Why are you suggesting I said there was an opposition or a contradiction? My point was that there is a filtering or constraint that is core to the method.

Indeed, philosophy requires sophistry as a contrast. — Mariner

Yes indeedy. As I said, we can see the difference in arguing for a belief and arguing to a belief. It is not as hard as you make out.

I could give an answer of my own to this problem, but the core of philosophy involves finding one's own answer and, as it were, picking sides between philosophers and sophists. — Mariner

That is the mistake. You say it is all about the personal when it is about the collective. Academia can promote individual intellectual freedom because there is then the collective judgement of the communal mind.

You are promoting a romantic individual journey of discovery, but the core to philosophical method is that arguments get made and people remember those that seem the most worth considering. Just think of the way Plato and Aristotle spent so much time analysing what others had said.

it is much more like the attention of a lover to the object of his love. — Mariner

Hmm. But love is blind they say. Some believe we are meant to look past the loved one's flaws.

And indeed, much of what passes for philosophical debate in these parts is a sophistic argument in favour of a desired belief.

So how is philosophical method meant to distinguish between the use of argumentation as a sophistical prop vs as a true means of inquiry?

And if you have "never" come across the advocation of scientific style reasoning before in philosophy - the triadic arc of abductive hypothesis, deduction consequence and inductive validation - then its pretty explicit in Peircean Pragmatism at least.

On those two points, as you say, the idea that truth is socially constructed is a very acceptable and modern understanding. But where Pomo can go wrong is then in being too PC (or Marxist - the earlier incarnation of utopian egalitarianism).

So yes, our world is socially constructed. But then in recognising this fundamental subjectivity, the philosophical project can be to discover the most objective point of view. Pomo argues instinctively for plurality and thus loses sight of the possibility that there is indeed a rational unity to be found.

On the second point - opaqueness - I have no objection to jargon and difficulty. But I agree that Pomo often uses language in a way that suggest cleverness rather than actually delivering substance.

The key trick is to employ familiar dichotomies - like love and strife or potential and actual - and treat them as self-contradictory paradox that radically undermines any possibility of unifying certainty. So because neither can be right, yet both are right, everything becomes just a poetic dance around the subject designed to make the writer look clever and the subject matter forever elusive. It can be talked about endlessly, and nothing settled can emerge - which is good if you want to dazzle the impressionable.

So Pomo - not all of it of course, just the general tendency - is opaque because it has institutionalised a fundamental abuse of good philosophical reasoning. It's game is to tease with paradox rather than account via dialectical analysis.

Then the other associated stylistic fault is that it resists giving concrete examples of the abstract arguments it pretends to spin.

AP is clear as it is scientific in this respect. Here is the general theory, now here is the commonsense illustration that makes precise what I might mean. This is an example of a sound method of thought being institutionalised (even if AP can be just as wordy, muddled or trite at times).

So writing skills vary tremendously. But well structured thought will always shine through. And rigour means developing a theory that is systematic (not a toying with contradiction to prove the impossibility of systematisation). And then that system of thought might be true or false - but that isn't a problem if you also argue your case using concrete examples. That is the evidence by which readers can test the strength of the intellectual edifice you wish to present.

This examination (which is the core of the Socratic "know thyself"), on the other hand, also follows rules. Closeness to the experiential basis. Sincerity with self. And reason, which is often taken as the core but which is mostly a method. — Mariner

I think this is a bit too feelgood. I would argue - pragmatically - that philosophical reasoning is just like scientific reasoning in being a method of theory and measurement. Or the stepping back (from the self, from the world) into an abstraction from where observation (of "the self" and "the world") is then concretely made. We form some idea that is philosophically general, then we test how well it seems to apply in our particular case.

So a reasoning method - which gives an articulate basis to the self examination - is indeed the core. We step back in a formalised manner, one taught as Socratic method, so that we can return to the thing in itself, our own experience, with some clear hypothesis about what that experience should actually be (or how it should function pragmatically as a sign relating our formal constructs to the measureables we articulate - the factual results we then claim as what is the case).

Philosophy is not a poetic free for all. It is a scientific method of inquiry. The difference with science is that it is not so demanding of the notion of empirical validation.

As a discipline, it does not seek to close down "wrong avenues" of inquiry. What counts as acceptable measurement - like poetry, feelings, values - is as relaxed as possible to encourage the habit of speculation.

And also, conventionally, the emphasis is on working out every possible formal variation of a possible theory. Like maths, there is value seen even in "abstract nonsense" as again dumb ideas might turn out to be fruitful after all. Crazy lines of thought are good if they are an exercise in experimenting with what sets of logical rules might produce.

So philosophy is a science in depending on the same essential method - formalising constructs and then seeing what results from particularising our experience of the world, of ourselves, from within that constructed framework. It is then different from science in also seeing the value of giving human invention free range.

It becomes a storehouse of every possible way of thinking about things - because who knows when junk might be useful. And who could know what junk looks like unless there was some place you could go an check out its vast variety. ;)

Given that human descriptions generally reduce to a dichotomy, or complementary opposites, what could be the psychological cause of this? — Galuchat

I'm not sure I understand your question. But we reason in this fashion as it is effective. Reducing our choices to a pair of polar opposites means we can act with counterfactual definiteness. There is simple clarity.

Certainly anxiety cannot just simply be reduced to physical processes like a churning stomach, an elevated internal temperature, shifty eyes, etc, for these are simply symptoms used to diagnose an emotional state, behaviorist black-box style. — darthbarracuda

In this case, the social narrative - understanding this variety of symptoms as a single feeling - is fairly accurate of the biology. We are naturally organised to respond to the demands and opportunities of the world in a dichotomous fashion - either relaxing or tensing in some appropriate holistically orienting and prepatory fashion. There is a sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic one. And we can be aware of all the telltale sensations of switching between the two - if we learn to pay attention to them.

Of course we would need to know when we feel scared or hungry. Biologically we need sensations about out own state, as well as the state of the world. But then in the same way, a modern psychological take would want to get away from the resulting "passive representational dualism" of talking about the "us" that experiences "feelings and precepts" to an active or ecological framing of the way minds model worlds.

So the OP sets everything up in the usual dualistic fashion - as if we are naturally observers of our own experiences. But biologically, we simply react to life with appropriate feeling. No mystery. And then humans have language with which they can socially construct a secondary narrative state of being. We can start to talk about "being scared" - and thus raise the counterfactual possibility of "being brave".

That is, we can be quivering in our boots and yet choosing to act according to some different behavioural script - as if fear is what we over-ride in favour of a tougher socially-approved course of action.

So the power of narrative is indeed to inject this "self" into the middle of our biological reacting. Counterfactual thinking becomes a new layer of response for socialised humans.

I understand this to mean that language defines our ontological commitments. And that would be a social constructionist position on emotions that I would agree with.

When we are talking about feelings like fear or bravery, we are talking about our notions of "some thing" that exists with real substantiality. So already there are all kinds of grounding presumptions made by such talk. And higher human feelings like bravery are clearly more social scripts of proper ways to think and behave. So to the degree we believe in their existence, it is an act of creation in that sense.

Obviously the game is to maximise the one and minimise the other. But given the future can only be guessed, we can't usually know the true risk-reward return and so we have to model some notion of our tolerance for risk vs reward.

If you are rich, that might make you risk adverse. Or if you are acquisitive, then even being rich, that might make you risk embracing.

So pain and pleasure seem a simple and direct dichotomisation of biological value. But from that simple basis, a complex world of Bayesian reasoning can arise. One could quite reasonably be young and foolish, or old and cautious. Our answer to the OP can be both founded on the same evaluative principles and yet also reflect the great variety in our individuated state of being.

And that is just nature at work, doing its thing.

You are talking about every triangle in realationship to having four sides. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yep. So we can talk about the intersection of sets - {triangles} and {four sided polygons} - that then result in empty sets. It fits one view of set logic. But then more realistic is the thought that triangles are a subset of the polygons. And the particular constraint is that they have just three sides. Or even more importantly - in being maximally generic - they are the least sides a polygon can have in a two dimensional plane.

So an apparently simple logical operation is in fact a flattening of the hierarchical complexity of an actual world (even the actuality represented by the idea of spaces enclosed by edges on a plane).

A subsumptive hierarchy notation would make the point plainer - {n-gon {3-gon}}. Or putting it the other way around, given the world of a plane - constraint in two dimensions - the minimum constraint that has to be added to close those two degrees of freedom is 1 further. Or a rotation of 180 degrees. The n-gon, effectively a circle or 360 degree rotation, is then the maximum number of sides that can be used to enclose a space.

So four sided triangles sound a logical nonsense because they are understood as a particular of set theoretic operation. But set theory is itself a metaphysically impoverished language for doing real metaphysics. Logical atomism's spectacular crash and burn was surely enough to demonstrate that. And perhaps you can forgive the survivors for walking away muttering, metaphysics, never again! :)

Now one might point out the unrestricted "everything" is talking about possibilities, saying that our language may talk of anything. This is true, but what does it mean? Well, it isolates the specific possibility of what our language can say. In the sense that it talks about anything, it's restricted to a specific possibility. It not about an unrestricted "everything" at all. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again yep. This is why a metaphysical strength logic wants to employ the further notion of vagueness, or the distinction between the radically indeterminate and the crisply individuated.

Vagueness can never be exhausted by inquiry. And the good thing about that is it means inquiry doesn't have to exhaust itself trying.

Theories of truth break themselves on the rocks because they believe the world is something definite and therefore every possible proposition has some true or false value. It's that AP disease. But as soon as you take the pragmatic view, everything changes. Truth only needs determining to the degree that a difference could make a difference.

So that is a real economising move. Truth is only in question to the degree it might actually matter in terms of a purpose or finality. We can lighten up. That was Witti's Peircean point.

On the other hand, we then need an objective model of finality - the purpose that determines what counts as meaningful. So that is the extra work that philosophy of language types never really got going on because they retreated into a commonsense realism about speech acts, thus completely avoiding the metaphysical issues which semiotics had already addressed.

Still promising the satisfaction you never could or intended to deliver? Life is too short for those coy games.

I would like a full answer. Not interested in cock-teasing.

In what way was it not correct?

I think retrocausality of some kind has to be the case. But TI does the usual physics thing of treating the transactions as a simple reversible symmetry. So the going forward in time is mirrored by a going backwards in time. It is talking of a material/efficient cause that simply swaps its direction in time.

That kind of makes sense as it feels holistic - like seeing an emission/absorption even as a single "handshaking" agreement across time. The event is now a thermal relation like a length of string with two ends.

But it isn't going to be holistic enough - which is why TI has probably languished. I think you need an interpretation which makes use of an actual asymmetry between efficient and final cause. So now what can act from the distant future to constrain the flight of a photon is the finality of a context. The experimenter, in setting up his quantum eraser experiment, is creating the finality which can then work backwards in time to have been constraining the photons flowing from that distant star the past billion years in the statistical wavefunction way so familiar from twin slit empiricism.

So short answer: we have to accept retrocausality in some form, but really that just means accepting quantum contextuality or holism in the broadest sense. The bigger shift in interpretation is giving up on a world made purely of efficient causes (moving either forward or backward in time). Our idea of the world has to embrace the holism of downward acting contextuality or finality.

Yep, we are certainly limited by our humanness. But it is now a metaphysically general argument that existence is limited by the resources it has to "compute itself". So your commonsense point can be cashed out as an ultimate ontological restriction on existence.

Of course, the actual physics still leaves plenty of questions unanswered as yet. Can the Planckscale itself vary? What is the source of the dark energy that in fact ensures that the cosmological event horizons can achieve a maximum entropy state?

But physics now can calculate real things by understanding computation - logical possibility - to be constrained by hard material limits. You can imagine a superbrain. But we also now know what it's ultimate physically realisable limits are.

Surely a utilitarian would agree? — Banno

Are you a utilitarian? I'm a pragmatist - and Peircean not Jamesian. So different in essential ways.

Ramsey was getting it - and whispering it in Witti's ear in a way that inspired PI. So AP could have gone down a very different road after its failed project of logical atomism. You might have had a very different philosophical indoctrination as a result. Life is so full of paths not taken.

By logical possibility, you mean counterfactuality. Things are definite in that they must either be the case, or not. So we can only count possibilities in terms of what we imagine as determinate outcomes. Logical possibility is constrained by its rules - the laws of thought - of which the law of non-contradiction is central here.

Material potential is a larger state in that it is ultimately vague or indeterminate. Logically, non-contradiction does not apply to this pure definition of "the posible".

But on the other hand, logical possibility - as semiotic variety, all that we could speak about - is larger than physical potential as physical potential only "speaks to" the actually materially realisable. And the logically possible lets us speak about eveything that is also in fact the impossible. We are doing that already - raising the ficticious, the alternative, the contradictory - just in the act of speaking.

So each kind of possibility exceeds the other. Hence the air of dualism that hangs forever over any serious Metaphysical debate. Physical existence is founded on a vague potentiality that exceeds any hope of us being able to list its contents in counterfactual manner. But then our ability to dream up counterfactual worlds is just as limitless seeming.

To resolve this dualism is tricky. But physics has discovered that information is in fact holographically bounded. You can't physically speculate about alternative worlds in a fashion that exceeds the Planck limits on energy density. A brain or computer eventually will cram so much effort into a region of spacetime that it will collapse under its own gravitational force to become a black hole.

So a unifying principle has emerged where potential - either epistemic or ontic, physical or symbolic - can be measured in a single coin, the Planckscale information bit, or canonical material degree of freedom.

f it's true that I'm never going to drop the ball, what is the resistance? — Mongrel

You are posing this as an instance of the unmovable object and the irresistible force. And that is a paradoxical framing as it claims the existence of a potential that can't be actualised.

In fact a ball blocked by your hand is some equilibrium balance between different species of force or potential energy. The attraction of a gravitational potential is in balance with the repulsion of the electrostatic forces that bind the ball and make your hand a barrier.

So the resistance - the threshold that must be topped to break this particular symmetry state - is whatever endurance you can muster given a ball of some variable weight. Are we talking ping pong balls or cannonballs? Are we talking about you as Pee Wee Herman or Superman?

In the real world, a ball in the hand is going to have to be a more materially specified state - more symmetries will be already broken. And if we then want to employ the generality of some thought experiment - as we would metaphysically - then it is important that we recognise that the notion of a potential does include the idea of a threshold not yet breached. And then that symmetry breaking can take two general forms - the accidental or the deliberate. Either material spontaneity or the necessity of finality may be the reason for a potential becoming actualised.

With your "ball that I won't let drop", you are playing with the paradoxical seeming contrast between these two limit notions of contingent vs necessary. Your decision to hold the ball is turning its gravitational potential into an "impossibility" - and so apparently making it a species of possibilty in that its desire to fall has been thwarted.

Language use is confused here. But potential usually is taken to refer to a general power that is then localised in its expression. So it is predicated of a thing and expresses some finality. The ball wants to fall.

Possibility is then dichotomous to that in speaking instead of what might happen spontaneously or contingently. It is something that global context or constraint is indifferent to, and so has no especial desire either to forbid or desire.

So both potential and possible talk about the particularity of some change - some breaking of a symmetry or state of suspension. And if we are talking about an already complexly developed world with rich structure, then goal-directed potential and possibility as undirected chance are clearly quite different kinds things.

But if we wind back existence to its simplest state, then the situation is going to become ... vague. An atom waiting to decay seems to be expressing both an extremely definite desire to thermalise (as captured in its wavefunction) and also the total spontaneity of possibility in that its actual decay is an instant of utter material accident.

So the metaphysical distinction that is easy to make in a complexly developed world becomes an indistinct or vague one in a state of maximum Metaphysical simplicity. Potentiality and possibility become one "thing" yet to be separated.

Physically a potential (for change) is a symmetry, a state of equilibrium balance, not yet broken.

Yep. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Or syntax is not semantics. The capacity to be meaningless or false is why language appears to have unlimited capacity to be meaningful or true.

I gave a reasonably definite view - both of what might be the usual response within an Aristotelian metaphysics, and then a more contemporary Peircean version that expands on that in a way remarkably in agreement with modern science.

You can respond with counter arguments to that if you like. But if you simply want to run around the village shouting your usual "metaphysics is bunk" slogans, then dung will naturally be flung in your general direction. It is indeed another game that we can find entertaining.

If it is, it might be the only one. — Banno

Yes. And so it might not be. Hence my request that you get beyond assertions and offer arguments. Of course I have zero expectation of that.

Or rather in the usual fashion of Metaphysical reasoning, we are seeking the dichotomy that breaks apart the question in its most perfect possible logical fashion. The distinction of the potential and the actual attempts to meet the standard of being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

They might not achieve that as a dialectical opposition. The attempt may be found wanting. But at least it is understood what the essential game is here. The meaning of terms of art are defined in this mutually grounding fashion.

To order coffee and seduce their beloved. But not to do metaphysics. — Banno

So the answer to my question is this? Metaphysics shouldn't exist? And you can't see that is already a metaphysical proposition?

Great, a straight answer to one question at least. No.

So what about that Lewis guy, eh? Modal logic produces the craziest of all crazy Metaphysical shit.

Science seems to be happening and thriving despite your belly-aching. People talk about path integral and multiverses quite happily. Ideas about everythingness have become research projects as we understand them in terms of ontologically rational limits or constraints.

The way metaphysics usually wants to use it though, as a reduction of all the world to a singular idea, is just incohrent. "Everything" cannot exist. To exist means to be distinct from other things, a seperate state to anything else. We might say that any state is is defined by NOT being everything. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah. So that is why metaphysics would in fact be so concerned with the obvious demarcation between everything possible and everything actual.

Have any of you guys ever studied any basic metaphysics?

Evasion.

So can you answer a straight question for once: how ought a metaphysician use words?

So when metaphysicians agree on usage, or when they differ, do they not seem to think there might be some essential ground for doing so? Is it really "just a word game" within that linguistic community, or is only within philosophy of language that a word game is actually a word game in the way you intend to use the term here?

Hmm. Isn't that a profound Metaphysical question you're asking?

So how ought a metaphysician use the word?

This now seems an entirely different question. Are you asking how anything in fact comes to exist? What causes being? Why something and not nothing?

In my Peircean approach to that, individuation is symmetry breaking. The story, being developmental, is triadic. You need the three categories of a vague potential, an emergent regularity of habit or law, and then the third thing of a resulting world of actualised particulars or real possibilities.

So possibility divides into the unformed or vague and the formed or lawfully shaped. The vague state is a true everythingness that is a nothingness in its pure symmetry or indeterminacy. But as that vagueness is broken by organising principles, then you have crisp alternatives where events have either happened or they have not. Counterfactuality exists.

Thus talking about an actual world - as a container - is talking about a state of habitual emergent order in which local events or entities now can be said to concretely exist in a counterfactual sense. It is now the case they might not have existed - as either the global laws of nature, or simple material accidents, might have determined they do not.

So in our world at least, the possibility of rivers flowing uphill is not an actuality due to natural laws. And then the possibility of this river forking there rather than here is a possibility denied merely by some material accident of history. It is impossible not in the formal sense, but in the sense of a material fact.

Thus actuality itself is an irreducibly complex state - hylomorphic. And possibility is a word we use that in fact reflects the various elements it takes to be actualised. In Peircean jargon, you need the hierarchical organisation, the triad, of firstness, secondness and thirdness. You need pure vague potential, then the emergent habits that organise it into a definite state of being which then becomes a world of actual localised events.

In the beginning, anything is possible and nothing is actual. After the symmetry is broken, only some things are possible (due to laws and history). The rest are now possible in only the apophatic or suppressed sense of the counterfactual might have been. There is now a definite fact of the matter that they don't exist (either due to law or history).

How could any entity that was actually actual - ie: a materially individuated form - not be individuated within a world. Where would this material thing be? How could it be considered individuated except by virtue of a context of all that which it is not?

You seem very confused. The actual arises as a limitation or constraint on the potential.

Do you not agree that the actual is some numerical subset of all the possible forms of organisation plus all their possible material accidents?

If we are talking about architecture for instance, surely there would always be more design possibilities and potential flaws and defects of execution than actually ever physically expressed.

The mutual definition of the categories themselves is a different issue - which I also highlighted.

If we are talking about actual things in a world then the essential difference is that the possible forms are materialised. We are speaking of substantial being.

It would be usual to distinguish between every thing potential and every thing actual. One would be a subset of the other.

Then the potential itself could have various levels of definition. If you are talking about the existence of possibilities, that could be in this exact world, or a world similar, or in any notion of world at all. So it might be just all the worlds with our same laws of nature, but then different in all the possible accidental ways. Or it could be worlds with different laws - different necessities - too.

So the task of defining what "everything" might mean can be systematically decomposed via a number of standard Metaphysical dichotomies like actual~potential, particular~general and chance~necessity.

If you keep unravelling the notion of everythingness, you get eventually to the notion of vagueness or the indeterminate - the everythingness that is also a nothingness.

So we can define what we mean, but the question has quite a few levels to dissolve. And so our use of the word is quite context dependent. We are usually thinking of some already bounded form of "every thing", which is why you do have people like Tegmark trying to classify levels of multiverses for instance.

That's the rhetorical advantage of founding your "metaphysics" in the ineffable. No one can call you out for your failure to speak about it meaningfully, let alone provide the material evidence. ;)