Or say we want to study the aesthetic under scientific means. In order to even study the aesthetic, we have to know what the hell the aesthetic even is. Thus ontology is fundamentally necessary to any other mode of inquiry. Attempting to do ontology purely by empirical means would be an exercise in wastefulness and tedium - surely it's conceivably possible, but practically impossible. — darthbarracuda

But really, you make my point. We don't know what the aesthetic is unless we have some concept that seems measurable. It is airy fairy meaningless talk until we can at least do something as primitively quantitative as point at a Picasso and exclaim that's what I'm talking about.

So the ontic commitment is to counterfactual definiteness in fact. One has to be able to say that this is a particular instance of that general idea.

Thus conception is inherently empirical. Unless an idea can be cashed out in an act of measurement, we would have to ascribe to it the dismal status of being an idea that is "not even wrong".

I'd just clarify that it's a matter of dynamic organization. — Terrapin Station

I think you miss the holist point that emergence proper is about the emergence of new global boundary conditions that don't interact dynamically but act hierarchically.

So the reductionist just imagines a blur of parts in interaction and - somehow - an organisation emerges.

But holism says emergence is about dynamism becoming isolated by becoming stretched across different spatiotemporal scales. So the higher level order effectively "freezes out" from the point of view of the lower level dynamics. It becomes the stability creating ambience or backdrop - the boundary conditions, as I say.

Or, alternatively, we could just go the Deleuzean route and call philosophy the study and assimilation of concepts. — darthbarracuda

The problem with this is that even concepts make no real sense except when defined in ways that permit acts of measurement. Or in Peircean terms, you can't have habits of interpretance if you can't recognise the signs that are the subject of interpretation.

So it all keeps coming back to the "scientific method of reasoning". Or the modelling relation. We conceive of qualities. But that only makes sense if we are able to carry out acts of quantification. There is no such thing as a quality that can't be quantified. And so empiricism - for some reason much derided - is basic to philosophical thought. You can't talk intelligibly about the general if you can't successfully point to its proper instances.

It seems that the parts and their organization must exhaust what constitutes the whole, and therefore are equivalent to the whole. — Real Gone Cat

Yep. Even a trivial version of the argument says you have to add the further thing of "the organisation". Summing the parts ain't enough.

And I note you just avoid my point that proper holism stresses the way wholes shape their parts to make them the right stuff.

Wholes have the causal power of constraint or limitation. It is what the organisation can subtract by way of local degrees of freedom that needs to be part of your Metaphysical maths.

Vagueness is in the messages, not in the language itself, which pre-exists the messages. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not exactly. The physical constraints that might in retrospect be recognised as the "primeval ecosystem" can be "crisply informational" for purely accidental reasons. So in the beginning there is spontaneity and contingency. Later develops the regularity of a habit whereby a system of symbols takes on some necessary interpretation.

So - remembering that we are talking about the development of the coding side of the biosemiotic relation - the syntax might seem physically definite in the primeval condition, but the semantics is still maximally contingent. And being uncertain or indeterminate, that makes it spontaneous or vague.

Although vagueness proper speaks to the primeval conditions of the whole semiotic relation of course - both code and dynamics.

In making this type of analogy you must be sure to maintain a proper temporal order so as not to confuse cause with effect. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. Hence my point that it is only in retrospective fashion that we see "accidents" in terms of "necessities".

As we have discussed before, finality acts retrocausally from the future. It is the principle that determines in the long run exactly what are the necessary formal regularities of nature - its structural attractors - and what remains, even at the end of time, just "accidents. Contingencies which continue to be ignorable as they are differences that never make a difference.

So the messaging system comes into existence, and is formed in such a way as to fulfill the requirements of the pre-existing language, but what the child learns is rules which are derived from messaging system. The former is truly prescriptive, while the latter is descriptive. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. You are missing the point again.

What comes first is a vague state of semiotic relations. So chimps grunting in contextually meaningful, yet ungrammatical fashion, is at least some kind of messaging system.

And then the relation develops dichotomistically - each side of the equation strengthening in mutually co-arising fashion.

In human language evolution, we have the development by separation into words and rules. The more that speech becomes syntactically divisible, the more speech also becomes syntactically composable. Developing the syntactic habit of adding suffixes allows the development of a wide variety of semantic categories - like a variety of tenses.

So sure, you do have a division into syntax and semantics - or prescription and description, in your jargon. But the two are still aspects of the one developing dichotomy. And this co-evolutionary logic is why an organic systems perspective (such as Pattee's) never fits your own mechanistic understanding of time and causality.

A listing of the parts (the sum of the parts) is a whole no less so than any other arrangement of the parts. And no arrangement carries any more value than any other, accept that the observer chooses to make it so. — Real Gone Cat

It's just not the same thing to list a set of components in a way that leaves out the further fact that is their organisation. Especially when my claim is that the parts rely on such active constraints to even be what they are.

Another familiar illustration of the holistic point is try scooping a swirling eddy out of the river in a bucket. Look in the bucket, and the vortex has gone. Proof it only existed as a local feature in a living context.

So you are arguing from a point of view that the whole of nature is composed of substantial entities. And modern physics shows how every such thing is simply the local feature of a dissipative process - an excititation in a field, as they say.

what exactly is meant by the phrase "the sum of the parts"? Is it a listing of the parts as I've suggested, or something else? — Real Gone Cat

No, its not a listing of entities in fact. It is the claim that causality can be reduced to bottom-up construction - a tale of efficient/material causes. So the summing is about the way simple things can construct complex things in purely additive fashion. And then - so this reductionist view goes - you get secondary emergent states with their own properties when there is so much of some stuff that it undergoes a further phase transition. So get enough water molecules at the right temperature and pressure and - voila - liquidity pops out.

But true holism is arguing something much stronger than mere emergentism.

Emergence is already saying the organisation that emerges is more than what can be found in the parts themselves. But my kind of systems holism says wholes - representing mathematical forms and entropic purposes - actually reach down to shape the materiality by which their existence can gain crisp expression.

So even reductionists have their (semi-mystical) notions about emergence (which they try to sooth away by switching to talk about supervenience).

I'm happy to argue the way more radical holism of a systems thinker where there just couldn't even be a cosmos without the limitations that formal and final cause are able to impose on vague material potential.

Aristotle's hylomorphism is essentially correct when understood through the lens of modern symmetry breaking maths. (Ie: the premise behind the latest metaphysical bandwagon of ontic structural realism.)

Now the aphorism is not entirely without meaning - when properly understood. It actually means, "One arrangement is valued above other arrangements." — Real Gone Cat

So you are basically trying to apply a set theoretic point of view - and set theory is famously deficient in being able to account for the rules by which collections could be considered meaningful.

To value some arrangement over other arrangements is to add some rule that gives the collection meaning. So again the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You have your chosen collection in a bag tied up with a bow - and then the further thing of "its value".

Again essence has escaped your attempts at reduction. Again you have ended up with value (or final cause) made a property of the human observer and not a fact accounted for as part of the observable.

Magicians call this misdirection. The hand is quicker than the eye. Reductionists employ the same trick all the time ... on themselves, without realising it. One minute they are talking about explaining the meaning of a collection, the next, they are just pointing to a collection.

I would be glad to know how a naturalist approach might enable philosophy to deal with subjects for which the scientific method seems to me wide of the mark like aesthetics, ethics, politics and meta-science. — mcdoodle

In keeping with the OP, I am dealing with the meta-theoretic level issues. And you don't seem "glad" at all. ;)

So it should be clear that I am talking about the "scientific method" from the perspective of a Peircean semiotician and systems thinker. I am sure that you are thinking of scientific inquiry in terms of analytic or reductionist traditions where a full "four causes" approach is normally rejected.

Reductionism only wants to concern itself with the modelling of material and efficient cause (as formal and final cause is "naturally" eschewed, being what self-interested human modellers want to freely bring to the table themselves). But pragmatism - in treating formal and final cause as real, fully part of nature - has a way of putting human modellers in their proper place.

So there is not a lot of point attacking me for the sins of reductionist Scientism when I am in fact a natural philosopher in the four causes Aristotelean tradition.

I just came here from listening to some (bracing !) Schoenberg: there is a kind of knowledge, for example, in the way those notes are constructed and sung played. Perhaps there is in the spirituality Wayfarer is interested in too, or in love between people. — mcdoodle

The usual move - trying to suggest the "scientist" is somehow deficient in spirit, unable to enjoy life like a regular person.

The tropes of Romanticism are perfectly familiar. The issue is getting folk like yourself to actually question the grounds of such beliefs.

But of course rejecting analysis absolves one of the need to ever respond to a demand for actual intelligibility. Catch 22, or the escape via mystical paradox.

The issue is, where does this primeval ecosystem come from, within which the switching systems can emerge, — Metaphysician Undercover

Hate to say it, but Pattee is just talking about the necessity of vague beginnings. Where you have the "mystery" of a dichotomy - in this case, the abiogenetic chicken and egg question of which came first, genetic codes or metabolic processes - then the riddle has to be solved using a logic of vagueness.

So the argument is that the primeval "ecosystem language" (and note Pattee is talking specifically about the code half of the dichotomy here) would have condensed out of vaguer, analog, conditions in the same way that the formal grammar that (used to be) taught every kid in school is a "written down" distillation or idealisation of the more informal habits to be found in spoken language.

So Pattee is simply making the usual argument. Where we find a sharply dichotomised reality, we can then know that it could only have developed out of a vaguer version of itself. And if we reverse a history of symmetry breaking, logic says we arrive back at a state of perfect symmetry - a vagueness, a firstness, an apeiron.

Thus to the Chinese speaker, the whole (the arrangement of the brush strokes) may be greater (carry more information) than the parts (the brush strokes themselves). But to the English speaker ...?

Saying "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" has poetic value, but is not technically correct. — Real Gone Cat

But your own argument just showed that the whole has meaning, the parts are meaningless. So the whole has something more (unless you can show how meaning arises purely by the summation of brushstrokes such that an English speaker can understand Chinese by that method).

As a general example, analytic philosophy about aesthetics often seems risible to me, trying to utilise pseudo-scientific or quasi-logical concepts to describe facets of human life that need a different broader faculty of understanding. In what way can a scientising philosophy march on into these areas? — mcdoodle

But doesn't the "scientific" or "analytic" approach to nature have the advantage of being suitably modest? At least under the pragmatic or modelling relations approach to intelligibility, there is a clear demarcation between what the models can and can't achieve by way of "explaining things".

So it is understood, for example, that explanatory ambitions must be limited by the exhaustion of counterfactuality. You can't explain the ineffable redness of red, or the fundamental absurdity of existence, if there is no counterfactual observation to justify some theory.

And theory, on the whole, relies on the informality of acts of measurement. So the model can be completely formalised - the world can be described in terms of a closed tale of causal entailment. But measuring the values to plug into the equations always involves a free choice by the observer. Quantum mechanics merely illustrates how real this issue is in general for science.

Likewise pragmatism in particular stresses that modelling also includes the modeller's purpose. So that is another active limitation on "explanatory completeness".

Thus being a "scientist" involves great epistemic humility. It means understanding the limits of knowledge and developing a method of inquiry accordingly.

And it is because pragmatism doesn't fudge things that it can then inquire into any natural phenomenon with great confidence.

Say what you like about those Continentals, but quite a few of them know how to talk about poetry and symphonies. — mcdoodle

It might be useful to consider the standard tropes by which continentalism operates.

A primary one is an attempt to use the principle tool of intelligible analysis - the dialectic - against itself. So the continental strives to show that dichotomies are paradoxes and such reasonings are circular.

Metaphysical analysis aims to discover nature's dichotomous limits. Pure possibility is separated into its "otherness". So if flux is one extreme of possibility, then stasis is its other. And so on through all the familiar categories of nature.

And then dichotomies give rise to hierarchies as the divided then mix. So the logic of nature is hierarchical - not circular, chasing its tail on a single scale of being, but itself dichotomised into the whole and the part, the global and the local, the constraints and the freedoms.

So proper scientific naturalism (which recognises all four Aristotelean causes) has its ur-model of intelligibility. Dialectical reasoning works because existence is shaped by the self-organising logic of dichotomies and hierarchies.

And then along comes Continentalism which attempts to establish itself by twisting this naturalism to say its very opposite.

So now every dichotomy must be turned into a paradox. The continentalist says look, we have two contradictory things - like flux vs stasis. Well which is it going to be? And if it must be both, well then nature is fundamentally "unintelligible".

Likewise the continentalist seeks to make a muddle out of the hierarchical outcomes that result from dichotomies reaching equilibrium balances (that is, the broken symmetries being equilibrated by being fully broken over all possible scales of being).

The continentalist - citing Marxism or political correctness - wants to reject hierarchy as a political choice. It is just not right that power structures could be natural. It is only democratic that all existence is on the same level. Fluid networks of relations are fine, but concrete hierarchical order is coercive and abhorrent.

So there is no coincidence that continentalism chooses the play of paradox and the virtue of relativism as two principle tools of argument. If the pragmatic/analytic approach is managing to explain the world in terms of the rational inevitability of dichotomies and hierarchies, continentalism has to define itself as the unintelligible "other" to that.

So in Bizarro world fashion, continentalism exists in a way that simply only confirms what it seeks to deny. Dichotomies and hierarchies are what make rational sense of nature. Paradox and relativism then become the natural tools when mounting Romanticism's inevitable riposte to the triumph of Enlightenment reasoning.

If you are not onboard the pragmatic/analytic juggernaut, it is essential to create the fiction that dialectical metaphysics leads to mystification rather than intelligibility. It is the only way to seize back cultural control of the conversation.

I may try to demonstrate this on any example you will choose. — miosim

Great. Start with consciousness.

In that article, I see "switches" spoken of, which are just parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what shapes a switch? Is binary logic "real" in your book? (I say yes - as real as any physical circuitry it engenders.)

Where is this background environment of "language" supposed to have come from, God? — Metaphysician Undercover

No, not God. That would be stupid.

I highly suspect it is wrong and I don't particularly believe it, but only because I doubt that such a truly holistic scientism would even be possible to attain (the idea of achieving such a feat would be literally supra-human). However it does raise the question as to what makes something "philosophical" and what does not, and asks us to consider the nature of and relationship between science and philosophy. — darthbarracuda

At the core of philosophy is the assumption that nature is intelligible. Rational inquiry can thus produce some kind of answer.

But from there, you get a major divergence. The very position that nature is intelligible leads "philosophically" - by the same dialectic method - to the counter position that existence is fundamentally irrational. Or contingent. Or whatever else is the rationally contradictory position that could be thus put forward as the stark alternative.

So I think the accurate way to understand philosophy is as a pragmatic core - the broadly scientific method of reasoning described by Peirce - surrounded by its flotilla of splinter projects, the various "reactions" that the stately advance of that core engenders.

So yes. The core can aim at its "truly holistic scientism". And all the reactions to that core can remain part of philosophy to the extent which they are properly engaged as reactions. In that way, philosophy can be both a broad church and a productive trajectory of inquiry.

I think you want a more mechanistic definition - one that rules the wrong stuff out. But I would prefer an organic approach that only cares about the general "growth of reasonableness" in human models of existence.

The only way information can be represented are by parts, no? — darthbarracuda

http://www.academia.edu/863859/How_does_a_molecule_become_a_message

Again - for the nth time - the how is explained semiotically,

Wholes carry the memory or information. Life and mind have coding machinery - words, neurons and genes, principally - that are "physical stuff", and yet not physical in the ordinary way. Information - states of constraint - can be represented symbolically. That is, in a way that is not subject to the usual dictates of entropification but instead which can swim in the opposite direction, upstream or negentropically.

So it is simple to see "the how" of biological, neurological and cultural complexity. There is more going on than just material dynamics. There is also the very different thing of symbolic regulation.

The tricky new thing is pan-semiosis - extending this metaphysics to existence in general. But it is hardly a secret that physics is undergoing its information theoretic revolution.

I mean what do you think an event horizon actually is? Is it matter? Is it information? Or is it really about a habitual relation between these two disjunct aspects of reality?

Change the parts and the system changes. — darthbarracuda

Yep. So that is why a functioning whole needs the power of constraint over its parts. It must limit the freedom or indeterminism of its components to ensure they remain "the right kind of stuff".

We are familiar with this principle in biology and sociology.

Societies fall apart if they don't produce the right kind of people. Bodies fall apart if they don't regulate their cells.

You've got a problem if your skin cells decide to start expressing their genetic potential to be bone, or liver, or heart tissue.

So what are you evidences in favor of emergence? — miosim

I was talking about self-organisation and not merely emergence. And I gave evidence. I said parts "emerge" via holistic constraint in hierarchically organised systems.

So it is not just emergence in the usual sense of new global properties popping out of collective behaviour. Instead it is the argument that global forms and purposes act downwards to limit material possibility in fruitful fashion. The whole simplifies messy reality to shape the very parts that compose it.

I am strongly oppose the ontological emergence and believe that any theory based on emergence is wrong. Therefore I don't see much sense not accept or even discuss the definitions provided by such theory. — miosim

Yep. You gotta stick to what you believe and avoid all evidence to the contrary in this life.

That so even without human involvement. So, what's the issue here? — TheMadFool

This time around, its humans who have to survive it.

...while 'I' am the self organized system. — miosim

So what is "self-organisation"?

In systems theory, it is the limitations that wholes can impose to turn chaos into order, noise into signal. And that is why there is a metaphysical-strength contrast with the parts.

The parts can only construct a state of organisation. The whole has the opposite kind of causality in that it can constrain the state of organisation.

And that is why the whole is greater that the sum of its parts. It represents the other kind of causality involved in creating the kind of organisation we call systematic or purposeful.

Quantum entanglement provides a straight-forward example. What series of observations resulted in the induction of the theory? What was the "surprising observation" that resulted in its abduction? — tom

It is a puzzle that you don't see this as an exemplar of the Peircean account of scientific reasoning.

Schrodinger cites the surprising fact that demands an abductive leap - the EPR paper:

Attention has recently* been called to the obvious but very disconcerting fact
that even though we restrict the disentangling measurements to one system, the
representative obtained for the other system is by no means independent of the
particular choice of observations which we select for that purpose...

And then he offers "entanglement" as his abductive leap to the best retroductive explanation. As Schrodinger says, his hypothesis is based on a holistic or constraints-based take on reality, as opposed to EPR's more conventional deterministic (and nominalistic) metaphysics.

Another way of expressing the peculiar situation is: the best possible knowledge
of a whole does not necessarily include the best possible knowledge of all its parts,
even though they may be entirely separated and therefore virtually capable of
being " best possibly known ", i.e. of possessing, each of them, a representative of
its own. The lack of knowledge is by no means due to the interaction being insufficiently
known—at least not in the way that it could possibly be known more
completely—it is due to the interaction itself.

And then from this abductive leap to a different viewpoint, Schrodinger fleshes out the deductive consequences that might allow inductive corroboration of his position.

So what we have here is a classic example of the scientific imagination at work - there were none better at this than Einstein and Schrodinger.

But there maybe a "mystery" about abduction itself when it is seen in a typical reductionist light as a constructive, and non-creative, mental exercise.

It is indeed a problem how "induction" - of the bit by bit, step by step, variety - could ever get started. But that computational view of generalisation is simply wrong because it depends on a reductionist view of epistemology.

Actual brains work differently - naturally. They operate using a holistic Peircean logic.

So it is no surprise that abduction is not induction in any simple sense. It is instead all about the ability to relax states of constraint, ease up on existing habits of conception, so as to enter a suitable state of vagueness - a state in which the whole of a different story can pop out as a hierarchical symmetry breaking.

Creative thought starts with an inkling that this new generic principle could explain these particular kinds of observable particulars. You suddenly have the right kind of whole in mind. And the test of that is whether it has sturdy enough deductive structure to produce the right kind of inductive measurables.

So - ironically given the OP - Schrodinger's abductive leap regarding entanglement as a hypothesis was a break with the old nomimalistic order.

Einstein was all for retaining local determinism or nominalistic realism at all costs. (Not because he lacked imagination but because it was a principle that had served physics so well for so long - so inductively it ought to hold.)

But Schrodinger was willing to imagine a reality in which wholes are more than their parts because wholes shape their parts. Reality is at base indeterministic or vague. Existence is only crisply actual to the degree it has been collapsed or decohered by the universality of some global form.

Since the shock of quantum mechanics, the whole of physics has got used to thinking about existence in terms of this kind of top-down constraints logic. It is the new normal. Which is why Peirce has really started to catch on as the guy who pretty much got it all before the 20th century got going.

They're regularities of those particulars. We're not positing something other. — Terrapin Station

Nominalism vs realism is a pretty archaic metaphysics on both sides of the debate these days. Science has moved the conversation on.

In particular, a pan-semiotic approach based on hierarchy theory accounts for the way that particularities have regularities due to downward acting constraints - downward acting constraints being the modern version of formal/final causes, and thus the modern version of a realism that believes in universals.

The key idea is that global constraints make the particulars - a system's degrees of freedom - what they are. The global regulative action shapes the parts by limiting their possible actions, forcing them to become the "kind of things" that must re-construct the globally-prevailing state of constraint ... the thing that makes them.

So it is a classic cybernetic feedback story. The whole shapes the parts so that the parts make the whole.

The key metaphysical shift is switching from thinking of existence as a mystery of how something appears from nothing to instead an account of how it is inevitable that regularity will arise to simplify variety.

If everything is possible, then everything is also going to have its reaction against everything else. Most of these reactions will cancel each other away, leaving only some simple general form of reaction that dominates as the steady equilibrium actuality.

And this is hardly an esoteric way of thinking. It is central to science from evolutionary theory to thermodynamics and quantum field theory. Variety is self-winnowing. Generic simplity is what the least action principle requires of any natural system.

So the particulars of any system are emergent. They are variety pared down to form a part. The regularity of particulars is due to the higher level fact that to exist means being made to fit.

Why is sand composed of billions of the same tiny grains? Is this really a mystery to anyone?

In regard to the OP, this has been my favourite analysis of Trump's political "philosophy" so far....

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/13/putin-paradigm-how-trump-will-rule/

Lying is the message. It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself...Putin’s power lies in being able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality...

Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it’s not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when...

Then there is also this that explains the post truth phenomena ... algorithmic news feeds create self-reinforcing bubbles of opinion where data is mined for the facts which best support some subset of prejudices.....

But perhaps the most important insight came from Buzzfeed, which analyzed over a year’s worth of Trump’s tweets to figure out where the president-elect gets his information. Trump’s mental universe, as it turns out, is dominated by Breitbart...

It appears that Trump receives a view of the world that is vastly different from that not just of the “liberal bubble” but of the majority of Americans: on one hand, The New York Times seems not to figure in his world, but on the other hand, neither does network television and, it would seem, CNN.

There is no reason to think that Trump will broaden his world view once he is president. He has shown a notable lack of interest in daily intelligence briefings and in the State Department, whose expertise he has entirely ignored in his initial contacts with foreign leaders....

Which also speaks to a basic issue of ADHD in Trump's case ...

The real-estate magnate and the KGB agent share a peculiar trait: both seem to be lazy and uninterested in the world they want to dominate. Putin, as a former intelligence man himself, has not been known to shrug off intelligence briefings, but he prefers to take information in small doses, and in large type. He does not use a computer. With rare exceptions, he does not spend much time preparing for meetings, and he takes few meetings. But he makes grand public gestures, often ones that are at odds with established policy....

Trump, much like Putin, has neither views nor priorities: he has a thirst for power, and he has interests.
He is interested in the military, which is why he appoints generals. He took an interest in the secretary of state job in particular, taking the time to interview multiple candidates and maintaining an Apprentice-like intrigue around the process before finally announcing early Tuesday morning that he had chosen Tillerson. But he is not in fact interested in foreign policy as such, which is why the post of the American ambassador to the United Nations was handed out quickly, to Nikki Haley, the South Carolina governor who has no international experience and no history of supporting Trump...

And for those who don't like the fascist tag - which indeed smacks too much of Germanic dedication to a cause - then this seems accurate...

The best available definition of the kind of state Putin has built is provided by the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar, who calls it a mafia state: it’s run like a family by a patriarch who distributes money, power, and favors. Magyar uses the word “family” to mean a clan of people with longstanding associations; it is important that one cannot enter the family unless invited—“adopted,” in Balint’s terminology—and one cannot leave the family voluntarily. In this model the family is built on loyalty, not blood relations, but Trump is bringing his literal family into the White House. By inviting a few hand-picked people into the areas that interest him personally, he may be creating a mafia state within a state. Like all mafias, this one is driven primarily by greed.

And then another dangerous ingredient of the mix is this ... a facist/romantic antipathy to intellectual social order (very appealing to those with ADHD or feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of modern society(...

Many of Trump’s cabinet picks have one thing in common: they are opposed to the very mission of the agencies they have been chosen to lead. For secretary for housing and urban development an opponent of public housing; for secretary of education a foe of public schools; for health and human services a Congressman who wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid; for labor secretary an executive who is opposed to labor rights, for energy secretary a former governor who wants to scrap the department of energy, and for attorney general, a senator who was once denied a judgeship, is an opponent of civil rights laws giving protection to minority groups. These appointments may or may not be broadly consistent with Trump’s vaguely expressed political views, but they are clearly consistent with the core belief he shares with many of his voters and with Putin: the government ruins everything.

So Trump could be summed up as a sloppy corporate raider.

The US government was a fat opportunity just lying around. He rode a public mood of dissatisfaction - quite legitimate given the level of inequality and loss of social capital in the US - and grabbed something which was on offer. However Trump isn't really interested in his latest acquisition any more than he ever really cares about the business side of his businesses. They are simply vehicles to fulfill a narcissistic sense of personal destiny.

So Trump will peck away at this and that crisis to keep his ADHD entertained, with no long term strategic intent in mind. The US will drift in confused fashion like all his investments as a result.

nstead we need to grow up and start talking about reducibility of the properties of water to the properties of its atoms that in most cases is fully reducible and therefore no need to talk about emergence. — miosim

So say we have you, and then standing next to you, a small vat of chemicals - a vat of carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc - that is absolutely identical in atomic composition.

What is missing that is present In one but not the other?

Perhaps you don't meet many politicians in real life?

Or more likely, I'm not talking out of my arse.

Its nothing to do with cynicism and everything to do with psychological science. And I've never known a politician who wasn't behaving in very human fashion. So nothing you are saying is making sense.

I will agree this far about Trump: he has a certain something to his personality that other candidates don't. They, for lack of a better term, look weak compared to him. Not on certain policies, but just like weak people, or maybe sub-people, in that a politician doing their job can never really be a person. It's difficult to put into words. Trump creates an uncanny valley alongside other politicians who we realize are behaving quasi-humanly when they speak, whereas Trump as a celebrity out of politics seems inured to this and only has one register of speech he can't turn off. This might be what gives him the illusion of 'heart' in his speeches that even an Obama can't have, since an Obama still has to be a faux-folksy smiler, whereas Trump once in a while genuinely laughs, and sometimes in derision. Trump bullshits about facts, but Obama is a deeper bullshitter, a bullshitter about himself, he himself is entirely false as a constructed quasi-human being that faces the public, and when his masks slips, the impression I get is one of barely veiled disdain for the general public, whereas Trump's 'true self' seems to revolve around living large and doing whatever he wants and being the big man. — The Great Whatever

What guff. Romanticism is the go-to justification of the fascist. And politics is a social construction, so of course a skilled politician is going to be presenting a mask to match the occasion.

The very idea that people have "true selves" is where your attempted psychoanalysis goes wrong.

Is fascism being used here as a term of political philosophy, or is it being used as a pejorative? — The Great Whatever

Authoritarian, paternalistic, xenophobic, rabble rousing, anti-intellectual ... not really spotting the fascist boxes that Trump's not ticking.

I have been talking about real possibilities as an inexhaustible continuum of potential individuals - general, not particular. Do you disagree? — aletheist

I agree in that a continuum is the continuity of a habit or global constraint.

But a wrinkle may be that I'm avoiding treating a continuum as causally generative. So rather than creating possibilities - like a line producing always more points - it is all about suppressing vagueness, with crisp possibility being then the degrees of freedom that get left over.

So if the continuum simply generated the points that populate or construct the line, then where is the secondness, where is the reaction? The points are being imagined as static existents - at which point the reductionist will just say forget all the other causal apparatus and just take the points as real, treat the line an emergent fiction.

But I am stressing that the nature of the point is open ended. It is characterised only in terms of what about its spontaneity or tychism is actually constrained.

Of course in geometry, there is nothing more constrained than a zero dimensional point. Except it then has the open ended inertial freedoms of Newtonian mechanics - specifically the freedoms to translate and rotate.

So rather than calling the continuum inexhaustible - which suggest it is itself the generator of endless distinction - I would stress that it is instead a limit, and quite exhaustible. It can't restrict what is not within its scope. And what is unrestricted is the truly free.

Well, you might state it like that, what lies between the actual and non-actual is the possible. But that's simplistic, and incorrect, as the possible is the non-actual. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, this way of thinking is only true if you are locked into standard issue reductionism. In a holist, four cause, view of causality, existence becomes self organising development.

So we begin with a vagueness - everything is possible, anything might be the case. And yet embedded in that is the further constraint that most of these possibilities are in fact going to be contradictory and so cancel each other out.

Thus given an initial condition where everything is possible, that most general possible state is already going to suppress the actualisation of most of that possibility.

If I can shift a foot left just as easily as I can shift a foot right, then freely doing both will immediately cancel each shift, leaving me not able to move at all in effect.

So possibility is only actual when it meets the general constraint of being inteligible. It has to pass the test of not being self contradictory. Or rather, not being self cancelling in regards to some more general condition or constraint.

This is why you need a metaphysics that can distinguishes the two classes of potentiality - the possible vs the vague.

The vague is that state of everythingness to which the law of non contradiction fails to apply. In vagueness, there is no possibility that is not intelligible - because, symmetrically, there is also nothing to rule a possibility intelligible.

But a real possibility is a degree of freedom shaped by a context. It is something that actually could happen, in that it's happening is not already ruled self-defeating.

What then, distinguishes between a real possibility and an unreal one. It cannot be something real, nor can it be unreal, because it has to create a boundary between these two. In your system of definitions, what creates that boundary between a real and an unreal possibility? — Metaphysician Undercover

A real possibility is an intelligible, or non contradictory, particular. So it speaks to the reality of constraints or generals. A real possibility is what the general conditions of regularity allow - or more accurately, can't forbid.

Yeah. The first rule of Metaphysical club is that you never talk about Metaphysical Club.

A few of the actual top guys missing. Aristotle makes it on, but not Anaximander or Peirce. Heraclitus should get a mention. And no atomists??

I think that Peirce would disagree. He categorized all brute facts of existence under 2ns, but all generals under 1ns (qualities) and especially 3ns (regularities). — aletheist

Again, I used "brute fact" in it is usual philosophical sense. And it would also apply in the Peircean sense because my point is that laws, symmetries and other notions of thirds are just as much something human minds will run smack into as examples of secondness, like an actual brick wall.

So mathematical-strength regularities like circles are as resistant to our efforts to think them otherwise as the stone we attempt to kick. Although the modes of that encounter may be more rationalist in one, more empirical in the other.

To clarify - universals or generals are not real because they themselves are brute or objective facts of nature, but because they govern the brute or objective facts of nature. Right? — aletheist

My point - in response to mtheory largely - was that they are as much a brute fact of existence as the material particulars which they govern.

But then I am arguing for a process ontology and so there aren't really any brute facts of existence anyway. Everything is emergent.

So if you are thinking of the Peircean position on real/existing, then I would reserve the term, existence, to mean substantial form.

In this sense, any potential aggregate of possible points that are all in the same plane and equidistant from any other single point is a real circle. — aletheist

Yep. Ideals like perfect circles, or the principle of relativity, represent bounding limits. They are as real as it gets in terms of bounding material actuality. They are continuums in the sense of being complete symmetry states with no brokenness.

So they show how "reality" is dichotomous. Nature has to be divided or separated in this actual way to have the possibility of being.

If there is be material action, some kind of process, then its bounding limits are also just as real, but real in the complementary sense of being the continua or symmetry state that is the formal limit on that materiality.

So if the criteria for being real is that we are encountering some brute or objective fact of nature, then universals or generals are real as limits on being. Action - being symmetry breaking - has to have a real symmetry that it breaks.

It is the assumption that there is an objective reality. — m-theory

It is a rational hypothesis about the nature of reality. We presume - because of the success of earlier models - that the reality is best described in terms of symmetry and symmetry breaking.

Thus we eventually elevate these ideas to the level of general principles. We insist on the most general possible symmetry with the principle of relativity just as we do with the least action principle as the most general description of symmetry breaking.

We hardly have to presume the existence of an objective reality. Being a modeller makes no sense except as purposeful interaction between a self and a world.

But being a modeller also means accepting we only form self-interested understandings of that world.

So you are going too far if you think that minds somehow reflect reality in some true fashion. As I say, you are leaving out the self-interested reasons of the modeller, as well as the modeller's desire for modelling efficiency.

So sure, the principle of relativity is a useful pragmatic maxim. And it is pretty true of the reality in that assuming the Universe is organised by its symmetries and symmetry breakings has turned out to be both a rationally intelligible idea, and one that has kept delivering results.

But the "objective" world could still be different. That is highly unlikely, yet also a possibility. So we can't assume our assumptions to be objectively true. It is core to the epistemology of science that all belief is provisional.

Relativity is a theory precisely because it could be violated. And it is especially celebrated as a theory because the equations can fit on a t shirt.

So I'm failing to see your point.

What results are produced by the model that we cannot know what is really real?
Does this foundational assumption produce any results?
Does it unify different theories under a single model or produce better predictions than the models that presume the principle of relativity? — m-theory

Given that all of science is conducted under this kind of pragmatism, yes, it has produced results.