This is why I think rejecting the reality of types also entails rejecting the reality of particulars, insofar as even particulars already belong to the order of types (and vice versa!). — StreetlightX

Right, this is why dismissing the predicate would be a mistake for any ontology. It breaks down the categorical division between the object (particular), and what the object is doing (universal). What follows is the appearance of vagueness, and the illusion that vagueness has real ontic status, when the vagueness is really just due to this sloppy use of language. As I described, this is very evident in the concept of "energy".

It breaks down the categorical division between the object (particular), and what the object is doing (universal). — Metaphysician Undercover

Good. The best possible outcome.

I must be real bad today, the worst, I actually got a reply from you.

Sellars's own students Paul Churchland and Alex Rosenberg appear to have inherited the scientistic foundationalist strand of his thinking. — Pierre-Normand

Oops... I now realize that I had Jay Rosenberg and Alex Rosenberg confused in my mind. Jay, who unfortunately passed away 10 years ago, was Sellars's student, not Alex.

I had them both correctly pegged as 'scientistic foundationalists', though. I'll say more about 'left-wing' Sellarsians (Rorty, Brandom, McDowell, Williams) versus 'right-wing' Sellarsians (Millikan, Churchland, Jay Rosenberg, Dennett, and also, I thinks, Brassier!) in another post.

I really want to read Millikan. All I know about her is that she fuses Sellars with biology in some manner and that sounds super super intriguing to me.

Also, Brassier is apparently writing a book on Sellars, altough his latest publication was on Marx, so y'know, a few plates in the air.

I don't think this follows. — StreetlightX

An excellent point. The picture of the world is part of the world. Another argument against the idea that we have a mental model that we refer to, which is distinct from the world it models.

I'm going away for a week, and I don't have time to write what I want to say, so it will have to wait until I return at which time it may no longer be relevant. Oh, well...

...at which time it may no longer be relevant. Oh, well... — Janus

Don't worry. I also often postpone responses for a long time because I want to think things though first or do some more readings about the topic. There is no harm done in resurrecting dormant threads, or revisiting an old point within a thread, with the statement of some new thought. In fact, it's better than keeping up with the flow of the discussion while expressing half-baked or knee-jerk opinions. Also, truly philosophical questions tend to retain most of their relevance for two and a half millennia or more.

Aren’t you confusing life and metaphysics? I don’t lose one by doing the other. They get to take turns.

But the boast of metaphysics is that its providing the ultimate. Everything can be explained and understood by reference to [metaphysical model]. The metaphysician may lay down his metaphysics from time to time in order to engage in life. Yet, when he takes it up again, he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. If such a claim is to be taken seriously, as the metaphysician intends it to be, then the things which he was doing un-metaphysically are things that can, in principle, be brought back into his metaphysical ambit. However he can only do so by reducing them. Yet its that very irreducibility that makes up the substance and texture of reality. The easy trick is to make the irreducible stuff the 'other' which is always-already included as other. However this stroke already misses the varied texture which is experienced as that textured variety.

[yes, but you're doing the same thing, now, with variety and texture, that your 'metaphysician' was doing with 'otherness'.]

This is the finger pointing to the moon. I can engage in that texture and variety and experience. I can, sitting at my computer, conjure up a whole host of precise, singular, memories etc. I can express these in poems and literature, through playing with friends etc etc. I *can't* do that with the other-oriented third of a triadic metaphysics. All I can do is apply that metaphysics to this or that thing where all I find is repetitions of the same pattern. I find that what I'm doing, when I do this, is a single kind of activity among many. However, this particular activity has the strange distinction of wanting to say that all the other activities are somehow linked back to this one.

My triadic approach predicts this. — apo, regarding a new and improved neo-bloomian approach

Yes, but you've missed the point of the Bloom example entirely. You asked what your approach leaves out. I used the Bloom example to point out that, given a Bloomian lens, nothing will ever be left out. It will always find that the material it looks at fits into its system, in the same way an engine will always find the same use for gasoline. But what it will lose, if it pretends to be a Literary Theory of Everything, is the poem itself. Tweaking and improving it to make it even better at leaving nothing out is...well, an anticipated response, I guess.



tldr; I think there's something askew with 'the very idea' of metaphysics. 'metaphysics,' I think, represents a useful activity ( recursive cognitive modeling) that has metastasized (other things can do this too though: religion, myth, a photographer who can only see the world as composition etc etc. Group em all together under Midas-ism)

[so romanticism then?]

Nah, I think Blake railing against the demonic mills and all that is well-within a triadic model. The Romantics qua Romantics were thoroughly infected and inflected by the dialectical. A poem about how poems are better than reason is very much prey to the sort of thing you're talking about. A poem that communicates is something else.

[so lets talk about that 'something else', then]

If I do so, on your terms, you'll always be right, because you've set down the rules. e.g. [show me, on this table, something that isn't on this table.] But now if I ask you to write a poem in response, or if I ask you do some improv with me etc.

Good point; I think that's a very good approach. I often do go off half-cocked myself, and end up saying some ill-considered things. :worry:

The metaphysician may lay down his metaphysics from time to time in order to engage in life. Yet, when he takes it up again, he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. — csalisbury

As usual, I would point out that you are treating as a bug the exact thing I would call the feature.

So for you, there is an obvious problem if one or the other is not defended as the foundational (making the other epiphenomenal or otherwise "illusory").

But I am saying that ideally, the two activities would be complementary extremes. The "doing well" would be doing both well in a reciprocally-defining fashion. So one doesn't ever have to lose sight of the other. Indeed, both knows what it is by keeping its "other" squarely in its sights.

Practically speaking, this might mean being conscious of how a learnt habit of analysis or critique can interfere with "just living life". So when one goes on holiday or to an art gallery, does one document everything with a camera, try to relate it to some wider metaphysical theme. Or instead, is there a fruitfully contrary mode of simply becoming as mindlessly immersed in the sensual experience as possible?

Can becoming more analytic foster its corollary? Or must it simply replace it?

A balanced life would be where you can live the contrasting extremes of being both on the inside and the outside in a fully expressed fashion. The best choice is always both ... to their extremes ... in an overall resulting balance.

The easy trick is to make the irreducible stuff the 'other' which is always-already included as other. However this stroke already misses the varied texture which is experienced as that textured variety. — csalisbury

Again, you have this fixation for either/or and missing my point - it is the dialectic of "possibly either/or" that leads you to the resolution, the synthesis, that is "definitely both".

So if the metaphysical pole speaks of the generality, the necessity, then its opposite pole is that of the particular and the contingent. And that is not an invalid pole of being. It is the "other" pole which gives the metaphysical pole any meaning.

What I am pointing out to you is your fixed habits of thoughts. If you hear someone totalising, then out you dash with your counter of pluralism.

And that is fine. There is always that corollary. But my argument is that my brand of systems metaphysics incorporates the reaction to every action. I am already including the pluralism that makes my totality the complete one. In Peircean fashion, I am saying contingency and particularity are basic ... and that makes no difference. Even the contingent and the particular - the individuated - makes no sense except in the context of necessary and the general.

Pluralism depends on unity and couldn't just exist on its own. (Or the other way around.)

I can express these in poems and literature, through playing with friends etc etc. I *can't* do that with the other-oriented third of a triadic metaphysics. All I can do is apply that metaphysics to this or that thing where all I find is repetitions of the same pattern. — csalisbury

Poems and literature can be a way to distance yourself from lived reality. They can be bad metaphysics.

Even at school I told my teacher I wasn't going to analyse the set texts as it would spoil any enjoyment they might have. I rejected the idea of creating a critical distance.

Of course, I just wanted to avoid any homework. But still, I really do believe if that an author has an important point to make, poetry is the least efficient way to make it.

I love Tarkovsky's films. However I won't waste time trying to extract a concrete message from them.

But what it will lose, if it pretends to be a Literary Theory of Everything, is the poem itself. — csalisbury

As I say, I tend to agree that poetry or art doesn't really need any overarching theory if the issue is finding "raw sensual impressionistic" pleasure in it.

However, what you frame as either/or, I say has triadic unity. If you have a reason for stepping back from the local level of folk enjoying their culture, then you can start to see the production of meaning in terms of some theory. And that theory will be useful - meaningful at its own meta-level. It will reveal the patterns underlying the mechanics of the human response, the methods used to create.

Yes, if you are operating at the level of an art critic or social anthropologist, you might "lose something" by working at the level of generalised necessity - you will lose precisely the contingent particulars. But why would you lose the complete ability to move between the two levels of experiencing the world?

The Romantic misstep you may be making is thinking that the lived level is foundational, the metaphysical level is somehow fake and inauthentic. My semiotic argument is that both are naturalistic and authentic. Or to put it the other way, the lived level is just as socially constructed.

The Romantics qua Romantics were thoroughly infected and inflected by the dialectical. — csalisbury

Why would that surprise me, given my particular totaliser scheme here?

Romanticism set itself up as the other of the reductionist/materialist Enlightenment. And so it tried to express that otherness in every possible way.

If the Enlightenment said humans are naturally socially constructed creatures, then the Romantics wanted to get outside of that with both more extreme views of nature (the innocent savage) and of spirit (the sublime self).

So the dialectical manoeuvres of Romanticism are exactly what my systems logic would predict. Everything semiotic always works like that - creating itself by find its otherness to the other.

But Now if I ask you to write a poem in response, or if I ask you do some improv with me etc. — csalisbury

I would gag. I couldn't fake that "encounter group" level of earnestness. :)

Why would that surprise me, given my particular totaliser scheme here?

Even though this comes chronologically late in your post, I think its a good place to begin. I'm trying to understand why you thought I thought this would be surprising to you. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I've seen you make this kind of point before on the forums. What I was trying to do was demonstrate that I agree with you on this point, in order to show that what I was trying to say wasn't that kind of thing. Strangely, you took this as a starting point to remind me of the same structure I had just outlined. so:

So the dialectical manoeuvres of Romanticism are exactly what my systems logic would predict. Everything semiotic always works like that - creating itself by find its otherness to the other.

Of course, I'm well aware. I said the same thing, or tried to, in order to orient us both toward a particular obstacle, to say 'hey we both see this, it's a very real thing, and I don't want to go toward that either.'

As I say, I tend to agree that poetry or art doesn't really need any overarching theory if the issue is finding "raw sensual impressionistic" pleasure in it.

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. Art doesn't work that way, for the same reason 'play' doesn't work that way. The pleasure of a poem, or of a work of art, or of a childhood game: all of those are saturated with concepts and myths and associations and memories and knowledge and everything else. The 'raw pleasure' of a picture of some typical scene (say the Annunication) will be a complex mix of tons of things, some of which involve my knowledge of other annunications. "Raw impression" suggests a dude being hit in the eyes with sense-particles. The aesthetic experience is more like: a Scene one must be present to in order to experience, but which is hyper-complex and draws from everywhere else.

The Romantic misstep you may be making is thinking that the lived level is foundational, the metaphysical level is somehow fake and inauthentic.

Not at all. What I'm saying is that the 'lived level' is hyper-varied and composed of all sorts of things, including Big Concepts. The 'lived level' from the beginning involves all sorts of Concepts. That's why kids playing tend to cast the play in terms of archetypes.

What I'm arguing against is extracting certain patterns or ways of thinking from out of this in order to say that these are the essential patterns which govern everything else.

So if the metaphysical pole speaks of the generality, the necessity, then its opposite pole is that of the particular and the contingent. And that is not an invalid pole of being. It is the "other" pole which gives the metaphysical pole any meaning.

Yes buttttt. Didn't I address exactly this in my earlier post?

If you hear someone totalising, then out you dash with your counter of pluralism.

Sure, but, again, I addressed exactly this distinction between totalisation and pluralism. Maybe it fails, I dunno, but I addressed exactly this point. You seem to suggest that I'm symptomatically misreading you ("Again, you have this fixation for either/or" ) but, from my perspective, if seems like you're symptomatically glossing over my intentional engagement with this exact thing.

so:

So for you, there is an obvious problem if one or the other is not defended as the foundational (making the other epiphenomenal or otherwise "illusory").

Exactly the opposite! I'm trying to indicate that I have problem with 'foundations' in general, not trying to usurp the throne of the-one-who-has-the-right-foundations.

finally

So when one goes on holiday or to an art gallery, does one document everything with a camera, try to relate it to some wider metaphysical theme. Or instead, is there a fruitfully contrary mode of simply becoming as mindlessly immersed in the sensual experience as possible?

I don't accept this distinction and find it strange that you ascribe either/or thinking to me while reflexively trying to make sense of what I'm saying int these terms. Thinking or mindless immersion in sensuality? The only way I can make sense of someone who approaches art (or other stuff) as something involving 'mindless immersion' is someone who can't think outside of a simplified thought/feeling model.

I would gag. I couldn't fake that "encounter group" level of earnestness. :)

I know. An acute sense of ridiculousness and softness and disgust seems like it underlies your whole approach. You systematically bleed things of those features, to find the skeleton, again and again and again. It's not that humiliating to do poetry and improv, though it will be if you assail yourself for being repulsive for even engaging in it. I struggle to understand how you engage with poems in the way I'm talking about, if the idea of an exchange of poems makes you gag.

he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. If such a claim is to be taken seriously, as the metaphysician intends it to be, then the things which he was doing un-metaphysically are things that can, in principle, be brought back into his metaphysical ambit. However he can only do so by reducing them. Yet its that very irreducibility that makes up the substance and texture of reality. — csalisbury

To me this is almost the criticism of theology metaphysics. For me this is tied up with the idea of God becoming flesh. Words like 'flesh' point toward the irreducible texture you mention.

apo mentioned pragmatism. That's a good ism. I like understanding 'theologies' as tools that we carry into the jungle of real life. I'm grateful to the earnest 'theologians' and the itch that compelled them to build tools for the rest of us. Some of them wanted to make all other tools obsolete with their own. They wanted to have personalities big and/or strong enough to engulf and/or cancel all others. In some ways it's a likable trait. On the other hand, we've all been (?) trapped in a pair of word-goggles or trapped with someone trapped in a pair of word-goggles. These 'word-goggles' can obscure the immediate social reality especially.

The best choice is always both ... to their extremes ... in an overall resulting balance. — apokrisis

This sounds good, but it's hard not to doubt the extremity of these extremes. The theoretical physicist can get down to some hip music, but presumably without putting a needle in their arm or living in poverty in the name of the art of the future or just the holy, mortal moment. And the reverse. The species casts us off in different directions, and some of us do what we can to assimilate as many fragments of this splintered god as we can. But even this goal is 'fragmentary.'

I know. An acute sense of ridiculousness and softness and disgust seems like it underlies your whole approach. You systematically bleed things of those features, to find the skeleton, again and again and again. — csalisbury

Wrong analogy. I did biology and found the dissecting of dead things a chore. I stopped going down the psychology/neuroscience path once I found what was expected in an animal lab. My natural interest was in understanding the living and dynamic - the ecological and anthropological story.

So yes, that is about seeing through to the hidden structure. But - to draw attention to your cheap rhetorical devices - the opposite of thinking the structure that matters is the dead and lifeless anatomy of the bled corpse. The structure I am interested in - the semiotic/systems one - is the "mathematical-strength" one that animates even physical existence itself.

It gets tiring that you keep trying for these cheap oppositions - you fun-loving artistic type, me sterile reductionist - no matter how many times I explain how that is not it.

But as I say, you need me to be that other here to justify your own contrasting "metaphysics of value". I have to be as simplistic as you to make your simplicism admissible.

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. — csalisbury

Hence the self-conscious quotes. That was the point I was making about authenticity.

To the realist, the pragmatist points out that all scientific belief rests on the reading of dials. Numbers replace the thing-in-itself.

And to the idealist, the pragmatist points out that science does read dials. It is materialist only in that semiotic sense of fully cashing out the phenomenality involved in being in a knowing relation with the world.

So here, the pragmatist does say that all phenomenology is simply a play of signs of this kind. It is all an umwelt. And that then becomes the new triadic relation (of interpretant, sign and world) that becomes the generic departure point for our pluralistic metaphysical excursions.

What I'm saying is that the 'lived level' is hyper-varied and composed of all sorts of things, including Big Concepts. — csalisbury

So it is still "composed"? We are thus still in the land of the reductionist, the atomist.

My argument has been the systems' one of constraints matched by degrees of freedom - so constraints and constructions.

Our lived level is not hyper-varied, as that is just going back to the pluralism that is the direct consequence of atomistic contingency - the world constructed by degrees of freedom. Our lived whole is triadically structured. It divides dialectially into the globally generic constraints and the locally particular accidents.

If you just want to talk about concepts, they would still have this triadic structure - coming in various shades of the three basic dimensions, the general, the particular, and the vague. So there are our most general organising ideas (like reductionism, or holism). There are our vast variety of particular impressions - our concept of what is significantly different or indifferent about some passing conscious moment. And then there is also the vagueness where the lived experience is ambiguous, confused, or otherwise ill-developed and ill-defined. Neither general nor particular, as yet.

Yes buttttt. Didn't I address exactly this in my earlier post? — csalisbury

I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account.

Maybe you are thinking it is enough to accept the logic of the dialectic as a qualification to the simple basic approach of atomism/compositionalism, whereas I am arguing for its upfront replacement by a causal holism?

Exactly the opposite! I'm trying to indicate that I have problem with 'foundations' in general, not trying to usurp the throne of the-one-who-has-the-right-foundations. — csalisbury

Again, I don't see how this can be your position if you are arguing so hard against the kind of holistic foundationalism I am advancing.

So there are foundationalists. Then there are anti-foundationalists. But where is your own next move to the synthesis - the one that puts the totalisers and the pluralists accurately on complementary ends of the larger thing of a connected spectrum?

The Peircean point is that this can only be done triadically - as in the form of a hierarchical relation.

So if you reject triadicism, then you still haven't transcended the simple opposition of totalisers and pluralisers. You don't have an actual metaphysical model that speaks to this situation in a manner that is a mathematical theory that could make specific predictions.

The only way I can make sense of someone who approaches art (or other stuff) as something involving 'mindless immersion' is someone who can't think out of triadicism. — csalisbury

So are you taking proper note of the quote marks here? Remember this is a meta-theoretic account now.

Whatever "mindless immersion" could mean would of course be culturally and historically conditioned. And so of course the analysis - at the meta-social level of the anthropologist - would be triadic.

Fer fucks sakes, who else first embraced structuralism as a mode of analysis? Although I agree that the sad history is folk went for the dyadic semiotics of Saussure over the triadic semiotics of Peirce. Or alternatively, the half-baked material dialectics of Marxism.

But my argument is that a holistic view of sign relations has to be triadic - for all the reasons Peirce pointed out.

So it is not that I can't escape the pit of my own triadic presumptions. I can think like a reductionist as good as anyone else. It is that I chose this triadicism as the best explanation following a pretty exhaustive search.

And if you mention any human cultural activity - poetry, coin-collecting, tennis - then I would consciously apply this particular theory of semiosis to the analysis.

It is not because I don't have other choices. It is not because I am trapped in an unthinking habit. It is because a triadic structuralism is the best way to be a holist. It is as simple as possible, without being too simple.

The species casts us off in different directions, and some of us do what we can to assimilate as many fragments of this splintered god as we can. But even this goal is a 'fragmentary.' — syntax

Yes, society is now large enough that we must all become some kind of specialist. We must all inhabit niches.

This is in fact another direct prediction of the hierarchy theory approach I take - my earlier posts on Stan Salthe's work.

Simultaneously we become both more general and more particular as culturally individuated beings. Everyone knows far more about the Kardashian clan than makes social sense. And every one of us also has narrower interests than can be shared with our immediate social group.

So increasingly, exponentially, we all diverge in these opposing directions as individuals. We have more in common with the world and less in common with each other. We go hard out in both ways - leaving us wondering about the "me" who has to be found in the middle, still holding the extremes of selfhood together in some coherent, integrative, fashion.

Well, again this speaks to the essential differences in viewpoint being expressed here.

Personally, I want to be integrated and whole. I don't want to become a pluralistic bricolage of conceptual fragments and varied impulse.

And that sets me against the kind of PoMo celebration of foundational diversity which doesn't, in turn, recognise its own roots in a totalising notion of humanity - the highly questionable foundation provided by a "one world" Romanticism.

As a psychological model, it just doesn't fly. Instead, my holist approach takes you to places like positive psychology that understand the socially constructed nature of "the self".

The only way to be integrated as a self is to understand the disintegrative forces at work.

Thousands of years ago, poetry and improv were at the heart of personal identity within a tribal social setting. They were the right technology for an oral tradition.

But thousands of years on and we are not in Kansas anymore. That is why I find them inauthentic if taken out of that tribal context and advanced as a viable modern mode of analysis.

Marxism had its analytic moment. Post-modernism had its analytical moment. So lets keep moving right along swiftly.

Sociology now roots itself in biology, and biology in thermodynamics. It is the new ontic structural realism - the theology of dissipative structures. :)

It may be too sciencey for many. But science has only really cracked the back of complexity in the past 30 years or so. So it will be another generation of philosophy perhaps before there is that general catch-up.

It gets tiring that you keep trying for these cheap oppositions - you fun-loving artistic type, me sterile reductionist - no matter how many times I explain how that is not it.

But as I say, you need me to be that other here to justify your own contrasting "metaphysics of value". I have to be as simplistic as you to make your simplicism admissible.

But I'm not fun-loving. I'm often moody and paranoid and mean - just look up my post history here. I'm well aware that I can be a total asshole. Again, what strikes me as strange here is you reflexively interpret me as giving myself these qualities in opposition to yourself, as though that were the underlying motivation for everything else. It isn't.

In other words, apo: You want me to be, for some reason, someone for whom life is a spray of roses. I'm not and never have been.

so:

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. — csal

Hence the self-conscious quotes. That was the point I was making about authenticity.

Right, but the point of those quotes was, quite explicitly, to impute to me a particular stance and then show why it was wrong. What I was doing was to show how that imputation, to me, was incorrect. What i was saying was: You were trying to frame my approach as something already accounted for in your metaphysics, and I was rejecting being slotted into it. Then: sketching out why the approach you were imputing to me was not my own.

So:

I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account. — apo

I don't see it that way. I feel like I'm very aware of the 'totalising pluralism' you impute to me. I think I've done yeoman's work to show that I recognize what you mean by that and to show that what I'm saying is something else. I know, in my head, that I anticipated everything that I think you're saying now, and tried hard to show I understood that and to maneuver around it. But maybe I should just sit back and let you demonstrate what you mean and why I fit into that mould.

From my perspective, it feels like all these binary either/or things you're accusing me of are things I explicitly addressed, very consciously addressed, and tried to sketch a way around. You may very well be right, ultimately, but I feel like I haven't actually been heard. I feel like I quickly became to you yet another romantic who wants to make you feel lacking in order to make me feel good and artistic. So quickly, and so in spite of my anticipatory points to the contrary, that I feel like I'm being mistaken for something else.

I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them.

@apokrisis I ask you to think about all the ways you've characterized my position and then re-read my post, the one that began 'but the boast of metaphysics.' I quite sincerely believe I've addressed almost everything you've said. I'm not the thing you keep wanting me to be.

I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them. — csalisbury

Well, tell me what it is that you accept about a global, triapartite, holism exactly. Give an example of how it applies here.

What I've been addressing is this:

So, for instance, the whole Pierce triadic thing .... what stops me from saying this procedure is as infected, at heart, as the atomist thing? It wants to find the base of everything - then it thought a while and said, well, not the base, but the engine. But it still is driven toward the central thing, even if the central thing is a weird triadic relationship. — csalisbury

Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?

Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?

Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why?