Yes, but human perception is neither a lens nor a camera.

I have seen enactivists use the metaphor of "lenses" as opposed to "images," as a counter to representationalism. They employ the lens metaphor pretty much to make the same point Leo is making.

Of course, a lens is something you actively use. The photographer isn't passive.

I suppose another difficulty has reared its head ITT. If modeling (with deflationary assumption or not) is something like "the one true methodology," then whatever cannot be modeled to our satisfaction must be jettisoned, or reduced to something that can be modeled.

Primary targets here have been truth, goodness, beauty, and consciousness, but even "life" comes in for this sort of treatment. For instance, "life" being defined somewhat ambiguously in biology has already been offered up as evidence that such a thing cannot exist. But it seems to me that the assumption supporting this needs to be something like: "either it can be modeled (generally mathematically/logically) or it cannot exist."

I suppose that a commitment to models need not go along with a commitment to empiricism, but they often go together. This occasionally leads to, IMHO, bizarre conclusions. For instance, behaviorist, and later eliminitivist discussions of language will often want to dispatch with any sort of "internal meaning" by which we "mean things by our words," or through other arts, gestures, etc. This is normally argued for on the grounds that such meaning is "unobservable." Yet this is a fairly strange conception of what counts a "observable," for I can think of few things more directly observable to me than that I mean something by my words. This is a bit like telling someone: "no, you are not really in pain because you have failed to shriek and grimace."

I'd argue here that the problem isn't actually that things like the quiddity, whatness, of things is unobservable. Quite the opposite, we observe such things everywhere. It is rather that such observations cannot be modeled.

But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its virtus dormitiva.

Yes, it generally not helpful to approach a philosophy through the lens of an explicit parody of it-which is what Moliere’s Invalid Imaginaire is doing here-nor to attempt to emulate that parody.

As for the second sentence I've quoted, I'm not sure "things do what they do because of what they are" will be much of an advance over "no reason at all." Why do ducks quack? Because it's in their nature? Is that different from saying a duck is a thing that quacks? No one is going to be excited to learn either that ducks quack because they're ducks or that ducks quack because ducks quack.

Right, people are unlikely to be satisfied by an empty parody of philosophy. But an explanation that explains that ducks quack in order to signal an interest in mates, to signal for dangerous predators, to signal that they have spotted food, to coordinate their flying behavior so as to take advantage of aerodynamic drafting and expend as little energy as possible while flying long distances (which they do to seek food and warmer weather more conducive to homeostasis), etc. seems pretty edifying to me.

Likewise, Socrates was willing to die, rather than to capitulate on his beliefs and flee or beg for mercy, because he thought that this was truly better.

Yet the explanations of this sort of goal-directedness is famously difficult if one begins with the assumption that everything is just a heap of inscrutable, atomic behaviors or "building blocks." And it's difficult to explain why different sorts of things seek the particular goods they do without any reference to what they are, particularly if your starting assumptions assume that "beings" can only be defined relatively arbitrarily, leaving no unified, goal-directed organic wholes to go about seeking the sorts of goals that those sorts of organic wholes are inclined to seek.

"Natures" are originally called in precisely to explain mobile, changing being, to explain why things change the way they do. With no natures, and no beings, it is incredibly common to oscillate between smallism (everything is just ensembles of composite building blocks of atoms of behavior, and all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller things) or bigism (there is just one thing). Either one tends to lead to claims like "there are no sheep, ducks, stars, etc. in the world, all this is an illusory projection of man's mind, there is just one thing/many fundamental bits."

Basically, show me how you get from a heap of behaviors with no essential unity to something like Achilles thinking through his choices and choosing glory and a short life over a long but inglorious life.

The idea that thing's "do what they do because of what they are" is quite popular in contemporary philosophy of physics. This tends to go along with pancomputationalism, and conceptions of causation as a sort of computation. This is more of an explanation then "for no reason at all." Yet, these philosophies often have problems with a slide into bigism or smallism. For instance, for Tegmark, each "universe" in the "multi-verse" is a discrete "mathematical object." This is a view that retrieves formal cause, but in a very deflated way. Still, it's more than nothing.

Of course, if one allows for some sort of emergence that goes beyond the data compression of weak emergence, then there doesn't seem to be much of a problem with positing natures. One of the advantages of process philosophy is that it is able to tackle emergence much better. However, the slide into "bigism" remains a problem for much process philosophy. The Scylla of Parmenides' silent monism and the Charybdis of Heraclitus inchoate slide into plurality remain book ends for a lot of metaphysical projects even today.

The "because" in "because of what they are" feels a little thin. Are we sure that talk about how something behaves and talk about what it is aren't just equivalent vocabularies?

Only if the difference between ChatGPT and self-reflective, thoughtful human speech or the difference between a rock (largely a heap of external causes) and a living organism, with its (relative) capacity for self-organization, self-determination, and self-government, is "thin." If biology is "just physics we have arbitrarily decided to separate from physics, and is, in the end, just the study of particular sorts of heaps of particles (which are heaps of behaviors)," then yes, the difference does seem very thin indeed. However, I think we are plenty justified in seeing a thick, substantial difference between a heap of ground meat in a butchers shop and a living, thinking human child-that the two are different sorts of things.

Joshua Hochschild has a good article on just this divide.

https://www.academia.edu/36162636/What_s_Wrong_with_Ockham_Reassessing_the_Role_of_Nominalism_in_the_Dissolution_of_the_West

He responds directly to Moliere's caricature.

What we have here, notably, is not an argument against the notion of formal causality, but a perspective which simply fails to appreciate the role that formal causality once served for those thinkers that took forms seriously. Forms had explanatory power in the older realist framework, not because general belief in that power was supposed to replace the empirical work of discovering and characterizing how they operated, but because confidence that there were such causal powers helped to account for the order of nature and the very possibility of successful scientific inquiry.

It is commonly said that modern science neglects formal causes but attends to efficient and material causes; but classically understood, efficient and material causes cannot function or even be conceived without formal causes, for it is form which informs matter, giving concrete objects their power to act on other objects. The loss of formal causality is thus in a sense the loss of efficient and material causality as well—an implication that is not quite fully realized until we see it brilliantly explored in the philosophy of David Hume.

Of course, the gravity of the loss of teleology is also evident in the realm of ethics. Ockham was no libertine or relativist, but he prepared the way for the intractable confusion of modern moral reflection. Morality is concerned with ends, and humans, having the natures they do, need to acquire certain further qualities or forms—virtues—which help them fulfill their essential natures and achieve their
ultimate end. Alasdair MacIntyre has most famously traced the inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project to explain morality without teleology. Ockham’s denial of forms and formal causality is unquestionably part of the conceptual disaster that left Enlightenment thinkers with only misunderstood fragments of a once very different project of moral theorizing.

There is another, even more basic, implication of the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality. In the realist framework, the intrinsic connection between causes and effects was particularly important for explaining how the mind knows the world; concepts formed by the mind, insofar as they are causally connected to things which are the foundation of those concepts, necessarily retain some intrinsic connection to those things. While we can be mistaken in particular judgments, we can be assured of the basic soundness of the mind’s power, thanks to the intrinsic connection between concept and object. The kind of radical skepticism Descartes proposed, even if only methodologically, was simply never entertained through most of the middle ages.

More classical versions of skepticism, usually having to do with the fallibility of the senses, were commonplace, but the possibility of a complete incongruity between the mind and reality—such that even mathematical concepts could be the product of some deceptive manipulation and have no connection to the mathematical “realities” they seem to represent—this was not available in a realist
framework for which concepts are formally and so essentially related to their objects. Ockham’s nominalist innovations almost immediately raised the specter of such radical doubt; this was noticed not only by the first generation of Ockham’s critics, but even by Ockham himself, who proposed thought experiments about God manipulating our minds to make us think things that are not true. For Ockham, such thought experiments were possible not only because of God’s absolute transcendent power, but because the human mind retained for him no intrinsic connection to an intelligible order. Ockham was no skeptic, and he was no Descartes; indeed, he was rather confident in the reliability of human cognition. But the law of unintended consequences applies in the history of philosophy as elsewhere, and it was only a matter of time before some philosopher exploited, as fully as Descartes did, the new opportunity of skepticism made possible by the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality.

Accordingly, Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble. In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.

Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom. Notice: even if contemporary philosophers came to a consensus about how to overcome Cartesian doubt and secure certainty, it is not clear that this would do anything to repair the fragmentation and democratization of the disciplines, or to make it more plausible that there could be an ordered hierarchy of sciences, with a highest science, acknowledged as queen of the rest—whether we call it first philosophy, or metaphysics, or wisdom.

No one denies that norms condition the manner in which we tell truths. But that is not enough. Truth outruns and precedes the norms, and it is not enough to say, "Yeah, well the norms know that truth outruns them." The norms are not an omnipotent deity in which all of reality can be grounded. Studying norms is not first philosophy. First philosophy requires us to study the things that the norms norm. Norms can be right or wrong, and this itself proves that we need to talk about something other than norms. If we are honest, frame-talk can't replace truth-talk.

Right, and this shows up most clearly in the realm of ethics. If there is no truth about what is "truly good" outside the realm of norms, then there are simply no grounds for criticizing other culture's norms (including their epistemic norms; relativizing practical reason inevitably relativizes theoretical reason).

The stories Sam Harris relates in The Moral Landscape are pretty good examples of the consequences of this sort of thinking. He discusses being a conferences full of doctors and public health officials who are unwilling to say that compulsory female genital mutilation can in any way be judged bad. He also discusses asking one doctor if it would be bad if a superstition led a culture to tear the eyes out of every third born child soon after birth. Her response was: "well, if its a cultural practice..."

Now, I get that many people might not want to go as far as "middle aged men should be able to buy young girls as wives and babies should be mutilated so long as it's a norm," but when you also accept that reason simply cannot adjudicate such claims all that is left is power struggles.

What do you imagine "actually true" means?

As in: "really true," i.e. not something that merely appears to be true, is said to be true by others, or is believed to be true. Presumably, there is a difference, as you say: "The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that."

Our norms of truth telling also understand things like if people stopped using a currency, it would cease to have value. See what I mean?

I don't think so. Is the idea that if people's standards for determining what is true changed, what is true would also change. So, if 10,000 years from now our descendants have a very deficient understanding of history, and they think Adolf Hitler was the first President of the USA, and this belief is justified by their epistemic standards, by the "currency" they use, it would thereby really be true that Hitler was America's first president?

I can see how this would make all claims mutable, but I can hardly see how this would avoid more extreme forms of relativism. At any rate, I would argue that the norms of determining truth presumably become what they are because they help us discover what is really true (there can, of course, be other factors). The truth is not, in all cases, dependent on our norms however.

The thing is, models are sort of inherently hypothetical. They tell you what the world would be like if a duck were right there, what patterns you would see, what connections to other loci of behavior there would be, how the world system would work if it included that duck node.

It seems to me that this is more a question of how models are viewed. Are models, and the observations used to construct them primarily a means of knowing the world (a word that may contain substances/things), or are models, observations, propositions, language, etc. all primarily what we know.

Some people take claims like: "we don't actually know what anything is like, even our own hands, or that chair over there, we only know what our experiences of them are like. We only ever experience our experiences!" - very seriously. For others, this represents a sort of profound confusion, to say "I only experience my experiences of my car," is simply to say "I experience my car," etc.

I don't think a model can answer this question for you. It is one of the limits of the methodology. "There is nothing outside the model," seems like something that it would be hard to justify with a model. Just as, "there is no such thing as internal 'meaning,'" is more something that someone presumes by starting with the premises of behaviorism (behaviorism of the sort once in vogue in psychology, not of the broader sort we are discussing) rather than being something one can demonstrate from such premises. The premises assume the thing in question in this case.

I think that there is an important sense in which "things are what they do," can be affirmed without having to jettison the intuition that "things do what they do because of what they are." Where I believe we get into trouble is when we end up with something like: "things are what they do and what they do is unintelligible brute fact, i.e. they do what they do "for no reason at all." I don't think many people would want to be committed to this sort of view, but whether or not it follows from the suppositions some philosophies is another question.

For instance, if the causes of behavior/action are completely epistemically inaccessible, this question is at best undecidable. Things are what they do and why they do what they do is inscrutable.

BTW, I missed this earlier because we seemed to be in agreement, but perhaps not:

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary. They're provisional and often revised

You both seem to want something "extra", in addition to norms of truth telling, knowledge and how people discover and find stuff out in the world, as a ground for knowledge.

I was speaking to descriptions, models, etc. being correct vis-a-vis their adequacy to reality. That seemed to be what you were speaking to as well, but here you have pivoted to "norms of correct assertibility."

But wouldn't you agree that these are not the same thing? If "correctness" is only correctness relative to current norms, than I am even less sure how you are going to have a response to more extreme forms of relativism, because these very obviously do shift by location, era, etc., even across the span of one person's lifetime. Hell, they can shift dramatically over the course of a single day as you move between different academic departments.

The something extra I would like it the notion that things are in some sense actually true, not just true relative to norms.

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary

Yes, this is essentially what I would argue. Truth is filtered-through socio-historical conditions, through institutions, language, etc. However, it is not reducible to them, and it is in a certain sense prior to culture and history. I mentioned earlier ITT that it seems plausible to me that technology, scientific institutions, and educational institutions serve to "objectify" certain sorts of knowledge in the same way that Hegel has social institutions (e.g., markets, the state, unions, etc.) objectifying morality for individuals.

Likewise, while language, models, scientific theories, etc. can be the explicit objects of our study, they generally are not. Language, models, theories, etc. are a means of knowing, not the primary objects of knowledge (as plenty of contemporary philosophy would have it, because they have made philosophy of language their first philosophy).

However, I would also argue that "everything is mutable," aside from being straight-forwardly self-refuting (if everything is mutable, then this claim itself must change and cease to be true), and as absolute and totalizing a claim as any "One True...." claim, also makes it impossible to justify this position.

I would just point out that Big Heg, the great modern philosopher of the Absolute, also has a fallibilist, circular epistemology. St. Thomas, for his part, rejects the notion that man's happiness is to be found in the knowledge of God had through demonstrations precisely because such knowledge is always mixed with a great deal of error. The point being, the opposite of "all is mutable and flux" is not foundationalism (which, as far as I am aware, is a distinctly modern concern).

For @Count Timothy von Icarus - I think a big difference between the perspective you're advocating and the one I'm coming at this with is that our perspective is also one thing among many, another material process. It's another form of assemblage that acts upon others.

I don't think this is a difference. The human intellect is part of the world and interacts with it.

I don't see why I would need to man the gates against relativism?

To have a response to one of, if not the, dominant philosophies of our era?

Especially since it's correctly assertible that things which have counted as knowledge - been knowledge - in eras past have turned out to be false.

Well let me ask, since everything changes relative to different background positions, do you think it will cease to be true that "George Washington was the first President of the United States," at some point in the future? Likewise, "Adolf Hitler was the first President of the United States," is false. But will the background frames in virtue of which this is false change eventually, such that Adolf Hitler was the first President? Or is it at least possible that they shall?

I would maintain it is not possible. Adolf Hitler will not become the first President of the USA at some point in the future due to any relative shifts in "frames in virtue of which things are true." I think I'm on fairly strong ground with this assertion.

However, if I am mistaken, and background frames can shift such that Adolf Hitler was the first president, then surely claims like "we need not worry to much about this shifting because it is occurring very slowly" are also liable to become false. When might they become false? This seems absolutely unknowable if there is no epistemically accessible regularity in the ways in which underlying "background frames" change. You say such changes "are not arbitrary" but then you also seem to also be claiming that any underlying pattern to such changes is both unknowable and changing. In which case the question is: "so ultimately, how do you know that that they aren't arbitrary?"

You can claim "it's not a problem, these frames shift slowly," but of course this statement, even if it is true now, is subject to change. When might it change? Who can know?

From my perspective, seeing relativism as a problem which must be defended against only invites it into the space of relevant problems. I've made no reference to incommensurability of conceptual schemes, the relativity of whether X is true to an individual's perspective, the relativity of whether X is known to an individual's perspective and so on and so on. From where I'm sitting whatever relativity I'm committed to is in the territory. Things really do behave as if they're relative to a context. Whether that's a path on a mountain or a response in a thread.

I'm confused by the bolded part because you seem to have just claimed that we, our languages, concepts, etc. are all part of the territory? Is there anything outside the "territory"?

Anyhow, shouldn't one have a response to other philosophies that goes beyond simply ignoring them? I am not sure how "I don't think that's true so I will simply not consider it," doesn't amount to an endorsement of blind faith/dogmatism.

We agree, the radical relativist is wrong. I would argue that one should be able to explain why. Certainly, one cannot do so in the relativists own terms, since this is presupposed to be impossible (any refutation would just be a refutation relative to some language game, culture, etc.), but one should be able to do it in one's own terms.

A description of how things are can be more or less adequate. We agree that there are more or less adequate accounts of how stuff is, and we agree that metaphysics is alright. Shouldn't that give you pause? You're arguing against a perspective I don't hold, nor have I advocated for.

Well, we have a rather severe case of miscommunication here, because I don't think I've tried to ascribe these beliefs to you at all. What I've been trying to point out is rather what I think is necessary in order to have a response to extreme relativism. My question is: "what's you're response?"

To simply reply "I don't feel that is a very useful way of looking at things," just courts the reply "well I do."

Mostly I'm needling {what I see as} @Count Timothy von Icarus''s insistence on a single way of doing philosophy as clearly, but unstatedly, Christian. And I'm needling with that phrase as it's sometimes used as biblical support for Christian religious pluralism. Considering the underlying dispute between our dear Count and I in this thread, as I see it, is between an expansive form of pluralism in metaphysics and epistemology {me} and a thoroughly singular Aristotelian+Christian worldview {the Count}, it seemed appropriate.

I have no idea where you've gathered that. I have been very broad in my generalization. In order to combat the pernicious forms of relativism, I am simply saying that not everything and anything can be relative.

I think you're interpreting me as committed to a relativist "everything goes all the time" approach. I am not. I doubt any sensible person is.

Again, not at all. What I have been pushing you on is how you can respond to people who do maintain that such views are a consequence of everything being relative. BTW, this itself is also an absolute statement. To claim that "everything is relative and mutable" is no less absolute than claiming "some things are not relative and mutable."

Connecting "absolute" fixity to the possibility of adequate descriptions is something you're positing, not me. And that needs to be argued for on its own terms. Why is it the case?

I've made my argument for this. Feel free to respond to it. I don't think I have made any assertions related to "One Methodology," and certainly none related to the need for philosophy to be Christian. This is, TBH, a bad miscommunication on my part, or misreading on yours. Is the assumption that the only options are methodological monism, and a sort of Christian fundamentalism, a "One True X" or else "everything is relative?"

Anyhow, as noted above, a denial of any "One True..." is as absolute as the claim that such a thing does exist. I hardly think there could be anything like a "One True Methodology," but I do think there will be something all good methodologies share.

But this isn't what I've argued for at all. I have repeated "there are many ways to be (more or less) correct," many times, and that there are many ways to do this or to reach correct descriptions, models, etc.

Now, if no one could imagine such a thing, we might feel ourselves on safer ground claiming, this just doesn't make sense, or this is against all reason. But in this case, you are disputing @fdrake's view, things he is actually saying. That might give you pause. Your position would have to be that @fdrake does not actually understand the position he claims to and claims to advocate, but not by arguing from a position of superior knowledge, that is, that this is something you understand and that's how you know he doesn't ― you don't have direct knowledge that he doesn't; you believe no one can, from which you infer that @fdrake can't, and finally that he doesn't. Okay. But how will you manage the inference from "I haven't make sense of this" to "No one can make sense of this"?

But that isn't what I've claimed at all. I understand what is speaking to with the idea of mountains and paths. That's all well and good. What I am pointing out is that if everything is mutable, and there are no regularities or anything which "stays the same" by which to judge things, then what follows is that theses like "cognitive relativism," radical misology, claims that no description of reality can be more or less accurate/adequate and that we can essentially never be wrong about our beliefs all follow.

I think is on pretty solid ground with his naturalistic examples. That only makes sense. Philosophy of nature, physics, is the study of mobile/changing being. The whole point of positing "natures" is to explain change.

But a blanket rejection of all stability is essentially a rejection of reason tout court, since there is nothing stable about what counts as good reason. For instance, someone of a more post-modern persuasion might want to take 's account a good deal further.

They might, for the moment, grant that mountains are relatively stable. But, anything said about them is said in language, using concepts. And they will say that these are not stable. Aren't there various, differing indigenous notions of time?The cyclical and spiritual times of the ancients and medievals, etc. And aren't language and concepts constantly changing, and not like mountains, but rapidly, varying from era to era, culture to culture, and person to person. So too, what counts as a "good model" or "adequacy" will be subject to all this variability.

And from this we reach the conclusion of B above, that it there is no sense in which any description of or beliefs about reality can be more or less correct than any other. At best, they can be more or less correct relative to some arbitrary frame (perhaps as defined by cultural values, but it could just as well be the individual).

No doubt, we might want to reject this. On what grounds? Barring an appeal to something in virtue of which we can be more or less correct, we simply are making our own disparate, parallel claims to "usefulness." These claims end up being bare assertions however, with no way to decide between them, hence the reduction of all of philosophy and politics to power relations. That or we end up with "bourgeois metaphysics," where tolerance is the only virtue. Anything can be "true" so long as it allows anything else to be.

We had a thread on this earlier back: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15023/the-unity-of-dogmatism-and-relativism/p1

My position would be that extreme forms of relativism (for no doubt, relativism is quite supportable in less extreme forms) essentially reduce to a sort of dogmatism, and sort of misology.

But, if one does think there are standards of good reasoning, then the fact that extreme sorts of relativism are straight-forwardly self-refuting is indeed a problem. They can be, at best, "true" relative to the speakers own relative context.

This is much harder with abstracta.

It seems to me that it will be harder to find agreement on things like truth and goodness because those are extremely general principles, on many accounts, the most general.

I suggest that it’s this sort of intransigent approach that can benefit from considering Quine’s point about gavagai.

Maybe, if we use the example very loosely. IIRC Quine proceeds by essentially assuming something like behaviorism, and this is crucial to how he makes the argument. This is already a very particular view of signs/language and what sort of "evidence" one has to support translation. He also assumes physicalism, which IIRC for him is rather corpuscular and reductionist. Everything comes down to particle ensembles.

With such presuppositions in play, what would be shocking is if it was possible to give the sorts of "translations" he is disproving. Meaning, in the sense that is "disproved" seems to have already been eliminated from the outset, or at the very least rendered completely epistemically inaccessible. However, I think many thinkers would simply say that to take Quine as a starting point would be essentially to beg the question on the sorts of topic you're talking about.

I probably misunderstood you then. I took: "number is a way of thinking about (talking about, treating, approaching) the animals" to mean that number only/primarily shows up in our (i.e. human) speech and behavior.

Why?

I'll follow up on the rest later, but your original remark was: "This is an odd mix of being profoundly anti-systems building but also profoundly for systems building - yes, make arbitrary systems, go nuts, so long as they describe what's there."

Now, to my mind, this denotes one of two things:

A. You have to accurately (perhaps more or less so) describe "what's there." This, by definition, isn't arbitrary. The model, description, etc. has to be, in some sense, adequate. Presumably it can be more or less adequate. But this to me seems right in line with the idea of truth as "the adequacy of intellect to being."

B. A. doesn't hold if any system qualifies for "describing what's there," and all do so equally well. I assume this is not what you intended, but correct me if I am wrong. I think a host of issues crop up with B.

To my mind, this is a bit like Tolstoy's remark at the opening of Anna Karenina, that: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." One might allow that there are "many ways to be right," while still allowing that there appears to be "always very many more ways to be wrong."

Now, the issue of "fixity" shows up if there is nothing at all stable about what constitutes being "more or less adequate." Perhaps adequacy can vary (although, personally, I think that in an important sense it does not), but it cannot vary without any rhyme or reason (i.e. some regularity that "stays the same") to it, else we are essentially in scenario B above, since what constitutes "adequacy" is inaccessible.

Yes. Ex-post-facto logical entities that have good explanatory and descriptive power, but are not baked into the structure of the universe

Yes, but genera aren't supposed to be ex-post-facto logical entities. Genera are the result of their being principles. If there are no principles, then I am not sure how there can be knowledge.

From the Aristotle thread J started:

A second interesting point is that falsity, and knowledge, need to involve universals. If we just invented a sui generis term for each particular, we could never be wrong about our predication. If I say, particular102939940204 is term24828920299202, and term24828920299202 only applies to that particular (perhaps in that moment), then I cannot be wrong about it. Falsity only shows up when we judge that x is y, but x can fail to actually be y. Borges' short story "Funes the Memorious" plays around with the problems, and ultimate incoherence, of seeing all particulars as only particulars.

This is closely related to the epistemic issues related to the One and the Many. One cannot come to know any % of an (effectively) infinite number of causes/particulars in a finite time. We're dividing by infinity here. So here too, knowledge has to deal with overarching principles, Ones that apply to a Many.

But I think we do have discursive knowledge. Therefore principles must exist. Whereas, the skeptic, who thinks we never have knowledge, faces a number of issues. First, they cannot know that their claim is true, or even that their reasoning about the issue is good. However, I think the larger issue is that one cannot have an appearance/reality distinction without having both appearances and reality. So, on the view that "everything is just appearances," then appearances are just reality.

Yet, as we both seem to agree, we can, and often are, wrong about things. There appears to be "facts of the matter" outside belief and appearance.

One can delimit a measure arbitrarily. This doesn't mean all measures are arbitrary. To count "brown animals" requires knowing an animal, an organic whole, as a unit. I don't think this is arbitrary. For instance, show me a single culture that sees what we consider to be a cow, bear, etc. to be more or less than one of that sort of animal.

The salient bit is that number is a way of thinking about (talking about, treating, approaching) the animals.

Well, the separation, (or inseparability) of thinking and being is a whole rabbit hole. My point would merely be that, when paleontologists unearth two fossilized birds who fell into a tar pit together when the branch they were sitting on snapped 2 million years ago, they (and we) are justified in thinking that there were indeed two birds that fell into the tar pit. This, despite this event being prior to man or any human languages.

Not all wholes are so obviously wholes. There is no doubt a gradient here. But individual animals, planets, etc. make good examples of multitudes.

On a side note, it is strange to me that claims running counter to my own (e.g. "Mars and Saturn being two distinct planets is a fact that is, in an important sense, not dependent on we speak of them.") sometimes feature charges of "anthropocentrism." It seems to me that claims like "there are never two tigers in a clearing, two stars in a binary star system, etc. but that man speak or think of them so," are themselves the height of anthropocentrism, a sort of desiccation of being outside the gaze of man.

But wouldn't the search for such good generally always be a good which is fit for practical purpose founded in experiential practices, rather than a platonic notion of good?

I might have time to respond in more detail later, but for now I think it's important to note that the Platonic Good is not absent from anything that appears Good. And this is true for the classical tradition, and still is the dominant view in Orthodoxy and Catholicism. All goodness, even the good of mere appearances, is a reflection of the Good, like light refracted through different mirrors, some more smokey than others. We see now "through a glass darkly."

The transcendent, to be properly "transcendent" cannot be absent from what it transcends. Likewise, the absolute is not reality as set over and against appearances, but must encompass all of reality and appearances, both what is relative and in-itself.

So, the good of a good car is not a sort of sui generis sort of good for Plato, or for St. Augustine, or St. Maximus. Nor is the good of good food, or sex, a sort unrelated good. This is why folks like Augustine can write extremely sensuously of God:

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new.
Too late have I loved you! You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you!
In my weakness, I ran after the beauty of the things you have made.
You were with me, and I was not with you.
The things you have made kept me from you – the things which would have no being unless they existed in you!
You have called, you have cried, and you have pierced my deafness.
You have radiated forth, you have shined out brightly, and you have dispelled my blindness.
You have sent forth your fragrance, and I have breathed it in, and I long for you.
I have tasted you, and I hunger and pant for you.
You have touched me, and I burn for your peace.

As for reason, the quotes in this post are fairly instructive on the old view: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/956012

The "rule of the rational part of the soul," taken in modern terms, sounds like being turned into a dispassionate robot. This is not what Plato means though, it is rather the means of desire's deepest fulfillment, as he has it when Socrates begins bursting out into ecstatic love poetry in the Phaedrus. It isn't the abrogation of the passions and appetites, but their proper orientation towards what most fulfills them (which, for various reason, we fail to achieve when "ruled over" by them.)

Anyhow re: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/957656, this article was by Gerson, which makes sense now that I see it.

"Only as it is at work" . . . I think he means that we can't find the concept of reality or facticity as the object of thought; rather, it's contained or implied in the act, the "work", of thinking that anything is so. No doubt Witt would approve.

IDK how closely Rodl follows Aristotle (or Hegel), but in their case this has to do with the identity of thought and being (something Plotinus brings out in Aristotle in his rebuttals of the Empiricists and Stoics). This ends up being, in some key respects, almost the opposite of Wittgenstein, although I do think there is some interesting overlap in that they tend to resolve epistemic issues in ways that are isomorphic.

I’ve become very interested in (although not very knowledgeable about) the idea of the ‘divine intellect’ in Aristotle and Platonism generally.

The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy by Christian Moevs is surprisingly the best treatment I've seen of this. It spends a good amount of time on Aristotle in the third chapter, including this exact question. Dante's role as a philosophical thinker is often overshadowed by his role as a literary figure (and how could be otherwise? He is often ranked as one of, if not the greatest). However, there is a lot of interesting stuff there.

I find this sometimes, the best succinct treatment of a topic ends up being in an unrelated topic. For instance, David Bentley Hart has one of the better treatments of classical notions of freedom in the last part of That All Shall Be Saved, and I'd recommend just that section even for people with little interest in Christian universalism (the topic of the book). It's funny how that works out sometimes.

Proper time? Seems to be dependent upon motion and vice versa. And nothing like ye olde absolute time exists right.

The same issue applies to "motion" and "change."

If you could flesh out what it means for you for a meaning to be fixed I'll play ball though.

Lets not jump to "meaning is fixed," I'm just saying something must stay the same.

But I'd also disagree in my terms, relative fixity is more than enough of a guarantee. It works for the mountain and the mountain trail, and it works for our word meanings. Even though we know they change over time we can still speak and understand each other, partly because the word meanings change slower than the speech acts which use them.

But what's backing this aside from blind faith or assertion of "usefulness"? And fixity relative to what? Because, in the "pragmatism all the way down" camp you also have plenty of ideas like the "cognitive relativism" reading of Wittgenstein, where translation between different cultures, cognitive communities, etc. is essentially impossible. On some views, this basically amounts to people living in different worlds (strangely, pretty much recreating the Cartesian skepticism Wittgenstein was trying to avoid, only now on the level of "language communities" - which one can never really tell if they are actually a part of). This isn't even the most radical of these sorts of claims either.

IDK, it strikes me as a weird sort of double standard. We cannot have metaphysics because it must be held to standards of "absolute certainty," as if it isn't possible to question essentially anything (sincerely or not), but then once you take the leap into "pragmatism all the way down," it's fine to stop at whatever is "useful." But of course the advocates of sui generis "Aryan physics" or "feminist epistemologies" claim their categorization is extremely useful. If there is no truth of the matter, then you just have a slide into plurality. Aryan physics and socialist genetics are plenty useful by the terms of their own advocates.

To my mind, the key issue here is that you have to ask: "is it really useful?" Or "really most useful?" Because, it seems fairly obvious that we can believe that something is useful, choiceworthy, etc. and then later discover that we have been mistaken. This is a ubiquitous human experience. And presumably, there is some truth of the matter about what we shall immanently regret prior to the moment we start to regret it. Likewise, it does not seem that all ways of describing the world are equally correct.

This is an odd mix of being profoundly anti-systems building but also profoundly for systems building - yes, make arbitrary systems, go nuts, so long as they describe what's there.

That's pretty much saying "make arbitrary systems, so long as they aren't actually arbitrary."

Another big departure from Aristotle's view of the world - at least on assemblage theory's own terms - is Aristotle's habit of hierarchically organising categories into genus, species and differentia through conceptual distinctions. The equivalent of categories in assemblage theory are fungible, and the hierarchical organisation principles aren't strictly based on type-subtype relations {or they don't have to be}, it's more based around functional parts arranged in a modular fashion.

This seems to be looking at species and genera more as the later "calcified logical entities."

What counts as one unit? We get to choose.

IDK, something about a cat or a dog seems to strongly suggest that it is a single cat or dog; I am not sure how much "choice" we have in the matter. It's just like how I could refuse to use the word "blue" for my car, but it would in no way cease to "look blue to me" simply because of how I've chosen to speak. The same holds for livestock. There are pastoralists all over the world whose languages, and their domestication of the local fauna, occurred in relative isolation, and I don't know of a single one that divides up the units of what constitutes and individual mammal differently.

This seems to be a choice that is very much constrained by what things are, including how they break down into unified wholes. Good luck cutting a sheep in half, declaring that each half is a unit, and then trying to mate them to get more sheep, for instance.

Plus, the idea that a single male eagle and a single female eagle would cease to be single eagles capable of producing single offspring if the "language community" disappeared seems pretty far fetched. This is what happens if you make philosophy of language your first philosophy.

No doubt, the claim that "you need language to do any philosophy," is true. However, the person who champions a reduction of philosophy to neuroscience will be on similarly strong ground: "no one ever does philosophy without their head." The advocate of phenomenology will likewise argue that no one ever did philosophy without first having experiences and perceptions. Hence, this is not a good way to determine first philosophy.

↪Arcane Sandwich You kinda learn who when you learn your first language, as you learn to use words like "one" and thereabouts. You are part of a community. Them.

As noted above, the language community doesn't seem to choose arbitrarily. In some cases, its choices seem more or less made for it. But the way in which these choices are constrained is exactly what realists are talking about.

Do you mean by this that reason provides a universal framework, which transcends our personal and cultural beliefs, and therefore is able to facilitate a dialogue about what is "truly good" or "really true" ? Or do you mean that reason may function as a conduit for us to access a 'divine' realm? Do you see reason as having limitations?

You might take it that far, but it can be far more concrete. Consider picking out a school for your kid or buying a car. You want a school/car that is truly good, not one that merely appears to be good, or one which is said to be good by others. Likewise, if you have back pain, you want a treatment that will truly fix it, not just one that appears good or is said to be good.

The desire for what is truly good is what takes us beyond appearances (generally the purview of the appetites) and "what others say" (generally the purview of the "spirited part of the soul," particularly our concern with honor, status, reputation, etc.). It's the desire for what is really true and truly good that consistently motivates us to move beyond current belief and desire. This is how reason is transcendent, through its desire to know truth it takes us beyond the given of what we already are. You could call it ecstatic as well, since it involves going outside of what we currently are.

Now, we might very well be led around by our passions and appetites and still end up being exposed to new things, forming new beliefs, even learning things. However, our attempt to go beyond what we already are here, beyond current belief and desire, will only be accidental in this case, something we stumble across as we pursue our current desires based on our current beliefs. It's reason's desire for the True/Good that makes this its very mission.

It's also reason that allows for us to have coherent "second order volitions," i.e., the desire to have or not to have other desires. E.g., "I wish I didn't want to x..." It is what allows us to ask "I have a strong desire for x, but is x truly desirable?" Or "I am enraged with Y and have a strong desire to vent my wrath, and to restore my honor, but is this truly good?" The target of these questions lies outside current desire and belief.



In the modern tradition, reason is often deflated into mere calculation. So, the desire aspect tends to get lost. IMO, this is precisely what makes Hume Guillotine even plausible in the first place.

My apologies, my question should have been phrased: "what would be an example of a philosophy that does "need an external, transcendent organizing principle," to explain beings? I wasn't really sure what the counterexample was supposed to be.

The thread example is interesting. Our threads involve the intersection of many actors with different aims, and this is precisely how some philosophers define "chance/fortune." However, I am not sure if this works as well for something like say, my replacing my mother-in-law's side view mirror or assembling some IKEA furniture for here, or the development of a duck to maturity, etc.

I feel efficient cause is an antiquated ancient concept, which has logical problems. Sure, we can say that parent is a sufficient cause for the child, but I am not sure if there is philosophical or logical point in doing so.

You seem to be mixing together sufficient and efficient cause here. There is a pretty big difference between the Aristotelian Four Causes and Humean constant conjunction and counterfactual analysis, although the two notions can be used in concert. I am not sure about "antiquated." Both concepts are employed in the sciences all the time, e.g. do-calculus, etc. Any student in the natural or social sciences has to take statistics and they will be taught again and again that "correlation does not equal causation."

It is useful in medicine for example. Pseudoexfoliation glaucoma is the result of a single nucleotide polymorphism common to Nordic peoples. It leads to defective elastin proteins that "clog up the eye." The gene is, in an important sense, the cause of the disorder. For some disorders, a since mutation might be sufficient to ensure that, if a person lives long enough, they will develop the disease (obviously, it isn't sufficient entirely of itself, e.g., one doesn't develop Huntington's if one dies early in life.)

When our understanding of a thing changes, due to shifts in scientific and technological knowledge, it is not simply a matter of reconfiguring our knowledge of the external causal associations between objects. What also changes is the ‘core’ concept of object as center of properties and attributes.

Sure, in some sense. I've long held that, just as Hegel has institutions (e.g. the justice system, family, state, etc.) objectifying morality for a people, we also have science, educational institutions, technology, and the productive arts/trades, serving to objectify certain aspects of the natural world. Positive and negative charge is objectified for us every-time we change a battery or rewire an outlet.

Terminologically though, I would rather say this is a refinement of our intentions, as opposed to our concepts. This is because otherwise, we would be forced to say that "wetness" or "human" is changing, but it seems to be an important distinction that are intentions are changing (and hopefully becoming more perfect). I did not experience a different water when I went swimming before I came to know that water was H2O, a polar solvent, etc.

Plus, to speak only of (presumably efficient) causal associations leaves out the phenomenological whatness of things, their quiddity. I suppose that, on the conception of reason as primarily/wholly ratio, that's all there is, sets of propositions formed from empirical atoms that get shifted around. But I would tend to say that objects are present and grasped/apprehended in a way that transcends this.

Now, something like water does indeed change in some sense when we come to discover that it is a "polar solvent" or "H2O." Being known is a relation after all, and things are, in some sense, defined by their relations. Yet at the same time, there is a more obvious sense in which water today is the same water the dinosaurs swam in, and wetness today the same wetness experienced by a medieval peasant every time it rained. I am not really sure how to capture this distinction outside of an appeal to per se predication.

The reason that this core concept of objectness does mot remain stable in the face of changes in under is that it is an abstraction derived from a system of relations not only between us and the world we interact with, but between one part of the world and another.

I am not sure I really understood this. It seems to me that anything involving "us and the world" necessarily involves "one part of the world and another," so I am not sure what the difference is supposed to be. Nor do I think I wholly understand what changes in the core concept of an object, or abstractions being derived from a system of relations entails.

"The Storm before the Storm. The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic" by Mike Duncan

I have this sitting on my bookshelf because I really like his podcasts. I haven't read it yet though because I am pretty well versed in the period, but it would be nice to stroll down memory lane again at some point. I often contend to those afraid of President Trump making himself a dictator that he is, at best, a Sulla, but probably more a Gracchi. He isn't competent enough to be a Caesar, let alone an Caesar Augustus. Maybe a Marc Antony lol.

His Revolutions podcast is coming back. He is going to be doing Cuba, Iran, etc. It's a shame he is dodging the Chinese Civil War though; it'd only take him a few years to cover all 50 years of it after all...

Sure, those are all things that clearly are mutable. What about paths or time? What about process? Are these stable? To be sure, our intentions vis-a-vis them may change, but does what it mean to be a path constantly shift, or to have a location? Or to be "two" or "binary?" To be true? To exist?

The problem doesn't show up with mountains, which clearly do change, but with metaphysics. If what it means to be a "process" or "tangle" is shifting, that seems more difficult. It's more difficult still if time and stability are also changing, for then what does it mean to say "don't worry about these issues, they are stable over long periods of time?" But every term in that sentence is liable to shift, and if time and stability are both unstable, then that sentence is no guarantee of anything. Likewise if "knowledge" and "true" are liable to shifts.

In this sense, Phenomenology is supporting rather than dissolving Kant's "Transcendental Idealism"

It can. It often doesn't. Just for two examples, there is Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person and G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Both disagree with Kant's dualism. For Hegel, Kant is a dogmatist, and it is his dogmatic assumptions that leave him with his dualism problem. He just presupposes that perceptions are of objects and goes from there. For Hegel, this is less than fully critical. For the much of the classical tradition, they are going to reject the idea that knowledge of would involve representation/correspondence as opposed to identity. For Sokolowski, indirect realism and representationalism is entirely misguided, a confusion of sorts.

Anyhow, most of the phenomenology I am familiar with attempts to rebut Kant, not support him. It would be a mistake to assume the phenomenology necessarily entails something like how Kant thinks of the difference between phenomena and noumena (even is Husserl himself arguably works himself back in this direction in his later work). Eric Perl, for instance, speaks to the use of phenomenology in the pre-modern tradition (terms like "intentionality" come from Scholasticism), and how the pre-moderns do not accept anything like the British Empiricist/Kantian dualism as a starting supposition (and I agree with Hegel that this is very much something started with). Indeed, both Plotinus and Aquinas consider it and reject it.

Embodied cognition is the idea that the body or the body’s interactions with the environment constitute or contribute to cognition...

The sentence continues: in ways that require a new framework for its investigation. The first part has rarely been denied, although it is sometime more or less ignored.

The enactivists I am aware of tend to be harsh critics of Kantian representationalism. It gets offered up as a way to avoid Kant's problems, not a way to recreate them. The article you're citing mentions phenomenology as a means of dissolving the very Kantian dualism you are claiming this approach represents.

An entity is an process with a slow rate of progression relative to a background.

Does this have to presuppose that all entities are mutable? That everything is mutable?

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being. If, as Heraclitus says, we “cannot step twice into the same river,” then it also seems we cannot speak of the same river twice either.

Heraclitus, for his part, has us both stepping into the same river and never doing so in one of his fragments. It seems he can appeal to the Logos as "that which stays the same." The problem is that this concept, at least in what survives of his work, is very ambiguous. It sort of just gets pulled out as a catch-all to fix problems, just like Anaxagoras's Nous. Contemporary philosophers likewise sometimes fall victim to this tendency in the process philosophy space.

I suppose another common problem for modeling approaches and bundle theories is that they tend to have to ignore or demote the quiddity/whatness/intelligibility of things. This ends up needed to be decomposed into "behavior."

But this is bothersome is one thinks these represent essential facets of being. In a sense, it seems to assume a sort of representationalism, which would require a particular approach to phenomenology.

BTW, this topic actually opens onto a host of interesting questions. There is a really good article on this in the Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism called something like "Neoplatonic Epistemology." It focuses on Plotinus, but it also covers Aristotle a good deal because Aristotle was a huge influence on Plotinus in this area and on the Patristics in general.

One of the points Aristotle makes is that belief and knowledge cannot be reduced to mechanistic (efficient) cause and effect. If belief is just the rearrangement of atoms, then it is hard to see how it can be "false." Falsity implies a sort of judgement, it implies intentionality, etc. So how do beliefs work vis-a-vis a mechanistic picture? On a common understanding of mechanism, they don't, that's the whole impetus for res cognitans or of semiotics.

Certainly, we understand perception better now. Information theory is very helpful here. But these fundamental questions about intentionality, perspective, etc. remain major open questions in the philosophy of information and in contemporary thought more broadly (e.g. the "Hard Problem").

A second interesting point is that falsity, and knowledge, need to involve universals. If we just invented a sui generis term for each particular, we could never be wrong about our predication. If I say, particular102939940204 is term24828920299202, and term24828920299202 only applies to that particular (perhaps in that moment), then I cannot be wrong about it. Falsity shows up when we judge that x is y, but x can fail to actually be y. Borges' short story "Funes the Memorious" plays around with the problems, and ultimate incoherence, of seeing all particulars as only particulars.

This is closely related to the epistemic issues related to the One and the Many. One cannot come to know any % of an (effectively) infinite number of causes/particulars in a finite time. We're dividing by infinity here. So here too, knowledge has to deal with overarching principles, Ones that apply to a Many.

But if these universals are just, in some sense, arbitrary "representations" (a misunderstanding of ens rationis), and they too are subject to change, because all of thought and intellgibility is mutable, then knowledge will prove impossible. But we do have discursive knowledge, therefore something in the assumptions that lead us to reject knowledge is false.

The whole Plotinian identity theory of truth (which rejects knowledge as belief), a popular and influential interpretation of Aristotle and Plato, requires a nous that is in some sense immutable.

If language is a game

It isn't. It shares some similarities with games.The idea that language, war, science, religion, etc. are all games requires a notion of "game" so broad as to lose the original insight about how aspects of language are like games. Plus, people routinely equivocate on the sense of "game" here.

Anyhow, does a game imply other players? Does the existence of prayer prove that God must exist? Does it prove that anyone praying must "really believe" that there is someone on the other side of their prayers? I don't think so.

Yes, obviously he can be wrong.

However, there is a sort of open-endedness to questioning. Just as Moore pointed out that we can always ask "is it good?" or "why is it good?" we can also always ask "but what if it is false?" or "what if I am mistaken?"

This is because reason is, in an important sense, transcendent, which is precisely what allows it to take us beyond current belief, habit, desire, etc. in search of what is truly good and really true.

Reaction to this post:

Sometimes in philosophy we show by arranging our concepts into a persuasive paradigms. This is very different than presenting logical arguments from true premises to demonstrated conclusions. Like “cause and effect”, we accept these concepts and enjoy the fruits, not born from logical demonstration but life forces these concepts on us. Accepting the sandwich, our big bang to certainty.

Sure, and this can absolutely be so. But there is a difference between noting this and appeals to the "language community" as somehow decisively settling all questions of solipsism or anti-realism. The madman should be nonplussed by this response. Does his speaking imply accepting a "language community?"

No, he might do so because it helps him with his delusions. Indeed, he speaks because he was deluded about the nature of the world, and he is now stuck with this habit. But just because one smokes does not mean that one is forced to affirm that "smoking isn't 'bad for me' or 'irrational.'" People who suffer from OCD or phobias often show this radical divorce between rational belief and behavior in this way. "No, I really don't think I'll get sick if I don't wash my hands 10 times... but..."

All the madman needs to affirm is that the demon tormenting them (perhaps also them) has been very clever in conditioning them.

Yes, it's useful to distinguish between them. Causes would involve individual instances, principles every case of twoness, a binary, etc.

Here is a quick explanation I wrote a while back:

The epistemic issues raised by multiplicity and ceaseless change are addressed by Aristotle’s distinction between principles and causes. Aristotle presents this distinction early in the Physics through a criticism of Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras posits an infinite number of principles at work in the world. Were Anaxagoras correct, discursive knowledge would be impossible. For instance, if we wanted to know “how bows work,” we would have to come to know each individual instance of a bow shooting an arrow, since there would be no unifying principle through which all bows work. We cannot come to know an infinite multitude in a finite time (for the same reason that one cannot cross an infinite space in a finite time at a finite speed.)

However, an infinite (or practically infinite) number of causes does not preclude meaningful knowledge if we allow that many causes might be known through a single principle (a One), which manifests at many times and in many places (the Many). Further, such principles do seem to be knowable. For instance, the principle of lift allows us to explain many instances of flight, both as respects animals and flying machines. Moreover, a single unifying principle might be relevant to many distinct sciences, just as the principle of lift informs both our understanding of flying organisms (biology) and flying machines (engineering).

For Aristotle, what are “better known to us” are the concrete particulars experienced directly by the senses. By contrast, what are “better known in themselves” are the more general principles at work in the world. Since every effect is a sign of its causes, we can move from the unmanageable multiplicity of concrete particulars to a deeper understanding of the world.For instance, individual insects are what are best known to us. In most parts of the world, we can directly experience vast multitudes of them simply by stepping outside our homes. However, there are 200 million insects for each human on the planet, and perhaps 30 million insect species. If knowledge could only be acquired through the experience of particulars, it seems that we could only ever come to know an infinitesimally small amount of what there is to know about insects. However, the entomologist is able to understand much about insects because they understand the principles that are unequally realized in individual species and particular members of those species.

All of this can be explained from the POV of Object Oriented Ontology, IMHO.

Really, it should be explainable by any metaphysics worth its salt. Explaining why we don't drink rocks when we are thirsty or give our babies razor blades to play with shouldn't exactly be a big hurdle. Once one removes any notion of "human nature" or of the "essence/quiddity" of objects, however this becomes a much more difficult task.

I will just add that it's helpful to recall that physics is the study of mobile/changing being here, so to have everything under it would be to imply that everything is mutable. I don't even know if this is Heraclitus, because he at least has the Logos.

I think it's De Anima III that covers nous and the active intellect.

I think classical approaches to this grant that there is a primary register of beings - like a substance, or god, or idea, and try to show how everything else is a mode of that's elements. Which for me is a similar move to the above, holding one entity set constant so another can emerge upon it. Only I think this applies to disparate entities of different types rather than whole regimes. Rather than all arising from one type of entity, consider something like: a body eating a cyanide pill erases a human mind from existence, causing grief in that person's loved ones, through inhibition of a cellular process. That's a death. It implicates natural, social, metaphysical and perhaps even spiritual orders in one event, in a manner which is not a raw juxtaposition of parts. Beings are not isolated, they clamour together. I think this speaks to @Srap Tasmaner's point about bundles of behaviour, that bundles in the map show up because the territory comes prepackaged.

The quoted bit sounds to me much more like the early-modern-period-and-on's focus on reductionism (also a trend in the pre-Socratics). I don't think this really applies to the classical tradition though. Everything isn't "reduced to substance." For Aristotle, there are "things that exist from causes," essentially bundles of external causes/processes without much of a principle of unity (e.g. a rock, which can be broken into many rocks fairly easily; whereas if you break a cat in half you no longer have a cat but a corpse) and "things that exist by nature," beings. The things that are most properly beings are ordered wholes, namely organisms, which are goal-directed (goals make a whole oriented towards some end as a whole), and the ordered cosmos as a whole (oriented towards the Prime Mover).

But things are ultimately understood in terms of their unifying principles. There are principles that are more and less proximate, more or less general, but this does not denote a "reduction" of one to the other. Yet there is a relation. Which makes sense, the principles of chemistry are not unrelated to the principles of health, which are not unrelated to goodness and well-being.

We can say that an event applies to many different "orders" but it's also clear that these orders relate. A death from cancer is a social event, an emotional event, a spiritual event, and a chemical one. The biochemistry of cancer treatments isn't unrelated to the spiritual, emotional, and physiological health of the patient. So, in order to avoid having a jumble of discrete models, you need some way of looking at these relations.

This probably shows up most acutely in ethics. Different disciplines have different measures that are closely related to what is "good,' i.e. desirable or choice worthy. Economics has utility, medicine has health. Welfare economists will tend to measure utility in terms of what people are willing to spend their money on. And yet plenty of doctors will tell you that people spend lots of money on things that ruin their health. If you have no overarching notion of the good as principle, you just have a heap of sui generis measures floating about. The same applies to health if one considers "mental health" versus "physiological health." I've seen a philosopher argue that diets are immoral because they cause suffering and are bad for "mental health," yet clearly this needs to be judged against the benefits of physiological health.

This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within.

What would be an example of such a philosophy?

Yes, but the response doesn't really act as a good counterpoint. We might very well use a PC desktop as a doorstop. However, we wouldn't turn into into a soup and serve it for dinner, wear it as an earring, attempt to drink it if we are thirsty (seeing as how it is not a liquid), use it as a sledgehammer to replace our sidewalk, ask it out on a date, hire it as our attorney, take it home as a pet, etc. Just as we wouldn't use a hunting knife to clean our ear and just as, while there are pastoral societies all over the world that raise animals for their meat and milk, none raise animals to consume their feces.Nor do any pastoralists mate sheep to cattle, goats to horses, etc.

A series of connected lines and curves made out of sticks doesn’t shape what we do with the this ‘object’ all by itself.

Obviously. What's the assumption here, either things determine what we do with them or we decide how to interact with them? But that's simply a false dichotomy. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," nothing is read without a reader or eaten without an eater, etc.

What makes the screwdriver a screwdriver for us is not inherent in the object all by itself but in this totality of chains of ‘in order to’s’ that belongs to and on the base of which it was invented.

A screwdriver is an artifact. It's built to purpose. Rorty's point, aside from being a bad one (one he expunged from the transcript he published of the debate), also gets things backwards. Of course you can do many things with a screwdriver, open boxes, etc. But try loosing a Torx screw with anything but a Torx screwdriver and you will be in for some frustration. You can use a computer as a doorstop, but good luck trying to use a doorstop, or anything but a digital computer to run Windows. There can be many ways to be right and still always very many more ways to be wrong.

If it's impossible to be wrong, philosophy/science is worthless (another point Eco makes, echoing Socrates in the Theatetus).

Do the world, and truth, impose themselves on how we deal with things? Yes, but only in and through how we deal with things.

Right, how else would it work? Sort of like: "does the shape of my feet impose itself on how I walk. Yes, but only in how I walk."




Re: the whole quantification thing, this just seems like equivocation.

Consider:

Brutus: Wow Cassius. I saw your results to my survey. I had always thought you were an atheist and a materialist, but I see here that you marked down that you think that both God and ghosts exist.
Cassius: Well of course they do Brutus. Both can be the subjects of existential quantification! But no, I am an atheist and I don't believe in ghosts.

Well, does Brutus have a right to be miffed over what seems to be sophistic equivocation here?

It's a red herring at best. It would be like if the thesis under consideration was: "do subjects determine what can be meaningfully predicated of them?"

Brutus: I think this is so. Consider, only numbers can be prime.
Cassius: Au contraire! I ate a "prime" rib just the other day.

First, going back to what I said to ↪fdrake, "But activity is only half the picture. The other half is receptivity..."

That's a good point. I glossed behavior as "act."

Will it be sufficient to know how ducks behave? I don't think so. I think one will also need to know how ducks respond to the behavior of other things, such as the fox that eats duck (including how it responds to having its neck broken and being digested). And one will also need to understand not only the internal proportion of duck "behaviors," but also the principles, causes, and explanations of the behaviors, which dictate the manner in which different kinds of behaviors interact (as well as the proportions and interactions between these powers).

Right, epistemically accessible acts involve interaction. When we speak of (essential) properties, we can be inclined to miss this. So, for instance, nothing looks red in a dark room, and for something to "be red" there needs to be (at least potentially) something that can "see red." Likewise, while we might say that salt is "water-soluble," it only ever dissolves in water when it is actually placed in water. That's a thought that comes out a bit stronger in later Patristic synthesizers of Aristotle (e.g. the St. Maximus quote above). No finite thing is wholly subsistent in itself: "[things'] essences and... their way of developing [are determined by] by their own logoi and by the logoi the beings that provide their external context. Through these logoi they find their defining limits."

I suppose if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far, such that it includes everything about a duck, then there can be no difference between behavior and being - no 'being' of the duck that is not captured by its behavior.

Right. For instance, when we see a sleeping tiger it is still "behaving" in how it interacts with the ambient environment, light bouncing off its body, etc. However, there is a serious problem for the functionalism mentioned by and as a "universal solvent," how exactly do you decide where different being start and end? Everything is just a heap of behaviors. Are all our groupings of them into beings and entities ultimately arbitrary? They certainly don't seem arbitrary.

Consider "The Problem of the Many" (not to be confused with "the One and the Many.") If a cat on a mat is just a cloud of atoms (or measurable variables), where does the cat end. When we see the cat, shouldn't we all just be part of some single, diffuse "physical system." Now, I will allow that, in some sense, we are part of a single system. A lot of problems crop up, particularly with superveniance, if one doesn't think of perception as involving the perceives, perceived, and the ambient environment. However, surely we don't want to have to default into mereological nihilism and deny that cats, stars, ourselves exist as entities that are in some way discrete.

Well, this is the old problem of the One and the Many, and it shows up as fiercely in process metaphysics as in atomism, perhaps more so. You see this all the time in contemporary though, a constant flip between smallism (e.g. everything is just configurations of quarks and leptons-or isolated "behaviors") and bigism (e.g. there are just a few quantum fields, perhaps all unifiable, in which case we just have one thing in all the universe). Surely, it might be profitable to seek a via media here, no?

Now, the deflationist might say: "hey, no worries, we just pragmatically decide where different substances start and end." Now, this might very well be what you do in some cases, based on practical concerns, but this seems pretty weak as a philosophy (not to mention totally at odds with common sense and how science, with all its focus on classifications, is actually done) . For one, it leaves you with no grounds for deciding how the sciences should be organized, because now there is no per se predication and no essential identities.

So, you'll often see people throwing up their hands at the idea of a separate, sui generis "feminist science" or a "physics of the global south." Lots of people can agree that there is bias in science, and that we need to eliminate it, but this sort of thing smacks of the old "Jewish versus Aryan physics" of the Third Reich or the "capitalist versus socialist genetics" of Stalin. Yet often, all critics of these view can muster is incredulity. They cannot actually offer an explanation of why "the physics of Quebec as conducted by Asian men on Thursdays" is not as valid a potential division of the sciences because they've overdosed on more radical forms of nominalism or reductionism.

but those aren't waters I've swum in.

Well, if you're interested, Rescher's book is quite good. Some other treatments tend to look just at Whitehead and Bergson, but he goes back to look at Hegel, Aristotle, etc.

Say the scientist is talking about convergent evolution where mammals and fish

Well, you can talk about the "behavior" of the species' genes in response to various tests, etc. However, note that such a view will tend to dissolve any notion of species in the first place.

We don't talk this way much anymore. There was a time when "essence" was tidied up as "necessary and sufficient conditions" for ― for what? For truthfully applying a predicate, mostly. Being is scrunched down into the copula, and all that's left is being a value of a bound variable.

I've seen many advocates of the Aristotelian and medieval traditions present this as a grave deflation. Species and genus becoming primarily calcified, logical terms is often presented as a corruption of the classical tradition that sparks all sorts of problems in modern thought. Principles through which a "many" are "one" are what is important, not logical terms.

Supposing we want to play the game of finding the "next of kin" to the OP, I would look to metaphysical or mereological bundle theory, not process philosophy. Process thought does provide an alternative to substance metaphysics, but it is historically and metaphysically thick in a way that the modeling approach is not, and I don't think it has received much attention in the Anglophone world apart from religious philosophers.

You are probably correct here. I thought of process metaphysics because I like it much more.

You could also think of unit and measure as causes of number in that it does not seem that we would develop such concept if not for the fact that phenomenal awareness is full of numerically discrete entities that share a measure (and principle of unity). And it does not seem that this would be in phenomenal awareness unless it existed in the world (which our empirical investigations would tend to support), hence, unit and measure are causes of number in that sense as well.

↪Arcane Sandwich I can get why they’re not efficient causes at least, but I’m trying to grasp this in the same lens that the Aristotelian tradition considered the genus of a thing to be the cause of its species. Now, 1 is obviously no genus of 2, but is the genus in any way argued as *efficient* cause by them, or is it formal?

And regardless of that, is it at least then established and agreed upon by most experts that a thing can be necessary for the existence for another thing, and yet not be a cause? If so, my more confused question would be what best defines a cause most generally across all types besides this criteria of necessary priority?

Metaphysics Book X, Ch. I is probably a good place to start. How familiar are you with Aristotle's treatment of the "Problem of the One and the Many" and discussion of causes, principles, and measures? That might be the place to start, but that's covered more in the Physics (Joe Sachs guided translation has some good stuff on this). Book V on causes is relevant too.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-mathematics/#10 <== is also pretty relevant.

Key points:

Numbers are more like concatenations of units and are not sets. To draw a contrast with modern treatments of numbers, a Greek pair or a two is neither a subset of a triple, nor a member of a triple. It is a part of three. If I say that ten cows are hungry, then I am not saying that a set is hungry. Or to point to another use of ‘set’, my 12 piece teaset is in a cabinet, not in an abstract universe. So too, these ten units are a part of these twenty units:

One (a unit) typically is not a number (but Aristotle is ambivalent on this), since a number is a plurality of units.

See also: Metaphysics 1052b35: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0052%3Abook%3D10%3Asection%3D1052b

Unit is related to number as principle, not species.