Maybe form and formlessness are dependent on one another for meaning. It's one concept.

St. Gregory of Nyssa takes this up in "On the Making of Man." Apparently, a common argument at the time was to say that matter must be coeternal with God (a view based on the Timaeus) because God, as pure act, would lack the properties of matter (which must come from somewhere). But as St. Gregory points out, having removed all form, all whatness, from matter, one is left with nothing, no attributes at all—so there is nothing to "lack" in a "lack of potency." (This is also how Aristotle's Prime Mover(s) or Plotinus' One cannot be said to suffer from any privation through being pure act). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's interesting. One of the books I read about Plotinus suggested that he was an eliminative idealist (like a reflection of an eliminative materialist). Though we talk about the privation of the good (or mind), it's not really an independent thing. It's also part of the One, though apparently the part where Plotinus explains this is squirrelly.

Now, if form is rather something created by/imposed by the mind, it almost seems to counterintuitively dislodge the phenomenological side of the understanding of eidos, since now the whatness of things is no longer essential to what they are but is rather something produced in one corner of the world, for some perceiving subject. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I suppose that goes well with panpsychism. I've leaned pretty far into the skepticism about metaphysics these days. Don't have much to say about it, but I could go on and on forever about the dramas that Form and Formlessness play out in the psyche. Cool stuff.

I've never thought of logic as normative. Have you? I've always thought of it as if the mind is a landscape that's just there, that we're inside. Logic is part of the boundaries of it. What do you think logic is?

I love most of Koons' stuff. But yea, investment is like accounting: it's a bizarre other world. S&P500 futures make about as much sense as a giant balloon dog.

Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations. — Joshs

What now?

Both points are intended to cast a bit of doubt on the presumption that our propositions are always referentially determinate, and thus their truth conditions too, at the time of our choosing, — Srap Tasmaner

If you express a proposition you just need to be pointing to some state of affairs. Precision isn't really the issue.

Cosmology shows there are enormous amounts of formless matter scattered throughout the Universe. And that's only the matter that can be seen! — Wayfarer

But we imagine that if we had eyes small enough, we would see particles down there. It's not really formless, is it?

But you just did. — Banno

You misunderstood. I have never said that.

If you are incapable of entertaining a statement without deciding if it is true or if it is false — Banno

You keep saying this in spite of protests from both me and Leontiskos that no one has claimed this.

...given the right circumstances — Banno

Exactly. The only way I can make sense of Frege's idea of a proposition (a thought) that is disconnected from assertion is to imagine that we're looking at humans as if they're robots and we're examining the programming to see where the meaning is coming from. That's wild.

They are not the sort of sentences that ordinarily might be considered true or false. But "The cat is on the mat" is. — Banno

Sentences aren't usually considered to be truth-apt. There's a good SEP article that explains why.

What do you think "apt" means? — Banno

It means it can be either true or false.

"The cat is on the mat" can be given a truth value, and hence counts as a proposition. — Banno

How can it be truth-apt if we don't even know which cat it is?

Isn't it apt to be true, or perhaps false? Couldn't it be true, or perhaps false, in suitable circumstances? — Banno

Exactly. You need context to turn a sentence into a proposition.

The blob is still a form and generates content for Bob. — Nils Loc

Yep. There really isn't any such thing as the Formless. It's just that once you start talking about forms, you have to have something that received the form. It's more about the way we divide up the world. It's something built in to the way we think.

How could "the cat is on the mat" be truth-apt? We don't even know which cat it is.

The old war still rages, — Srap Tasmaner

Are you like, presently in a dungeon on trial for heresy?

Through the form. — MoK

:up:

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger critiques the idea that form and content can be treated separately, as though form were something imposed on a thing, or content were ‘beyond’ form and style. — Joshs

I first encountered Heidegger in a book about the philosophy of beauty. Some secondary source told me that Heidegger thought that we experience form and matter in a relationship of dynamic tension. We broadcast the form outward onto the world, and pull sensations in (as in listening more closely, squinting to see). That broadcasting versus drawing in (which is also yin and yang, btw), is what a thing is. Supposedly he said that the original greek word for subjectivity meant core, as in the unchanging idea of a thing, like the center of a solar system. Cool, huh?

I can only say that form is mind-dependent, and I agree with you. — javi2541997

So when you look out at the world, are we seeing mind-dependent forms all over the place?

Why is this a curious question for you? — I like sushi

This was in John Perry's book about personal identity, as I recall. It's about the relationship between form and matter (matter being defined as something formless.) It's just examining the way we think.

The idea that thought is inherently forceful can only become an insight if it is concretely shown how that idea is compatible with the fact that embedded thoughts and dependent acts of thinking must do without a force of their own. If thoughts as such are tied to some force or other, while embedded thoughts (e. g. p qua part of not-p) do not directly come along with a force of their own, it must be clarified how the indirect connection to force, which embedded thoughts must indeed come along with, is to be understood. That is, it must be clarified how dependent logical acts that have an embedded thought as their content, and the overarching logical act that does indeed bear a force of its own interlock with each other such as to provide for the unity of a propositionally complex thought." — Pierre-Normand

Couldn't it just be that the force of an embedded thought is a phantom context from which meaning can be drawn? It's not that we're imagining an actual assertion. It's that our worldview grew out of one in which the world is alive. There's some sort of divine narrator.

If I judge P true, and so do you, aren't we making something we'd want to call "the same judgment"? — Srap Tasmaner

If we make the same judgment, we agree on the same proposition. We aren't agreeing on a sentence or an utterance. Would you like to work through the argument that establishes that?

My premise lies rooted in the encounter between agent intellect (subjectivity) and intelligibility (objectivity). This encounter plays in real space as the form/substance interweave. — ucarr

This sounds like a ghost in the machine. Is that what you mean?

:grin:

Bob received a blob of clay. What he ordered but didn't receive was the work required to turn that clay into a statue as well as the artists skill and vision. — T Clark

So you're saying it's not the form Bob paid for, but labor costs?

I don't think the statue is really attached to the clay in terms of form and content. Although it is true that Bob went to a potter, a statue can be made of different material, such as marble or gold. — javi2541997

You're saying Bob paid for the form, not the clay. It sounds like you're saying we can separate the two. As you say, the same form can appear with different materials. But where is the form if it's separate? In a special realm? In people's minds?

That makes sense. I read this in the SEP article on Lotze (he lived from 1817 to 1881):

"The new model of the academic researcher demands the replacement of prominent personalities—i.e., romantic ‘geniuses’—by the new exemplar of the sober scientist."

Lotze navigated a transition from German idealism to a philosophy that focuses on values and analysis. Maybe we could say the whole western culture was shifting toward an emphasis on quiet objectivity rather than an emotional idealistic view. Frege was a part of that?

We live on the other side of the 20th Century, so we know what kind of terrain that shift was headed toward: eliminative materialism, functionalism, inscrutability of reference. Complaining about the view from nowhere seems to target something that's foundational for us: scientific objectivity.

I wonder if the impetus for separating content from assertoric force is related to the 'view from nowhere.'

It's language that's detached from any particular human. It's like the narrator of the novel we inhabit.

Sorry, wasn't trying to be dense. You mean the marbles are identified separately, but the colors, being universals, can merge?

What is wanted? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't it's a case of ambiguity. You just don't have enough information to know what's being asked. You'd have to go back and get the request clarified, right?

I agree. I think Frege would too.

I can say we agree, and I can say what we agree on, without attributing to "what we agree on" independent existence, but instead treating it hylomorphically as an abstract object that is immanent within our agreement. "Our agreement" is another such abstraction. Does it exist independently of our agreeing? — Srap Tasmaner

I think abstract objects are products of analysis. We dismantle mind and language use as if we're taking a cuckoo clock apart. We may become so engrossed in the pieces laid out in a table that we forget that.

As long as you're tuned into the fact that in this framework, propositions are content, not sentences, you're good to go.

Do we see from the above that mass and abstraction, like form and content*, are interwoven? — ucarr

Maybe we could pursue this in a different thread. It's sort of along the lines of Plato. I'll start one if you're interested.

I'd have to go with Schopenhauer and say that subject and object are two sides of the same coin.

The mass of an object, for instance, can be treated as an abstract object, — Srap Tasmaner

Abstract objects are things like numbers, sets, and propositions. Mass is a physical property.

as long as you're not saying that agreement is only consensual, then we're on the same page. — J

I'm happy exploring behaviorism and pondering whether there really is any such thing as agreement, but my home base is to imagine that I agree with billions of people I've never met on a mass of propositions, many of which I've never brought to mind consciously. :smile:

I like the clarity of this, but doesn't it beg the question? The "other side," so to speak, would say, "A proposition is supposed to be a thing with a truth-value, something we don't merely agree or disagree on, but claim objective reasons for doing so." — J

I didn't mean to say that propositions are limited to the things we agree or disagree on. We imagine there are true propositions that no one knows, for instance, the answer to whether there is life on other planets.

I was trying to show what's at stake if we decide that there are no propositions in the Fregean sense of the word. We'll have to give up the notion of agreement as we commonly understand it. I was thinking about this because I was quoting Soames and the first chapter of his book on truth explains why we can't use utterances or sentences as the basis of agreement. It has to be propositions, or the content of an uttered sentence. With regard to whether there's life on other planets, notice how we "smuggle in" an assertion as Kimhe puts it.

I start to think that frank might be working at the US Fed Res. — javi2541997

I'm the janitor.

You just can't do hummus without lemons. It's unthinkable.

Thanks for the info and sticking up for the little guy. — BitconnectCarlos

But you're right. Israel is the little guy. They wouldn't be there if it weren't for their strategic value to the US, which has been fading for several decades now.