as clearly, but unstatedly, Christian. And I'm needling with that phrase as it's sometimes used as biblical support for Christian religious pluralism. Considering the underlying dispute between our dear Count and I in this thread, as I see it, is between an expansive form of pluralism in metaphysics and epistemology {me} and a thoroughly singular Aristotelian+Christian worldview {the Count}, it seemed appropriate. — fdrake

Thank you very much for your thoughtful response, @fdrake.

A description of how things are can be more or less adequate. We agree that there are more or less adequate accounts of how stuff is, and we agree that metaphysics is alright. Shouldn't that give you pause? You're arguing against a perspective I don't hold, nor have I advocated for.

Well, we have a rather severe case of miscommunication here, because I don't think I've tried to ascribe these beliefs to you at all. What I've been trying to point out is rather what I think is necessary in order to have a response to extreme relativism. My question is: "what's you're response?"

To simply reply "I don't feel that is a very useful way of looking at things," just courts the reply "well I do."

Mostly I'm needling {what I see as} @Count Timothy von Icarus''s insistence on a single way of doing philosophy as clearly, but unstatedly, Christian. And I'm needling with that phrase as it's sometimes used as biblical support for Christian religious pluralism. Considering the underlying dispute between our dear Count and I in this thread, as I see it, is between an expansive form of pluralism in metaphysics and epistemology {me} and a thoroughly singular Aristotelian+Christian worldview {the Count}, it seemed appropriate.

I have no idea where you've gathered that. I have been very broad in my generalization. In order to combat the pernicious forms of relativism, I am simply saying that not everything and anything can be relative.

I think you're interpreting me as committed to a relativist "everything goes all the time" approach. I am not. I doubt any sensible person is.

Again, not at all. What I have been pushing you on is how you can respond to people who do maintain that such views are a consequence of everything being relative. BTW, this itself is also an absolute statement. To claim that "everything is relative and mutable" is no less absolute than claiming "some things are not relative and mutable."

Connecting "absolute" fixity to the possibility of adequate descriptions is something you're positing, not me. And that needs to be argued for on its own terms. Why is it the case?

I've made my argument for this. Feel free to respond to it. I don't think I have made any assertions related to "One Methodology," and certainly none related to the need for philosophy to be Christian. This is, TBH, a bad miscommunication on my part, or misreading on yours. Is the assumption that the only options are methodological monism, and a sort of Christian fundamentalism, a "One True X" or else "everything is relative?"

Anyhow, as noted above, a denial of any "One True..." is as absolute as the claim that such a thing does exist. I hardly think there could be anything like a "One True Methodology," but I do think there will be something all good methodologies share.

But this isn't what I've argued for at all. I have repeated "there are many ways to be (more or less) correct," many times, and that there are many ways to do this or to reach correct descriptions, models, etc.