The reason why "a state of affairs" cannot list "the positions" some object occupies over time, is because this is explicitly a compilation of a multitude of states. Therefore it is not "a state". — Metaphysician Undercover

And now

This is false, — Metaphysician Undercover

Keep dithering and vacillating and no one can touch you with anything so solid as an argument.

Sounds good. — frank

Well, the core criticism here might be much the same as Wittgenstein levelled at his own work, the Tractaus.

But better to set out what the combinators are proposing first...

You’re importing a picture that does most of the work for you, then blaming states of affairs for its consequences.

First, the idea that a ‘state’ must be unchanging is a stipulation, not a truth. A state of affairs can include change. ‘The ball rolled east at 2 m/s for five seconds’ is a perfectly ordinary state of affairs.

You keep treating a state of affairs as a snapshot, not a way things are. A way things are can be extended in time and internally structured. Saying a state of affairs can’t include change because it would no longer be that state assumes that the relevant description must be momentary or static. That assumption hasn’t been argued for. You have yet to make your case.

Second, your complaint that states of affairs don’t ‘describe the change itself’ is misleading. A description doesn’t re-enact what it describes. A trajectory doesn’t move; a sentence about change doesn’t change. That’s not a deficiency. A state of affairs specifies what’s the case, it doesn't bring it about.

Finally, the move to energy doesn’t do the work you want it to. Energy isn’t a metaphysical substitute for possibility; it’s a parameter in physical theory. Saying energy is ‘the possibility of change’ is a metaphorical gloss, not an ontological insight. Physics already quantifies change in terms of states—states with energies, including their transitions and the laws governing those transitions.

So, the problem isn’t with states of affairs, but with a picture that insists they must be instantaneous, static, and incapable of internal temporal structure. Once that picture is dropped, the alleged contradiction disappears, and the need to relocate possibility somewhere ‘between’ states goes away.

, that chat seem'd to end here:

'If the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish; and as appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us.'
— Wayfarer

This... is Waif's strong doctrine. If you press it's logic, he will deny it, stepping back to some merely transcendental reality. — Banno

But no, as I said, carry on.

Yep!

A conversation which clearly indicated that you didn't grasp the point with which you intended to take issue. — Wayfarer

Ok, so have another go at explaining it to me.

'cause I think I do, and everyone else is still sleeping off their Christmas.

Yeah, increasingly I take it that the common error here is the "maximally inclusive situation". At its heart it's the idea that we might list every sentence and whether it is true, or it is false, exclusively.

As I suggested earlier to @Ludwig V, there's no good reason to suppose this sort of completion.

And indeed, we have good reason to think that a formal system (at least, the ones that count) can be consistent, or it can be complete, but not both.

So I'd take it that what has gone wrong here is not the fallacy of composition so much as an assumption of conceptual completion.

Put simply, we do not need a description of the whole world in order to say that Anne might not have been at her desk.

But the three theories of Possible Words discussed in the article presume just this.

Not so much begin with it, as remember that it has been forgotten, and why. — Wayfarer

And this was the point of our walk through the mountains toward the sea - to give an account of how it hasn't been forgotten, but how it is inadequate. The account given by the homunculus is too small.

there is no 'one correct view' being promulgated here — Wayfarer

Yeah, there is - that we must begin with consciousness.

Have you noticed the push-back against Buddhism as it is so often viewed by the west, in the last few weeks? The most recent Philosopher's Zone and Australian Philosophy Review both take issue with the common perspective. Interesting stuff.

@frank, the danger now becomes confusing abstractionism with combinatorialism. But were abstractionism posits only individuals in the actual world, combinatorialism allows any individuals; were abstractiomism has alternate arrangements of that actual stuff, combinatorialism is more a construction set which might build that actual stuff, but also might not, and so more easily allows for exotics; and for combinatorialism the actual world once again becomes indexical, as it should be.

So onward?

:angry: No, my target is not just "res cogitans" but foundationalism, the view that there is at most one correct view. and then the supplement that, that foundation is consciousness in isolation.


I admire your use of Medium, by the way.

I think you're misreading it, but I won't press the point. — Wayfarer

I will. I don't see a misreading.

Bitbol considers consciousness to be “self-evidentially absolute”: the one domain of existence that is given fully and indubitably whenever it is present. — Wayfarer

Yet consciousness is a response to the world in which it arrises.

There's the Cartesian temptation to choose some one thing as fundamental and derive everything else from it. Then there is the Hegelian move to two things, interacting. But last we have the Wittgensteinian dissipation of an absolute foundation, to different and yet equally valid ways of being and of doing.

Bitbol moves backwards to Descartes.

...not really sure how that cuts against the quoted passage. — Wayfarer

Here:

Conscious experience is not a phenomenon among others. It is that in and to which the very distinction between “phenomenon” and “object,” “inner” and “outer,” first take shape. — Wayfarer

It rests consciousness on the distinction between "inner" and "outer "- the homunculus arrises!

Bitbol wants to make consciousness foundational, but he inadvertently re-inscribes the Cartesian subject, which is exactly what Banno resists. The emphasis on the reality of the living subject hopes to ameliorate the sense of the homunculus that arose out of Cartesian dualism - does it succeed? To be conscious is to be conscious of something, and so is already embedded in what for Bitbol must be outside the mind...

We also had a quite, and quite peaceful day, of music and books and happily much home garden produce, mostly with cream.

Phenomenology begins from a simple but far-reaching insight: the reality of first-person consciousness is ineliminable, and any account of the world must ultimately be grounded in the structures of experience as they appear to the subject. — Wayfarer

Banno of course would point out that this is muddled, that we are inherently social beasties, and that our place in the world is not that of a homunculus siting inside a head looking out, but of a being already and always embedded in a world that includes others... and so on.

Where Bitbol emphasises first‑person experience as the unavoidable condition of possibility for objectivity, Banno would push back: experience is always already structured by social and intersubjective relations.

Where Bitbol tends toward a version of transcendental dependence in which the world and science is only intelligible within a lived field, Banno would say this is too individualistic if it doesn’t acknowledge that lived experience itself is socially mediated.

Where Bitbol brackets the “natural attitude” to expose pre‑objective experience, Banno would emphasise that the social world is also "pre‑objective" in a different sense: language, norms, cultural practices, shared lifeworlds shape the very way phenomena show up. So consciousness isn’t a solitary medium but a socially inflected field.

Yet Bitbol and Banno would agree that physical reductionism misses something of the utmost import.

But you know Banno would do that, as does ChatGPT, and yet you carry on regardless. :wink: Good for you.

Hope Christmas was enjoyable.

Carry on.

It's unfortunate that we have now gone back to some really basic stuff.

The "spectre" of the possible-but-not-actual appears to upset some folk. States of affairs are introduced as a way to deal with this discomfort. I don't share that discomfort. But if we take it seriously, it helps explain what is happening in 2.2.3 Actuality and Actualism

States of affairs are perhaps the descendent of the "logical space" of the Tractatus. There, Wittgenstein described a space in which objects could be arranged in any logical way - the apple on the table, or under it, or falling towards it, or whatever; of these various ways things might be arranged, one set is the way they are actually arranged. That arrangement is set out in his proto- first order language.

The actualist idea seems to be that possible worlds are different arrangements of the very same sorts of things we find in the actual world, and so those possible-but-not-actual things are in effect just rearrangements of actual things. Hence the puzzling suggestion in SEP that they hold that "Everything that exists in any world exists in the actual world". This by way of ameliorating the fear of the possible-but-not-actual.

That's why exotics are such a problem here. By their very nature they cannot be a mere rearrangement of the stuff in the actual world.

So Plantiga introduces haecceities in part as a way of explaining exotics. It's haecceities that get rearranged, rather than the objects of the actual world. And as a bonus he gets to prove to his own satisfaction that there is a god.

But for my part this is far too complex to be considered viable, in order to answer a problem that isn't really a problem.

How dose that sit with you as an explanation of 2.2.3?

The reason why "a state of affairs" cannot list "the positions" some object occupies over time, is because this is explicitly a compilation of a multitude of states. Therefore it is not "a state". — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense. A state of affairs can set out what happens over time.

The term "state of affairs" is perhaps first found in the Tractatus, or in Russell. There is no indication in either Russell or Tractatus-Wittgenstein that a state of affairs must occur only at an instant, or that it cannot encompass temporal extension or change. The idea that states of affairs are instantaneous is your own addition.

:roll:

The term"obtain" has misled you here. Try re-working this in terms of possible worlds.

w₀ : The apple is not on the table
w₆ : The apple is on the table
w₉ : The apple is on the table
w₁₂ : The apple is on the table

Notice that each of these refers to an individual apple. Part of the problem here is moving between the apple, with talk of an individual, and an apple, with talk of a kind.

We could have

w₀ : No apple is on the table. (no individual apple is specified)
w₆ : Some apple is on the table (an individual apple is specified)
w₉ : The apple is not on the table (an individual apple is specified - this could be true even if some other apple is on the table)
w₁₂ : The apple is on the table (an individual is specified).

What we don't need here is the idea that the apple can exist yet not obtain. It might be that at w₀ the apple is elsewhere, or never grew, or event that there are no apples whatsoever. Talk of "obtaining" adds nothing to the logic. Nor do we need haecceity, unless you have an overwhelming need to prove that there is a god.

:wink: Yep. And we are very pleased that they did. Isn't it odd that we needed to point this out?

Suppose in the world are the States of Affairs i) the apple is on the table ii) the apple is not on the table. These States of Affairs are not perspectival.

If the State of Affairs, the apple is on the table, obtains, then it is a fact. This is also not perspectival.

A State of Affairs exists even if it does not obtain.

A State of Affairs expresses a possible world.

When I say “the apple is not on the table”, this is perspectival from my point of view.

Then my proposition “the apple is not on the table” is false because the apple is on the table. — RussellA

This apparently presumes only one possible world.

We cannot have a possible world in which (i) and (ii) are both true. We can have w₀ in which there is not an apple on the table and w₁ in which some apple is on the table. And here there is no contradiction.

We don't here need "obtain". Just that "An apple is on the table" is true at w₀ but not at w₁; and so SOA₀ exists at w₀ but not at w₁.

We may index our possible worlds by saying that w₀ is the actual world. Calling that "adopting a perspective" suggests an unneeded subjectivism. All we are doing is saying that we are speaking from w₀

“The apple is not on the table” is true at w₀ and false at w₁.

A state of affairs that obtains is a fact. — frank

Exactly.

And we might add that a state of affairs need not be at an instant, but may be over a period of time.

However in modal logic, the apple exists even though it does not obtain. — RussellA

In this and what follows, it would pay to make clear in which world the apple exists. That was the bit we discussed way back where truth and existence are both relative to a world; sentences are true at a world, and things exist at a world. The addition of "obtaining" is unnecessary. It is a somewhat confused proxy of "actual", and a part of Plantinga's erroneous metaphysics, which treats actuality as a property rather than an index... in order, I might add, to procure a dubious ontological argument for there being a god.

The common error in ontological arguments is to treat existence as a predicate. Plantinga avoids treating existence simpliciter as a predicate, but reintroduces the same error by treating actuality and necessary existence as properties that do the existential work ontological arguments require.

In Ordinary language, when we say “there is no apple on the table”, we mean that the apple does not exist. — RussellA

If that were so, then we could ask which apple is not on the table. But “there is no apple on the table” is not about an individual apple.

This makes logical sense, because the apple must exist in some sense if we are able to refer to it. — RussellA

But the sentence "there is no apple on the table” is not referring to an individual apple. And nor is it referring to the haecceity of some absent individual apple. It's not saying "There is an x such that x is an apple and x is not on the table", but that "for all x, if x is an apple then x is not on the table".

Formally, the following is invalid:
¬∃x (A(x) ∧ T(x)) ↔ ∃x (A(x) ∧ ¬T(x))

Meta has dragged the argument over to his misunderstanding of physics. This was I suppose inevitable, given that it underpins much of his miscomprehension. I should know better than to respond.

A State of Affairs could list the position of an object through time, — RussellA

Yes, it could, but if that were the only possibility then it would indeed be subject to Zeno's paradoxes.

There is a very profound difference between listing the position of the ball at, say, 1/10th second intervals, and saying that it has a velocity of 2m/s. The latter tells us were the ball is for any point we might choose.

There seems to be an unstated presumption that a state of affairs is how things are at some instant. But the logic does not make this presumption. The state of affairs can be how things re over time.

So it might say that the train arrived at t1 and left at t2.

I'm somewhat surprised to find myself pointing this out.

His argument feels like a construction for a pre-determined outcome — Ludwig V

Like most such arguments.

Hear, here.

It may be. However the penchant for a modal ontological argument gives me pause.

I agree that a State of Affairs can only capture one moment in time, — RussellA

maybe take care here, too. Why shouldn't a state of affairs list the positions some object occupies over time? As, 'The ball rolled east at 2m/s'?

Meta would have to disagree with this, because he can't make sense of instantaneous velocity, or of calculus or any sort of limit or infinitesimal in general. See the Christmas Cracker above, where Meta treats change as a series of static instances rather than as dynamic, and as a result discovers that motion is impossible. :wink:

Change cannot be reduced to a sequence of instantaneous states - but no one is claiming that.

Obviously the problem cannot be expressed in formal logic, because the nature of the problem is that it renders the formal logic as fundamentally unsound. — Metaphysician Undercover

:rofl:

If your argument cannot be expressed clearly, then the obvious implication is that it is unsound. Again, S4 and S5 and derivatives have been shown to be complete and consistent. You appear to be simply wrong here.

The demonstration is like this. If the world is describable as state A, and then it becomes state B, we can conclude that change occurred between A and B, We could then assume a state C as the intermediary between A and B and describe the change as state C, but this would imply that change occurred between A and C, and also between C and B. We could posit state D between A and C, and state E between C and B, but we would still have the same problem again. As you can see, this indicates an infinite regress, and we never get to the point of understanding what change, activity, or motion, really is. Activity, change, motion, is what occurs between states of affairs, when one becomes the other. — Metaphysician Undercover

:lol: Have you thought of going in to writing the jokes for Christmas crackers?

"Actual" reality is simply stipulated, even Banno accepts this, as indicated below. — Metaphysician Undercover

What twaddle.

Ok. We need to keep the quantification in line - again, there is a difference between any apple and a particular apple and the apple I didn't eat need not be any particular apple. So is

...the proposition “the apple might be on the table” is true because there might be an apple on the table, — RussellA

About a particular apple or not? Is it that there might be an apple - any apple - on the table, or that some particular apple is on the table? And then how, if it is possible that the apple is on the table, do we understand the haecceity of the apple being on the table but not the apple?

All this by way of mostly agreeing with you. Including the suspicion that Plantinga is misled by his faith.

Suppose the properties that comprise an individual essence is comprised of this maximal set: 100% of the individual's intrinsic and relational properties at every point it time that it exists. There is a relation to everything that exists in this world, and therefore the set of possible worlds in which the individual exists is just the one: the actual world. I suggest this is the base case - because it does clearly identify an individual. — Relativist

Nice.

Such an individual immediately brings about modal collapse, since p→☐p. What we have is further reason of rejection the notion of essence as resulting in incoherence.

A haeecity is an essence, or at least an essential property (a component of an essence). — Relativist

We need to take care here.

Here is a way in to talk about essences that make sense: the essence of some individual is those properties that it has in every possible world in which it exists.

Here's a way to talk about essences that is somewhat obtuse: the essence of something is that which makes it what it is and not another thing.

Here's a complication on the latter: we can call the thing that makes something what it is, its haecceity... And the italics are there to mark the hypostatization, the presumption that what makes a thing what it is, is yet another thing...

Muddle on muddle, compounded mud.

Nevertheless, it seems to me a possible world in which you eat a different apple depends on kind-essentialism - the essence of what an apple is. — Relativist

How to make sense of this? A possible world in which I didn't eat a different apple to the one I didn't eat for breakfast? :chin:

I didn't eat an apple for breakfast, and yet it's not the case that this is the apple that I didn't eat for breakfast. Plantinga wants this to be the apple I didn't eat - he wants there to be a particular uneaten apple in some possible world.

Plantinga would respond that haecceities are primitive - they don't reduce to qualitative properties (including kind-properties). But this makes transworld identity mysterious; he inevitably smuggles in kind-essences when reasoning about counterfactuals.


The apple is an apple, with no need for essence or haecceity or other bloody philosophical obfuscation. And there is no particular apple that I didn't eat for breakfast, despite my not having eaten an apple for breakfast.

For Plantinga, individuals are identified across worlds by their haecceities, not by their kind membership, a “different apple” in another world isn’t just a different instance of the same kind; it is a different haecceity. The semantic machinery that lets us say “I could have eaten this apple” relies on the haecceity of the apple, even if it is unexemplified in that world.

Your reading of Plantinga is through a kind-essentialist lens: i.e., the identity of transworld apples is determined primarily by kind. Plantinga’s haecceity-essentialism is individual-specific, not kind-specific. It’s not “an apple of kind K in another world,” it’s “the very same apple’s haecceity in another world,” which may or may not be instantiated.

So do you conflate kind-essentialism with individual (haecceity) essentialism? Plantinga’s machinery is much more fine-grained, tracking this very apple, not “an apple of the same kind.”

Basically his use of haecceities looks to me to be reworking the problem rather than solving it.

Is it a mental state? — frank

No. The apple can't be a mere mental state because we are now each talking about the very same apple, and your mental states are not my mental states.

It has to be something shared, or at least public.

My view isn't all that firm yet, but I've mentioned to @Ludwig V that I think all three views suffer from the same error in that they presume maximally complete worlds. I don't see that as needed, and what follows might be a more ad hoc and constructive approach.

We talk as if there were an apple. That's just one of the many games we play with words. And that's related to the counts as... stuff from Searle; we just do talk about apples in this way, like we talk about property and credit, none of which are things in the way the apple in the fruit bowl is.

I'll have a bit of a bitch about Plantinge awhile we are here.

It seems to me that Plantiga takes a way of talking and turns it into a thing. Suppose I say that I might have had an apple for breakfast. Plantinga would say that the apple I might have had necessarily has a thing that makes it what it is, and that this thing is what I might have had for breakfast. It would be ridiculous to say that there is an apple that I might have had for breakfast, and Plantinga tries to avoid the ridicule by replacing that apple with a haecceity-of-apple, as if that were any better.

Perhaps something like this sits behind @Metaphysician Undercover's confusion, or @Relativist's disquiet. Something like it seems to underpin the essentialism that the forum Thomists misuse.

Yep.

Yep. We might be clearer about Plantinga’s view. It's not primarily about properties like “being an apple”. It is about individual essences (haecceities). For Plantinga very individual has a haecceity (e.g. being that very apple), and haecceities exist necessarily, and oddly it seems worlds contain haecceities whether or not they are exemplified. So in a world where the apple does not exist, the haecceity "being that apple" exists, and is unexemplified. That haecceity is what does the semantic work for quantification.

All of which looks quite contrived to my eye. Not keen on Plantiga's approach.

For Trace Actualists, things in possible worlds can exist. This allows the modal semantics of (23) ◇∃xEx is true if there is a world in which ∃xEx — RussellA

Isn't it more that ◇∃xEx is true if there is an accessible world in which ∃xEx can be represented? Roughly, if we can posit, or perhaps talk abuot some world in which ∃xEx?

See how the sentence you keep quoting begins with "Say that...".

Why?

Here's the whole paragraph:

On the assumption that there is a (nonempty) set of all possible worlds and a set of all possible individuals, we can define “objective” notions of truth at a world and of truth simpliciter, that is, notions that are not simply relative to formal, mathematical interpretations but, rather, correspond to objective reality in all its modal glory. Let ℒ be a modal language whose names and predicates represent those in some fragment of ordinary language (as in our examples (5) and (6) above). Say that M is the “intended” interpretation of ℒ if (i) its set W of “possible worlds” is in fact the set of all possible worlds, (ii) its designated “actual world” is in fact the actual world, (iii) its set D of “possible individuals” is in fact the set of all possible individuals, and (iv) the referents assigned to the names of ℒ and the intensions assigned to the predicates of ℒ are the ones they in fact have. Then, where M is the intended interpretation of ℒ, we can say that a sentence φ of ℒ is true at a possible world w just in case φ is trueM at w, and that φ is true just in case it is trueM at the actual world. (Falsity at w and falsity, simpliciter, are defined accordingly.) Under the assumption in question, then, the modal clause above takes on pretty much the exact form of our informal principle Nec. — SEP

See how the single line you quote is part two of four of the antecedent of a mooted definition of true-in-M that is being true in any arbitrarily selected world. The conclusion is the opposite of what you suggest: any world might have been chosen to take on the place of the actual world, with the same result.

For those reading on, Meta isolates (ii) (“its designated ‘actual world’ is in fact the actual world”) and treats it as if it were doing independent semantic work. That is a mistake.

Again, there Might be a point Meta could be making, but his utter inability to understand and use the formal logic here incapacitates his expressing his view. Meta might be gesturing at a familiar philosophical concern, namely that the appeal to an “intended model” smuggles metaphysics into what is advertised as a purely semantic account. To make that objection, Meta would have to distinguish object-language truth conditions from metasemantic stipulations, recognise the difference between fixing a model and evaluating formulas within it, and understand how conditional definitions work in formal semantics. There may be a point Meta could be making, but his inability to understand and use the formal logic prevents him from expressing it.

You seem to want to focus on one, the abstractionist interpretation, as if it is the only acceptable interpretation — Metaphysician Undercover

No, Meta. I haven't moved past it because i keep answering your silly quibbles. My bad, yes, i should go back to ignoring you.

Cheers.

Note the correction. I was trying to be too general. Truthmaker theory is my theory of choice. It is correspondence, but in general it is not deflationary. — Relativist

Why, when the article we are reading clearly uses the semantic theory, and with good reason, is this even worth mentioning? I prefer pistachio nougat - but it's not relevant to this thread.

I don't require those numbers to be correct for this point to stand — AmadeusD

:grin:

"Anecdotal evidence reliable? One man says 'yes!'"