Poor old SX. :yawn:

Your criticism is correct, but your tone is way over the top.

Poor old Wayfarer. He has his views and he promotes them pretty politely. He doesn’t deserve your shrill tirade.

Metaphysical systems can themselves be read as attempts to flatten experience with 'magic' words. — foo

We have a tendency to exaggerate the importance of our own discoveries and to mistake our opinions for facts. ... In this context, it makes perfect sense that science would be built around the measurement of public and non-controversal entities. — foo

Hah. This level of commonsense is going to kill the thread. Kudos. :)

To be actualized from what? You presuppose the existence of what is being actualized here. I think to be actual is to exist in one manner, namely, in reality, whereas to be potential is to exist in another manner, namely, in the mind or nature of a thing. — Thorongil

Well, we could say they exist in different manners or that they are real in different manners. That still leaves us with the issue of how they are both the same in some sense, but also sharply different. It is the metaphysical distinctions we are trying to draw out which matter.

I think it is just less confusing to talk about potential being and actual being. And I would call both real in that they are ontically distinct yet related - nicely opposed in a mutual dialectical fashion. You really need both to make sense of being.

But then to exist seems to relate to actuality - to being that is definite, concrete, part of the here and now. Potentiality is about what does not yet exist right here and now in concrete fashion, but which might exist at some future place and time. To the degree a potential exists in the here and now, it is a vagueness, an indeterminancy, an Apeiron. It is the opposite of the concrete when it comes to existing.

So there are problems in saying that the potential simply does not exist, and that it is thus not real. That is going too far. It leads to a metaphysics where something must come from nothing - the familiar problem of a metaphysics of being.

But a potential whose existence is vague, unmaterialised, unformed, can be the proper opposite of the kind of existence which is concrete and here and now - a substantial existence. A vague potential is effectively a "nothingness" right at this moment. Or better yet, an "everythingness", as no possibilities have yet been concretely eliminated. And so it can be both real - present as unformed and unmaterialised - and yet completely lack the concrete actuality which denotes "existence".

The same way of thinking can apply to that other standard metaphysical distinction - this time between the concrete and the abstract. An advantage of a triadic Peircean metaphysics is of course that it includes this as well.

So universals or generalities can be considered to be real even when they are abstract objects. Or more accurately for a Peircean process metaphysics, when they are mathematical-strength finalities or necessities. They too "exist" - just not in the concrete here and now fashion of the actual. They exist as ultimate or ideal limits on form.

Again, the terminology gets pushed and pulled about by the underlying metaphysical positions being taken. But Aristotle did do a good job at establishing the basic jargon - missing out only the one crucial dichotomy really, that of the vague~crisp.

So a Peircean metaphysics makes a triad of the potential, the actual, and the necessary.

You have actual concrete substantial existence arising in the middle as the emergently definite and individuated in terms of a time and place.

Then there is the vague potential which is unexpressed possibility. And indeed, unsuppressed possibility. Nothing has yet happened to limit it.

Then there is formal necessity waiting to limit it. The possible becomes the actual by becoming substantially formed in terms of latent regularities. Possibility contains everything, but not everything can be actualised as many of those possibilities would conflict and cancel. You can be a circle, or a square, but not a square circle.

So the term "real" would span all three fundamental categories of being. But "exist" would be reserved for what seems obviously the most developed state of being - the concrete actuality of substantial being where a free potential has been most fully constrained or determined.

I can see you just want your usual argument, and to get it started you must misrepresent what I say, and so force me to spend the next 100 posts trying to correct you. I suppose we could do that. :)

But you adhere to process metaphysics, — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep.

so you do not even recognize that any objects have real existence — Metaphysician Undercover

It's more complex. Simple physical "objects" like rivers, stars and mountains are highly contextual. As individuated objects, they do depend on a context that individuates them. But complex objects, like a cat or a chair, can be organismic. A cat is formed by the genetic information it contains and so reflects the constraints or a particular evolutionary history. A chair is formed by cultural information - shaped by a human purpose, and furthermore is designed to be resistant to natural erosive or entropic forces. A chair is as context-independent as we humans can make it. We choose materials we know are going to last.

Thus a wave on the ocean exists in a highly contextual sense. A chair is at the other end of the spectrum in being the least wedded to a natural context. People who want to endorse an object oriented ontology will naturally think of chairs rather than waves when wanting to argue their case for the existence of objects.

Boundaries are vague to you. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I said the opposite really. Boundaries are the definite limits that emerge to regulate vagueness or indeterminacy.

There is no such thing as unity in your metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, that is the opposite of what I always say. The unity may have an irreducible triadic structure. But then that triadic structure is thus a single unity by definition. It is the relation the three aspects have which allows us to speak of their holism as being a thing.

Your claims to holism are the hollow claims of pragmatism, which renders the object completely subjective. — Metaphysician Undercover

My pragmatism would instead say that the holism of a sign relation approach - ie: a triadic semiotic - is about the whole of that relation. So it shows how our notion of "an object" would arise as the best way to mediate between the subjective and objective aspects of being - if here you are meaning to talk of the duality of mind and world.

You seek to do the logically impossible... — Metaphysician Undercover

So why is it logically impossible?

You might want to argue that based on some particular metaphysical premise. But then you know that I have my own view about the lack of holistic coherence in your usual metaphysical approach.

If you reject holism, you reject holism. But can you give a good reason for rejecting holism yet?

I, in reply, agree with reductionism - but only as far as is sensible. And a Peircean approach says that holism can only be reduced to a triadic or hierarchical relation. Dualism is too simple. Monadism is even worse.

And I think that is because, for a long period, up until recently, the idea of there being 'different perspectives' was rejected. Nominalism and scientific realism tends towards the view that something either exists, or it doesn't; there isn't a scale along which things can exist 'in a different manner'. But the idea of a 'dialectical' understanding has been revived through process philosophy, Peirce's semiotics, and the like. — Wayfarer

Hmm. But I am then concerned to make the further distinction that is only now coming through in the past century of science and physics.

So it is not just that there are different points of view on the same thing - that figure/ground shift you describe where the mountain, or whatever, is first seen as an existent object, then appreciated as a contextual feature (a wave in the earth's crust generated by plate tectonics), and then finally seen as the wholeness of these two opposing views.

The even larger story is that any possible view is going to see the same general thing simply by virtue of it being "a view". So this is the fractal or scale-free story. Anything viewed on any scale will resolve into a view where at the same scale as the observer, there are a bunch of individuated entities. And then in one direction, those entities shrink in size until they effectively become a continuous blur. And in the other direction, the entification gets so large that it completely fills our entire view and becomes again a constant backdrop as we can no longer see the edges of the thing.

So there is a flip-flopping dichotomy where we can - in Gestalt fashion - switch views to see the individuated in terms of an object that exists and a context that is doing the individuating. And then there is the hierarchical development of that duality so that it is an asymmetry expressed over all possible scales of being. That dichotomy of the individuated vs the contextual is being spread over all scales, from the smallest to the largest, in such a way that it is always present for an observer.

But while it can be clearly seen at scales sufficiently close to the observer, at scales much smaller or larger than the observer, it again changes apparent character. The dichotomy fuzzes into a steady blur as it becomes something very small to us, and then expands to fill our entire view to create a generality or constancy as it becomes something very large to us.

So yes, it is pretty complicated. :)

The dialectical is the step that leads towards the hierarchical. The dialectical is the fact of a symmetry-breaking - the emergence of a figure~ground distinction or individuation. The hierarchical is then that symmetry-breaking becoming fully expressed over all possible scales of being. It accounts for the limits that then emerge to "ground" that being for an observer.

Eventually, things become either too small or too large to be part of the "world of process". Just purely due to the distances involved, they become a constancy of sub-microscopic fluctuations or the constancy of macroscopic changes too large to be encompassed by our experience. The macroscopic - as in the laws of nature as they impinge on us - may as well be fixed, God-given and eternal.

It is this shift - from same-scale dialectics to scale-free hierarchical organisation - which is the key for a pan-semiotic understanding of nature, I would say.

I don't think they are real by definition, but they certainly exist, just as impossible things don't and can't exist. — Thorongil

I guess to my ear the term "exists" means to be actualised. To be present and individuated in terms of matter, time and place. Existence is the concrete fact of being. So my interest is in how you can understand that normal definition in terms of a holistic or process metaphysics where any such actuality or individuation is a passing feature in a more general flow.

In this view, existence becomes emergent or a kind of illusion - a state of persistence due to some context of constraints. And possibility is the fundamental wellspring of being. Existence becomes not the conversion of a possibility into an actuality, but a constraint on the generality or vagueness of a potential such as to leave behind something highly individuated. A wealth of possibilities gets suppressed to produce actuality, rather than some concrete possibility getting converted into a state of substantial being.

To say of a thing that it becomes is to say that it changes over and within time, while to say of a thing that it is is to say that it exists immutably either eternally or outside of time. To use my example, the chair as concept is, while the chair as percept becomes. A concept doesn't exist in time, but physical objects like chairs do. — Thorongil

Yep. That would be where we differ in that you take a theist and Platonist route here?

So I would take the Peircean position where to exist is to be actual and individuated. But to be real includes all three things of the contingent, the actual, and the necessary. So pure potential is real in that it is causal - it represents spontaneity. And then constraints are also real even if emergent in their regulative presence. Ultimately constraints express the necessity of mathematical-strength form. The laws are a necessary generality - which is why they seem timeless and Platonic, even though they can only be real via a process of material emergence.

Having said that, the emergent habits of nature would be both real and seen to exist if we could see the Cosmos unfolding in time and space as itself an individuated object. So "to exist" is tied to a point of view.

This is made explicit in natural philosophy approaches like Stan Salthe's hierarchy theory. For us, sitting at a particular scale of cosmic being, we can look down towards the very small and it eventually moves so fast that it merges into a constant (quantum) blur. Likewise we can look up to the very largest scales and things start to change so slowly that they apparently cease to change - much like a mountain range.

Anyway, the point so far as the thread is concerned is that terms shift their meanings to try to express their motivating metaphysics. And there are at least three metaphysics in play here.

The standard reductionist one which circles around nominalist and monistic views - brute existence. The Platonic one that leads to a hard dualism or frank idealism. And then a process metaphysics which is triadic or hierarchical in terms of what it considers real, and therefore which treats existence as being an issue of what causes localised habits of persistence within a backdrop of a generalised flow.

What if we returned to the pre-nineteenth century label of 'Natural Philosopher' for people that Do science, and left 'Scientist' for those that worship it. — andrewk

Scientists who work at the systems science end of things - who take an Aristotelean and holistic view - do self-consciously call themselves natural philosophers.

For example, Stan Salthe:

Natural Philosophy (or the philosophy of nature), is a developmental view of evolutionary processes, from cosmic evolution to organic (biological) and cultural evolution (see "Natural Philosophy: Developmental Systems in the Thermodynamic Perspective" [here]), now including, e.g., MEP (see "The Natural Philosophy of Ecology" [here]). Its antecedents lie in the Nineteenth Century -- with Comte, Goethe, Peirce, Schelling, Spencer, etc. It is a perspective that constructs a science-based story of where we came from and what we are doing here (see text, Becoming, Being and Passing). It is sometimes known as General Evolution, and encompasses cosmic, organic and cultural evolutions. Its goal is an intelligible creation myth (using "myth", not as a pejorative term, but as it is used in ethnography).

http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/

So this is a holist vs a reductionist distinction, from the working scientist point of view.

It seems like one result of your distinction would be that something could be real and not exist or could be and not exist, which is surely absurd. Am I wrong? I want to say that the statement "the chair is" is equivalent to saying that "the chair exists." — Thorongil

But are possibilities real? Do possibilities exist? How do you answer there?

They seem real in that they are there, just not yet substantially expressed. They don't exist as being, but do we need to stretch "exist" to include the post-hoc fact of a potential to become?

And was a possibility is substantially expressed, it no longer exists. Being is the end of becoming. (Or is it the birth of fresh becomings and so no more than all part of the real flow?)

I think the point is that people jump to familiar positions on what is a far more complex issue. The terminology speaks for a metaphysical point of view. So you can't actually examine the definitions to find the proper answers. The terminology is instead attempting to stabilise some particular metaphysical view ... which itself ought to be the thing in play.

It is commonly acknowledged, for instance, there there might be a being of fiction no less than a being of the social or the material, and that for the most part questions of being are relatively unrealted to questions of existence. — StreetlightX

So are possible beings then beings that exist? Or simply beings that could exist?

Does the possible itself exist? And is it real if it doesn't? In what sense does the possible have being?

And does the impossible exist if it is the concrete limit to what could in fact exist? Do the limits on existence count as part of existence?

I think it is obvious that all these are questions that relate to "existence" as an ontological qualifier. It is not wrong to want to systematise our use of these terms in a way that can make our ontological commitments clear.

Louis Lane believe superman can fly but does not believe that Clarke Kent can fly, despite clark and Superman being the very same individual. — Banno

A belief is a habit of interpretation. It reads reality in terms of confirming signs.

If an individual wears his underpants over his trousers, it is inductively more likely that he is a superhero with superpowers. The belief is some established Baysesian model. How you wear your underpants is a sign by which the reality can be predicted.

Of course beliefs aren't infallible. Which is why evolution builds in both a psychological propensity for habit formation and for sudden disbelief or questioning when some chosen sign starts to seem unreliable. The surprise of a mismatch - Clark Kent is noticed to have shifted location at a speed which had to be superhuman - can spark the search for a better habit of interpretation. How he rocks his duds ceases to be a signifier.

The belief that Clark and Superman are the "very same individual" is of course just a further habit of interpretation - an inductive inference open to falsification.

Whether the belief is "true" or not falls out of the picture as some kind of transcendental pipedream. In making belief dependent on "a sign", the believing mind is separating itself from the world to build its own functional relation with that world.

The world presses in with all its myriad messy variety. The mind's job is to reduce that clutter to some set of sharp symbolic responses. To what category can an experience be assigned in terms of some yes/no definite question?

A cat is a cat until something clicks because the world we are reading in terms of a set of predictable features is throwing up too many surprises. This "cat" is rather bulky, bushy tailed, with a bumbling gait and a black mask across its eyes. Hey, it's a "racoon". (Well it isn't. It's the advance force of an invading alien armada as we are next about to learn. Etc.)

So a belief is a habitual way to read the world in terms of a set of signs. It is a theory that is held "true" while it holds up functionally in terms of the acts of measurement which it legitimates. As long as the signs are seen, the interpretation is held to be justified.

But the relation is an indirect one. The signs that confirm our state of belief are part of our psychology, not part of the world in some brute physicalist sense. They are informational not material, phenomenal not noumenal, in being answers to our potential questions.

Hey, that's fine. I don't take things personally. It's all about the cut and thrust of ideas. But thanks for saying that.

So to 'exist' is to be 'this as distinct from that', to have an identity. — Wayfarer

Yep. So to exist is to be substantial. Yet to be substantial is to be individuated. And so the question become how does individuation come to be. And then what would its "other" - the unindividuated - look like.

This leads you from an ontology of things to a metaphysics of processes. Being is a state of individuation which has a reason to persist.

The question is then whether this reason for individuation to persist is immanent or transcendent. Does it emerge as the limit of a process, or is it in some sense imposed from outside?

Mathematical form comes into view as the answer that seems to serve both camps there. :)

It is hard to find in that description events that take the inductive form. So again I suggest that induction is a post hoc account. As such I do not agree that it takes a centra place in science. — Banno

So does that account instead describe deduction as being central to the development of the thinking involved? I think not.

Newton's theory of universal gravitation has of course become a classic test case for philosophy of science. Newton himself rejected a simple hypothetico-deductive model in favour of "the Newtonian style" which endorsed an abductive approach able to take the leap from complex particulars to simple generalities.

Inference to the best explanation involves a back and forth where the world as it is seen, and the laws that might explain that, swim into view together as the two halves a modelling relation. So the particular is extrapolated to discover some general - motivated by the reasonable metaphysical principle that lawful simplicity underlies all the messy real world complexity. And then the truth of that generality is checked against what it then predicts. It is tested by whether it seems to predict the particulars that were used to predict it.

So abduction is a mix of the inductive and deductive - but at a still vague level. All it needs is the start of what feels like it is going to become a good fit. Things are starting to snap together. A pattern is beginning to emerge.

You can try to formalise abduction as an if-then habit of thought. It is a species of induction in attempting the "invalid" thing of going from the particular to the general. And it is also "invalid" in that it accepts vagueness as a suitable grounding. Nothing actually has to be crisply or definitely stated at the beginning. That is instead the desired destination. Meanwhile a loose fit is good enough if it is a fit that seems to be growing tighter as work is done to clarify the direction being revealed.

Anyway, it is if-then reasoning. If this general rule were the case, these kinds of particular results would not look surprising. These kinds of particular results do exist. Therefore the general rule is probably the case. And historians show that this is the way Newton moved in his reasoning to develop a mathematically-definite theory.

So all reasoning involves this two-way interaction. We need to go from the particular to the general, and from the general to the particular, in as secure a way as possible. Obviously, deduction is more secure than induction because it introduces no new semantics. But then the cost of that is that deduction can introduce no new semantics.

Then the sense that this is a real jump, not some gradual change, is explained by the complex world of messy particulars being the state of broken symmetry in nature. And what we are trying to recover - as the trick that makes scientific models work - is the deeper symmetry that got broke.

We have a smashed up lot of glass bits on the floor. And a lot of bits are probably missing. We theb want to know whether it was once a glass vase or a glass dish, or whatever.

So the move from the particular to the general is seeking a hidden symmetry that is believed to lurk behind a messy complexity. We can't see that symmetry directly as a further thing to observe - symmetry-breakings tend to be thermally irreversible and so the past is gone. But we can imagine it mathematically. We can recover it as a mathematical idea.

Any amount of observables can't add up inductively to reveal the hidden whole. What's broke is broke when it comes to our available view of reality. But we can leap imaginatively to the kind of symmetry that could be broken to yield the kind of fragments we see all around.

So reasoning itself is an irreducible coupling of the inductive and deductive directions of thought. And then abduction goes to the fact that this self-organising loop has to start off as a seed and then grow into full and definite flower.

Abduction has both flavours of thought coupled together - as it must to be capable of growth towards a definite understanding. But it is that possibly successful thought still in its tentative stage - one where a loose fit is still acceptable. We are in a state of mind where we are allowing ourselves to be guided by some general principles - like that simple symmetries lie behind every messy and complex broken symmetry - and then looking backwards retroductively to see what generalisation can in fact predict the particulars we seem to identify as being suggestive or significant.

The peculiarity of an elliptical orbit could be explained if it were composed of an inertial straightline motion coupled to a centripetal accelerative force. The inertia is a symmetry, so falls out of the story. You now just have to account for the symmetry breaking which is the centripetal force exerted by a planetary body.

But why should only planets have gravity? Right, let's again find the symmetry. All masses attract. It is not something special but something which is the same for all. The symmetry of the force is broken only by the accident of the locally differing quantities of mass involved. There is the universal principle - the further inductive leap of imagination - needed to get a proper theory going.

And so a sharp picture of this thing called gravity swims into theoretical view. Eventually we can crank out predictions and begin to support the theory's newly acquired, strictly deductive, form with a sufficient weight of inductive confirmation.

Induction and deduction are initially entwined so closely as an if-then inference to the best explanation that the lines are blurred. The mind abductively has to juggle both at once in loose fashion.

But the goal - as a scientist - is to arrive at a clean separation between a theory and its truth. In the end, you want the deductive bit to stand alone as some mathematical grammar that encodes a symmetry and its symmetry breaking. And then the inductive bit becomes the evidence that supports that theoretical structure in terms of the observables that are close enough to whatever was predicted not to count as an unwanted surprise.

If one grants abduction and induction, then their place can only be in justifying belief, not in finding truth. Unless one follows apokrisis in rejecting truth altogether. — Banno

Don’t be such a sook. If you agree with Janus, you agree with me. Get over it.

It is if you think it is truly a view from no perspective at all, but when you realize it is actually a view from no particular perspective, which means from every perspective, then it becomes apparent that it is not incoherent and is, at least in principle, attainable, even if not absolutely attainable (whatever that could mean). — Janus

Yep. It is an interesting exercise to imagine seeing any object from every perspective possible. So Ayers Rock from the inside, from every distance outside, then over all timescales as well. Any notion of its substantial being would become dissolved in some truly panscopic view that built in no preference.

And then contrast that with the kind of scientific view we aim for where we instead see Ayers Rock in terms of natural laws and initial conditions. More like a wire frame computer simulation.

Choose any point you like as the origin, choose any units you like. They can be translated into metric or imperial or cubits or whatever. — Banno

Sure. If you have a theory of abstract reference frames then you can add the further constraint that it’s distances are ruled off in terms of some arbitrary unit. But so far you haven’t shown how that mental construct relates to someone’s world as a useful fact.

As I say, the aboriginal form of life is said to want to think about spatial distance in terms of duration of effort. The Aussie education system is suppose to recognise that cultural difference in its attempts to teach basic mathematical concepts in a way that don’t continue to favour the later white settlers.

So is a reply not in metres, or any equivalent notion of counting a unit of distance, going to get marked wrong by you? Does everyone have to conform to your Cartesian conception of reality?

Speak clearly now. You have probably used up your last chance.

So tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life.

For a start there is the distinction between generating an hypothesis and justifying that hypothesis. If you want to call generating an hypothesis abduction, well and good. But I think that more is needed to justify the hypothesis. Induction and abduction are insufficient to justify a claim. — Banno

More weirdness. Banno is told how it works. Inductive thought is about the creative leap from the particular instance to the general rule. Peirce then came along to argue that the scientific method - which had by then proven itself pretty successful - was in fact based on a three-step process of reasoning.

Rather than a dyadic opposition of induction and deduction - which of course wasn't really working out - Peirce made it explicit that "truth" is arrived at via a three step logic.

It starts with abduction - the leap from some particular surprising fact to some guess about a general rule. So this is broadly an inductive step in going from the particular to the general.

Then the next step would - quite logically - be to use the generality to make particular predictions. If the hypothetical rule were true, consequences could be safely deduced. Particular facts could be derived with syntactical certainty. They couldn't be logically wrong - given the truth of the general premiss.

Banno likes the sound of "valid" as the description of a deductive inference of this sort. It somehow suggests that induction is the faulty and shameful part of the deal if you are new to the game of critical thinking. It's a neat rhetorical strategy.

Then third we get the inductive confirmation to close the loop. Deduction gives us a prediction about particular observable facts. The presence of those observables then allow a second completing move from the particular back to the general. The general is shown to be true in the light of the available evidence.

So induction - going from the particular to the general.

Deduction - going from the general to the particular.

Put the two together in the right logical order and you have a holistic relation that can be used in recursive fashion to approach the natural limits on rational inquiry.

Actually, f you measure it in situ you will get about 348 m. I couldn't believe it was 863 m high, so I looked it up. 863 m is its height above sea level — Janus

LOL. But Banno covered that already.... "How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us."

So apparently the number of metres in question is both utterly arbitrary - choose any reference point - and also a physical, mind-independent, fact.

Live with the contradiction!

The issue is that for your Pragmatism there is only the measurement. — Banno

Why mention the three things of the world, the sign and the interpretant then?

Is this why you don't get triadic ontologies? You struggle with the counting?

But Uluru will be 863m, whether you measure it or not. — Banno

Oh dear. White man speaks patronisingly again. Cartesian co-ordinates exist whether that is a theory by which you make useful sense of your world or not.

How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us. — Banno

And now throw in some slap-dash relativism to show reality in fact has no preferred co-ordinate frame.

Height may be what you measure as a vertical distance from the ground ... until you throw in the next metaphysical twist of the co-ordinate frame tale. Keeping up wee black fella at the back of the class?

Your criticism is no more than saying that we can't talk (and that includes measuring) without the social constructs of language. Sure. But our social conventions have no influence on the height of Uluru. — Banno

They are what make the notion of "a height" meaningful - a proposition that would be truth-apt within a certain form of life.

You are wanting to talk about some notion of height that is "mind-independent true" - not grounded in a form of life. I am pointing out that all such truth talk is dependent on some communal, language encoded, point of view.

You are welcome to try to justify your leap from the pragmatic view to an epistemology of naive realism. But so far you haven't done that.

Again, address the specific question I put to you.

Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life.

In order to name something, there must be something to name. — Banno

You mean like the way God has a name? Or unicorns? Or Hesperus and Phosphorus?

I really think something must be broke about the way you reason. Some kind of agnosia going on.

I am a mere mosquito. Bzzz bzzz. — Banno

Squish, squish. ;)

n the sense that Uluru has a certain height, regardless of our measuring it. But that your Pragmatism cannot admit this; and so is fraught with anti-realism. — Banno

Rather than just answer with the same repeated misrepresentation, answer the question as it was posed. Or show where the literature of Pragmatism supports your contention of it being anti-realism as such.

So again. How is height "real" in your book. How is "height" to be understood when you are not imposing a concept involving Cartesian co-ordinates - and one presuming the Earth to be the Copernican centre of that inertial reference frame? What should "height" mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life?

Drop the evasions and misrepresenations. Just try to answer my questions honestly and directly.

To say it is true that the Eiffel Tower has a height, and that the height is 324m, is already admitting that "height" is a theoretical construct. An answer in metres - above some "foundation-line" - is only "true" because we agree that it would be a suitable response in terms of some ontological story we share through a common language, a common form of life.

Why are you not prepared to admit to this obvious epistemic fact?

So yes, we could then go on from there to discuss in what sense a model of reality based on Cartesian co-ordinates might be better than an aboriginal model that treats distances more in terms of notions of the duration of an effort.

Rather than being racist, a Pragmatic view says we can at least ask this question because "truth" in the pragmatic conception is what reason will arrive at in the fulness of time. It is what Nozick called the invariant view. We can see that some views are more subjective or observer-dependent than others. And so epistemically, we can have the goal of arriving at the view with is the most objective, or least observer-dependent as possible. Enter the justification or the scientific method.

So Pragmatism can both speak to the right of folk to construct the view of the world that they find most useful, and also still hold out the goal of moving towards a view of the world that is the most mind-independent or ontically abstracted. You can recover the Cartesian co-ordinates that you seem so attached to in the long run perhaps.

But now, once again, I'm answering my own questions, showing where there could be some agreement with your half-baked naive realism that poses as some kind of philosophical quietism.

A good student needs to have a go at giving an answer himself. So forget what I just said. Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life - given that we are not talking about idealism but the indirect realism of pragmatism.

You mean like the way I keep going on about "Form of Life"? — Banno

Hmm. Maybe you really do have a problem that I haven't picked up on?

I'm going to lunch. When I get back, I expect a post that is something worth a response.

In what sense is "height" real?

Sure there is a world out there - even if just noumenal. So this is not about idealism. It is about epistemology in the light of the practicalities of being in a modelling relation with that world.

In that light then, in what sense is "height" real?

Use the example you suggested and which I am happy to run with. We have aborigines and their relation to landcape features like Uluru. We have white europeans and their relation to feats of engineering like the Eiffel Tower.

Compare and contrast what "real" means in such differing "forms of life".

No, no. Finish what you started. Don't just keep deflecting.

Rhetorical strategies - you overuse this one, the pretence that you have already answered the question when you haven't. — Banno

Quote my reply and show how it didn't answer the question you posed.

So where are we with the debate? — Banno

Well I made my arguments. I also commented on what you had to say about yours, even though I had to pull it in from elsewhere. You have said nothing substantive against my position as far as I can tell. Now I'm commenting on your rhetorical strategy and the reasons behind it.

We agreed that your Pragmatic doctrine suffers an extreme anti-realism, to the extent that it can only talk about measurements, and certainly not rocks or towers or such. — Banno

No. That is your construction. And it is a deliberately obtuse one for rhetorical effect.

You already have all my arguments concerning why that is a misrepresentation of my position - if you want to actually engage in a debate and not merely a pissing game.

We agreed that I was making it up as I went along, while you believe you have all the answers. — Banno

More dog whistling.

Look at poor Banno. One of us. Look at nasty apo. One of them. Boo, hiss. Etc.

A neat sift. As if form of life had only one meaning.

Directing us away from the debate. — Banno

But it was you who made a fuss about my use of "form of life". You asked - confusingly - whether that was an insult (to aborigines?) or gratuitous (so in what possible sense gratuitious?).

For once take some responsibility. You directed the conversation to this new focus. But nicely, it reveals the essential problem I have with your standard "othering" rhetorical strategy. You simply try to bully people into submission by constructing an in-group/out-group dynamic.

You will go on and on about apo - some mythical apo - who is an engineer with no philosophical background, who is "religious" about some mystic figure whom you distain to actually read, who seems to have too much time on his hands to have a worthwhile life.

I'm not objecting to this game playing. I really enjoy it from an anthropological point of view. It is very revealing about the exact issue we are discussing.

But I will still point out that you do use the rhetorical strategies that are basic to colonialist and racist attitudes. Your form of life might be that of a white middle-class Aussie liberal, but here in this thread you are choosing to employ a different language game.

I just gave you the chance to explain yourself - to backtrack on your dog whistle appeals to rally against the "alien" in the group. It is interesting that you now very swiftly want to move away.

And of course that is how the net functions. You can rely on the fact people have forgotten anything posted three or four posts after it was said. When in trouble - instantly re-direct. It looks like you are engaged in a debate when really your only interest is in establishing who is in, who is out, in your little circle of friends.

Gratuitous? That I used the appropriate Wittgensteinian terminology?

You really need to make up your mind. Either I'm guilty of being dogmatically Peircean or I in fact acknowledge where the later Witti recapitulates the essential epistemology of Peirce.

As you know, aborigines had a very different relation to their landscape than the one you are insisting upon as the rightful and uncontradictable ground of signification. They didn't look and see objects they needed to measure with rulers so they could give legitimate answers to questions about "height".

Sure they lived in the same world as us. But they had their form of life, and we have ours. And why would we insist in some crude fashion that ours is the correct conception of the world.

It might certainly be the appropriate one for a modern western way of life dominated by engineering of course. Engineers are meant to be able to be measure the world with your unambiguous Cartesian certainty. :)

In the end, you can attempt to justify your white man/Cartesian rationalist language game in terms of its "scientific objectivity". But as I keep reminding you, that very objectivity derives from an epistemic cut that makes a break between "the mind" and "the world" - ie: the observer and the observable - in dualistic fashion. You are relying on the very Cartesianism that you claim to have put behind you.

And that is what we keep seeing in all your posts on the issue. You keep trying to trap people into speaking with white man/Cartesian rationalism. You point at the Eiffel Tower - an engineered object being obviously your best example - and demand I acknowledge it has "a height". Either I play your elitist language game, share your cultural form of life - conform to your "wisdom" - or else I "other" myself, demonstrate that I won't play that game and so can be treated as some crazy dark-skinned sub-human pagan outsider. A Peircean worshipper, in your words. ;)

It is this attitude of yours that I find (amusingly) offensive. By claiming that language games/forms of life are essentially unanalysable truths, you then assert a hegemonic right to have yours treated as the correct cultural representation of reality.

If someone won't simply just answer the question in the form in which you present it - say it is true that some edifice or other "has a height", as the height is a notion that has been "actually measured" - then they are part of the out-group, not part of your in-group, and rightfully get everything they deserve for that.

Is it not at all disturbing that you failed to acknowledge the semiotic right of first Australians to their own authentic form of life when given the opportunity? For some reason, you think that to be a "gratuitous" point?

The best way to deal with someone who thinks there are no rocks might be to stone him until he is more agreeable. — Banno

So you are a pain realist? It exists in the physical world? Throw the rock at a wall and pain is also going to occur as a consequence?

Not a lot of thought goes into your posts.

Was the term "An aboriginal form of life" meant to be insulting? or just gratuitous? — Banno

What are you talking about? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_life_(philosophy)

Hah. Your replies so fail to engage with my argument that it ain’t worth a response.

Read what I actually wrote and try again.

So again, for you a mountain does not have a height until it is measured. — Banno

Again, the difference is that my approach speaks about "the world that has us in it". It makes it explicit that "truth" applies to a modelling relation.

So for example, did Uluru have a "height" for the Anangu people before the white fella arrived with his Cartesian notion of a co-ordinate space?

An aboriginal form of life would measure Uluru in terms of the time it would take to scale it. Within that culture, what makes obvious sense is to speak about a degree of personal effort.

This keeps the two sides of the modelling relation front of mind. There is of course a big fat rock with a waterhole on top that is a significant landmark. But if you showed up back then, belligerently demanding of everyone you met, "deny that it is true that Uluru has a height of 863m", then you can appreciate what a crass move that might be.

Any notion of a measurement has to be motivated by a reason, a point of view. Measurements are not an objective feature of the world. They are a theory about the world that can be used to form statements which we can then confirm or challenge by some suitable act of observation. We can imagine the world in terms of a systems of signs - like a metre ruler, a ticking clock, an ergometer - and then read off a number that tells us about the quantity of some quality.

So in pressing me to confess that some tower or mountain has some measured height - in the naively realistic sense that height is an actual property of the world rather than a property of a modelling relation with the world - you are just making the same kind of cultural faux pas.

You are belligerently demanding that I bow to your ingrained white man Cartesian rationalism, saying that I have no right to the view that these kinds of "truths" are all relative to some purpose, some point of view.

Now of course, not just a couple of posts backs, you were trying to argue for that kind of socially constructed or PoMo notion of truth. You wanted to say that music, love and breakfast are so tied up with values that measuring them is more art than science.

Again, I can't make excuses for your inconsistencies. You lurch from one side of the debate to the other because you just haven't succeeded in thinking things through in a unified way.

But eventually you may start to see the point of actually having a modelling relations approach to epistemology. You will see that naive realism fails utterly. Just as does dyadic representationalism. You have no real choice except to up your game and understand "truth" as an irreducibly triadic epistemic relation with the world.

Your account fails to be about the world. — Banno

It's more subtle than that. Or at least you find this surprisingly difficult to understand.

What we are trying to arrive at is not a re-presentation of the world - the noumenal view - but instead a world, an umwelt, that is the world as it is useful for us to understand it. That is, the phenomenal view.

So if it is useful to see a tower in terms of height, then that is how we learn to see towers. And clearly, for white men with a grand project to rule the world, understanding reality in terms of Cartesian co-ordinates was a real plus.

But would you deny the Anangu chap his truth when he puffs out his cheeks and replies he doesn't know about your metres of elevation, but the Eiffel Tower looks a bloody effort to climb. Better start now before the day gets too long.

Again, that is not to say that science can't have the goal of a rigorously objective epistemology. There is a world out there, as well as whatever theoretical image we form of it.

Despite your attempts to make that the issue, a modelling relations approach is quite explicit that it believes there is a world - the Kantian thing-in-itself - to be modelled.

However then what is justified, what is believed, what is certain, what is true, is the image we form - the image that is the "world with us in it". Between the interpretance and the world stands the sign - the umwelt. And it connects both sides of the deal in fixing the idea of the "observing self" along with the "observable world".

The world may be recalcitrant. But it "has" that property only in the light of the fact that it refuses "our wishes". And in your naive realism, your white man cultural supremacism, you are failing to acknowledge that knowledge of the world is grounded in the third thing of the umwelt, the system of sign, that arises in the middle to fix some particular "truth" relation.

Epistemology must always recognise that fact

It is great to have the goal of complete scientific objectivity - or alternatively, to want to have the complete subjectivity of the poet, gourmet or lover. However to justify belief properly, we have to understand why complete objectivity and complete subjectivity are themselves impossible. They are the limiting extremes of a common mediating relation.

Get that straight and all the naive epistemic nonsense and inconsistency will just melt away.

No. That's again Straw Banno. — Banno

Straw is all there is. You described you own profile statement as straw Banno. Lordy.

So the anatomy of the black bird was sufficiently similar to the white bird called "swan" for that word to be used in the new case. Those similarities in anatomy are real, if not decisive. — Banno

Sufficiently similar for whom?

Again, the world does not arbitrate in the absolute way you want to suggest. There has to a self with a purpose at the other end of the semantic relationship. And that is the holistic deal that a "theory of truth" needs to deal with.

So again, you point at the world in a bid to deflect attention from the other half of this story. Someone had to make a judgement about "yes, similar enough vs no, much too different". And epistemically, that judgement would have to be secured by being able to point at a reason - a general intention - that was served in this particular instance.

If you like, we can take the foundations into account in our measurement. And sure, the units we use are conventional. We can set up conventions for the measurement of the height of the tower. HTe conventions are part of our language, not part of the tower.

What Apo's position leads to, although he will not say it, is the conclusion that the tower has no height apart from the measurement.

I don't agree with that. The tower has a specifiable height. To say otherwise is to fail to have language engage with the world. — Banno

Keep misrepresenting. My position is that "height" is a theoretical quality or generality that we can then quantify or measure in particular instances.

So going around measuring heights is a simple everyday pragmatic affair. Peirce's job as a scientist was doing just this at the level of international bureau of standards work. He was responsible for creating practical definitions for your standardised ruler or clock.

A mountain doesn't "have" a height. Height is an abstract or theoretical notion that we can go out and measure for a reason.

Jeez, you rail often enough against metaphysical realism - the existence of universals - and yet you talk way more realist than me. :)

So yes, I will always make the distinction that height is a theoretical construct when you come lumberingly along, talking naive realism about these things.

Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music. — Banno

Continuing the effort to flush out the contrasting epistemic positions here - not being one to bottle a debate - we can see that Banno is channeling the metaphysics of Wittgenstein circa the Tractatus here.

So there is the reasonable belief that: “The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?”.

Inductively, we can sense that reality does have a deep pattern. There is a rational, logical or mathematical structure at the heart of existence. And so "a theory of truth" becomes philosophically fundamental. It is not merely an epistemic issue. It is potentially ontological. Understanding rationality is understanding nature.

Wittgenstein famously came up with his own metaphysical position on truth. As a property, it belongs to the class of statements that are either tautological or empirical. The logical positivists loved that bit. But then Wittgenstein added there are also all the unspeakable truths that "manifest" as life's "mysteries".

Some folk feel that was a brilliant insight. It gave philosophy a reason to continue to be, safely separate from the utilitarian concerns of science. Philosophy could be the study of ineffable values. It could become a democratic and pluralistic exercise in which everyone could have their own truth systems, even pretty irrational ones.

Other folk might instead think that this was a gigantic cop-out. Natural philosophers for instance. Rather than truth being cosmopolitan and PoMo, or Biblical and "obvious" (Banno's version), truth would be still unifiable under a common metaphysics.

Natural philosophy would take the view that all Wittgenstein's dichotomy was doing was enshrining the distinction between the observer and the observables - the truth-teller and the truths told. And this is the motif that runs through all Banno's replies. The observer can be taken dualistically for granted. Banno doesn't even want to deal with the difference between the objective and the subject. He doesn't want to deal with the way purposes must shape inquiries and therefore what can count for the answering "facts". By dividing truth in terms of the empirical vs the axiological, value judgements are made safely transcendental and disconnected from the natural world.

Science is tied to the world by the strictness of a method. But then "philosophers" are free to just get on with being naive realists, simply assert their beliefs about what is real and certain as far as they are personally concerned, without needing to defend whatever opinion just came to mind. When pressed for justification, they can hang up a notice on the door - "out to lunch".

Anyway, my natural philosophy approach - the systems science or holistic approach that traces back to Aristotelean four causes metaphysics - is different in an important way. Apart from it just presuming the unity of nature.

The problem for a logicist's approach to metaphysics is that it presumes that reality is a structure. The hidden order of reality is some closed, eternal, fixed sort of pattern. It exists.

By contrast, a metaphysics that arises out of the natural view is that of emergent process. Things develop. They begin vague, formless, chaotic. But regularity or habit emerges to reduce this initial boundless variety. Reality becomes structured with time. It settles into a coherent and rational pattern.

As said, this is induction in a nutshell. A chaos of the particular becomes formed into definite and regular being via its own emergent self-regulation. Generality emerges to turn the particular into local actions that serve an ongoing weaving of a pattern. Constraints create reality as an average of what was possible.

So induction - in that general sense of being how probability works - is metaphysically basic. And deduction - as the mechanical story of classically absolute constraint - is then how the process of self-organising development looks once it has become so highly developed that it is almost completely formed by its general laws or habits.

At the end of time, a process manifests a mathematical-strength structure. Logical necessity finally appears to rule. And we can measure that in the lack of spontaneity or surprise to be found in the system. By the last stage, reality might as well be deductive or computational as any continuing action in the system has been ruled random, meaningless or entropic by the principle of indifference. All that remains once a system hits equilibrium are differences not making a difference.

So what we have here is a clear clash of ontologies. It is a metaphysics of existence or being against a metaphysics of development or becoming.

And Peircean semiotics then slots in as the holistic view of logic as a general semiotic mechanism - the trick by which development and the emergence of regular habits could even take place.

That process view is then logically robust enough - in terms of being a "theory of truth" - to unify the empirical and the axiological. We don't have to tolerate the debate-avoidance tactic of those who want to say there is scientific truth but then also - just as ontically - whatever is my own personally obvious subjective truth. The one that is unspeakable and manifests in private revelation. Often when I'm out to lunch and doing some serious unbottling.

It's not a method; its not algorithmic. It's just seeing the pattern. — Banno

Yep. And thank goodness our brains can work like that. There is a natural way to reason, as evolution shows.

The question is why for a minute would you expect actual humans to be algorithmic?

Again you are showing that there is just no joined-up, consistent position you are defending in this thread.

One minute, you are all about the absolute certainty of grammars, heights and the rules of chess. The next you are all about the mysterious truths of love, art and breakfast. You claim you yearn for the discipline of a formal debate and yet call even your own profile post a "straw man".

You chop and change for rhetorical purposes and oddly expect no-one to notice. Curious.

Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music. — Banno

C'mon Banno. This is laughably awful.

Remember, it is me who is putting forward a "theory of truth" that explains why language games have this kind of pragmatic looseness. I am arguing against strict definitions on the semiotic grounds that words can only constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion. There is always then a creatively open freedom when it comes to interpretation, coupled to the principle of indifference that allows us to limit the interpretive freedom on the grounds that it ain't being helpful.

So you are trying to hide behind precisely the thing that my semiotic approach explains.