How do you interpret nominalism?
Hello,
From my pov, nominalism is nothing other than the Cartesian doctrine that matter is extension. In other words, a materialist interpretation of matter. The "realist" position is actually idealistic: you have general matter ("prime matter") with a non-material principle as it's rational formation. Modern science does not need a logos inside matter. A willow tree is simply similar to another one in how their matter is organized. It's all just extension, matter. I've seen others take a far different approach to this on this forum in the past. I don't know the history of nominalism very well, so maybe somebody can illuminate this question with some quotes from the past
Thanks
From my pov, nominalism is nothing other than the Cartesian doctrine that matter is extension. In other words, a materialist interpretation of matter. The "realist" position is actually idealistic: you have general matter ("prime matter") with a non-material principle as it's rational formation. Modern science does not need a logos inside matter. A willow tree is simply similar to another one in how their matter is organized. It's all just extension, matter. I've seen others take a far different approach to this on this forum in the past. I don't know the history of nominalism very well, so maybe somebody can illuminate this question with some quotes from the past
Thanks
Comments (122)
Quoting Gregory
That is a view that resembles Francisco Suarez, bold is mine:
I will leave the translation to those interested.
On the other hand, we can't say a chair is alike another chair in how their matter is organised. Different chairs have wildly different shapes and materials. So something else must make their alikeness. Aristotle's teleology is useful here.
Note: platonism and Platonism are not the same thing.
The fact that two chairs can be different seems to me to say that the "realist" position is wrong. If you imagine a classical painting of a lake, with ducks, moss, tress, ect, it can be asked "how many forms are there there". This can't be answred at least to my satisfaction. Universals have to do with forms, which are immaterial. What a single "thing" is doesn't have to be specified by science. This is the difference between realism philosophically and basic scientific materialism: the former has trouble explaining the unity of objects while science is not so much concerned with that, or even wants to be
For Plato, the two chairs are imperfect imitations of the true chair, which is its form or idea. By that account, the existence of two chairs does not disprove the realist position.
Reminds me of the famous quip in Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
There are materialist realists. Some people posit that the are only a few universals, e.g. various flavors of quark, lepton, etc.
Interesting, that seems to be exactly the same discussion. I think that the rebuttal is well put, in that, if there are no universals held in common by particulars, there is nothing that would cause the idea of 'chair'. Uttering 'chair' is then a self-refutation. I would argue however that the alikeness, closeness of two things may cause an idea of commonness, then allowing categorisation. Like colours, each wavelenght is its own, unique, but we group a broad range of wavelenghts under 'green' for their closeness.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Enter: the preon.
Contrariwise, if everyone sat on tables, they would be chairs.
Well this is tricky. Plato, Aristotle, or Augustine are aware that Scythians and Egyptians call things by different names, that people can make up new names for things, that language is learned, and that language is a "social practice."
What makes them realists is the fact that they believe that universals like "triangularity," exist tout court; the names are invented to name the universals. For Aristotle, the universals only exist where they are instantiated, e.g. in triangular things. For Plato they exist outside of individual instances in a way, although not in the way that individual objects exist. For Augustine the sign directs us to the universal in the Logos, and even individual instantiations of things can be thought of as signs of a sort, all effects being signs of their causes and the world itself being both a sign and in a way sacramental (an outward sign of inward things).
Likewise, the nominalist will generally allow that there is some "real difference," between tables and chairs or tigers and ants, etc. If there wasn't a difference there would be no use in making up different words for them and we wouldn't be able to tell which words apply to which things.
More modern nominalists will often say something like: the names are names for "sense data," as opposed to "properties of things." E.g., Locke would have it that universals like "red" only apply to "secondary properties," which only exist in minds, or we could consider the Kantian noumenal/phenomenal distinction which gets roped in here at times.
And then more recently you get tropes. Trope theories vary a lot, but some seem to me like essentially realism for people who don't want to say they are realists lol.
Quoting Gregory
That is ONE way of using nominalism I guess?
The literal meaning of the term is how we name/nominate items of thought/experience as X. What use abstract concepts are, how universal terms work and how these terms relate to reality are all what nominalism focuses on.
A nominal perspective is a pretty interesting one to take when thinking about stuff.
I don't respect G. K Chesteron as an intellectual. He had too much fun(ny) doing what he did. He didn't work hard enough
This demonstrates an unconscious tendency of nominalism; why do nominalists have a tendency to appeal to an ontology based on the existence of particulars, as opposed to an ontology that starts from a united whole?
In Bertrand Russell's case, it was in the hope of making analysis tractable in piecemeal fashion, in contrast to the British Idealists who might also be described as nominalist, but who considered reality to consist of a single holistically unified entity. But this makes analytics impossible, since it implies that a local material change to reality causes the meaning and hence definitions of the rest of reality to change.
It sounds like nominalism drowns in contingecies (and infinity?) But numbers in general do this. 1 can be divided unlessly so that there is no base unit
I'm not sure I see a distinction here.
One thing with many aspects (due to relative position in space-time) seems functionally equivalent to many things whose only distinction is their relative position in space-time?
In any case, if the difference between things depends (solely) on the relationships between them (e.g. position in space-time) then there is no value in considering the things.
It seems to me that the critical component is the relationships that differentiate.
I agree that relative position (relationships) individuate. Given this, individual substances have no intrinsic properties, essence or identity. In this light the distinction between one substance and many substances is moot.
The only thing of relevance to discuss is the relationships (position) that gives rise to the distinct perceptions.
Quoting Gregory
I'm a big fan of describing what can be observed (nominally nomanalist).
The real number line and the imaginary number plane are concepts that can't be observed. Infinitely dividing 1 isn't a practical exercise.
As noted, if we attempt to find the properties, essence and identity of the number 1 by stripping away everything else - we end up with nothing.
What we can describe are the relationships between things. The useful parts of numbers are the differences between 1, 2 and 3.
As suggests - Bertrand is still clinging to realist/universalist assumptions. He is trying to elucidate the essence of numbers where no such essence exists. The same effort invested into describing the relationships of numbers is much more productive and, I would argue, closer to the principles of nominalism.
Quoting sime
I think this only applies to analytics of objects.
Analysing relationships (c.f. Graph Theory) is evidently practical albeit distinct from objective analysis.
I agree with what you are saying but I think the problem is in trying to preserve objective analytics within a relational (connected) system.
That is - it is true that local changes affect meaning and definitions globally. This is an issue when you assume static meaning and definitions.
However, in a holistic system it is the relationships and how they change that are the focus. It isn't a problem that meaning changes when that is the nature of the system that we are trying to understand.
As you say - the bias towards the existence of particulars over a united whole, especially among nominalists, is passing strange. But at least some of the resistance appears to arise from attempting to apply objective (isolationist/intrinsic) assumptions to relativistic (holistic) systems.
Objective analytics don't work in a relativistic system - but that doesn't mean that a relativistic system can't be analysed - just that the mechanisms of analysis are different.
The relationship is no big concern, in my view, nor of any particular relevance. Whats to discuss? The thing is everything, without which there would be no relationship or any other contrived measurement.
In my view nominalism fails to recognize the persistent and repetitive element of things. We can take time as the framework of the demonstration: If we imagine that something, a thing, in its minimum time this minimum time is less than that which is necessary for us to realize that it is a thing. This suggests to us that although no time is the same, something must remain the same in order not to fall into an absolute difference that would not allow us to identify things. In this sense in the identity of things there is essence and universalization (repetition through difference, through different moments or times. Isn't that belong to universals?). Thus the link of essence with identity is permanence and repetition through difference. Something that links essence with identity is permanence and repetition. Even in the principle of identity, in its formulation the repetition of sign X in X=X is implied. Universals are at least something that repeats and is the same for different times.
It can be said, in a certain sense, that nominalism becomes absurd if it is carried to its ultimate consequences. For it would deny the very possibility of identity as repetition and permanence. We need time and permanence in order to distinguish and identify. Identity and difference imply each other.
To understand nominalism, it's best to understand how it originated and what it opposed. Its origin is usually assigned to William of Ockham, famous for 'Ockham's razor'. And what was eliminated through said razor was belief in universals, which were central to the Aristotelian elements of scholastic philosophy, for example in Thomas Aquinas.
So what are universals? In Scholastic philosophy, 'universals' are abstracta that typify the shared properties or essences of particulars. These were said to be real by the scholastics, hence the term 'scholastic realism'. The reality of universals was central to debates about the nature of reality and knowledge. They argued that universals exist in three ways: ante res (before things, as ideas in the Divine Intellect), in rebus (in things, as the common attributes of individual objects e.g. the dogness of dogs, the tree-ness of trees), and post res (after things, as universal concepts such as 'dog' or 'tree'). In Aristotle 'nous' (intellect) is the faculty that grounds rational thought through the ability to grasp universals. This was distinct from sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory. The ability of the intellect to grasp universals is what enables the setting of definitions in a consistent and communicable way and explains how we can speak meaningfully about categories like 'dogness' or 'tree-ness' despite their instantiation in many diverse particulars. Realists believed that the ability to grasp universals is the unique prerogative and characteristic of reason.
See: The Theological Origins of Modernity, by M. A. Gillespie, published January 2008.
"Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which according to Gillespie dismantled the rational Cosmos of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, born out of a concern that anything less than such would undercut divine omnipotence."
Also The Cultural Impact of Empiricism, Jacques Maritain - a good summary of the role of universals in rational judgement.
The World of Universals, Bertrand Russell (from Problems of Philosophy).
@Paine - relates to the question raised in the thread on Gerson/Aristotle.
I've been considering the Absolute vs relativism. I think there is something objective but that it's so far out there it can't be grasped. So relativism is true in that things are only proprtionally true. Abortion is wrong might be more true than abortion is right. But nothing is the Absolute. That's what came to mind when i read your post
The Absolute is a place holder
I have not participated in this discussion. I recognize that you think that I need further education in these matters. I don't see how saying that advances your primary thesis.
But you (and everyone else) cannot describe a thing in the absence of relationships.
for all X
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The intrinsic properties, essence or identity of X are irrelevant. X is not what it is - X is its relationships with everything else (what it is not).
With this in mind - I fail to see how a thing is anything, let alone everything.
There are, indeed, many, many examples of relative concepts. Relative morality is, of course, an entire thing by itself.
We define words in relation to other words. Likewise for concepts - an idea takes on significance and meaning in relation to other ideas.
Your subjective experience is, of course, relative to yourself. You assimilate new experiences in light of previous experiences. Your taste in music is subjective (relative to yourself).
However, no one has ever managed to nail down a single example of a definite, unambiguous absolute.
There are no absolute definitions. There are no absolute truths. There are absolutely no absolutes.
This is a limit on knowledge. We will never be able to described a fixed point. We can only ever compare one thing to another. Language can only describe relationships. Language cannot describe an absolute.
The idea of absolute knowledge (omniscience) or absolute truth has a venerable history and was undoubtedly a driving force behind axiomatic mathematics (the home of mathematical proofs). However, the universe doesn't work that way.
In our universe, meaning is relative. A change over there impacts the meaning over here. Any change in relationships anywhere (slightly) changes meaning everywhere. Each observer perceives their own truth. Truth is dependent on context and your lifetime of experiences is a major context for your appreciation of what is true.
The quoted argument assumes that all words are universals, which is a ludicrous idea. Language has nothing to do with univerals. There is no truth in language; anyone can make a word and an arbitrary definition for it.
Language is also not an adequate system for universals to exist in. Uttering "chair" will not confer the same image in all minds. An idea cannot be perfectly transmitted because it requires language, which requires itself and so forth. Language comes about because humans have brains capable of prediction. Through such prediction we can allow the adequate but not perfect transmission of ideas.
Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of deconstruction, which is an interesting idea opposing these ideas if your interested and havent heard about it.
It doesn't. It doesn't assume 'of' or 'tomorrow' is an universal there is no of-ness or tomorrow-ness.
Quoting Ourora Aureis
If you can make up a definition for it, is it arbitrary? Does it not exist in relation to other words, which refer to things in the world?
What of the cogito. I think therefore i am? What is this relative too? Fichte says it's related to others but the existent of a single personality seems objective to me
His argument against H.G.Wells is that if you can refer to the concept of chairs, well then clearly there is some non-arbitrary similarity between them all, and thus the idea there is no category of chair is ludicrous.
However, this fails because language is based upon prediction. We cannot read each others minds and so the transfer of ideas and thus what words mean, will be different between everyone. If you asked everyone to classify a set of objects into chairs and not chairs, there would be disagreements precisely for this reason. "chair" has no single definition and so refering to it is not referring to a universal.
He presumes language refers to universals, when it doesnt, in fact it cannot.
Quoting Lionino
If a definition has no particular reason to apply to a word, then by definition its arbitrary. Practicality of language does not negate its arbitrary nature.
Also, be careful not to make a circular argument for universals. If there are no universals then there are no "things" in the world, but simply the world exists and we recieve information from it. These "things" are simply patterns our minds have formed and structured their understanding of the world on.
I hope someday you'll read one of Hegel's logics. For him pure materialism and pure idealism are simultaneously true as a paradox from which the Absolute is a rational (logos) impossibility to find, as one discovers intellect (nous). Aquinas's "champion" Chesterton is said to be the master of paradox but all he did was create word puzzles that are logically divorced from the subject matter he wrote about. Thomism is all together too in the middle, too ordinary, too boring to possibly be true in any real sense of the word. Once his "method" is undisguised his arguments all tumble and he becomes unfitting to read.
Be that as it may, and I certainly dont agree, neither the points raised in the OP nor the philosophy of Hegel are relevant to the issue of what nominalism is. Only @Count Timothy von Icarus and my post actually address the question which originated in the medieval period centuries before either Descartes or Hegel.
Where does it do that?
[Quote]Language has nothing to do with univerals.[/quote]
Presumably it has something to do with them since you're able to refer to them with words right here.
[Quote]There is no truth in language; anyone can make a word and an arbitrary definition for it.[/quote]
I am not sure how this is supposed to be taken. If there is "no truth in language," am I supposed to take it that nothing you have just expressed (in language) is true?
If I make up the world ishblaqwer and say it refers to dressers that have been painted green is this now an English word? Is it a Chinese word? Can I make up new Chinese words even though I don't speak Chinese?
Ha! I do find it sort of tedious how everything he says has to be delivered in some sort of sly turn of phrase, but on the occasions where he is right they do tend to make for great quotes.
You, a thing, are describing things. You cannot describe a relationship in the absence of things. X is a thing. Everything else are things.
Curious that the greatest genius of history agrees with me on virtually every issue.
But to the point, isn't that view a sort of immanent realism of universals? It surely reminds me of mathematical immanent realism.
Quoting JuanZu
Derrida's chain of deconstructive tropes (difference, gramme, trace) directs us to the futural difference within presence, the way that a would-be identity comes back to itself differently as the same . Derrida's notion of iterability is informed by a radical view of temporality he shares with Heidegger. The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an
Derrida's thinking here bears a remarkable resemblance to Heidegger's insistence that identity is never simply present to itself, but differs from itself as the same.
Nietzsche arrived at a similar conclusion:
Deleuze explains the meaning of Nietzsche Eternal Return in the following way:
Good question.
You exist.
Your existence encompasses your entire existence.
Your thoughts and your experiences are aspects of your existence.
Each part of your existence illuminates the other aspects. Your conception of consciousness is that it is not everything else.
Each of your individual conceptions is a network of relationships.
Your concept of a tree has a link to your concept of a leaf, of roots, of bark, of dogs peeing, of the one summer you climbed and scraped your shin...
A sufficiently dense web of relationships creates a compelling shape that we experience as meaning. The components of that shape are relationships.
A personality can (should) feel compelling without needing to be objective. The relationships between your experiences form something real and unique - just not something objective.
Quoting NOS4A2
It depends what we mean by "thing".
Various people have spent significant effort in trying to describe intrinsic properties, essence or identity in an objective, context independent way. These efforts have failed.
All definitions are circular. A describes B and B describes A.
Objective definitions don't exist.
We can, and do, describe things in relation to other things. We measure, for example, distance by taking one thing (a ruler) and comparing it to the distance we wish to measure.
Our understanding of everything is by comparison with everything else.
The relationships between things is all we ever see. We never see anything between relationships.
You experience relationships with tables and chairs. You don't experience the table and chair themselves. When you describe a table, you are describing relationships of the table.
The distinction between the table and the table's relationships is of little concern when sitting down to eat but is critical in meta-language and metaphysics discussions.
Axiomatic Mathematics
Axiomatic Mathematics specifically tries to describe tables while excluding table's relationships. This is impossible. The effort invested is wasted.
All our descriptions have always described the relationships of a thing. Your conception of a table is of a table's relationships, not the table itself.
If youve seen a relationship, and in fact it is all you ever see, what does one look like?
Why would you say the philosophy of Hegel has nothing to say about nominalism? The OP points out that realism tries to bring in spiritual realit8es as formative principles in matter. This would be a middle ground between the reality of extension and the reality of idealism as two parallel aspects of reality. I would disagree with this specific middle ground because, for one reason, matter is self-evidently material. To make it half spiritual half general matter is to have an odd idealism on your hands
So you are saying "I think therefore I am" is not a rigourus argument. But the substantial reality of experience is that consciousness is as "there", is as "out there", is as objective as are material objects that surround us. The sun shines everywhere and so does consciousness within us
In a sense my point is very similar to what Derrida says about how the identity of the self in order to transcend and have a certain ideality implies the particular disappearance of that self. Derrida suggests that when someone writes "I am X" we are in the presence of the identity of the self beyond its mere presence, and suggests to us that its factical absence is necessary and implied.
Isn't this the ideality of a universal that, in a sense, detaches itself from its particular ground and projects itself onto a repetition as the condition of possibility of identity? Derrida suggests to us that identity, the Being of things is always in transcendence and that transcendence is necessary for identity (just as in a book about me, read by someone else is an inelidible transcendence [Derrida would call it Spectrum] of my being and my identity ).
Nominalism would not take into account the repetition and transcendence in the identity of things, thus depriving itself of any discourse on Being. And like all skepticism it would fall into its own pragmatic contradiction by speaking of the being of things while denying the condition (transcendence, spectralization if you will) that allows it to speak precisely of things and to be a philosophical stance.
Maybe the answer is that objects are similar enough to mentally classify them as without saying that participate in a Form which is individual and distant. Objects have their own reality and support their own existence through their materiality
If two objects, say two bowling balls, are identical in everyway according to science, we don't have to posit them sharing something higher from them in order to use the same word for them. The same would be true is one was green and the other black although identical in all other respects. Classification is not depentent on Platonism or platonism. We use language however in a Platonic way
I would agree with that, but that is because I am not a platonist or a Platonist, I lean towards nominalism.
Quoting Gregory
I don't think we can use language in a Platonic or nominalistic way, since these two are already related to how we use language.
When we classify two objects in a language set we are more focused on the use of language then with the objects. The latter are discerable by the senses while language is understood by the mind. Therefore langauge uses more of a generalization then the senses use
if nothing is said of a thing except that it is an actual thing, an external object, this only makes it the most universal of all possible things, and thereby we express its likeness, its identity, with everything, rather than its difference from everything else. when I say 'an individual thing', I at once state it to be really quite a universal, for everything is an individual thing: and anything we like. More precisely, as this bit of paper, each and every paper is a 'this bit of paper', and I have thus said all the while what is universal. If I want, however, to help out speech- which has the divine nature of directly turning the mere 'meaning' right round about, making it into something else, and so not letting it ever come the length of words at all- by pointing out this bit of paper, then I get the experience of what is, in point of fact, the real truth of sense-certainty. I point it out as a here, which is a Here of other Heres, or is in itself simply many Heres together, i.e. is a universal. I take it up then, as in truth it is; and instead of knowing something immediate, I 'take' something 'truly', I perceive (wahrnehme, per-cipio)." [The Phenomenology of Mind, chapter 1)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Electrons, chairs, tables, humans, donkeys. These are words. His argument is that by saying such words, one is referencing universals. His entire argument is that its contradictory to not believe in such universals and yet refer to them when making an argument against them. Hence, one saying "All chairs are quite different" is contradictory.
If you have a different interpretation of his argument then please present it, but I think your response here is merely semantics surrounding "word".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You took this statement out of its context within an argument. Language has nothing to do with universals because its purpose is communication, not metaphysical truth. Communication is flawed and based upon prediction by others, it cannot be 100% precise and so cannot refer to a universal, just as one is unable to describe colour to the blind. There are limitations to language.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, this is semantics. When I am referencing truth, I am describing the non-static and arbitrary nature of signs and definitions. If I define X as Y, it doesn't mean it is the "true" definition, in fact there is no such thing. Language is entirely relational, you can swap out anything and it doesn't become "false" for doing so. Hence, any term such as "chair" will never be able to have a single agreed upon definition. Everyone will have a different conception of how X is defined.
Someone is able to refer to the concept of a chair knowing this, that they are referring to a broadly understood but vague notion, which can nevertheless illicit the idea they wish to impose on other minds.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is entirely semantic. The simplist answer is that it doesnt matter to my argument or the broader question of nominalism.
If that is true, then Von Neumann ordinals cannot exist. Example 3 = {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}. It wouldn't work because it would be reduced to the empty set which does not even exist according to Le?niewski, So, that view is very unproductive.
Another gem in nominalist absurdity:
Structure is arguably more important than what individuals are contained in the structure. According to the structuralist ontology of mathematics, structure is even the only thing that matters. That is also what the Von Neumann ordinals actually suggest. Therefore, Goodman's views look very unproductive.
Not only this view rejects the admiral ship of mathematics proper, i.e. set theory, but it also makes any definition of truth impossible, because that requires at least some fragment of set theory.
Nominalism looks like a complete aberration in mathematics.
I do not know what kind of absurdities nominalism leads in other fields, but I am absolutely not impressed with its abysmal performance in mathematics. Mathematical nominalism looks like a smorgasbord of bad ideas.
That is one single nominalist out of the several nominalists. Stop misrepresenting the view that you found out about by reading a Redditpedia article two hours ago.
And your criticism is spurious.
Did I ask for your opinion? Stop giving unsolicited feedback. As you already know, yours is not appreciated.
I don't see how Chesterton's comment commits him to realism vis-á-vis universals. It seems completely consistent with many forms of nominalism as well, e.g. most forms of trope nominalism I am aware of. The point is simply that each particular can't be wholly sui generis or else there is no way to group them and no way to point to any sort of grouping.
I didn't mean to. I am also not really sure how this is supposed to show that language cannot refer to universals. Why must language be 100% precise in order for it to refer to universals? Why is being "based on prediction by others" a barrier to speaking of "redness" as a universal, but presumably not the "redness we experience vis-á-vis all red things?"
There are certainly limitations to language, but I don't see how the precludes talk of universals. Why does this lack of precision not preclude talk of other sorts of things like states of affairs, facts, properties, etc.?
Either way, you seem to be using language to say something about universals. Is the idea that we can only say what they are not, a sort of via negativa? But then this would seem to beg the question on realism since universals are called in precisely to explain phenomena, not vice versa.
I would disagree with the idea that language is arbitrary. It isn't. We don't have the words we do for "no reason at all." There is a reason every culture has words for color and size, rather than say, breaking the color spectrum in half and having some words for 'blue and green + size' and other words for 'orange, red, and violet + texture.' Terms like "grue" and "bleen" which denote color and age together don't exist in any language. This is for a good reason - sense perception does not immediately give us any good indication for "how old something is," and the question of "when something was created" is itself fraught.
Likewise, words follow a power law distribution across languages where the most commonly used words are always short and longer, multi-syllable words are always much rarer. It's easy to see why this is the case; it would be a barrier to rapid communication to replace words like "I," "the," "at," "you," "up." etc. with seven syllable words. There are other commonalities in sign systems.
All humans point and the object pointed to is determined with a line going out from the hand or finger in the direction of the object. As Wittgenstein points out, this could conceivably be otherwise (i.e. it is not logically impossible). Pointing could refer to whatever is behind the shoulder of the pointing hand. It's obvious why no one does this. Our eyes are on the front of our head and thus we would not be able to see what we were pointing at if pointing worked like this.
Human signs systems are grounded in what Wittgenstein terms a "form of life," and while this includes elements that are relatively malleable it also includes elements grounded in human biology, our world's physics, etc. As such, the sign systems won't be arbitrary.
I'm not sure how this is a problem for realism. Plato, the foundational realist, allows that people often only understand forms in a relative fashion. The universal is called in to explain why people can agree at all, not to put forth the thesis that agreement must always occur; it clearly doesn't.
It doesn't? It seems relevant to the claim that signs are arbitrary and that "anyone can make a word and an arbitrary definition for it." It seems to me that anyone can stipulate a definition, preform an utterance stating "x is defined as y," but this doesn't seem to be enough to make it a word in a language. Languages are emergent social phenomenon; they don't come down to one person.
Relationships look like everything you experience.
If you only ever experience relationships - then relationships look like everything you experience.
Quoting Gregory
I'm saying the usual interpretation (that we can only know our own existence with certainty) is limited.
It is true that we can only know our own existence with certainty.
However - our existence encompasses our entire existence. Everything you think, feel and do is part of your existence.
Using our (certain) existence as a basis, we can make statements about the nature of our existence:
Thus we have a clear and certain statement regarding the limits of knowledge and description.
We can describe things in relation to other things. Our understanding of things is contained entirely within the relationships between things.
We can describe the relationships of tables and chairs. We cannot describe implicit properties, essence or identity of tables and chairs (absent relationships).
Interestingly, even on a reductive physicalist account, the general notion here should be true. Sign relations involving human cognition are incredibly complex and dynamic, and will never repeat in exactly the same way. But then again they will not be entirely different either. Commonalities will probably defined in terms morphisms between some set of processes, and then these could potentially be given the status of "abstract objects."
I don't know if physical reality being inherently processual should be a problem for realism. On the face of it, they don't seem to match up, but you can turn any 3D process into a 4D static abstraction.
Yes, as commonly interpreted. Although Aristotle is often still interpreted in fairly "idealist" terms, which makes eidos (form/pattern) and universals quite a bit different than a sort of immanent realism that tries to work with most modern forms of physicalism. For Aristotle eidos is what is "most real," while matter is simply what explains what stays the same when eidos changesand there is no matter without eidos since this would entail being of which nothing can be said (Parmenides' "speaking nothing").
We can think of how eidos comes from the Greek iden, "to see." In Latin and then English these evolve into "idea," which is obviously now taken to be quite different from "to see" or "image." Now we might think of "what is seen," as studying arbitrarily far from "what is," but for Aristotle the eidos both makes a thing what it is and gives us grounds to say anything about it at all.
I had wondered if we also get "identity" from eidos, which would be instructive since identity, what a thing is, comes from eidos, but this is actually from the Old French "idem et idem," "same and same," and idem comes from Latin and develops from proto-Italiac not the Greek.
Consider that things can only be what they are in virtue of relation and process. This idea has been embraced in a number of disparate schools and the reasoning seems impeccable to me:
There is also the more science-based arguments for the primacy of process and relation: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619
Here we might also consider Roveli's relational quantum mechanics as an example. Then there is Jaegwon Kim's convincing arguments that any sort of strong emergence is impossible under a building block metaphysics where "things are the thing-units they are made of," which in turn seems to lead to either panpsychism or the denial of conciousness. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/837241
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
One of the many differences between what Derrida is getting at with iterability and a reductive physicalist account is that the latter presupposes subject and object, cause and effect. This grammar assumes that quantitative changes in a process are subservient to qualitatively determined identities constraining the sense of those quantitative changes. The qualitative nature of a cause is not allowed to be changed by the effect, it is transcendent to what is immanent to it.
Idein or idin (?????)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It comes from "identité", but it is correct that it comes ultimately from idem. I don't think 'idem et idem' was a phrase in Old French, though I don't have strong means of confirmation, it raises my eyebrows at least. ????? is where the -oid and -id at the end of taxonomic words come from (gibbons are not Hominids like all great apes but they are Hominoids) but that is not Greek or Latin, it is ISV.
My sincere apologies for my entirely unjustified "rant" towards you in another thread. It was immature of me.
I must admit, I was somewhat discombobulated by the extent of your (prior) understanding.
In any case, my response was irrational. I am sorry for my behaviour.
Thank you for linking me up with Process Philosophy.
I had intended a more substantive post than this... But I find myself digesting your linked posts and process philosophy.
I'll be back.
For epistemology, sure, the knowledge of a thing requires process and relation. But being does not require our knowledge of it, and metaphysics is not epistemology.
You're quote from St. Maximum is interesting although many arguments have been put forward for pandeism, pantheism, and panentheism. In the Summa Theologica Aquinas himself says that God is IN everything in His essence, although he says otherwise elwhere. To me this is panentheism, while pantheism would be an emanation of the simple God... SPINOZA himself had an argument similar to that of Alan Watts and modern non-dualists- that the essence God must be fully manifested *always in everything* (and we just don't see it in our delusion) otherwise God would not be unlimited. Matter is forms of that which can be extended (dirt, water, trees, ect) yet this an -atomistic material reality- can still have an other, unrestricted reality to it which our delusions can not fathom<>
That is a platonist view. The alternative (and my preference) is immanent universals: they exist exclusively in their instantiations.
Example: a 90 degree angle is instantiated in objects that have this angle. "90 degree angle" doesn't exist independently in some "platonic heaven".
They still are "forms" according to Aristotle, spiritual instantiations. It seems important to me to that with our eyes we see and recognize matter as types of extentions and not as informed by spiritual principles; while at the same time we see in our soul the world as irreducibly mystical. These are not on the same level of reality, these thoughts. Logo vs nous. The first is Cartesian matter (and nominalistic as i argue) while the other is seeing with the eyes of romanticism's idealism. One is reality, common, while the other is Reality, personal. Maybe there are levels even beyond. Nietzsche said the human experience is like an onion (a "glass onion"?) that has levels that never end
[I have my other thread to work on tomorrow]
Are you really a relativist?
I'm not a relativist in any traditional sense.
To me the question is whether what we exprience as "matter" is purely material and nothing else. Aristotle doesn't believe forms are purely abstractions but reside inside, or maybe for properly "around" matter, as well as existing within the mind. These union of form with form in the mind is the spiritual experience of perception for him, a position rejected by latter materialists from his school, such as Strato of Lampsacus I believe. For me this is allowing idealism enter where she doesn't belong. The eyes see as material with the brain (despite what Berkeley said about optics)
As with relatavism, it's a hard thing to think about. Thinking is hard. Relativism leads to absolute idealism, or vice versa. Keeping matter merely parrelell to any idealism is how i strike the balance
My view is mostly consistent with (physicalist) David Armstrong's metaphysics: everything that exists (an existent) is a "state of affairs" which is a particular with its properties. Properties do not exist independently; they exist only imminantly - instantiated in a state of affairs.
The same property can be held by multiple existents, therefore a property is a universal. Example: -1 electric charge is a property held by every electron (as well as other objects), so it is a universal. Universals are anything that can be multiply instantiated, which includes sets of properties (consider the complete set of properties that an electron has; so "electron" is also a universal).
We mentally identify properties through "the way of abstraction": conceptions are formed by considering the common features of several objects or ideas and ignoring the irrelevant features that distinguish those objects. Obviously, the abstract concept of a -1 electric charge is not the charge itself.
This makes the most sense to me because it parsimoniously accounts for everything that exists, while rejecting nominalism. It even provides a framework for laws of nature.
What the framework doesn't do is to treat abstractions as having some direct relation to the objects to which they apply. There is only the indirect relation of the way of abstraction.
Do you still believe you see the world as it is? Hegel says properties are universals as well, while the object is an "indifferent immediate" (extended matter). He had a strange relationship with Aristotle even as he considered him the greatest philosopher. In between Cartesian extension and the Absolute Idea were his thoughts on Aristotle, and they are hard to decipher, especially in the Logics. What exactly does it mean to say a property is universal? It is held in common with many "matters" but are they independent of each other as the matters are and as within the matters? What are we adding to our conceptual scheme by speaking of universals that modern materialism is missing?
Going off on a tangent, Hegel's philosophy was akin to Schelling's (who accused Hegel of stealing his ideas) while Fichte was more in line with Schopenhauer. The Absolute Idea and the Will are to aspects of God, and two aspects of us (in my belief). Instead of one Incarnation, there has been billions of them, and these beings can do good AND evil because really they are just biological matter. The separation between the universe and God is definite, yet they are One in union.
I believe we perceive a reflection of the actual world, one that is functionally accurate - i.e. it enables us to successfully interact with the world - which is mandatory for survival. I believe ontological theories (like the one I referenced) are theories about the way the world actually is - foundational aspects, at least.
Still, all our knowledge and theories are grounded in our human perspectives (this is actually the "relativism" I based my screen name on). I also don't think this is actually a problem, or at least not a problem worth worrying about.
Quoting Gregory
I think nominalists and Humeans are missing something. Properties are ways things are, and there do seem to be multiple objects that have commonnalities in the way they are. IMO, Humean regularity theory doesn't have a satisfactory account of laws of nature. Armstrong (a modern materialist) improves upon these.
I don't think this is correct. What is instantiated is what we sense as particular things, and that something has a 90 degree angle is a judgement we make. So "90 degree angle" is not an instantiation of the particular, it is a judgement which is made by human beings, produced through measurement.
Are you saying the relation of 90 degrees, that we measure, does not describe an objective fact? Of course, we define "degree" and "90", but the relation we identify as such is not mere opinion - it describes an ontological relation (setting aside the inherent error of making measurements). Do you disagree?
You can divide a circle into four equal angles, but the convention, that each of these angles is 90 degrees is completely arbitrary. The circle could have had 400 degrees, then the right angle would be 100. Or, we could say that there is an infinite number of degrees within the circle, and within the right angle as well. The issue is with the nature of "a degree". It's not something within the object, but designated by the subject, in a completely arbitrary way (other than that there is a conventional standard). This excludes the possibility of "the four equal angles of a circle are 90 degrees" being an objective fact.
When you say existence is a state of affairs, do you mean an "event" as in Process and Reality (Whitehead)"? I struggle to process "process philosophy" and "interdependance" as emphasized by buddhism. This plant here has no relation to my cup. They are clearly not dependant on each other. But maybe in a cosmic sense
No. I'm referring to David Amstrong's use of the term. "State of affairs" is the term he uses to refer to any ontic object. If X exists, then X is a state of affairs.
He uses this clumsy term in order to stress that everything that exists has 3 types of constituents, and the constituents never exist in the world independently of a state of affairs.
The 3 types of constituents are: (thin) particular*, (intrinsic) properties, and relations (=extrinsic properties). They constitute a state of affairs.
* A state of affairs can also be referred to as a particular. This is a "thick" particular. "Thin" particular is just an abstraction of a thick particular (=state of affairs) minus the properties and relations. He does this because he denies that existents (states of affairs) are simply bundles of properties.
My familiarity with the word "ontic" is completely from Heidegger. I always assumed he meant -that which we perceive with our senses, the substance we perceive. This is contrasted with "ontological" which includes all about the object we do and do not perceive.
Hegel also denies that objects are purely bundles of properties. The core of the object is "universal" for him in that he would equate a "thick particular" with "quality". Quality comes before quantity for him, the reverse of what most people believe. Quality is the bridge, as the universal in an object, through the Notion (logos), to the Spirit's Idea. Quality is more ontologically interior to the object then quanity (reminds me of the wizard of oz for some reason) and reveals the mystic semblance of nature
Do you mean that we perceive these as different, our perceptions of such objects are different? I mean science tells us that what we perceive as an object is really a bunch of molecules, which are a bunch of atoms, which are some other particles. So we perceive an edge, a boundary of some sort to those bunches of moving particles, and we measure the edge to be curving (angling?) at the specific degrees. That these angles of degrees are an accurate description of what is really the object, is highly doubtful, so we're best off to just recognize that these are descriptions of what we perceive.
I'm discussing an ontological theory: they are truly different, irrespective of what we perceive.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This was intended only as an example of an ontic property, to illustrate that properties do not exist independently of the objects that have them - in this ontological theory. If you don't happen to believe there actually exist objects with angles, it's irrelevant to the point. If you simply want to contrast this theory with some alternative theory, you first need to understand this one- then you can contrast it.
Would Aristotle agree with you that we may not see reality as it is?
[I]The ontic concerns concrete properties and characteristics of an entity, in contrast to the ontological which pertains to the specific way an entity of a certain kind has its characteristics.[/i]
I was not using the terms this way. I used "ontic" and "ontological" interchageably to simply identify something as actually existing in the world. The chair I am sitting on actually exists. A concept or perception of a chair (or anything else) does not exist in the world. So I would have said the chair I occupy is ontic or ontological, but my mental concept of the chair is not. Heidegger's distinction doesn't seem to apply to Armstrong's metaphysics, but to avoid confusion, I'll just "existent" or "existing in the world".
I think it would be fair to say that most theology prior to the Reformation and most Catholic and Orthodox theology since is pantheistic. God is present to all things as cause (St. Thomas in the Summa) and all effects as signs of their causes (St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas).
Well, except when they get frustrated by the explanatory gap and decide to start arguing that they don't really exist in order to save their system :rofl:
So you're not claiming anything about angles, you are making a statement about differences? I thought you were saying something about the "90 degree angle". My mistake then.
It seems the Eastern Catholics and Orthodox may be more explicit in this than the West, with their insistance on seeing God's energies. If i remember correctly, John Paul II accepted Orthodox saints as part of the Catholic community of saints and Gregory of Palamas was already considered a saint by many Eastern Catholics. Malebranche can be seen as Catholic Spinozism in allowing all human thought to directly utilize, and be, the Divine Ideas (ontologism) and Rosmini's appurtenance of God is the same. Even Protestant Leibniz has his Godly fulgurations, but there have always been those in Christianity who believe philosophy is corrupt. Martin Luther knew scholastcism but latter hated philosophy and considered it a hindrance to salvation. Instead of theology AND philosophy, these thinkers believe only in history and theology. I could never be one of those. Without philosophy, theology offers nothing interesting to my mind
I'll add that there IS a bit of arbitrariness to what we identify as a "state of affairs" (i.e. an existent) in terms of what we choose to consider. We could rightly say the universe is a single existent, or we could say it consists of the set of all galaxies, or the set of all stars, or the set of all quarks, leptons, etc. But any object(s) we identify is still a state of affairs - something that exists, and it fits the framework (a thin particular+intrinsic properties+relations to other objects).
Since time is always passing, and there is a lot of energy exchange making for a very rapid rate of change, how does an ontology based in "state of affairs" make any sense?
Jumping in, Parmenides pointed out that nothingness cannot be talked about or indicated. He's right in a way, in an ancient Greek way. Being is the unity of what subsists and for him thoughts are being. The world is becoming, but our thoughts are eternal. Heraclitus was like Nietzsche and Parmenides like the Socrates of Nietzsche's critique. The becoming, the fleeting, had great value for Heraclitus, as we burn like Fire amid the winds of life.
Technically there is very little evidence for this. It is simply a subjective assumption we make due to our appreciation of time (or rather entropy).
The phenomenological positioning of Husserl might shed some light on this topic. What is experienced is experienced. The 'reality' of it is neither here nor there. We experience. From this point we can then pick out certain universals.
By Aristotle's law of identity, identity is proper to the thing itself. "A thing is the same as itself". This allows that a thing may be changing as time passes, and yet remain the same thing. This is an important aspect of the law of identity, it allows for the temporal extension of a thing maintaining its identity as the thing which it is, despite incurring changes. Also, Aristotle insists that the identity of a thing is its form. This means that a thing has a changing form. This is shown to be inconsistent with a form being a "state of affairs", by the following argument.
If at the time known as t1, what exists is state A, and at t2 what exists is state B, and the two states are different, then change must have occurred between the two. Now we need to account for what happened between t1 and t2. If we posit state C as a state different from A and B, to account for that change, then there must be a change which occurred between A and C, and also between C and B. Then we would need to posit states D and E to account for the change between A and C and C and B. But now we need to account for the changes between A and D, D and C, C and E, and E and B. As you can see, this leads to an infinite regress, and the use of "states" to represent change is shown to be incapable of fulfilling that purpose.
So, we can talk about a series of different states which are "causally connected", but this does not provide us with a representation of what happens as time passes. Each state is static, so no time can be passing. Between one state and another, when time is passing, there is causation. But what does that mean? The representation you offer is very inadequate because it provides nothing to represent what occurs with the passing of time, which is what is really happening in the world.
Well Einstein himself thought everything was eternal (block universe, B time). Entropy is like the physical equivalent of Will. Maybe philosophy is completely a chemical process and it in no way reaches to some beyond space-time. Perhaps philosophy is purely normative, how evolved creaures should think for their sake. Becoming is the constant process
"With regard to what 'truthfulness' is, perhaps nobody has ever been sufficiently truthful." (Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV, para. 177)
"A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the animalization of God." (para. 101)
I am very interested in Husserl
Leibniz's law:
if, for every property F, object x has F if and only if object y has F, then x is identical to y.
This means identity implies identical in every way. Any other definition of identity depends on an arbitary set of necessary and sufficient properties that persist over time - or the assumption that identity is some metaphysical thing that could take on any form (your identity could exist as a cat, a stone, a quark, or a gust of wind.)
Under strict identity, the car in my driveway today is causally connected to the car that was there yesterday so I can claim it as my car from day to day. There's no metaphysical core that makes it so, it's just the way I choose to identify "my car"
I'm a materialist, and can't accept that a thought (nor abstraction) is truly a part of the furniture of the world. I don't insist everyone agree; I'm just defending the coherence and plausibility of materialism, based on Armstrong's materialist metaphysics.
What about matter creating the spiritual? There is an esoteric word for that but I've forgotten it. Hegel has the world coming from Spirit but even more importantly matter sublates into Spirit through the history
Why should I think "spirtual" refers to something that exists?
William Blake
I think stephen pinker nailed in when he said we have a "language instinct"
Understand how an infant is predisposed to grammar and you are speaking of phenomenology-
That is, a reality that is imposed a priori by descriptions and assimilations of relations
The kantian idea of a priori concepts that are irreducible to another category
We do not come into the world blank slates,
Names in themselves are arbitrary, the ability to name is not
A linguist, don't remember his/her name, discerned the possibility of more than 30 kinds of intelligible grammars where as only.5 were utilised globally
Say, you see a shape you've never seen before, you can say with accuracy it is formless, when you see it twice it is recognisable
The shape of the island of Ireland appears as something specific the second time you encounter it
A child's capability to name things is a priori, the form of trees are derived from experience but one's first impression precedes the concept
Saying nominalism is concerned with names only is not a paradox but a refutation,
Maybe when you think of spiritual you aren't really having spiritual content in your mind. When it is experienced one recognizes that it's different from matter's psychology. Spiritual vs psychological. I assume the spiritual is where I will go when I die, since annihilation doesn't make sense from experience and doesn't really refer to anything, unless to hell. I hope to stay out of hell and loss of consciousness into eternity, so I have great interest in spiritual things. Sorry but i dont think i can demonstrate these things to you
I was raised traditional Catholic. I don't believe in Christianity anymore. Anyway, as a materialist what do you think of Einstein's religious beliefs? He said he believed in Spinoza's God and admired Buddhism (annihilation vs anatman?).
There have been occasions on which I though that it was possible such a god existed, although it is didn't seem likely because it depends on the rather unparsimonious assumption that such a being just happens to exist. Even if it did exist, it would have no relevance in anyone's life - so it would be irrelevant.
When you speak of the identity of a part, then you are not talking about the identity of the whole, and vise versa. So, I think you have produced an example which shows that these two are incompatible. If "my car" is the object referred to, then the supposed individual parts cannot have a distinct identity, because the part's identity is subsumed as it is "a part" of the whole.
This can be understood as a matter of what is our subject here, the part or the whole. If the car (the whole) is the subject, then the part is a property of that subject. When the part is removed, that property is negated from that subject, and the subject maintains its status as the subject, without that property. So it's just a matter of affirming and negating properties It really does not matter which properties come and go.
On the other hand, if the part is the subject, then being in X relation with other parts, or wholes, are properties of that part. Then the part can be moved around accordingly, and whatever relations it is in, will define its position as "a part".
The important thing to notice is that whether a thing is a "part of" something else, is never an essential property, neither to the identity of the thing said to be "a part" (giving it an identity as a thing denies its status as a part), or the identity of the whole. Therefore "part" is a name we assign when the thing is in a specific type of relation, the relation is what is essential to the determination of "part", and if we give that thing which is said to be "a part" an identity as an independent thing, we deny that this relation is essential to the thing's identity, so we can no longer speak of it as "a part".
Quoting Relativist
Lebniz' law is not the same as the law of identity. The law of identity states that a thing is the same as itself. To make your statement representative of the law of identity, we would have to say that object named x is the same object as the object named y. The point to consider is that then "x" and "y" are symbols which both refer to the same object, and it is not the case that "x" and "y" refer to two different objects which are "identical". The latter is what is impossible by the law of identity, that two distinct objects could be "identical".
Quoting Relativist
By the law of identity a thing's identity is itself. This means your identity is not a symbol, idea (such as stone, cat, etc.), or anything else which a human being might assign to you (even your name). Your identity is you, yourself.
Quoting Relativist
I believe that "causally connected" is an unwarranted assumption here, which only complicates things. We can simply say that there is temporal continuity between the thing in your driveway yesterday, and the thing in your driveway today, which would allow us to represent it as a subject for predications, and "causation" is left as a distinct and unnecessary conception.
You need to distinguish between parts as understood philosophically and parts of an object seen as geometry. In the latter an object has infinite parts. In the former, well it is debatable. That is why Aristotle failed to refute Zeno. Zeno made a mathematical point with philosophical implications,and Aristotle responded simply with his philosophy
Ooh this feels very much in the discussions of the Speculative Realists like Graham Harmons Object-Oriented Ontology:
Quoting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
Quoting Ourora Aureis
Yes, that is a valid and good point. That is specially clear with redness. There is disagreement, often even within a single person, about what objects really instantiate 'redness'.
I remember reading a reply to that some time ago, but I can't remember it. Since I don't wanna put words in the mouths of some philosophers, I will say what I think the platonist would reply:
If we look at a wolf, and because of blurry sight or just ignorance of species, we identify it instead as a coyote, it does not mean that the wolf does not belong to its species. Likewise, a misidentification of the instantiation of a universal for another does not mean that the particular is not of its universal, but instead we misattribute its reality due to a mistake of our mind. That is the platonist position, the universal exists and it instanties itself in objects regardless if we are there to see it correctly or incorrectly or not. Not only that, but the object is imperfect in respect to its universal and, depending on how imperfect, it might hinder our capacity of identifying it as such. It is the nominalist that will make away with categories if an intelligent mind, expressing itself in language, decides so.
Quoting Ourora Aureis
Did you mean to say something else? Definitions typically are inbuilt in words or otherwise at least give them meaning, they don't apply to them. Definitions may apply to things, like the definition of 'white' or 'slim fit' applies to my pants. But 'colour above infrared' doesn't apply to 'red', one is the other.
If you mean instead that a definition/concept has no reason to apply to a thing, well, that is another argument, so you can let me know. But that is somewhat the counterargument that I gave to Chesterton, defending Wells, in my second post on this thread.
Quoting Ourora Aureis
I don't think I am :razz:
Quoting Ourora Aureis
Check out this article, I read it some years ago and enjoyed it. If you do read it, let me know what you think https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/the-deconstruction-of-identity-derrida-and-the-first-law-of-logic-3a6246c42eb
People who don't speak Greek make up "Greek words" all the time :razz:
I partially disagree: the parts of the car are still things, and can be a subject of discussion. I can refer to "my car's engine/steering wheel/tires" etc. I think your issues are a tangent, because states of affairs do not have a mereological composition: a part can be a constituent in multiple states of affairs.
I was only trying to show that "enduring indentity" is a problematic concept - because it depends on essentialism: the notion that there is something that is both necessary and sufficient to an individual identity. I probably clouded the matter by referring to "my car"; the real question is whether it can be considered the "same car" (an enduring identity).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
My point is that it's arbitrary, and not of much ontological signficance- it's more of a semantic convention. Consider this snapshot from one day to the next:
Day 1: I purchase a car and park it in my driveway (=Car1)
Day 2: I replace a tire on that car (=Car2)
Car1 is not strictly identical to Car2, but there is a temporal/causal link between Car1 and Car2: Car1 is a material cause of Car2.
Focus instead on humans: you are not strictly identical to the person you were yesterday: the sets of elementary particles that comprise the respective bodies are somewhat different, and you now have one more day of memories. Get more extreme: compare today-you to infant-you on the day you were born. There is no identifiable set of necessary & sufficient conditions that today-you shares with infant-you - so what would be your ontological basis for claiming you're the same person as infant-you? This is the problem with endurantism: it requires essentialism, the notion that there is some core of you that endures throughout your existence. If you're a theist, you might consider this your "soul", a substance that is assumed to never change -but good luck on proving such a thing exists.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Two problems with this:
1) In Armstrong's ontology, a "thing" (AKA an existent AKA a state of affairs) is not a property. Instead, we might define a complex state of affairs as a set of things connected through relations of some sort. (an "atomic" state of affairs is not composed of other states of affairs - it's just a thin particular+intrinsic properties+relations). So a car consists of parts that are connected to the other parts to form a functional whole. (I'll defer explaining the technicality of how a thing's identify perdures over time).
2) you're referring to something being "essential", while seemingly ignoring the fact that nothing can be identified as essential (both necessary and sufficient).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am referring to the conjunction of:
(the identity of indiscernibles) & (the indiscernibility of identicals).
Some refer to this conjunction as "Leibniz law" (see this). But whether or not it's a correct label is moot. The point is that strict identity entails an identical set of properties. We likely agree that personal identity is not the same thing as strict identity, but Armstrong's ontology makes sense of the distinction, without essentialism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The temporal continuity of the car depends on each version of the car being a material cause of the next version. That is warranted. Compare the completed process of gradually swapping car parts to simply swapping complete cars on day 1. The latter provides no basis for claiming the car I now possess is the same car as before.
Your quote on Graham Harmons is very interesting. It sounds like a philosophical answer to Zeno's paradoxes instead of the mathematical one. In fact, it might question the mathematical explanation since the object is no longer pure geometry. Hegel thought, because of the paradoxes, objects were instanstiated contradictions and this was a huge part of his philosophy in that everything resolved into other things as if forming a complete puzzle. This is a bit much, as if objects were finite and infinite in the same respect. They may seem to be by logic, but intuition sees them was they are
I don't see the relevance, we were talking about identity, which refers to things, not geometrical conceptions.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think that's a similar point. Properties are what we attribute, what we say about things. But in logic the object is represented as a subject, and we predicate. The predication is made of the subject, not the object, and there remains a separation between the subject with its predications, and any possible object which is represented in this way. This separation, makes the object completely separate from anything we say about it, even spatial-temporal location, it's reality is a possibility. This is what allows for the reality of mistake.
Quoting Relativist
These are predications though, your car is the subject, and you are saying that it has these things, as properties. At any time, such predications may be true or false. Therefore at sometime your car may not have any tires, then afterwards it might have tires which are different from the tires before. The swap in parts makes no difference to the identity of the car.
Quoting Relativist
The point though is that there is nothing necessary and sufficient, because identity is the thing itself.
Quoting Relativist
When you say "same car", you are designating a type of thing, "car", and that causes a problem because we might think that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for being "a car". I think the important point of the law of identity is that it makes identity distinct from anything we say about a thing, making it the thing itself.
Quoting Relativist
You are using "identical" in a different way. This is not the law of identity. It allows that the thing which you refer to as Car 1, and Car2, are the very same thing, a changing thing with different properties at different times. You have just taken different time frames, saying that the thing does not have the same properties at one time as it does at another, so you want to designate them as two distinct things. It's a different way of looking at things, a different ontology.
Quoting Relativist
I think your association of the law of identity with "essentialism", and "the notion that there is some "core of you" that endures throughout your existence" is mistaken. What is simply assumed is temporal continuity. This means that form one moment of time to the next, there is some continuity in what we observe, a certain persistence of things. So changes are not random, they are consistent with what we've observed already. That's what allows for prediction. That is the temporal continuity which we assume the reality of, because we've observed it. This allows us to say that a thing has an identity. The assumed "identity" is not supposed to be some essential conditions, nor is it assume to be "some core" of the person, it is simply the temporal continuity of the thing, which we observe as time passes.
Quoting Relativist
No, I said it is "never an essential property", not that it is essential. You seem to have misunderstood.
Quoting Relativist
Your idea of "strict identity" is completely different from mine. I am trying to adhere to the law of identity, you have a different set of principles which you are calling "strict identity".
Quoting Relativist
As I said, changing parts does not change the thing's identity, that's a matter of properties coming and going, what we express by having one subject with different predications at different times. Clearly two distinct things in the same place at different times, does not provide the temporal continuity required that it be one subject.
You talk in completely different language than I do. Example:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Huh? A subject in the philosophy I read is a conscious observer. You are saying that the subject is the object observed, and then use those words in the same way. I can't make sense of this. Are you saying the predication is made "of" the subject or "by" the subject?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Whether it's an ancient ship or a modern car, the argument still holds that we don't know when exactly minimally a the object ceases to be an object.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Huh? He was saying necessary and sufficient refers to what makes a thing a thing in itself.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So the object can never be completely known? It IS very strange that I can look at a pair a shoes and know the relation there and exactly what they are and yet there on other states of consciousness I could see them in which would be a wholly different experience of their ontology
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Where has anyone on this thread said time itself causes things to change?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So now time is what gives identity?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's just the language he was using. He uses "essential" to mean "identity". How is any of this an answer to the ship of Theseus?
I'll be honest: I have never understood a single post of yours on this forum. I never know what the heck you are even talking about :(
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In Armstrong's metaphysics, properties actually exist - they are not *just* what we attribute to things (and we often attribute characteristics to things that aren't actually properties). You seem focused on semantics, whereas Armstrong is focused on ontology. So I wonder if you're just treating individual identity as some semantical convention. That seems a defensible position, but it's not ontology - and it is ontology that Armstrong is dealing with.
Below is my original response (with a couple of *edit* comments added in italics):
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
(*edit* - the above reinforces my thought that you're dealing with semantic convention)
Again, I have not said the car has "things" as "properties". Rather, at a point in time, the car has a specific set of components. A swap in parts absolutely implies the resulting vehicle is not strictly identical to the car before the swap. I hope that is clear.
You claim that it makes no difference to the car's identity if some parts are replaced, but you haven't explained how that car's identity endures despite a change of parts. When the part-swapping process is completed, what has become of each original car's identity?
While I'm interested in hearing your view of how identity endures over time, don't lose sight of the fact that I'm describing David Armstrong's ontology. In Armstrong's terms, true identity is a strict identity. Below, I'll describe his concept of a personal identity perduring over time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This statement doesn't account for identity over time. What makes the car (or you) the same identity from one day to the next, or from one decade to the next? If you aren't accounting for it through essentialism, then how DO you account for it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Considering "types of things" actually strikes close to Armstrong's account of identity over time, so I'll describe it now.
Remember that every thing that exists (i.e. a particular) is a State of Affairs (SOA), and every SOA has 3 types of constituents: a (thin) particular*, (intrinsic) properties, and relations to other SOAs (AKA extrinsic properties). Properties, relations, and "thin particulars"* do not exist independently; they exist only as constituents in a state of affairs. Strict identity means the exact same set of constituents.
-------------------
*Thin particular: Armstrong denies that SOAs (AKA existents; AKA particulars) are nothing more than bundles of properties. There is also particularity to which properties attach in a SOA. When we abstractly consider the constituents of an SOA, we therefore need to include "particular" as one of these constituents (the particular considered without the attached properties & relations). To distinguish the SOA's constituent particular from an SOA (also called a particular), he labels the constituent as a "thin" particular.
-----------------
Armstrong next defines a "State of Affairs Type (SOAT) - SOAs that have one of more properties/relations in common are the same SOAT. Electron is a SOAT. A specific electron located at some exact location is an SOA. Every SOAT is a universal: it can be instantiated multiple times. An SOAT can be a single property, or a set of properties+relations. As in the case of an electron, all electrons have the same exact properties (excluding location) - but they are different particulars (with distinct "thin particulars").
Identity over time is a loose identity (as opposed to the strict identity I've been discussing): it is a SOAT; it is a universal. An individual identity has "temporal parts": the actual SOA at each point of time. Each of these SOAs is temporally/causally connected to each other (directly or indirectly).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You've indicated that personal identity is not identified by a set of necessary and sufficient properties. OK, then what does identify a specific personal identity, if it's not some subset of its properties that it holds throughout its existence? Are you, perhaps, referring to haecceity - treating identity as a primitive? *edit* or are you just treating individual identity as a semantic convention?
Just a barrage of thoughts...
I think we need to be careful when applying mathematics to reality. It may be less of a problem when applying reality to mathematics -because there are obvious mathematical relations between objects.
Xenos paradox is an example of a problem created by treating the mathematics of infinity as something that is instantiated in the actual world. Consider that there' a practical limit below which we can't divide accurately enough to actually conduct the scenario in the real world, but there may actually even be a real-world limit on the division, when we get down to the Planck length. The question should be asked: How does the mathematics map into the real world process? If that can't be described coherently, that's a clue that there is no such mapping. Mathematics is not ontology, albeit that there seem to be some mathematical relations among the actual objects of the world.
If what you say is true then I would have to conclude that matter is not pure extension (Cartesian) and so adopt some other philosophical stance
Today I finished The Theory of Mind as Pure Act by Giovanni Gentile ("design and setting by Alpha Editions" 2020). It's an incredible book. The spiritual side of me says i created my consciousness but I also know my brain and spine cause conscious throughout my body. I wonder what materialist explanations there are for consciousness being material and for consciousness seeing reality objectively. I see they are talking about this on my other thread. Anyway, i recommend the book
Are you familiar with "predication"?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/predication
Quoting Gregory
The point I made though, is that it doesn't. By the law of identity a thing is unique, and what makes a thing unique, i.e. the thing that it is instead of something else of the same type, is the accidentals. "Necessary and sufficient" are what is used as the criteria to judge that a thing is of a specific type.
Quoting Relativist
It is ontology, it's called "nominalism", the ontology that holds that only particular things exist. Armstrong obviously has a different ontology, but if he believes that properties have independent existence, not being simply what we say about things, then I do not think his ontology is nominalism
Quoting Relativist
But to say "the car has x. y. z components is to attribute those named properties to the named subject "the car". This is predication. And, as I said already, a thing changes as time passes, without loosing its identity. So we can predicate this set of components at one time, and another set of components at another time, and it is still the very same car.
The issue here is that you are using "identical" in a way which is not consistent with "identity" in the law of identity. You say "identical" means having all the same properties, but identity in the law of identity means being the same thing. This makes the properties which a thing is said to have, completely irrelevant, because a thing is the same as itself regardless of its properties. This is how a thing can be constantly changing, yet maintain its identity, because it is always the same as itself no matter what changes it undergoes.
Quoting Relativist
How a thing remains the thing which it is through all sorts of changes as time passes, is unknown, as a mystery of the universe. Asking to have this explained is like asking how there are laws of physics. Some would answer that God made the universe this way, it's God's Will that this is the case, but that doesn't provide a very good answer.
The principal alternative ontology. which you seem to be promoting, holds that every time a thing changes, it cannot still be the same thing because it is no longer 'identical" to the way it was before. From this perspective, each object must be created anew at each moment of passing time, to account for all the minute changes as time passes. Since it is impossible that an object maintains its identity as the same object, as time passes (by your principle of "identical"), because aspects are always changing, then we have to conclude that everything in the universe is newly created at each moment of passing time. This is a fine ontology, but then we have to account for the reality of similarity from one moment to the next. If things are created anew every moment, why do they remain so similar. And again this is often answered with reference to God. Something must create the new universe at each moment of passing time, and ensure that there is intelligible consistency from one moment to the next, and this is claimed to be God.
Quoting Relativist
As stated above, it's simply unknown. No one understands temporal continuity, and there is often an appeal to God. But this does not provide a good answer so it's better just to say that it's unknown.
Quoting Relativist
You say first, that every particular is an SOA. But then you say that an SOA consists of 3 type of things, and a particular is one of the three. So which is the true particular, the SOA, or the part of the SOA. Or do you have two very distinct types of particulars, one being an SOA, and one being a part of an SOA?
Quoting Relativist
This does not resolve the issue of which is the true particular, it simply creates an infinite regress. Each particular is composed of "thin" particulars, but those particulars, to fulfill what it means to be "a particular" under Armstrong's description, must also be composed of "thinner" particulars, and so on ad infinitum. This is the problem which the ancient Greek materialists known as the atomists were addressing when they posited a fundamental, base particle (the atom). I see no difference here. A rock is an SOA and its thin particulars are molecules. A molecule is an SOA and its thin particulars are atoms. Etc.. To avoid infinite regress, a base particular needs to be posited. But this assumption has all sorts of problems which Aristotle exposed, they cannot have any form, being indivisible, and without form they cannot have identity, making them all unintelligible.
Quoting Relativist
The problem though, is that when you get to the base particulars (particles), which are necessary to assume to avoid infinite regress, identity is completely lost. One cannot be distinguished from another, and they are moving as time passes, so location is of not help. At this point, "strict identity" turns into no identity, and the entire ontology falls apart by proposing a fundamentally unintelligible universe.
Quoting Relativist
This is exactly opposite of what is actually the case. Identity over time grants identity to the particular, "a thing is the same as itself. The SOA is a universal, a type. Because the base particular cannot have any thin particulars, to avoid infinite regress, the whole structure is undermined and all SOAs are fundamentally universals, because spatial temporal positioning loses its validity.
Quoting Relativist
As stated above, this is an unknown. It's why metaphysicians, and philosophers in general, still have work to do
Quoting Relativist
What's the difference? "Semantic convention" and "primitive" are the same, aren't they?
The subject of predication is the object of awareness, so subject and object are the same in that context. The conscious synthetic subject will analyze the object and account for predicates by synthesizing them into a mental picture. Substance and accidents don't refer to anything different anymore than matter and form for the reason that the object is particular (has "thisness"). You said on page 3 that angling was subjective but i think it is objective. You are using a dualism of substance and accidents (or a "quadism?" by using the prior prime matter/form distinction) to say that object of perception is beyond our comprehension. At the right time an object can be known for what it is. Right focus, right concentration are needed for this. Not bare "understanding", but intuitive knowing. Angles are part of the very shape of a thing. Without shape it's not physical anymore
Armstring's ontology accounts for it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps, but it's not the ontology I've been trying to explain.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I did explain it, right here: Quoting Relativist
You then responded:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then we haven't succeeded in communicating. I'll try this:
Every SOA is a "true particular" in the sense that we typically use the term. It is something that exists in the world, wholly and
independently (except that it may have relations to other particulars).
A "thin particular" is not a "true particular" - it isn't a thing that can exist wholly and independently. Here's how to conceive of a "thin particular": think about an object. Like all objects, it has intrinsic properties, and relations to other things. Now mentally subtract those properties and relations. What's left is the "thin particular".
(You may believe there's nothing left after you strip off the properties and relations. You'll need to set that aside and accept this as a stipulation of the ontology, at least for now).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There's a distinction between "strict identity" and an "individual, perduring identity" (IPI, for short; my term, not Armstrong's, but corresponds to his usage). An IPI corresponds to our everday view of identity.
A "base particular" is an "Atomic State of Affairs". It's analogous to an elematary particle in physics. It exists at a specific set of spatio-temporal coordinates with it's specific set of properties and relations. It's strict identity ceases to exist at the next instant of time. But each point of time has a successor, with a slightly different set of coordinates, properties, and relations. Every member of this set of successors shares a single IPI.
I'll leave it there to see if this got across - and to see if you are sufficiently interested to continue. I acknowledge it's complex, and takes some work to try and understand it.
This doesn't make sense, because you said an SOA is made of (thin) particulars, their intrinsic properties and their extrinsic properties. Now you say that I have to subtract those properties to understand what a thin particular is. A particular without any intrinsic or extrinsic properties is not a particular at all, nor is it a constituent of an SOA, which is made up of thin particulars which have intrinsic and extrinsic properties. It's not a real thing. So your description makes no sense.
Quoting Relativist
But quantum physics shows that elementary particles do not exist at any specific spatio-temporal coordinates. So if you are proposing a "base particular" which exists at "a specific set of spatio-temporal coordinates", this is not consistent with elementary particles in physics. Furthermore, this runs into the problems which Aristotle brought against the atomist. To begin with, a "base particular" cannot have any intrinsic properties, or else it would not be the "base". This means it cannot have any form, therefore no identity, and it is fundamentally unintelligible.
I was trying to clear up your confusion about what a "true particular" (your term) is, and how a SOA could both BE a particular, and yet have a (thin) particular as a constituent in a SOA.
You said, "A particular without any intrinsic or extrinsic properties is not a particular at all,..." This is true, and it's because in the real world, particulars necessarily have properties and relations (per this metaphysical theory).
But it's also part of.this theory that a particular (i.e. an SOA) has 3 types of constuents: thin particular, intrinsic properties, and relations (AKA extrinsic properties). None of these constituents exist in the real world independently of the others.
For example "-1 electric charge" exists as a property of electrons (and other objects) but it ONLY exists as "attached to" some such objects as electrons. We can nevertheless conceptualize about the property" -1 electric charge" through our mental powers of abstraction.
Similarly, I described how you could conceptualize about a "thin particular" - analogous to how we can conceptualize about a property: in both cases, we just mentally ignore the other constituents. A thin particular doesn't exist in the world independent of a complete SOA just as a "-1 charge" doesn't exist independently in the real world
The reason Armstrong defines a SOA as including a "thin particular" as a constituent is because the alternative would be to have objects that are nothing more than a bundle of 1 or more properties. This would imply "-1 electric charge" could exist as a real-world entity, unattatched to anything, located in spacetime. (Alternative metaphysical theories treat properties as particulars; Armstrong's does not).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think that's true. Can you point me at a source that says this?
The SOA model could be applied to quantum fields, directly. Each field exists at every point in space, so each point could be treated as an SOA.
So, how does Armstrong avoid the infinite regress I referred to? A particular (SOA) is made up of thin particulars. A thin particular, having intrinsic properties, is made up of thinner particulars. A thinner particular, having intrinsic properties, is made up of even thinner particular, and so on ad infinitum.
Quoting Relativist
I suppose it may be a matter of interpretation, but according to The Copenhagen Interpretation, quantum mechanics is indeterministic, meaning that elementary particles have no determinable location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation
Quoting Relativist
A "quantum field" does not represent particulars with intrinsic and extrinsic properties, it represent probabilities of particulars. This is what Aristotle showed as the failure of such an ontology. To avoid the infinite regress there must be posited a base or fundamental particular. However, such a particular cannot be understood as a "particular" (SOA in this case) because it must be indivisible and without intrinsic properties. So it is unintelligible, being designated "a particular" but not fulfilling the criteria of "a particular". Therefore we must look for something other than particulars, or thin particulars, as that which constitutes an SOA.
Not correct. Thin particulars do not have properties. Rather, a "thin particular" is a [U]constituent[/u] of a state of affairs. Everything that exists in the world(as opposed to mental abstractions) is a SOA. Every SOA has 3 constituents (thin particular, a set of intrinsic properties, a set of relations).
Thin particulars are not composed of thinner particulars. Refer back to the mental exercise of conceptualizing the term: ignore the properties and relations and consider what remains. What remains is not further decomposable.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That doesn't imply particles don't have a location. That article links to an article on complementarity:
[I]"The complementarity principle holds that certain pairs of complementary properties cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. For example, position and momentum..."[/i]
A position could theoretically be measured to any degree of precision, but this would result in increasingly less certainty about its momentum (and vice versa). Position and location aren't be independent properties. In terms of an SOA, the property would correspond to the wave function that described the relationship between position and momentum.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The probabilities are a consequence of a wave function. The wave itself is an entity that actually exists at every point in space:
[I]"a quantum field isnt only present where you have a source (like a mass or a charge), but rather is omnipresent: everywhere....
...empty space as we understand it, with no charges, masses, or other sources of the field in it, isnt exactly empty, but still has these quantum fields present within it." [/i] -- source
So fundamentally, each quantum field is a SOA (a particular). But it's impractical to analyze (say) the quark field as a whole, encompassing all of space.
The purpose of a metaphysical model is not to replace, or guide, physics. Rather, it is a framework that needs to be consistent with physics.
Does a thin particular exist? If so, it is an SOA. And if it is an SOA it must have thinner particulars as constituent parts. That leads to infinite regress. If it is not an SOA, then it is a mental abstraction, along with the sets of intrinsic and extrinsic properties which describe it, making the entire SOA a mental abstraction. Which is the case, the infinite regress, or is the entire world just mental abstractions? See, there's something missing from this ontology.
Quoting Relativist
If it is not further decomposable it is not an SOA, therefore not something which exists in the world, and it's simply a mental abstraction. Then the SOA, being composed of mental abstractions is also a mental abstraction.
Quoting Relativist
The wave is not an entity though. By accepted theories, there is no medium (ether), therefore no real wave, just particles without any location, and a mathematical abstraction (wave function) which describes the particles. The supposed "wave" is an SOA without any thin particulars, relations without any substance, because the wave function really describes particles, not waves.
Non sequiter. Consider that "-1" electric charge exists, but it doesn't exist as an independent entity. It exists only in states of affairs, like electrons. The same is true for a thin particular: it exists, but only as a constituent in a SOA.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Another non-sequitur. I haven't actually described the way lower order states of affairs form into higher order (more complex) states of affairs. Lets's stick with the lowest order: the atomic states of affairs. They are the simplest possible objects that exist in the world. They are not decomposible. Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In his book, "Quanta and Fields", Sean Carroll says, "the wave function is how we describe reality...According to our current best understanding, quantum fields are the bare stuff of reality....For a field, locality means that how it evolves at any one point in spacetime only depends on the value of that field and other fields at that same point, as well as the immediate neighborhood of that point."
Do you accept this description?
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
Facts, for example, allow for the recognition of relations without the necessity of assigning physical (or immaterial) existence to them. The back door is to the right of the dining room table describes the relation of two physical objects to each other. Again, to the right of, is a relation and not a physical object; and yet it exists in the world. Its a fact, not a thing.
"Facts also allow for the recognition of other categories of non-physical reality. Interest rates, for example, are arguably real while, at the same time, not regarded as physical objects. But neither are interest rates considered mystical, spiritual or immaterial. After all, interest rates directly affect the amount of money that accumulates in bank accounts.
Interestingly, physical events such as hurricanes and war can affect interest rates; and so can non-physical situations such as panic and market conditions. So again, its perhaps best to say interest rates are facts, not physical (or immaterial) things.
Again, apologies for my making this sideways comment! Keep twalking amongst yourselves! :cool: