Behavior and being

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Say you're building a model of a farmyard that includes a duck. Your model duck should look like a duck, waddle like a duck, quack like a duck, and so on. The important thing is that for each way a duck behaves that you're interested in, your model duck has a correlating behavior.

Like this, you mean?



Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior.

Like this, you mean?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

..what questions of being could possibly be interesting or important?

For example, can a model of conscious verbal behavior be conscious?

A model of a duck is arguably not a duplication of a duck. It's a model or simulation based on a selection of observed and known behaviors. A model of duck depends on what we observe and know of ducks. For some anti-realists, also ducks depend on us. I think ducks are not so dependent on us, but when we speak or think about ducks we construct models based on what we observe and know.

Likewise, we construct models based on what we observe and know of our conscious verbal behavior. But being conscious and modeling something is different from being the model.

Quoting jkop

A model of duck depends on what we observe and know of ducks. For some anti-realists, also ducks depend on us.

Yes. ... This model of a duck is not so much a duck as it is a human-reflected duck(?). When we filter anything through human perception, we attach characteristics and behaviors that to it that are not at all the same as through the perception of a duck.

Have you ever had someone in your life tell you that you've 'changed', and later both of you discovering that it wasn't that you had changed so much but that the person had never actually invested the time and energy to 'know' you better. That person, in the interest of limited perception time, had refected their own biases into the conclusions they had reached.

If I had a dollar for every time I have been cordial towards a man and he took it as my being attracted to him. .... But that doesn't mean that I will stop being cordial. THAT is who I am, not the woman coming on to him that he has modeled in his mind based on his past experiences or hopeful future ones.

First of all, good OP! You've got your eye on something important in philosophical method.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

the question is whether the duck being modelled could possibly exhibit any behavior that could not be modelled. That is, whether there is any reason, in principle, not to expect that the models can be kept in synch.

For the moment, I'm inclined to assume that there is not.

Do you think a model duck can eat, digest, excrete, and reproduce? These are all behaviors. For myself, I can just about imagine, in some future state of technology, a model duck doing the first three, or at least imitating them in a way that would be indistiguishable from what a live duck does, but not the fourth. And this connects with the deeper question you're raising, about whether behavioral models neglect "being," or life, or consciousness. It may turn out that consciousness is a feature only of living things, in which case the model won't have it. I suppose that would not be an issue if "behavior" is defined exclusively as what is visible to the naked eye. Is this a good definition, though?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior.

I'm curious to know which philosophers you have in mind (not on TPF!). I don't seem to run into this approach very often, in my reading.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

A deflationist reading this will likely wonder what all the fuss is about….

That’d be me, on the one hand, insofar as that which is, is given. But it is, on the other hand, the systemic function of my intelligence to internally model that which is given, in such a way as to accommodate my experience of it.

But that’s not the point herein, is it. There must already be an internally constructed model in order for there to be a duck as such, in the first place. Otherwise, there is merely some thing given, subsequently determinable by its behaviors. Or, as they liked to say back in The Good Ol’ Days, by its appearance to the senses.

So why do I need to model a real duck, if I’ve already done it? The duck I physically manufacture and situate in an environment adds nothing to my experience. Even if I discover the naturally real duck exhibits a behavior absent from my experience, and I manufacture Duck 2.0 incorporating it, the latest version must still have its own internal precursor, in order for its formally unperceived appearance to properly manifest.
————-

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

What do models model exactly? It's not a hard question; the answer is behavior.

While physically manufactured models model behavior, the necessarily antecedent intellectually assembled models, which do not exhibit naturally real behavior, do not. It still isn’t a hard question, it just doesn’t have a single, all-encompassing answer.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

All there is, is behavior.

You started with the concept of a duck though.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

What do models model exactly? It's not a hard question; the answer is behavior.

If you're modelling a farmyard, it's the overall behavior of the system that matters, not the behavior of individual elements. For that, the relationships among the behaviors of the various elements are more important than the behaviors themselves. You start off with initial conditions which are then modified based on internal time rates of change for each element and external defined relations with other elements. The duck model you are discussing just provides the initial conditions.

@Srap Tasmaner

I have a lot I want to say, but I will need to take some time to respond.

The purpose of creating a model duck within the model farmyard is to analyze the interaction between the duck and other entities within the farmyard. Not to analyze the duck itself. If analysis of an individual in isolation is one's goal, you use a real duck, ie there is no role for a model.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

that there may be other ways of doing philosophy that, to the deflationist, are not even wrong, not just invisible, but plain unimaginable.

Many people here have views here that directly contest mine which may be what you call "deflationary style" (but tell you the truth I read this and "deflationary style" and "model-building style" look exactly the same to me - so I would identify as both unless I have probably misread something).

I am so in at the deep end with my views about how I think brains work though that I think that all of these different philosophical views are implicitly a kind of behavioral-style because in my views, that is the only way that brains do understanding. All views are compatible with a "deflationary-style" on the meta-level insofar that all views are "deflationary-style" models from a brain perspective. I have a kind of view that brains, minds are actually kind of like scientific instrumentalists at the deepest level but this is not immediately obvious to us because of the richness and automaticity by which beliefs and thoughts and behaviors work. We take everything we do and say for granted without thinking about it. Again, this is the meta-level, and so to it applies to debates about realism and anti-realism - a dichotomy far too coarse and flimsy to say anything interesting without serious caveats.

On the floor-level what differentiates "deflationary-style" from "essentialists" and others? Perhaps we all have a choice of at what level to deflate or decompose explanations - some prefer deeper levels than others. On shallower levels, you can hold up concepts without trying to give deconstructing analysis of what it actually means to use the idea. You just assert it and say it is right and know that it is meaningful to you in a commonsense way. Like many people do with God and say they just believe in God and don't want to deconstruct what that actually means - often science would bring up difficult questions too - rather, they just settle that they don't need to go deeper, it doesn't need to be explained: it just is. The "deflationary-stylist" will go deeper and deeper deconstructing everything: it just isn't and there is no essential nature to anything. But whats the difference between shunning further deconstruction versus deconstructing and concluding on a deflation of the essential being? Not much difference to me. Sure, you may be able to create new empirical questions and testable parameters for God. But the meaning of the thing within our perspectives has no foundation beyond what - in my opinion - the instrumentalist mind or brain, and instrumentalist networks of interacting instrumentalist minds or brains. You can conceivably be right or wrong (approximately) in some sense about hypotheses concerning empirical structures under some very strict caveats. Is there a meaningful distinction between the "deflationary-stylist" and the "essentialist" beyond this? I guess not so much from my perspective. You just end up discussing the compatibility of your concepts and what you consider good standards for acceptance or rejection - which is the same story for all knowledge for instrumentalist brains.

Hmm, but what about discussing the compatibility of "deflation" and "essentialism"? What does one bring to the table that the other doesn't? This must be a genuine question. Perhaps at a guess it is a matter of something like accuracy vs. complexity trade-offs. Do you embrace the details (that would deflate the more abstract level of analysis [by effectively prioritizing the bottom level?]) or coarse over them (and effectively ignore them)? Insofar that truth is about accuracy in some sense then where you stand on these trade-offs affect what you say is "true" or "real" or "deflated" or "idealized" - but we can choose different levels for different things. Does that mean then that "true" and "real" is just a kind of abstract label in enacted, instrumentalist models? Yes, maybe. It becomes more tangible when there is an easy answer to whether your predictions are correct or not - but the more abstract you go, the more murky this gets and the less is resolved. And obviously another issue is that, you can change assumptions on the more abstract levels to change what the easy answer is on a more concrete level. Some people reject chairs exist. But again, changes on the abstract level are so murky - mereology doesn't really change our experiences of "chairs" because we all experience similar regularities about them, presumably due to the fact that there is an outside world beyond our perspectives or experiential purviews.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

That might seem like a problem, or at least a little odd, but my claim is that this is quite natural to the model-building impulse. It's behavior that matters, and model-building is deliberately agnostic, as we might say, about being.

I'm not sure about this whole "behavior/being" dichotomy. The old Scholastic adage is actum sequitur esse, "act follows on being." I have a few good quotes on this:

[b]It is through action, and only through action, that real beings manifest or “unveil” their being, their presence, to each other and to me. All the beings that make up the world of my experience thus reveal themselves as not just present, standing out of nothingness, but actively presenting themselves to others and vice versa by interacting with each other. Meditating on this leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that it is the very nature of real being, existential being, to pour over into action that is self-revealing and self-communicative. In a word, existential being is intrinsically dynamic, not
static.[/b]

...by metaphysical reflection I come to realize that this is not just a brute fact but an intrinsic property belonging to the very nature of every real being as such, if it is to count at all in the community of existents. For let us suppose (a metaphysical thought experiment) that there were a real existing being that had no action at all. First of all, no other being could know it (unless it had created it), since it is only by some action that it could manifest or reveal its presence and nature; secondly, it would make no difference whatever to any other being, since it is totally unmanifested, locked in its own being and could not even react to anything done to it. And if it had no action within itself, it would not make a difference even to itself....To be real is to make a difference.

One of the central flaws in Kant’s theory of knowledge is that he has blown up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses; but he insists that such action reveals nothing intelligible about these beings, nothing about their natures in themselves, only an unordered, unstructured sense manifold that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. But action that is completely indeterminate, that reveals nothing meaningful about the agent from which it comes, is incoherent, not really action at all [or we might say, cannot be meaningfully ascribed to any "thing," i.e. as cause].

The whole key to a realist epistemology like that of St. Thomas is that action is the “self revelation of being,” that it reveals a being as this kind of actor on me, which is equivalent to saying it really exists and has this kind of nature = an abiding center of acting and being acted on. This does not deliver a complete knowledge of the being acting, but it does deliver an authentic knowledge of the real world as a community of interacting agents—which is after all what we need to know most about the world so that we may learn how to cope with it and its effects on us as well as our effects upon it. This is a modest but effective relational realism, not the unrealistic ideal of the only thing Kant will accept as genuine knowledge of real beings, i.e., knowledge of them as they are in themselves independent of any action on us—which he admits can only be attained by a perfect creative knower. He will allow no medium between the two extremes: either perfect knowledge with no mediation of action, or no knowledge of the real at all.

W. Norris Clarke - "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics"

Or for an oldy-but-goody:

For all created things are defined, in their essence and in their way of developing, by their own logoi and by the logoi of the beings that provide their external context. Through these logoi they find their defining limits.

-St. Maximus the Confessor - Ambiguum 7

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

And my point is that this latter form of disagreement is all but invisible to the model-building approach (and anathema to the deflationist), which will only ever find more behavior to model. (And the former sort of disagreement ? having agreed on the bundle-of-behavior part ? may be intractable because there's so much agreement, all that's left is personal taste.)

Well, to my mind what makes deflationism distinct is that it essentially amounts to a sort of radical skepticism. Either there is no being to speak of, or being is entirely unknowable. However, the position that there is "only" or perhaps "most fundamentally" behavior/action is just process metaphysics. This isn't skeptical, it just views process as more fundamental than susbstance (thing-hood). I'll admit, I was quite taken with this view for a while. Here is a good argument for it:

To be a substance (thing-unit) is to function as a thing-unit in various situations. And to have a property is to exhibit this property in various contexts. ('The only fully independent substances are those which-like people-self-consciously take themselves to be units.)

As far as process philosophy is concerned, things can be conceptualized as clusters of actual and potential processes. With Kant, the process philosopher wants to identify what a thing is with what it does (or, at any rate, can do). After all, even on the basis of an ontology of substance and property, processes are epistemologically fundamental. Without them, a thing is inert, undetectable, disconnected from the world's causal commerce, and inherently unknowable. Our only epistemic access to the absolute properties of things is through inferential triangulation from their modus operandi-from the processes through which these manifest themselves. In sum, processes without substantial entities are perfectly feasible in the conceptual order of things, but substances without processes are effectively inconceivable.

Things as traditionally conceived can no more dispense with dispositions than they can dispense with properties. Accordingly, a substance ontologist cannot get by without processes. If his things are totally inert - if they do nothing - they are pointless. Without processes there is no access to dispositions, and without dispositional properties, substance lie outside our cognitive reach. One can only observe what things do, via their discernible effects; what they are, over and above this, is something that always involves the element of conjectural imputation. And here process ontology takes a straight-forward line: In its sight, things simply are what they do rather, what they dispositionally can do and normally would do.

The fact is that all we can ever detect about "things" relates to how they act upon and interact with one another - a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable, properties save those that represent responses elicited from it in interaction with others. And so a substance metaphysics of the traditional sort paints itself into the embarrassing comer of having to treat substances ·as bare (propertyless) particulars [substratum] because there is no nonspeculative way to say what concrete properties a substance ever has in and of itself. But a process metaphysics is spared this embarrassment because processes are, by their very nature, interrelated and interactive. A process-unlike a substance -can simply be what it does. And the idea of process enters into our experience directly and as such.

Nicholas Rescher - "Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy

However, we don't generally tend to talk about processes occurring involving "nothing in particular," and a weakness of process philosophy is its ability to explain why some things do appear to make up self-organizing, organic wholes, which are even directed towards aims. It can certainly do so, but successful attempts at this I've seen tend to conform to the old Aristotelian framework of unity, which is fine, since in some sense Aristotle's philosophy is one of process (although still focused on the being of substances), it's just that this tends to get lost in simplifications.

Hegel has some useful things to say here too:

Hegel's basic demarche in both versions [of the Logic] is to trade on the incoherencies of the notions of the thing derived from this modern epistemology, very much as in the PhG. The Ding-an-sich is first considered: it is the unity which is reflected into a multiplicity of properties in its relation to other things, principally the knowing mind. But its properties cannot be separated from the thing in itself, for without properties it is indistinguishable from all the others. We might therefore say that there is only one thing in itself, but then it has nothing with which to interact, and it was this interaction with others, which gave rise to the multiplicity of properties. If there is only one thing-in-itself, it must of itself go over into the multiplicity of external properties. If we retain the notion of many, however, we reach the same result, for the many can only be distinguished by some difference of properties, hence the properties of each cannot be separated from it, it cannot be seen as simple identity.

Thus the notion of a Ding-an-sich as unknowable, simple substrate, separate from the visible properties which only arise in its interaction with others, cannot be sustained. The properties are essential to the thing, whether we look at it as one or many. And so Hegel goes over to consider the view which makes the thing nothing but these properties, which sees it as the simple coexistence of the properties. Here is where the theories of reality as made up of ' matters' naturally figure in Hegel's discussion.

But the particular thing cannot just be reduced to reduced to a mere coexistence of properties. For each of these properties exists in many things. In order to single out a particular instance of any property, we have to invoke another property dimension. If we want to single out this blue we have to distinguish it from others, identify it by its shape, or its position in time and space, or its relation to other things. But to do this is to introduce the notion of the multipropertied particular, for we have something now which is blue and round, or blue and to the left of the grey, or blue and occurring today, or something of the sort.

-Charles Taylor - Hegel

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

This is a spin-off from the anti-realism thread

<This one>, for those who are interested.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

For the deflationary style, this is the point. In the model-building style, being just disappears, and whenever you reach for it you find more behavior to incorporate into the model. But for the deflationist, ruling out the issue of being is the first move. Model-builders lose track of being; deflationists flee it and end up with behavior.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior.

Supposing Aristotle is a primary source of being/essence considerations, we should ask why he disagrees with the "behaviorist." Let me give some ideas off the top of my head.

First, going back to what I said to Reply to fdrake, "But activity is only half the picture. The other half is receptivity..." In the first place, "behavior" is a bit loose. If we model grass with artificial turf, are we modeling behavior? Does grass behave? Only metaphorically. For Aristotle the proper term is not behavior, but act/actuality (energeia or entelecheia). And the first Aristotelian objection to "behaviorism" and @fdrake is that there is not only act; there is also potency/potentiality (dunamis) (cf. SEP). For example, humans can die and female ducks can become pregnant. These are potentialities, not behaviors or acts.

For Aristotle, with natural entities we begin by observing their motion/change, both the way they move/change themselves and they way they are moved/changed by other things (and this pertains loosely to act and potency). From these observations we move to infer powers and then essence/whatness. Apparently your behaviorist thinks it is otiose to go beyond a consideration of motion/change. Why does Aristotle disagree?

He disagrees because powers explain motion/change, and essence/whatness explains powers. Truly explanatory principles are at play. To give an example, suppose we observe a human infant. As it grows it begins to speak English. Why does it speak at one time and not at another? Because it has a power to speak English. We then note that some children speak Spanish, and others other languages, and others multiple languages. We deduce that the English-speaking child not only has a power to speak English, but it also has the power to speak, or rather learn, Spanish. It has the power of language acquisition. And what can we conclude from the fact that humans can speak and learn languages, including formal mathematical and computational languages, as well as cultural languages? We can conclude that they are rational, i.e. they have the ability to compose and divide with their mind in a way that produces knowledge. For Aristotle this is a deeper explanatory level, namely that the essence/whatness of human beings is "rational animal."

Now suppose a god is going to recreate the duck, perhaps as Aulë created the dwarves. Will it be sufficient to know how ducks behave? I don't think so. I think one will also need to know how ducks respond to the behavior of other things, such as the fox that eats duck (including how it responds to having its neck broken and being digested). And one will also need to understand not only the internal proportion of duck "behaviors," but also the principles, causes, and explanations of the behaviors, which dictate the manner in which different kinds of behaviors interact (as well as the proportions and interactions between these powers). For example, ducks have a desire and power to mate, eat, survive, migrate, etc. These are more generalized than particular, isolated behaviors. Finally, when we say "duck" we are thinking of a coherent totality of properties, behaviors, environmental interactions, and potentialities that make up a unified whole, and this is the essence/whatness of a duck. It underscores the fact that there is one thing/substance to which all of these different facts are attributable, and that this substance has a determinate nature that differs from other substances, such as foxes or fish.

Interesting thread. :up:

P.S. To contrast "being" with "behavior" is a bit odd, given that behaviors have being (and also truth in relation to @fdrake's context). The reason Aristotle talks about substance, essence, and nature is because he thinks the being of the duck is different from the being of the quack, and both underlies and precedes it in an important way. 'Quack' is a verb, a behavior. 'Duck' is a noun, a substance that produces behavior. Can the behaviorist account for nouns?

Anyhow, what irks me about deflationist accounts is that they tend to ignore how radical a claim like "there is no such thing as truth, it's just a token in games/systems," is. It's on par with "the external world doesn't exist" or epistemic nihilism. A radical claim needs good support. But in general, arguments for deflationism just tend to rely on the same tired false dichotomy. Either knowledge is the "view from nowhere," sign systems as the "mirror of nature," etc. or there is no truth and its "pragmatism all the way down" (which leads straightforwardly to an infinite regress). Not-A, so B. But these aren't are only options. And to try to make these appear to be the only two options, they tend to backwards project the epistemology of a narrow period in the history of analytic philosophy back on to the whole history of philosophy.

Another major assumption in play is generally that reason is just something like "the process by which one moves from premise to premise," or computation. So, reason, now neutered, has none of the ecstatic, transcendent properties that were once ascribed to it.

Language, systems, games, all become what we know instead of a means of knowing. Well, that's one position to take, but it hardly seems like the sort of thing that can be assumed as a premise, particularly if the conclusion is going to be so radical.

As I put it before:

I will not assert that such a position can be convincingly demonstrated within any specific language game. After all, the very assertion in question is the ability of language games to join us to what lies outside them—metaphysical truth. To be sure, I could provide an argument that demonstrates my conclusion. I might even be able to do so using axioms that many readers would find to be “self-evident.” Yet, per the deflationist, this would merely express what is “true” within one conceptual scheme. Reason has become a fly trapped within the isolated fly bottles of discrete language games.

Here, it might be helpful to end by reflecting on G.K. Chesterton’s discussion of the “madman” in Orthodoxy. As Chesterton points out, the madman, can always make any observation consistent with his delusions. “If [the] man says… that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny [it]; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.” Expressing the man’s error is not easy; his thoughts are consistent. They run in a “perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle… though… it is not so large.” The man’s account “explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.” For Chesterton, the mark of madness is this combination of “logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are. Rather it paces in tight, isolated circles. On such a view, reason represents not a bridge, the ground of the mind’s nuptial union with being, but rather the walls of a perfect but hermetically sealed cell.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

What do models model exactly? It's not a hard question; the answer is behavior.

Well, what is the standard "model duck"? A duck decoy. And a decoy does not model behavior, it models form. The form then mediates expected behaviors, which is why the decoy is successful. In real life the metonymy of the decoy functions in virtue of the relation between the outward form/characteristics and the internal principles of action and passion. So if I see a decoy tiger I will become fearful because tigers have the power to kill me, and the thing before me looks like a tiger. If there were no difference between a tiger and its fearful behavior I would already be dead upon encountering one.

-

Edit:

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior.

Maybe that's genuinely the best way to go, and good riddance to questions of being, as the deflationist would have it.

I suppose if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far, such that it includes everything about a duck, then there can be no difference between behavior and being - no 'being' of the duck that is not captured by its behavior. And of course we may need to hone in on exactly what the OP means by 'being', or where that distinction is coming from. But I am in general wary of stretching the meaning of words in this way (whether with fdrake we stretch "social construction" to include the findings of the hard sciences, or with the behaviorist we stretch "behavior" to include potentialities such as passions, powers, and organism-unity). Usually that kind of stretching warps our thinking even where it doesn't lead us altogether astray.

Maybe this would be a useful way to think about it... Suppose a god like Aulë attempts to create a perfect replica of a living duck. What is the test of his success? We give him two "ducks," but he lacks knowledge of which one he created. We impose no limits on his investigation: he has as much time as he wants, and he can explore as he pleases, including vivisection and dissection. If he truly cannot tell the difference, then he has succeeded in creating a duck. And then we should ask: supposing he does succeed in creating an indiscernible replica, are all the criteria he ended up using in order to try to discern which duck is his, criteria which limit themselves to purely behavioral considerations? I would have an extremely hard time believing that they would be.

(So in order to reject the "behaviorism" of the OP I don't think we need to say that there are realities of substances that in no way manifest empirically, but I think it is right to reject it on the basis that there are realities of substances which manifest empirically—in "behavior," say,—but yet are not themselves properly called behaviors. A simple example would be the form/characteristics of the wings, which allow for flight. This form is not a behavior, but it is an intrinsic property of ducks and a prerequisite for the flying-behavior of ducks.)

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior.

The model describes existence, the way something is. It does not describe how it is to be a duck. Is that a blind spot? I don't think so - I am not a duck....

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

The issue, I see it, becomes significantly harder the more complicated a model is.

If the model is about a particle, well, there's is only so much tinkering you can do, beyond a point, given the simplicity involved, the thing described by the model, is probably a very good approximation to the thing itself, again because it is so simple.

And much to our great Suprise, the model in simple systems show quite mind-boggling behavior, that we are still debating the foundations of such experiments 100 years later, apparently no closer to a resolution now than back then.

But this complexity just becomes overwhelmingly difficult with things like insects, much less ducks.

We have very little reason to believe that just because a thing we create walks like a duck and quacks like one, is actually a duck (famous phrase aside).

At best, if we get the physiological properties more or less right, then we could say something about flying or ability to withstand environmental conditions.

But whatever is going on "behind the eyes", well, models will tell us almost nothing. What matters to understand a duck, is how the creature is interpreting the world. Behavior tells us almost nothing, especially is the duck is a mechanical construct, we are leaving out way too much.

There are lots of ways this discussion could go. I'm just going to call someone who does metaphysics in the modelling approach a "functionalist", so that I've got one word for it. This choice of words corresponds to Sellars' philosophy of language being called functionalist, and also references old discussions on the site about related issues with @Isaac.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

That is, whether there is any reason, in principle, not to expect that the models can be kept in synch.

For the moment, I'm inclined to assume that there is not. And if not, it's not clear in what sense we would distinguish the model duck from a duck.

I think there are a few readings of:

That is, whether there is any reason, in principle, not to expect that the models can be kept in synch.

I'll set up a bunch of symbols for stuff. The modelled entity, your duck, will be X. Its true set of behaviours will be B. The set of behaviours the model has accounted for will be B'. For now, I'll just assume that "accounting for" a behaviour is a very weak condition. The weak condition being that some subset of true behaviours b in B will be accounted for if they are mapped to some subset b' in B'. Roughly saying "this bunch of stuff the entity does in reality corresponds to that bunch of stuff in my model". That isn't saying anything about accuracy or internal coherence, just about correspondence.

Keeping in synch would be whenever some collection of behaviours b in B is discovered, then some corresponding set of behaviours b' in B' could be added.

With this really weak idea of correspondence, I agree with you that one should expect the models can in principle be kept in synch. Because any description of some behaviours b in B can be added as a b' in B'. It makes it hard, if not impossible, to find a counterexample in the functionalist approach's own terms. Which means the only way around that is a table flip - reframe the discussion.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

And that's why I'm posting. Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior.

I think this impulse is the one that I have, yes. But I think that you can study mappings from B to B' for their own sake, which are metaphysical questions and epistemological ones. Those strands of questions, if I can be ridiculously presumptuous, might be corralled into the themes:

Metaphysics: what is it about the objects that allows them to be conceptualised as they are?
Epistemology: what is it about our concepts that makes them adequate to their objects?

And abstract answers in those domains of inquiry seem intelligible. Like general principles "a being is what it does", or "if two people's concepts of the same objects have inequivalent representative quantities, they instead have different concepts".

I think where a deflationist who also enjoys the functionalist paradigm above would disagree with a functionalist simpliciter is whether metaphysical {and maybe even epistemological} questions can only concern specific instances of the mapping between true behaviours and our descriptions. In effect, they disagree on whether the only salient questions about objects and concepts are of the modelling form. Which is roughly describing how things work, or describing {how describing things work} works.

There's more I want to say, but I'll need to figure out how to say it first.

Does the model already contain all possible behaviours as possiblilities?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae2ghhGkY-s

Quoting Manuel

But whatever is going on "behind the eyes", well, models will tell us almost nothing. What matters to understand a duck, is how the creature is interpreting the world. Behavior tells us almost nothing, especially is the duck is a mechanical construct, we are leaving out way too much.

I had posted this in another thread, but it seems like it might be helpful in this one too. If not, just bypass.

The link at TensorFlow Projector shows an artificial intelligence neural network LLM model. Scrolling over the data points shows how the model statistically correlates different words. There are also different ways to explore the model. The words have no relational correlation, only statistical.

Reply to fdrake Good. Your "weak idea of correspondence" is an excellent limit case, calling into question whether we would even use the term "model" for a mapping that perfectly matched B and B' but provided neither structural, pictorial, nor functional resemblance -- no "accuracy or internal coherence." In what would that perfect matching consist? A mere stipulation that "b' is to count as b"?

My earlier issue about whether a model of a duck could reproduce is, in contrast, a limit case in the opposite direction. It raises the same question about how b' and b relate, though. Is it reasonable to expect a modeling of B to not only mimic B perfectly, but also produce the same real-time results -- in this example, the fertilizing of an egg -- as B?

We may want to find a middle ground by being clearer about what counts as a behavior. Is it merely something I do? Do I "do" digestion? Blood circulation? These are strange ways of speaking, but what is it about the idea of behavior that seems to rule them out, and limit behavior to something that's . . . intended? deliberate? Is that the criterion?

Quoting fdrake

I think where a deflationist who also enjoys the functionalist paradigm above would disagree with a functionalist simpliciter is whether metaphysical {and maybe even epistemological} questions can only concern specific instances of the mapping between true behaviours and our descriptions. In effect, they disagree on whether the only salient questions about objects and concepts are of the modelling form. Which is roughly describing how things work, or describing {how describing things work} works.

Can you say more about this? I want to read you as saying that the deflationist doesn't countenance any abstract structural modeling but I'm not sure that's what you mean.

Quoting J

Can you say more about this? I want to read you as saying that the deflationist doesn't countenance any abstract structural modeling but I'm not sure that's what you mean.

What I meant is that the deflationist who is a functionalist refuses all questions which do not take the form of that modelling exercise about a prespecified entity. More general structural principles about connections between {roughly} being ( B ) and thought ( B' ) aren't even to be entertained. And moreover, that the only way of approaching specific instances of that connection is with these behavioural trappings.

My non-deflationist functionalist would approach specific instances of modelling like I specified, as a schema, but also be willing to entertain questions about the schema connecting objects to concepts through modelling - and how that connection relates to thought, being, and thought and being's interrelation.

The deflationist stops at the schema structure, it's a barrier to all further inquiry.

Some quick hits, substance later. I guess.

Quoting fdrake

I think this impulse is the one that I have

Hey, so do I!

Quoting fdrake

functionalist

Right.

Quoting fdrake

old discussions on the site about related issues with Isaac

Yes, exactly. I've just now bothered to find that old exchange. Turns out I even used the phrase "bundle of behaviors" two years ago. Totally forgot I had shoehorned in a rant about sortals in that post.

And sortals were my logico-linguistic way of getting at

Quoting Leontiskos

being/essence

The word "essence" was very much in my mind writing the OP. Knew I could count on you to get it, @Leontiskos.

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

Where do Quine's bound variables live? In models. That was the whole point. If your model quantifies over ducks, you're committed to ducks as entities, no cheating. But the anti-metaphysics comes by flipping that around: ducks are entities just means you have a model in which you quantify over them. That implies "duck" has what amounts to a functionalist definition: what role ducks play in the model, how the duck nodes behave, interact with other nodes, and so on.

And the world is already such a place, a sort of real-life model ? as young Wittgenstein noticed about propositions.

And if that's the case, it provides a kind of justification for functionalist philosophy: we know this will work because we're just doing the same sort of thing the world is already doing. Sometimes there's a detour through neuroscience; we know our brains are already doing this sort of thing, and in philosophy we do more of that, for reasons that are a bit unclear.

Nevertheless, it's not exactly the relation "A is a model of B" that I was interested in. It's that functionalist "metaphysics". Now maybe this is a species of

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

process metaphysics

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Either there is no being to speak of, or being is entirely unknowable.

Yes, the deflationist view is that there's just nothing to say about the being of things, so don't bother. You can however talk a lot about their behavior, and in fact that's all there is to talk about.

Quoting Leontiskos

if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far

Oh yeah, really far. Most ordinary people aren't going to notice that the only consistent way to do this is, like @Isaac, to treat the universe as behavior all the way down, never bottoming out at some thing it's the behavior of. Which is why you might be right, @Count Timothy von Icarus, that this falls into the tradition of process philosophy.


Quoting fdrake

It makes it hard, if not impossible, to find a counterexample in the functionalist approach's own terms. Which means the only way around that is a table flip - reframe the discussion.

Exactly. Functionalism, the universal solvent. You and @Isaac and I had exactly this discussion I think ? in a thread about gender, was it?

So, yes, to understand this thread, the first thing is to understand that there will never be anything anyone can come up with that will force the functionalist to say "I can't model that." Never anything that has to be acknowledged as substance rather than behavior.

But precisely because there can, in some very real sense, be no counterargument to functionalism, no counterexample, there ought to be a niggling doubt, such as I have nursed for a long time. Ralph and Sam, striding through philosophy with their functionalist hammers for years, and one day Ralph says, "Hey Sam. You ever notice that the world is full of nails? That there's nothing but nails? That's funny, isn't it?"

That's the sentiment behind this thread.

Quoting fdrake

The deflationist stops at the schema structure, it's a barrier to all further inquiry.

Got it, thanks. And I would say that the ban on connections between being and thought goes in both directions, so to speak. A deflationist won't entertain any modeling between thought, in general, and concept -- indeed, that wouldn't even be considered modeling -- and will likely also reject any talk about my thoughts or consciousness, since reference to such arcana aren't necessary to behavioral modeling, on this view.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

So, yes, to understand this thread, the first thing is to understand that there will never be anything anyone can come up with that will force the functionalist to say "I can't model that." Never anything that has to be acknowledged as substance rather than behavior.

I think this is substantially right, but pressing the functionalist on what they mean by modeling can be useful, along the lines of @fdrake's "weak correspondence." The problem may be as much with the whole modeling project as with a functionalist approach to metaphysics.

Quoting J

since reference to such arcana aren't necessary to behavioral modeling, on this view.

Yeah. There's relevant questions about what counts as a behaviour, in what contexts. I enjoy that degree of recursion in a functionalist approach, but I don't know if that move would be available to our deflationist stereotypes. There's probably some logical workaround to it that lets you construe such questions as a modelling in the sense I put it, but I don't know how to do it without reducing the concept to be just our behaviour. Which isn't quite the same thing. We'd be talking about how we talk about stuff, rather than about stuff. Even if the stuff we're talking about is how we talk about stuff.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

And sortals were my logico-linguistic way of getting at

Yeah, I remember. Sortals are a good touchstone. I'd prefer to leave them to the side in my own posts for now, even though they're under the surface as the "essence" {ooh-err} as the counts-as relation.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But precisely because there can, in some very real sense, be no counterargument to functionalism, no counterexample, there ought to be a niggling doubt, such as I have nursed for a long time. Ralph and Sam, striding through philosophy with their functionalist hammers for years, and one day Ralph says, "Hey Sam. You ever notice that the world is full of nails? That there's nothing but nails? That's funny, isn't it?"

Say the scientist is talking about convergent evolution where mammals and fish have evolved the same phenotype in response the same conditions (like dolphins and sharks). She needs to be able to easily distinguish mammals from fish in some way other than behavior. The easiest way to distinguish them would be by genetic lineage, which is already handled in the scientific names for the animals. This is not a counter argument. It's just an example of why we don't generally categorize animals by behavior.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

And that's why I'm posting. Much as I've enjoyed building models over the years, I'm a little uncomfortable that the approach I'm describing has a sort of blindness. Whenever a question is raised about what something is, it is immediately rewritten as a question about how that thing behaves, so that we can get started modelling that bundle of behavior.

This is basically the argument I have been making regarding Philosophy of Mind for years. Others on here have similarly pointed out this "blind spot"- it's the Hard Problem. It's metaphysics par excellence. Talks of maps overtake talks of terrain. The terrain is discarded as "non-sense" and thus "cannot be spoken". The continentals don't seem to care about this self-imposed rule. It tends to lead to neologisms, mystical flights of fancy, solipsism, and all the other epithets that more analytic-types would throw at it.

Reply to Mapping the Medium

LLM's become even more complex too, because if one believes that the words it uses to make sentences refer to things, then naturally some can believe this indicates such things have some kind of "inner mental life".

But yeah, in this case statistical correlation makes sense. I'd wager it's different with biological systems, like ducks or tigers or foxes.

Quoting Manuel

But yeah, in this case statistical correlation makes sense. I'd wager it's different with biological systems, like ducks or tigers or foxes.

And people. ... Exactly. ... LLMs concretize abstractions haphazardly, like many people often do, but people are in real life situations, where metaphor, analogy, and body language are understood culturally, not statistically. ... LLMs are a 'reflection' of society in a given snapshot, but they do not operate at all like the continuum a biological being exists in.

Also nothing more than a quick intervention...

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Oh yeah, really far. Most ordinary people aren't going to notice that the only consistent way to do this is, like Isaac, to treat the universe as behavior all the way down, never bottoming out at some thing it's the behavior of. Which is why you might be right, @Count Timothy von Icarus, that this falls into the tradition of process philosophy.

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

When I studied metaphysics we focused on Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, and the competition was bundle theory, not process philosophy. The main ideas are often traced to Hume, and permeate the Anglophone horizon. The OP strikes me as some variety of bundle theory. See:

Quoting Bundle theories versus substrata and “thin particulars” | SEP

A second important issue in contemporary discussions of substance is whether substances are in some sense reducible to their properties, or whether there exists some further component, such as Locke’s notion of a substratum discussed in section 2.5. Both views have been defended in recent discussions.

For another entry from SEP, see <the subsection on objects>.

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In speaking to Parmenides and Heraclitus Aristotle says something like this, "You fellows have theories that possess admirable simplicity and unification, but they turn out to be too simple to save the appearances. What we find in nature is motion, and this entails both perdurance and change."

Our age has this same tendency towards simplicity and unification, whether in the form of determinism, string theory, monism, or bundle theory. The question is whether the notion of a bundle or the notion of behavior is sufficient to save the appearances that we actually encounter in reality. Aristotle says that it is not sufficient, and that substance/substratum is also necessary. The idea is that, contrary to "behaviorism," nouns are not dispensable.

Quoting fdrake

I think where a deflationist who also enjoys the functionalist paradigm above would disagree with a functionalist simpliciter is whether metaphysical {and maybe even epistemological} questions can only concern specific instances of the mapping between true behaviours and our descriptions. In effect, they disagree on whether the only salient questions about objects and concepts are of the modelling form. Which is roughly describing how things work, or describing {how describing things work} works.

You seem to be saying that the deflationist and the functionalist (or "behaviorist") occupy the same position, but the former occupies it dogmatically and the latter occupies it tentatively. That is an interesting idea, but if someone looks like a deflationist, quacks like a deflationist, and waddles like a deflationist, is he then a deflationist? :razz:

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Quoting Srap Tasmaner

And sortals were my logico-linguistic way of getting at [being/essence].

Okay, interesting. There is here the closely related issue of accidental wholes vs. organic wholes (organisms), i.e. whether organisms can be modeled as machines.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

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

The thread, "Essence and Modality: Kit Fine," comes to mind.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If your model quantifies over ducks, you're committed to ducks as entities, no cheating.

Yep, and Reply to bongo fury was recently overseeing this rule.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But the anti-metaphysics comes by flipping that around: ducks are entities just means you have a model in which you quantify over them. That implies "duck" has what amounts to a functionalist definition: what role ducks play in the model, how the duck nodes behave, interact with other nodes, and so on.

This is where Reply to fdrake's shift from "behavior" to "function" becomes a bit precarious, especially given that he never actually drops the "behavior" language. I'm not sure that the jump to functionalism or "behaviorism" is justified. Is there a petitio principii which allows 'ducks' to be entities in the first place, as Reply to frank claims? This is the question of what an entity is, of what a duck is, and this is presumably related to your "sortals."

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

And if that's the case, it provides a kind of justification for functionalist philosophy: we know this will work because we're just doing the same sort of thing the world is already doing.

My basic counterargument here is that what the world is already doing in a prima facie sense is represented by our language, which includes verbs and nouns. If the behaviorist needs to rewrite that to exclude nouns (i.e. if models require only behavior and not bearers of behavior), then behaviorism is not ready-made. It requires a revision of our prima facie interpretation of the world.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Oh yeah, really far. Most ordinary people aren't going to notice that the only consistent way to do this is, like Isaac, to treat the universe as behavior all the way down, never bottoming out at some thing it's the behavior of.

Yes, exactly.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Ralph and Sam, striding through philosophy with their functionalist hammers for years, and one day Ralph says, "Hey Sam. You ever notice that the world is full of nails? That there's nothing but nails? That's funny, isn't it?"

That's the sentiment behind this thread.

Okay, haha.

But I don't necessarily buy the idea that functionalism or "behaviorism" are unfalsifiable. Regardless, you are right that in order to assess it one must step outside of its frame. In many discussions with @fdrake I have the suspicion that he is not ready to step outside of its frame. For example, in the thread about triangles I kept trying to push the discussion away from merely stipulated definitions and into metaphysics, and I felt that he kept saying, "I am not opposed to metaphysics," all the while resisting the shift into the explicitly metaphysical register.

(There may be a meta-mentality about the limitations of the powers of human knowing at play, such that “metaphysics” is necessarily limited to a model-theoretic framework. On my view this is related to Enlightenment motives and the quiet significance of behavior vs. function, but more on that later.)

Quoting Leontiskos

The idea is that, contrary to "behaviorism," nouns are not dispensable.

Reminds me of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Withdrawal

Quoting schopenhauer1

Reminds me of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Withdrawal

Real objects withdraw for OOO, but sensual objects don't. Sensual objects, unlike real objects, have direct access to each other.

... and with that, I'm out of this Thread.

Reply to Leontiskos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

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

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

Reply to frank

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

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

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

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

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

Reply to Leontiskos

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

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

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Real objects withdraw for OOO, but sensual objects don't. Sensual objects, unlike real objects, have direct access to each other.

... and with that, I'm out of this Thread.

As I interpreted it, "real objects" always retain something "withdrawn" that sort of makes it its "essence" (though that word is a bit tricky in various contexts). If it was all sensual objects, everything would be indeed just a "bundle of properties". There is something of the object qua object, that doesn't get translated in this theory. This theory seems to directly oppose "bundle theories" and "process theories", as both would be the translation part, but not the object part.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Right. I was trying to explain that behavior reflects the way a thing interacts with it's environment. For that reason, it's not good to fuse thing and behavior. It's potentially unhelpful anyway.

Quoting Leontiskos

You seem to be saying that the deflationist and the functionalist (or "behaviorist") occupy the same position, but the former occupies it dogmatically and the latter occupies it tentatively.

Nah. I see myself in the functionalist camp, and see the modelling thing I mentioned as how I approach metaphysical stuff. Being able to talk about whether it's up to the task of metaphysics, I think, is something that distinguishes the thread's deflationist stereotype from non-deflationists.

It could very well be that there are ways of asking questions about being, or finding things out about it, or structures of knowledge, which don't resemble anything like the structure I've outlined. There might be questions which that schema can't handle even in principle. I suspect that there are, even.

Though I also imagine that I would construe something which went outside the schema as another flavour of schema, without any convincing reason not to. However I do agree with our dear @Count Timothy von Icarus:

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Some things I think resist being put into the schema are ontogenetic questions. Events need to be individuated in order for there to be patterns in them, events need to be patterned - what individuates events? How are events individuated? What patterns events? How are events patterned? It's difficult for me to imagine how to tackle those without taking some domain of entities as a fundament, which would then give rise to another domain of entities. If someone wished to ask ultimate questions about things, they would not find my perspective very helpful in that endeavour, and would vehemently resist the way it frames metaphysical questions.

For my part, I do think individuation only occurs as part of an extant process - like a crystal appears as a distinct unit out of a solvent, or a volcano from subduction of tectonic plates. The question of how the crystal distinguishes itself from the solvent, or a volcano from the plate subduction, definitely has a metaphysical flavour to it.

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

The framing of metaphysics would be: providing descriptions of mechanisms abstracted from encountered patterns. The schema I provided is, I think, a prototypical example of such a thing. You take notes about a thing's behaviours, think about them a bit, then put them together. A bunch of stuff has to be posited in the background in order for such a thing to get going. Whether you can get at that background with a more general functionalist description is anyone's guess.

I'm inclined to say "yes" in some sense, and bite the bullet of @Count Timothy von Icarus's regress. Since infinite regressions tend to work through infinite chains of presupposition needing distinct justifications for why they're there, things on one level of explanation presupposing things on another. And with reference to Chesterton's madman, it can't be turtles all the way down if you arrange them in a big circle.

Though I believe that the events themselves are "arranged in a big circle", because every single thing which happens is a terrifying alchemy of ontological categories - a nation can end due to bloodloss of a leader, a civilisation due to its empty stomachs. And their patterns are tangled between registers (thoughts, cellular processes, chemical processes, geology, social institutions}.

I also believe that the tangledness of things is "in the territory", and so if a functionalist perspective appears tangled, that is because what it views really is.

Though I am biased, I absolutely love the filth of things.

Reply to schopenhauer1 - Yep, good connection.

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Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, this is the old problem of the One and the Many

Yep, and I think the entry point into one of the deeper issues at play here is the modern concept of "sortals" that Reply to Srap Tasmaner mentioned.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Right, although the bundle theorist who wants to beef up or thicken their approach could always move in the process direction. The difficulty is that the modern mechanistic paradigm is the hurdle that must be leapt over, and I think it is a rather large hurdle.

I don't mean to derail the thread, but there are lots of interesting theological parallels and antecedents. The Thomistic resistance to what is now called "existential inertia," and its contention that esse is the participatory act of existence can easily be taken in a process or bundle-esque direction (although Catholicism has always tried to maintain a balance).

Further, the <simplicity and unification> approach finds its antecedent in Occasionalism, and I think there are good arguments that Hume—who is often seen as the father of bundle-theoretic paradigms—is deeply indebted to Occasionalists.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

But this is about how we choose to see the world, right? That's more apparent when we look at the moral dimensions of it. Do we want to identify people by their behavior? Joe is a drug addict. That's all there is to him. That's a common way of seeing people, but it's dehumanizing, which is a reminder that a person is a well of potential.

Quoting Leontiskos

The idea is that, contrary to "behaviorism," nouns are not dispensable.

I'm also going to @Srap Tasmaner as this post gestures toward a metaphysics of "processes all the way down".

I'm suspicious of treating all nouns as substantive - that is, naming a demarcated natural entity. Where does this or that cloud end? That seems to be a matter largely of our fiat. Whereas the endpoints of a duck do not seem arbitrary.

I think that there's an interesting functionalist response to that boundary. Though it may be a way of passing the buck on an individuation question to another set of concepts.

There are some processes, potentials and properties which distinguish the duck from other things. Process - its own homeostasis. Potentials - it can fly through flapping its wings. Properties - its bill is its. You can read this as a collection of predicates which only have that duck as their extension, but that's a consequence of what I'm getting at.

Like @Count Timothy von Icarus suggested - you can treat the duck as a bundle of coupled processes, properties and potentials, and you can construe processes as series of patterned events. Even though all of those processes are also coupled with environmental processes, there's a substitutability of the environment in some of them. When the duck flaps its wings, the exact molecules the air is made of near the wings doesn't matter for the wing function, only that the air has certain properties - like sufficient density. Its digestion doesn't care too much about the chemical constitution of its food, only that the food is digestible and has appropriate macronutrients to integrate with its internal biochemical processes.

There are two concepts at work there - a sharp autonomy, like the relationship of the duck's wing flapping with the air molecules, and a loose autonomy, like the relationship of the duck's digestive process with the arrangement of chemicals in its food. That makes how one process individuates itself from others a matter of quality and degree. The gut doesn't care if this worm is eaten before that one, only that both go down in a single act of eating.

Then let's return to the cloud. I think this works decently well for a cloud - which is a field of condensation of water droplets, so the fungibility of its boundary, its condition of individuation, gets explained by a distance from its already localised molecules. The field of condensation is a localising process, and brings with it potentials and properties. Like the droplet size in the cloud, the type of cloud, and the volume of rain it will create. The ambiguity of the boundary humans will draw between the cloud and its environment is explained by the cloud's nature as a field, and its constitutive process as a matter of dissipating concentration away from its already constitutive water. Its boundary is ambiguous for humans because its characteristic functions are dissipative over space.

Two more supporting intuition pumps for using processes as individuating conditions. Some - likely all - types of process are generative. And processes tend to have conditions of dissolution. The former creates individuated patterns, the former marks that an individuated pattern is present because it can end.

By generative, I mean that processes couple patterns of events together, and thus create joint patterns and pattern forming mechanisms. Gestating an infant is a paradigmatic example, one process individuates another by setting up the latter's internal constitution.

By dissolution, I mean that processes cease to function as they do when their subprocesses decouple. If you decouple digestion from the production of energy for an organism, the processes that depend on it dissipate - the human dies when ingesting the cyanide pill. And note the human who dies is also the one whose digestive process is dissipated.

What this perspective does replaces problems of individuation with problems of relevance. How does one process become coupled to another? And to what degree? I think that is a genuine problem. It is a similar flavour of problem to mereological ones, only regarding functional parts. What does it mean for two processes to together constitute a function? Versus what does it mean for two simples to constitute a whole?

I should also say that the underlying flavour of metaphysics above is assemblage theory, rather than process philosophy, but the concept of an assemblage is more academically obscure than the concept of process. Everyone knows roughly what a process is, few people have gone down an assemblage theory rabbit hole. The above is based on engagement with the naturalistic assemblage theory of Manuel De Landa and a reading of Deleuze which emphasises what I'd called "tangles" {my term not theirs}, which are assemblages that span multiple ontological registers {strata}, like the act of opening one's window to check the if it's raining tangles the weather with ideas. The tangle there is between the state of rain outside with my knowledge of whether it's raining.

Reply to fdrake

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

The measure of success is evidently saving the appearances. Clouds and ducks don't look much alike, so you have to show how they can both be accounted for ("generated" perhaps), how using the same underlying mechanisms can produce endless forms most beautiful.

But as @frank noted, science is already pretty hard at work doing this. In biology, that's evo-devo, genetics, epigenetics, and all the rest. Clouds don't have generic material as such, but they are natural aggregations of the sort that abiogenesis looks to for the origins of genetic material, and there are common chemical mechanisms.

I think what you really want is something like a large set of dials: set them to a certain position, you get a duck, slightly different a mallard duck, quite different a cloud, more different again a nation-state. I'm sure it's an interesting project, but I don't know why you'd want to do that.

In particular, if you're committed to saving the appearances, what makes this an explanatory framework like science (which it really seems to want to be), rather than just a change in vocabulary?

(I wrote this last night, and although it pushes things a bit far, I am going to post it. That is, it may be more appropriate for later in the thread, and maybe I will come back to it then, but if we have no anchor for speculative knowledge then I'm not sure there will be room for things like science, scientific explanation, and understanding, to breathe. That is, I think scientific understanding precisely in the classical, "useless" sense is at the bottom of much of this.)

Quoting fdrake

Nah. I see myself in the functionalist camp, and see the modelling thing I mentioned as how I approach metaphysical stuff. Being able to talk about whether it's up to the task of metaphysics, I think, is something that distinguishes the thread's deflationist stereotype from non-deflationists.

It could very well be that there are ways of asking questions about being, or finding things out about it, or structures of knowledge, which don't resemble anything like the structure I've outlined. There might be questions which that schema can't handle even in principle. I suspect that there are, even.

Well if you think your behavioral model is incomplete then it would seem that you are not modeling a duck; you are modeling a duck’s behavior. It looks like your deflationist is the one who uses behavior to (completely) model ducks. You part ways with this deflationist because you think there is more to ducks than their behavior. (Apparently your model would be a bit like an x-ray that captures a duck’s bone structure but does not pretend to do more than that.)

I think that’s right. I think there is more to ducks than their behavior.

The natural scientist or philosopher wants to understand ducks. They want to know what a duck is. Others are different insofar as they have only a limited and practical interest in ducks. They may want to know how to cook a duck, or how to hunt a duck, or how to get a cute photograph of ducklings. The one who wants to understand a duck’s behavior is somewhere in between. They seem to seek speculative knowledge of the duck, but only of one part of the duck (unless they are the sort of deflationist who sees behavior as the whole). But the difficulty for this person is that the boundary of their interest is a bit arbitrary. Why be interested in the duck’s behavior and not the duck beyond the behavior? If they are a descendant of Francis Bacon then the answer lies in a value judgment, and in that case their interest in nature really is practical rather than speculative. Hence “functionalism.”

I see that as the inflection point: the Baconian lens of something like utility or gaining power over nature. After all, models are the tools of engineers, and engineers make things happen. The goal is pragmatic. Granted, there are rare cases in which a “behaviorist” (like perhaps fdrake’s deflationist) would not be a pragmatist. And although the way that the modern mechanistic paradigm feeds into Bacon is important, a speculative-mechanistic motivation nevertheless looks to be quite rare. So I would expect the lion’s share of “behaviorists” (and functionalists) to be pragmatists in the lineage of Bacon.

If this is right then it might account for why the behavior-modeling approach continues to haunt those who see it as insufficient. They are left with a question like, “What else is there to do with ducks beyond modeling their behavior?” To say just a bit more, I think that if one is able to weaken that pragmatist-Baconian lens then it will be easier to relativize behavior and use a wider palette to paint the duck, and it should also become easier to access a speculative (or what in Aristotle often gets translated as “contemplative”) mode. For Aristotle contemplating the duck in its wholeness is the highest stage of philosophy, and this act is “useless” and certainly not pragmatic. It may be easier to grasp the idea if you think of a lover rather than a duck. It would be absurd to constantly construct models of a lover or her behavior without ever simply appreciating her, just as it would be absurd to constantly take pictures of her without ever seeing her or gazing on the pictures. It is a bit like, after spending a semester studying the technical and discursive details of impressionism, then simply sitting and gazing on a piece by Cézanne for long hours, where the wholeness and splendor of the piece impresses itself on you and is finally allowed to shine through. Such contemplation can only occur when the pragmatic mindset has been quieted, and it answers the “What else…?” question in a way that is unanticipated and yet meet, in much the same way that at the end of a chain you don’t find yet another link, but you also don’t find something that is unrelated to the links you have been following. ...And the paradoxical irony is that Cézanne often repays the contemplative even with the sorts of wages that the laborer seeks.

* Many of these discussions over the last couple weeks have reminded me of Joseph Pieper’s Leisure: the Basis of Culture (link). His thesis is basically that useful things are for useless things, and we have become hamsters on a wheel after forgetting the properly useless ends. There is a way of understanding merely to understand, and also of allowing that understanding to simmer, develop, and unfold of its own accord. But such understanding is not self-conscious. It rests in the other and forgets itself – a kind of intellectual wu wei. Receptivity of the knower calls forth receptivity of the known.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

I think the point of it is to promote some styles of description and disincentivise others. One context I'm familiar with assemblages "in the wild" is in addiction studies. And as frustrating as all all the rhizome woo can be in that field, it's a useful framing to take. Why would use this approach as a framing device? Because it enables some descriptions, provides a good lens, and a unifying vocabulary for a set of problems. If you've got an ontology which says "agents first", you've got to grapple with how a chemical can override an extant agency, if you've got an ontology which says "bodies first", you've got to grapple with how people in hospital who're given morphine don't tend to suffer addiction to heroin.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

I think the reason you'd want a flat ontology, not necessarily even assemblage theory, is in circumstances where a unique stratum doesn't behave like a fundament for your inquiry. If you're doing chemistry, treat matter as a fundamental thing, fine. Law? The law and its politics and institutions. As soon as you end up needing to cross registers, eg how violent oppression can create intergenetational trauma - bridging the political with the agential with the bodily - , a flat ontology and its bizarre tangled networks starts to make more sense. When the world's causal networks seem to look like that.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

In particular, if you're committed to saving the appearances, what makes this an explanatory framework like science (which it really seems to want to be), rather than just a change in vocabulary?

So yes, if you notice that the appearances have those weird causal tangles, adopting an appropriate ontology for it makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there are others.

But, more generally, at this point I'd need to press on the distinction between a description and an explanation, those two things are very linked. If you describe that someone who injects heroin tends to become addicted to it, you have a little causal model of addiction. If you describe that someone in a wheelchair gets depressed when socially excluded in some way, you have a causal model of why they were depressed after work booked an inaccessible venue for their night out.

That isn't unique to assemblage theory obv. That's just about descriptions and explanations in general. If you describe something's causal structure you've provided an explanatory model of {some aspect of} that thing, like if you described duck flapping and lift you'd have a model of them flying, but thus an explanation of why when they flap they fly.

Networks, assemblages, all that jazz, don't however tend to isolate variables like the above when they're used. They're used to highlight mediations between layers. Like the social context mediating addiction in hospitals vs in the street, hospitals make less addiction for the same chemicals, why. Rather than trying to isolate aspects of causal chains which span registers.

I imagine you don't need assemblages as a vocabulary to do work like the above. No physical scientist or mathematician I've met has cared about or even been aware of assemblage theory. Social scientists are sometimes though. So why use it?

I think something particularly good about it is that it lets you leverage how "flat" the ontology is [hide=*]{though I want to read it as permitting arbitrary hierarchies of entity types rather than privileging none ever}[/hide] to span disparate themes.

From a philosophical standpoint, emphasising interaction like assemblage theory does has a nice effect on some philosophical problems. You just don't end up worrying about most of them. As an example, the interaction between bodies and souls goes away when you just sort of start with "it's all networks all the way down, soul? Not causally isolated, part of network. Body? Not causally isolated, part of network. They're all networks. And if they're not networks they're emerging from fields or networks".

Which is a similar argument for why one would want to adopt modal realism, it lets you say lots of neat stuff about philosophical problems. Or dissolve them. And even create new ones! Cry havoc.

@Srap Tasmaner - if you wanted me to make a more ontological argument for why thinking about things as assemblages is a good idea, I could try to scrape one together. But I figured a pragmatic justification would do for now. As usual.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

like science (which it really seems to want to be)

I think that's a good question. What makes me want to engage in metaphysics which are naturalistic and kinda flat is that I see them as providing good bridges between intuitive and scientific concepts, when I am aware of them anyway. A bit like a language of mutual framing which enables a reciprocal connection between the concepts.

This is the usual "philosophy is a bridge between the scientific and manifest images" jazz. Though I'm framing metaphysics as an intimate part of the bridge. It's a form of "conceptual engineering", of propagating changes and insights from one to another.

Though plenty of metaphysics are useful for this. I'm sure @Joshs would have lots of good things to say about Matthew Ratcliffe's work using phenomenology as a lens to link psychology concepts with clinical practice - a move between the theoretical and practical through an articulated metaphysical medium. Rather than taking the nascent ontologies of mind in psychology research.

Quoting fdrake

What does it mean for two processes to together constitute a function? Versus what does it mean for two simples to constitute a whole?

Quoting fdrake

few people have gone down an assemblage theory rabbit hole

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

Depending on what fdrake means by “assemblage,” there are those who have explored this in great depth and in a programmatic way, namely the dialectical materialists. This in turn gave the Aristotelians a very clear target to develop their own views. One example of this is Richard Connell’s Matter and Becoming, which I have profited from. The Aristotelians cast this as what I called the “issue of accidental wholes vs. organic wholes.” An accidental whole is something like an accidental collection of substances, or as Connell states, “an accidental whole results from the composition of a substance or substances with an accident” (66). For example, a bronze statue is a bunch of bronze arranged spatially, and spatial arrangement is an accident of bronze. Bronze cares not whether it is spatially arranged in one way rather than another. “Accidental whole,” “Aggregate,” “Collection,” and, “Composite,” would be other names for the same sort of thing. Fdrake’s “two simples to make a whole” is an example of this.

And why does Aristotle think that not everything is an aggregate? Because he thinks there are organisms (organic wholes), such as ducks, and organisms are not aggregates. In organisms the relation between part and whole is not accidental. Bronze does not care how it is spatially arranged. You can break the statue in two and the two parts will still be bronze. But a duck does care about, say, the way that its internal organs are ordered. If you cut the duck in two it will no longer be a duck. This idea of dialectical materialism that there are only aggregates is also found in the mechanistic philosophical paradigm flowing from Descartes, which sees everything as a kind of machine (with accidental relations between parts and whole).

This means that for Aristotle ducks exist and statues don’t, at least qua whole. “Duck” names a real whole and “statue” names an accidental or artificial whole. Unlike the duck, the statue is an arbitrary collection of bronze, a true social construction. Thus the two nouns refer to very different realities, and so @fdrake is right to be suspicious of “treating all nouns as substantive.” Indeed, this is precisely correct, for the statue is not a substance given that it lacks a substantial form, i.e. a soul which integrates it as a single organism and whole. Yet the question is not whether all nouns are substantive, but whether some nouns are substantive. ...It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at this topic, but a substantial form is something like an internal principle of motion and change, which Aristotle attributes to vegetation and animals (in the sub-lunar sphere).

To bring this back to “behaviorism,” if fdrake (or his “deflationist”) is a behavior-atomist such that behaviors are the only real things and everything else can be reductively explained in terms of behavior, then for such a person there are no ducks in just the same way that there are no statues. If a dog barks and a duck quacks, then we have two behaviors or verbs that are not explainable in terms of substances or nouns. We say “The duck quacks” in the same way that we say “The foot belongs to the statue.” In both cases the attribution of part to whole is pure imagination, for the “whole” is nothing more than the sum of its arbitrary parts (which do not even belong to it in any real sense).

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Why do that?

Why do that? For the dialectical materialists, it is ultimately because Marx wanted to change the world rather than simply understand it (not unlike Bacon). So you focus on matter, which is malleable and changeable. (And, going back to my last post, even among the dialectical materialists one will find speculative thinkers (non-pragmatists), because for Aristotle wonder and simply understanding are characteristically human activities which will occur wherever you find humans. But that speculative inclination will in this case be hamstrung by an environmental pragmatism.)

-

Quoting fdrake

Everyone knows roughly what a process is

Do we, though? I haven't adopted your term 'functionalism'. Why? Because you kept talking about behavior instead of function, and they are not the same thing. Now you are talking about processes.

A basic characteristic of the OP is that it tries to paint the whole world in one color "all the way down," and this approach has trouble saving the appearances. But when you uncritically introduce new tools, such as behavior, function, process, assemblage, etc., you look to be introducing new colors without admitting that you are introducing new colors. If new words and concepts are really needed, then behavior-atomism has already been abandoned. In that case what is really going on is this, "Yes - I admit that behavior is insufficient to capture reality, but I think that behavior+process will be enough to get the job done."

(Note that I haven't yet read fdrake's three most recent posts. Maybe some of this is addressed there.)

Quoting fdrake

Though I am biased, I absolutely love the filth of things.

Quoting fdrake

a flat ontology and its bizarre tangled networks starts to make more sense

Quoting fdrake

Cry havoc.

Huh!? Flat ontologies are squeaky-clean. Diversity is what creates tangles. If there is only one thing "all the way down" then there are no tangles at all. Metaphysics is the science of the fully tangled realm, and it only makes sense for someone who admits a large variety of different kinds of entities. Bad metaphysics happens when specialists in sub-disciplines conflate their partial territory with the whole, thus oversimplifying the whole in the direction of their familiarity. For the flat ontologist the tangles are entirely illusory. For example, substance metaphysics is much more complex and tangled than Atomism, and Aristotle's moral theory is much more complex and interactional than the sorts of things that are in vogue today. The point of flat ontologies is simplicity and unification. A flat ontology "makes sense" of the tangled appearances by reducing them all to one or two simples.

Quoting fdrake

I think the point of it is to promote some styles of description and disincentivise others.

But to what end?

Quoting fdrake

for a set of problems

...it is to the end of solving problems. It is, I think, a form of pragmatism. It's a bit like saying that we should develop lots of tools, even if we don't currently know what they are for, so that we will have more tools to draw on in confronting future problems. Sort of how the defenders of the moon landing will point to all the inventions that were harvested from that endeavor.

---

Quoting Leontiskos

if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Oh yeah, really far.

How should ontological concepts work? Presumably given the complexity of reality, top-level concepts should be wide and general, and yet because of this there will be significant limitations on their explanatory power. So for Aristotle you "begin" with the concepts of act and potency (and already you have a tension between two principles rather than a unitary atom). Being broad, they explain everything and nothing. Or taken individually, half of everything and half of nothing. But then the diverse kinds of act and potency flower within each concept; the appearances do not force us outside of the basic, broad concepts (unless one wants to see the interaction of act and potency as a third sort of thing, which @apokrisis may be able to speak to). If not everything is a nail, then the top-level explanations must be able to generically accommodate a large variety of diverse phenomena.

If this is right then it helps highlight the problems with "behavior" and the resultant need to stretch it. In a sense behavior is too explanatorily potent to function as a top-level ontological concept. It is explanatorily potent in the sense that it is so useful in describing the class of organisms. If such an explanatorily potent concept could ground all of reality, that would make for an astoundingly unified theory. But because it can't do that, we have to go outside of behavior, either by artificially stretching its meaning, or else by introducing new concepts and pretending they are no different than behavior (function, process, etc.).

Reply to fdrake Quoting fdrake

I imagine you don't need assemblages as a vocabulary to do work like the above. No physical scientist or mathematician I've met has cared about or even been aware of assemblage theory. Social scientists are sometimes though. So why use it?

The assemblage theory helps to emphasize a social entity's contingent and constructivist nature. It allows us to conceive of it not as a unified whole governed by a single determinative principle. A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity. In contrast, a social entity can be seen as an assemblage of institutions, forms of organization, practices, and agents which do not follow a single, consistent logic. Thus, assemblage theory offers an alternative to the logic of unity, highlighting the interaction of its heterogeneous components.

Quoting Number2018

A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity.

What are the effects of its unity?

Quoting fdrake

This is the usual "philosophy is a bridge between the scientific and manifest images" jazz. Though I'm framing metaphysics as an intimate part of the bridge. It's a form of "conceptual engineering", of propagating changes and insights from one to another.

:up:

Quoting frank

A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity.
— Number2018

What are the effects of its unity?

The pre-given whole exists prior to the emergence of its parts. The consistency and stability of its unity prevent the development or recombination of the parts, as such changes would threaten its very existence.

Reply to Number2018
There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out. :grin:

Quoting frank

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out

Yes, it is interesting. Deleuze developed the concept of an open whole. It refers to a dynamic and ever-evolving whole, where the parts are interconnected in a "rhizomatic" manner. The free and continuous interaction of various processes drives the unfolding of their relationships. This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within.

Quoting Number2018

Yes, it is interesting. Deleuze developed the concept of an open whole. It refers to a dynamic and ever-evolving whole, where the parts are interconnected in a "rhizomatic" manner. The free and continuous interaction of various processes drives the unfolding of their relationships. This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within.

That's cool. For the mind, the organizing principle is meaning: the need to find it.

Quoting Number2018

The assemblage theory helps to emphasize a social entity's contingent and constructivist nature. It allows us to conceive of it not as a unified whole governed by a single determinative principle.

Isn't it commonly agreed that a social entity is not governed in this way, namely that it isn't a substance?

Reply to fdrake

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

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

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

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

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

Reply to Number2018

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

What would be an example of such a philosophy?

Reply to Leontiskos

Take the following as provisional definitions of process, behaviour, event, assemblage. I think they work for my posts.

An event is something which happens.
A process is a sequence of interrelated events.
A behaviour is a type in a process, or a type of process.
An assemblage is a network of events, processes and behaviours.

If you want entity too:

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

Yes, the sense of behaviour is very big. I think this makes sense. "What's the behaviour of the system?" is the sense of behaviour used, it isn't like walking. It's more systems theory inspired.

Quoting Leontiskos

Huh!? Flat ontologies are squeaky-clean. Diversity is what creates tangles. If there is only one thing "all the way down" then there are no tangles at all.

You can read it like that. Or you could read it that being's arbitrary propensity for interaction makes the ontology flat. It isn't so much a flatness of "everything is the same thing", it's a flatness of arbitrary structure and nesting. Flatness through lack of {global} subordination of one register to another.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The quoted bit sounds to me much more like the early-modern-period-and-on's focus on reductionism (also a trend in the pre-Socratics). I

Yes I had forgotten that classical philosophy meant the classical period's philosophy as well as paradigmatic approaches. Forgive me. I know very little about the classical period at all.

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

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

Reply to fdrake

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

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

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

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

I don't see why it would have to presuppose that. If a background doesn't change fast at all it doesn't disrupt any ontogonetic processes which use it as a foundation. Example, mountain range, a path on it, a person walking on that path, a bead of sweat on their face. The mountain range changes in the rate of epochs, the path changes in the rate of years, the person on the rate of days, the sweatbead in the rate of seconds.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

“say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change.

Why? You can say that the bead drips down the walker's face, regardless of whether the path will be there when the mountain falls.

Reply to fdrake

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

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

Quoting fdrake

being's arbitrary propensity for interaction makes the ontology flat

Okay, thanks for the clarifications.

Quoting fdrake

An event is something which happens.
A process is a sequence of interrelated events.
A behaviour is a type in a process, or a type of process.
An assemblage is a network of events, processes and behaviours.

If you want entity too:

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

"Interrelated" and "type" are doing heavy lifting here, to put it mildly. You can try to shift the ground to "arbitrary propensity for interaction," but once those two terms get cashed out I think the propensities for interaction will be anything but arbitrary.* To bring it back to that simple point, the differences between nouns and verbs do not seem to be arbitrary, and if being's propensity for interaction were truly arbitrary, then there would not be verbs and nouns. Once we agree that being's propensity for interaction isn't altogether arbitrary or undifferentiated, then we must ask how non-arbitrary it really is. ...Of course one could detach from the universe in the same way that one detaches from the street level when one takes off in an airplane. From that perspective cars and people look like ants, and from that vantage point everything is plausibly arbitrary. But if we want to understand the street level we don't want to hold it at a 3,000 foot distance. It might look like arbitrary relations from that altitude, but only because we've obscured our view.

Or to put it differently, it seems like you want to emphasize relations. That's fine up to a point, but I don't see how an emphasis on relations can so thoroughly ignore relata, and this seems particularly true when it comes to assemblage theory.


* What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). He ends up using different language to say the same essential thing.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

?Number2018

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

What would be an example of such a philosophy?

Foucault's philosophy of language provides a compelling example of this idea. Let me begin with @frank quote:
Quoting frank

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out

The assumed, precise meaning of each word in this context evolves throughout the unfolding sentence. @franknoted that "the purpose of the whole" implicitly guides the flow of the event, yet "even the author may not know how it ends until it does." Foucault offers a detailed conceptual framework for understanding the immanent principles that organize our discursive practices. According to this framework, the coherence of a discursive construction, a 'statement,' does not arise from the logical consistency of its elements nor the a priori presence of a transcendental subject. Instead, he introduced the concept of 'regularity in dispersion.'
But how can dispersion itself serve as a principle of unity? Let's explore this thread. It is in a state of continuous unfolding, but is there an explicit rule governing its development? We might assume that our understanding of the thread's progression—its unfolding meaning, and the role of each post, —is not predetermined. Also, there is always the risk of the discussion's ceasing, becoming dull or unproductive. The precarity and unpredictability of the process expresses the dimension of 'dispersion.' At the same time, we reiterate our philosophical positions, knowledge, understandings. There is an evident repetition—the constancy of references, styles, themes, and vocabularies. It can be referred to a manifestation of 'regularity.' All in all, depending on the overall unfolding context of the thread, the meaning of our posts may shift. The modification of the evolving whole of a 'statement' and the continuous reconfiguration of its parts mutually influence one another. The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves.

Reply to Number2018

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

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

Quoting Number2018

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves.

I think that coherence comes first from emotions. You don't grieve the death of an assemblage. It's that unique person you miss.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

time?

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

paths

Seems an ambiguous reference. A mountain path can change.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

but does what it mean to be a path constantly shift,

I know very well what you intend with the question, but I don't want to play ball with the assumptions regarding concepts and essences it comes with. If you could flesh out what it means for you for a meaning to be fixed I'll play ball though.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

then that sentence is no guarantee of anything

Willing to bite the bullet in your terms. I don't believe there is an "absolute" guarantee of anything, the fundament is always relative to the task. The fundament of our life is Earth, everything on it depends upon the Earth's existence in plenty of small ways. A meteor is irrelevant. Unless that meteor will collide with it. In which case the fundament shifts.

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

Quoting Leontiskos

Okay, thanks for the clarifications.

No bother. I try to be as direct as possible so that people can disagree with me substantively.

Quoting Leontiskos

What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close).

Yeah. My impression is that you're imagining infinite semiosis, coupled with the idea that material stuff can count as signs? I think assemblage theory is a bit like that, but it also departs very strongly from it. To my knowledge, signification in assemblage theory is a particular flavour of process, there are others. Lots of processes contain signifiers, which can link in with others {smoke => fire, when someone may infer it}, they are signifying to begin with {like a conversation}, or alternatively they're mixed {like a conversation to manage the development on a building site, which contains various things to fix which signify required actions...}.

Another big departure from Aristotle's view of the world - at least on assemblage theory's own terms - is Aristotle's habit of hierarchically organising categories into genus, species and differentia through conceptual distinctions. The equivalent of categories in assemblage theory are fungible, and the hierarchical organisation principles aren't strictly based on type-subtype relations {or they don't have to be}, it's more based around functional parts arranged in a modular fashion. An indicative phenomenon for that perspective might be a kidney transplant, which takes two entities {damaged kidney to be replaced, replacement kidney} with material differences {they're not the same kidney} but equivalent functions {what kidneys do} on the level of the body's self regulation. No material substratum is needed to reconcile, or render compatible, that manipulation, only a check of functional equivalence - or really, functional substitutability. Does the new kidney work in the old one's place.

Which is probably very unintuitive if you're not used to thinking of it in that way - the new kidney is clearly not identical to the old kidney, but it's equivalent to the old kidney's old function as part of the body as an assemblage, even if there are material differences involved in all the constituent parts and those differences might even make a real difference in the real functioning of the process. Like the new kidney might be rejected.

Parsing that would be that the entity - the kidney - isn't exhausted by its current set of interactions, it also has a field of potential interactions. Above and beyond that it's singular, it's this or that kidney, and it will only ever be that one as it's the only one which was individuated as that one. It has its own entire history.

Another difference is that assemblages tend to be organised in networks rather than trees. The entities corresponding to abstractions loop around in terms of their causal flows. A worked example with addiction - the substance behaves more addictively if you've had adverse childhood experiences or a history of mental illness, both of those latter contexts are societally mediated or outright social phenomena. The consumption is also socially mediated - ritualised, consumed with friends or at parties, when the dealer's got good the best smack. The social stuff is also drug mediated, as it depends upon the addicts being repeat customers and being the demand for the business.

Complex systems of mediation are the paradigmatic object in that metaphysics. They don't "nest" very neatly at all, as soon as you start talking about one concept you tend to need to start talking about another. Because the events tend to propagate that way through the different registers of concepts. Different registers brought together into the same event sequence, a tangle. And they need to be thought together "in their own plane", in a manner true to them.

You can enter paroxysms about the sheer degree of mediation in an assemblage, and focus on mediation so hard you forget about causes entirely - and that's IMO an all too common pitfall of the approach. But "a deaf ear for context" induced by "flatness" it does not have. Its emphasis is on engineering ontologies for situations based on how they behave, a kind of descriptive metaphysics.

But it does have general themes and concepts in it, you just don't ever think "oh yeah the world is made of assemblages" like you might with a substance, or ideas. "made?", nah, "behaves like".

Some concepts are clearly so broad and so implicated in assemblages that they're worth extracting as general abstract patterns with their own principles - like matter and signification, or as generic principles that assemblages seem to work with - coupling, decoupling, dissipation [hide=*]("following a line of flight" technical term}[/hide], structuring into a context [hide=*](territorialisation, the technical term)[/hide]. There are also relevant meta principles, like you might want a word for the sort of... thingybob... matter and signification are in terms of assemblages, a "stratum".

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

Quoting Number2018

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves.

Yes. An assemblage doesn't have to make sense at all does it? It just has to work together. A "law" is a durable regularity. Some are so durable that they appear immutable, and may as well be.

Quoting Leontiskos

How should ontological concepts work? Presumably given the complexity of reality, top-level concepts should be wide and general, and yet because of this there will be significant limitations on their explanatory power. So for Aristotle you "begin" with the concepts of act and potency (and already you have a tension between two principles rather than a unitary atom). Being broad, they explain everything and nothing. Or taken individually, half of everything and half of nothing. But then the diverse kinds of act and potency flower within each concept; the appearances do not force us outside of the basic, broad concepts (unless one wants to see the interaction of act and potency as a third sort of thing, which apokrisis may be able to speak to). If not everything is a nail, then the top-level explanations must be able to generically accommodate a large variety of diverse phenomena.

Aristotle is a systems guy and the systems answer is always triadic. This thread seems another example of how everyone arrives at some dichotomy – as symmetries must be broken to create realities – and then either tries to be reductionist and treat only one arm of the dichotomy as "the fundamental reality", or instead knows how to go on and see how that which gets forcefully separated is then also that which gets freely mixed. From the duality of the dichotomy flows the triadicity of the hierarchy. You get some pair of complementary limits on Being, and then the space of concrete possibility that those limits create.

It is like how black and white are the extremes of luminance that then bring with them all the possible shades of grey. You don't have anything until you have that possibility of a symmetry-breaking contrast – the first action of being a little lighter and so equally, a little less dark. And then from there, you have a division that can grow in scalefree fashion. You can keep going towards a state of absolute brightness ... to the degree you are continuing to go away from the counter-possibility of absolute darkness.

Neither black nor white are primary. Indeed, as absolute bounds, neither is realisable as a state of being as to arrive at either destination would mean losing all contact with the other that must be being measurably left behind in the rear view mirror. So an actual reduction to one or other state is impossible. It is the antithetical relation between the two – the actualisation of a world with this particular structure of contrast - which is what a reality is founded upon. It is the emergence of a concrete middle of all the possible shades of grey which winds up as the place we all want to talk about.

This is clearer in Aristotle's hylomorphism than being~becoming as we have the hierarchical sandwich of potential, actual and necessary. There is "material" possibility that interacts with the formal cause of structural necessity. What physics now calls the interaction of quantum indeterminacy and topological order. And out of that interaction between the randomness of action, and the need for it to become at least statistically organised as a global attractor, you get the substantiality that ontology seeks. You get a system where global constraints emerge and a free potential is shaped into some set of concrete "degrees of freedom". All the shades of grey that white and black paint can mix. All the fundamental particles that can exist as localised excitations under the constraints of gauge symmetry breaking.

So always our inquiry into the nature of Nature is going to arrive at the central logic of symmetry-breaking. Some kind of dialectical divide where the "everythingness" of an unformed potential begins to grow a self-grounding split. It will start to head in one direction – the apparent "primal act" or fluctuation – and that in itself is already the co-creation of whatever can count as the other direction it is then leaving behind. Thesis and antithesis is revealed as soon as there is any "act" at all.

So the symmetry that gets broken is the potential. The act that breaks it is already in fact a self-grounding relation. The background on which the mark is being made is being made along with the mark. And then the broken symmetry is where all this has got past being just a fluctuation and become the wholeness of a growing system, kept alive by its own capacity for a persistent dynamical balance.

A whorl of turbulence spins up into existence and wants to keep growing. It turns a laminar flow into a rotational flow. If it keeps growing, it both gets larger and also starts to break up into the scalefree complexity of a chaotic turbulence. There is a phase transition where all the smooth laminar flow is lost and the stream is just every shade of vortical motion. The action achieves its most extreme state of asymmetry. Not just a little bit different as one passing knot of turbulence but as much difference as the world of the flow can contain.

This is the fractal distribution of matter and energy that best characterises Nature. We see it in the Cosmic Web. It is the new "better" explanation for dark energy. Symmetry gets broken. Potency gives expression to its primal act - a Planck-scale fluctuation. But then that act isn't complete until it has grown to be expressed across all possible scales of being. As a division of figure and ground, it has to become a universalised motif – the gravitationally swirling structure that is vortexes of material dissipation over all scales from spinning stars and black holes out to galactic clusters and beyond.

So actuality arises out of the interaction between material potential – the possibility of an action with a direction – and structural necessity. The constraints that must emerge once every kind of action is trying to actualise itself and so cancelling away most of the other available possibilities. There is a contest and some statistically-constrained regime emerges as the global state of the system. All that remains in terms of the local action are the shades of grey or fundamental particles that are permitted by the self-grounding system. The world that has grown itself in a free way that expresses its central organising dichotomy over a hierarchy of all dimensional scales.

Quoting Leontiskos

What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). He ends up using different language to say the same essential thing.

A key difference would be that Peirce makes formal cause clearly immanent rather than leaving it sounding transcendent. You don't need an outside mind imposing a design that is "good". The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. There is an optimising principle at work. But it is self-grounding. It is whatever is left after all else has got cancelled away because it didn't really work.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

Assemblage theory is another way of talking about dissipative structure theory – the naturalness of fractal or scalefree hierarchical organisation. It is for good reason the flattest ontology as it just is the simplest statistical pattern that Nature could be organised by.

Nature – as a flow of entropy – is organised by its information, its boundary constraints. And the simplest state of such a flow – the one requiring the least information to be stored – is one of open log/log fractal growth. Mountains and coastlines are fractal structures as they represent a dynamical balance of accumulation and erosion over a wide hierarchy of spatiotemporal scales.

Every point of a landscape is either a little more built up or a little more broken down than its immediate neighbourhood. From there, it can either become a little more like or unlike that local context. Revert to the norm or become more exceptional. Repeat that easy to remember/low information distinction over all scales – from minutes and inches to eons and continents – and you get a fractally-organised world.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Clouds and ducks don't look much alike, so you have to show how they can both be accounted for ("generated" perhaps), how using the same underlying mechanisms can produce endless forms most beautiful.

If dissipative structure is the flat ontology of Nature – one based on the ur-dichotomy of entropy~information – then we can account for life and mind as another step on top of that where the information regulating the dissipation is moved to be inside an organism rather than standing out at the global boundaries of the physics as a whole.

So organisms arose when they stumbled across the further trick of encoding information using genes, neurons, words and numbers. Organisms could form semiotic models of their world as they might wish it to be. They could mechanically switch the entropy flows to construct their bodies and even their local environments. Bacteria brought about the Gaian revolution of a world with a carbon cycle, steady temperature and a high oxygen level simply by being able to encode the right metabolic algorithms. So even a little coding power could completely remake the chemistry of a whole planet, bringing it under the control of the desires of its biology to have its optimum growth conditions.

Does metaphysics get this fact? Well, it seems to lag well behind the science. In principle, life and mind just are expressions of the generalised cosmic desire to optimise dissipation. The Cosmos does its best but is hampered by the fact that all the information handling the dissipation is as distributed about the environment as it can get. The Cosmos operates at its simplest level - the flatness of assemblage theory (as another name for the Prigogine's dissipative structure science). But life and mind arose to take advantage of that flat ground to become its own hierarchy of semiosis – of encoded dissipation regulation – that could grow vastly more complex.

So the same dichotomy is at the root. Entropy~information. But information moved from the generality of some statistical erosion~accumulation pattern formation to an organismic self-model which started making things happen in an agential goal-oriented sense.

Disorder only ever existed in the context of order. And biology is part of Nature because it applies more order to the business of disordering. In some ways it is causally very different. In the larger way, it is more of the same, just a way to put some greater distance between sources and sinks. The information is packaged and its resulting waste more widely dispersed.

Quoting apokrisis

From the duality of the dichotomy flows the triadicity of the hierarchy. You

What a Beautiful statement. I mean that Aesthetically, and only in that sense (the aesthetic sense of the term, not the Aesthetic sense of the "word"). I just love the musicality that those words have. I would, of course, add a fourth element there (just as a hypothetical suggestion):

From the triadicity of the hierarchy, flows the fourthness of the transfinite landscape.

That phrase, though dubious from a semantic standpoint, sounds rather "pleasing" to the ear, objectively speaking. Why? Because it combines a "modern" tone, that of "transfinite sets", as in the work of Cantor. Yet, the former part (the antecedent) sounds more "ancient", somehow. Well, of course, triadic thinking is essential to both Christianity as well as Taoism. But you see, that duplicity, -Christianity and Taoism -does not drain the "metaphysical Well", so to speak, in the manner of a poet. There is Freedom in Subjectivity, is there Freedom in Objectivity? If so, in what sense?

And the answer to that question, my friend, is the following:

In an absolute sense. The "intent" of it, if you want to call it that, is both "realist" and "royalist". Such matters cannot be avoided, for they are the literal semantics of the very word, "absolute". Yet, -and please don't laugh-, millions of people worldwide, everyday, get drunk on some cheep alcohol called "Absolute Vodka". How funny, right mate? That's the kind of joke that Zizek would make.

Except he wouldn't. He doesn't dare to. People, generally speaking, think he is extremely provocative. He isn't. Real Wars are provocative. Except that they are not. War is not something to be Glorified: there is no Honor in Violence. That does not mean that violence should be committed: it should, under the just circumstances. Otherwise, you aren't speaking of justice, but of something else, and that is where, through the process of Dialectical Analysis, not Dialectical Synthesis (as a Hegelian would), you arrive at the reductionist (and false) dichotomy of only two options at this juncture. And if you pursue that road, you end up, again, by analysis, at solipsism. Proceed one more step, and now you are about as aware as a rock: you have removed Firstness, you have removed your Physical First Person Perspective on the world, and it just seems like "A Thing, In Itself".

But it just seems that way, mate. That is no indication of what it actually is. Want to call it something? Call it "Tao", like Lao Tzu did. Who cares? Call it Nature, call it Absolute Spirit: It is there, and it is not you. And now, Understand that fact.

One of the side issues with seeing entities as aggregates is the way we pick out what it is that "contains' the parts. It could be:

1. innate (since we know navigation capability is innate to some extent, maybe the ability to divide the world up in a certain way is also innate).

2. Socially mediated (for some things maybe)

3. Because Plato was right and we're perceiving particular manifestations of Forms :grimace: )


Other possibilities? @apokrisis is right that this is a thesis, antithesis, synthesis situation.

Quoting frank

One of the side issues with seeing entities as aggregates is the way we pick out what it is that "contains' the parts. It could be:

But are "parts" really any different from the "part" that contains those "parts"? Does this question really need an answer? Is there even any definitive sense into how "parts" are divided or aggregate into more "parts" that we uphold all the time or even any of the time? I am not sure I think so. We notice distinctions and similarities in our sensory landscape which are multiplicitious, overlapping, redundant.

Quoting Apustimelogist

Does this question really need an answer?

YES DAMMIT! Just kidding. It probably doesn't need an answer.

Quoting Apustimelogist

But are "parts" really any different from the "part" that contains those "parts"? Does this question really need an answer? Is there even any definitive sense into how "parts" are divided or aggregate into more "parts" that we uphold all the time or even any of the time? I am not sure I think so. We notice distinctions and similarities in our sensory landscape which are multiplicitious, overlapping, redundant.

Hi, allow me to say something about that: there is a sense in which we should not mix up two very different meaning of the very word "part", for it has a mereological sense, as well as a metaphysical sense. In the former case, you are debating mereology: the domain of philosophy that studies the part-whole relation. In the latter case, you are debating metaphysics of ordinary objects: the domain of metaphysics in the Analytic Tradition that is concerned with the being and the existence of ordinary objects and extra-ordinary objects.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich
I'm not sure I see where you're going with this.

Quoting Apustimelogist

?Arcane Sandwich

I'm not sure I see where you're going with this.

I'm not going anywhere with it, I'm just trying to see if we can reach a common understanding, by slightly enforcing the rules of language. If not, then I will stop.

Thanks for that. I am short on time and I actually don't know that much about assemblage theory, so let's look at your example:

Quoting fdrake

An indicative phenomenon for that perspective might be a kidney transplant, which takes two entities {damaged kidney to be replaced, replacement kidney} with material differences {they're not the same kidney} but equivalent functions {what kidneys do} on the level of the body's self regulation. No material substratum is needed to reconcile, or render compatible, that manipulation, only a check of functional equivalence - or really, functional substitutability. Does the new kidney work in the old one's place.

Which is probably very unintuitive if you're not used to thinking of it in that way - the new kidney is clearly not identical to the old kidney, but it's equivalent to the old kidney's old function as part of the body as an assemblage, even if there are material differences involved in all the constituent parts and those differences might even make a real difference in the real functioning of the process. Like the new kidney might be rejected.

This strikes me as an odd example, because if a duck is not a substance then I don't think organ transplants make sense. Organ transplants exemplify the part/whole relation of organisms, which is different from the part-whole relation of aggregates.

Regarding the bolded, the material substratum that is needed seems to be the living body that the kidney is regulating. This is the thing that it "might be rejected" by. Without that substratum an organ transplant is a non-starter.

Quoting fdrake

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

I think genus/species is plenty fungible, but the key for Aristotle is that without the form of intermediation represented by such a thing, one would be incapable of identification or categorization. So if Aristotle is right then the assemblage theorist will be as indebted to genus/species orderings as anyone else.

As Reply to apokrisis demonstrates, Aristotle can be quite flexible. Hearkening back to the OP, I think we are asking whether behavior-modeling is sufficient to account for things like ducks. And the foil of the OP is "questions of being," the meaning of which we haven't tried to mete out. How do we reorient the discussion back to that original topic? It sounds like you want to say that the difference between a noun and a verb is accidental or a matter of degree. Everything is in a state of irretrievable change, it's just that some things are decaying/corrupting more quickly than other things? Substance-identity is ephemeral?

(If so, I think the particular part of Aristotle you're concerned with is the distinction between organic wholes and accidental wholes, or the idea that the most proper substances are biological organisms.)

---

Quoting apokrisis

A key difference would be that Peirce makes formal cause clearly immanent rather than leaving it sounding transcendent. You don't need an outside mind imposing a design that is "good". The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. There is an optimising principle at work. But it is self-grounding. It is whatever is left after all else has got cancelled away because it didn't really work.

Thanks for this and for the generous post. I hope to come back to some of these points.

Reply to fdrake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

IDK, it strikes me as a weird sort of double standard. We cannot have metaphysics

I don't believe that. Instead I believe avoiding metaphysics is a great hypocrisy, as every philosophy has metaphysical commitments - the question is whether they're explicit about it or not.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Why?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

But what's backing this aside from blind faith or assertion of "usefulness"? And fixity relative to what?

A background? Like a mountain is fixed relative to a path on it. I don't mean this facetiously, what type of ground do you think is required of a philosophy? And why is it required to be that?

I don't think any unique ground is necessary, even if some grounding is necessary for each context. Do you believe there is a unique, correct ground to do philosophy from? Or a metaphysical structure of the universe? Why, and what is it?

I don't mean these facetiously either. I can understand disagreeing with my points, but we're currently disputing whether fixity relative to X makes sense, I gave you an example where it did. It seems to me you're saying that there needs to be a unique ground of things in order to provide a satisfying answer to your question - am I right in that?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Yes. I agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Yes. Ex-post-facto logical entities that have good explanatory and descriptive power, but are not baked into the structure of the universe. Though they may be characteristic features of some assemblages. Like the flow of organisms organised into a cladistic tree, splitting based on presence or absence of traits.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being

Is it really the preservation of pure identity over time that we need in order to benefit from a concept of truth, or is it inferential compatibility, the understandability of something on the basis of recognizability, likeness and harmony with respect to something else?

Quoting Joshs

Is it really the preservation of pure identity over time that we need in order to benefit from a concept of truth, or is it inferential compatibility, the understandability of something on the basis of recognizability, likeness and harmony with respect to something else?

Predication handles recognition, likeness, etc. The way predication works is that the potentially transient properties of an object are specified. The object has to be held as unchanging relative to the properties.

For instance when I say the wax has melted, the wax has to be temporally stable. If it's not, then the wax has ceased to exist. Therefore it can't have melted.

Reply to fdrake

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Aristotle thread J started:

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

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

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

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

if there is nothing at all stable

At the very beginning of this thread, I suggested that if you asked a "deflationist" "What is the being of a duck?", he would find the question incomprehensible, and if you asked it of a "model-builder", he would describe various duck behaviors, in a very broad sense, including how duck tastes. If you insisted you didn't mean any of that, he would stare blankly at you.

I think, @Count Timothy von Icarus, you've landed in a similar place. When it is suggested that the world may only exhibit relative and local stability, you find this unimaginable, incomprehensible. Yes, you're giving arguments in support of your view, but the point of those arguments is only that something else you find unimaginable and incomprehensible would be the case.

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

Reply to frank Reply to frank

Quoting frank

Predication handles recognition, likeness, etc. The way predication works is that the potentially transient properties of an object are specified.

The object has to be held as unchanging relative to the properties.

For instance when I say the wax has melted, the wax has to be temporally stable. If it's not, then the wax has ceased to exist. Therefore it can't have melted

But prior to the use of predication, perception handles recognition and likeness. Predication is just an abstractive invention tacked onto perception. Just because predication may require an unchanging nature relative to properties, this does not mean that perception does. Perception recognizes ‘unchanging’ objected all the time, even though built into the recognition is that this self-persistence is only relative self-persistence, a way of continuing to be the same slightly differently. Recognizing sameness over time as inferential compatibility is optimally useful, whereas the propositional requirement of absolute unchangingness leads to confusions and the appearance of contradictions and incompatibilities.

Words are meaningful only when we put them to work. Repeat a word over and over again and it gradually loses all sense of meaning. We understand propositions as meaningful not because of but in spite of our presupposing them to be dealing with an unchanging identity. Wittgenstein describes the notion of changeless repetition as language on holiday or an engine idling.

“..the very attempt to achieve a clear view of matters by suspending usage renders them opaque, like shining light on a developing picture. This is what Wittgenstein means by his famous claim that “the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.”

“…detaching a phenomenon from absorbed activity drains it of the meaning that flows through it while knitted into its language-game. It is this shriveled, barren husk of meaning that seems strikingly incapable of generating vibrant communication. Instead of a profound discovery about language or meaning or thought, however, this is just an odd fact about us, like the way repeating a word over and over again (“noodle, noodle, noodle . . .”) reduces it to a thick senseless sound. It offers no secret insight into the profound workings of anything, except the folly of philosophy. (Lee Braver on Wittgenstein)

Quoting Joshs

But prior to the use of predication, perception handles recognition and likeness.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, I'd like to relate a story:

I draw and paint, so I'm used to surveying my visual field without judgement about what the objects are. Those judgments interfere because it's like my brain already knows what a tree looks like, and it wants my hand to draw that stock image instead of what's actually in front of me. I divorce identity from perception and all I see is shapes, light and dark, a cascade of colors.

Once while doing this, it occurred to me to wonder what in my visual field tells me that this is a tree. It was one of the biggest philosophical moments of my life when I realized the answer was: nothing. There is nothing in those sights and sounds that says: "tree." I realized that tree is an organizing idea. It's not something I learned about through sense data. The idea of the tree is like an invisible nucleus with orbiting properties. This is all phenomenology. I'm not explaining how the world really is, but just how I experience it. So all I can say is that I don't recognize, detect likeness, etc. through sensation, but maybe you do? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "perception"?

I think what you're saying is that we choose a frame of reference and declare a certain spot to be unchanging (like the horizon). I agree that we do this reflexively, but the awareness that fiat is involved is purely intellectual. There's nothing in perception that lets us know that the horizon isn't really stationary.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

You're right. The state of things isn't arbitrary. It's very flexible. There are lots of things with lots of structures. Assemblage is a generic term for such a structure. Any particular assemblage will have a structure. Even if assemblages in general have no general laws.

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

I think you're interpreting me as committed to a relativist "everything goes all the time" approach. I am not. I doubt any sensible person is. Connecting "absolute" fixity to the possibility of adequate descriptions is something you're positing, not me. And that needs to be argued for on its own terms. Why is it the case?

Compare that to a model of discursive knowledge based on something closer to an equilibrium of truth seeking norms - negotiated conditions of correct assertibility. If you want me to put it in metaphysical terms, you can describe an assemblage adequately when an assemblage of knowledge production can couple with the other assemblage in a discursive fashion that satisfies the norms of correct assertibility.

I think where you're coming from has a certain alignment of One Methodology and One Metaphysics. "Functionalism all the way down" has a similar alignment - of a methodological pluralism and a circumscription of ontologies to contexts. Even if some contexts are really expansive.

So when you're reading me as performatively contradicting myself, or committed myself to logical contradictions, I'm just going to read that as you projecting your own presuppositions onto me. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to make that move so long as you're following One Methodology One Metaphysics.

And I think the views and criticisms you've made have merit, of course. But allow me to make a similar move - I can see that your views and criticisms have merit, and a scope of application, because the philosophical paradigm {as it were} I'm sympathetic to has a great deal of room in it for alterity. Whereas your instinct seems to be to rebuke this. Even though we both agree {act as if there is} on there being a structural symmetry between the metaphysics stuff we're saying and the methodology stuff we're saying. The father's house has many rooms.

So yes. Of course you're going to read me as contradicting myself, and maybe I am, but the ones I've seen you point out are contradictions based on your presuppositions of how things work. And not mine.

Quoting fdrake

The father's house has many rooms.

Hi, @fdrake, can I ask for some clarification here, please? That's a biblical phrase (it's John 14:2), specifically. What did you mean by that, when you used that phrase in the context of your latest post? Thanks in advance, and please feel free to ignore this comment if what I'm asking is trivial.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Hi, fdrake, can I ask for some clarification here, please? That's a biblical phrase (it's John 14:2), specifically. What did you mean by that, when you used that phrase in the context of your latest post? Thanks in advance, and please feel free to ignore this comment if what I'm asking is trivial.

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

Quoting fdrake

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

Thank you very much for your thoughtful response, @fdrake.

Reply to fdrake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

You've construed me as committed to this when I don't believe I am? Correctness conditions for assertibility aren't the same idea as usefulness. Simply because being correct isn't always useful, and being useful isn't always being correct. We agree on that. Even though I believe it's to do with the norms regarding utility and the norms regarding correct assertibility being rather different!

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

My question is: "what's you're response?"

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary. They're provisional and often revised. My position's roughly stated in terms of the following inequalities:

socially constructed != arbitrary != false. Fallibilism != skepticism. natural != conventional.

It's correct to assert plenty of stuff, even if it doesn't turn out to be right upon new evidence, or appears to be a non-problem if the norms change. I see that as a descriptive statement rather than a proscriptive one - I'm making first a descriptive claim that the norms of discourse regarding knowledge construction are not arbitrary, and a proscriptive one that in order to create knowledge using them one must act in accord with them.

A good example there is Ramanujan the mathematician. He wrote a lot of correct things, even though he couldn't assert them correctly with the standards of mathematical proof at the time. When he was trained to do such a thing in his collaboration with Hardy, he produced a lot of knowledge. Before that, all he said was conjecture. What made his conjectures knowledge are that they were correctly assertible, and they were so even before their proof.

Reply to frank

Quoting frank

I'm not explaining how the world really is, but just how I experience it. So all I can say is that I don't recognize, detect likeness, etc. through sensation, but maybe you do? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "perception"?

I think what you're saying is that we choose a frame of reference and declare a certain spot to be unchanging (like the horizon). I agree that we do this reflexively, but the awareness that fiat is involved is purely intellectual. There's nothing in perception that lets us know that the horizon isn't really stationary.

I draw and paint also, so I understand what you’re saying about the shift in stance that is required to ‘paint what we see’ rather than our linguistic concepts. But I beleive that all perception is conceptual, so when I am trying to ‘survey my visual field without judgement about what the objects are’, I am still using a kind of conceptual judgement. That is to say, seeing colors and contrasts and lines and textures is not seeing purely what is there without any mediation from prior conceptually-derived expectations , any more than is seeing the visual field in terms of trees, houses and cars. It is just a different sort of conceptual stance.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.

Quoting Joshs

I draw and paint also, so I understand what you’re saying about the shift in stance that is required to ‘paint what we see’ rather than our linguistic concepts. But I beleive that all perception is conceptual, so when I am trying to ‘survey my visual field without judgement about what the objects are’, I am still using a kind of conceptual judgement.

How is conceptual judgment different from predication? You said predication was tacked onto perception, but it sounds like you've got them happening simultaneously.

BTW, I know that any description of the visual field will be organized by ideas. My point was that the visual field itself is not driving conclusions about identification. That involves the application of discernment. Call it proto-predication.



Quoting Joshs

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.

That may be, but as you drive down the road, you're not usually aware that the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns. That would be something you'd realize via your intellect. It's a pretty sophisticated thought.

Reply to fdrake Quoting fdrake

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves.
— Number2018

Yes. An assemblage doesn't have to make sense at all does it? It just has to work together. A "law" is a durable regularity. Some are so durable that they appear immutable, and may as well be.

Quoting fdrake

There are lots of things with lots of structures. Assemblage is a generic term for such a structure. Any particular assemblage will have a structure. Even if assemblages in general have no general laws.

One likely needs an assemblage when confronted with situations that defy sense. When something impossible, improbable, or unbearable occurs, one can no longer rely on traditional ethical criteria of judgment or the innate "good nature" of reason itself. How can philosophy proceed when the principle of universal rationality bear upon or compatible with extraneous and heterogeneous elements? New ethical questions arise concerning action and life within a totality, and these became pressing concerns for thinkers like Adorno, Blanchot, and Levinas. For Foucault and Deleuze, these issues were central, forming the driving forces behind their development of assemblage theory.
The classical Frankfurt School’s solution was that the systematic progression of rational utility calculations required an increasing repression of the spontaneity of inner nature. Abstract, impersonal forms of domination seemed to take precedence over the agency and freedom of a self-identical subject. Even Habermas’s shift from instrumental reason to communicative reason implicitly remained within the traditional vision of a totalizing state of future reconciliation. But how, then, can one assemble a multiplicity from disparate agentive instances—parts that have no connection to the Dominating Whole, whether it is a lost whole or a virtual one yet to come?Deleuze and Guattari's solution is that the Whole becomes related to its parts only as a complex of interconnected processes and relations—only through a set of sheer differences. It operates like a machine, but unlike a mechanism, it lacks a predefined or intentional design. It sustains itself and maintains its consistency through the regular reiteration of divergent elements, which do not follow a direct causal order. The consistency that emerges is not the result of predetermined design but of the free interplay of parts. Regularity in dispersion thus gives way to the relation between the concrete assemblage and abstract machine. The abstract machine, in this context,serves as the primordial function substituting the absent whole. It acts as an unrepresentable diagram for assembling heterogeneous elements, maintaining a complex coordination without imposing a fixed structure.Take, for example, walking down the street: one’s behavior is automatically involved in navigating terrain, making one’s way to a destination, admiring sights, avoiding traffic, waiting at traffic lights, and so on. Who is orchestrating this set of disparate capacities? Similarly, who is in charge when one is driving a car or browsing the internet? An abstract machine becomes recognizable just through its apparent effects within a concrete assemblage. There are clear political and ethical implications in closing the gaps between instinct and intelligence, between thought and action, and in the automatic, habitual, and instinctual nature of internalized thought. The assemblage theory can offer a means of understanding how agency and structure, spontaneity and regularity, are dynamically interwoven, revealing a new approach to thinking about action, ethics, and the complexities of human existence. “Abstract machines operate within concrete assemblages. They draw the cutting edges of decoding. They make the assemblage open onto something else, assemblages of another type, the molecular, the cosmic.They constitute becomings." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.510)

Quoting Number2018

It operates like a machine, but unlike a mechanism, it lacks a predefined or intentional design. It sustains itself and maintains its consistency through the regular reiteration of divergent elements, which do not follow a direct causal order.

We probably agree more than disagree. I just wanted to note that jettisoning causality from assemblages entirely {not that I'm saying you do this} is one of the paradigm's worst excesses. With reference to addiction studies, the sheer discursivity of heroin addiction makes people want to prohibit conceiving heroin as an addictive substance. As in, heroin is not addictive, it does not cause addiction. This is a lot of fart huffing and ceases to take materiality seriously, in materiality's name.

The way I prefer to approach causality in assemblages - and this might be my own brainfarts - is that causality in an assemblage is equivalent to the behaviour of a change propagation through connected parts. Like if you had the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, if you had shitty heroin instead of good heroin it could propagate changes into needle behaviour {up the dose} addict behaviour {inject the higher dose, craving} and social stuff {complain at the dealer, buy more...}. And it's appropriate to think of that as a cause.

Though I agree that the causal order can be tangled in assemblages - if you're considering addict-heroin-socius-needle as an assemblage, it doesn't have any unique event ordering. You could have a change in addict propagating to heroin-socius-needle, then back to addict, or a change in socius propagating to addict-heroin-needle.

When I'm writing those dashes, I'm intending to treat the connected terms as a fully connected network, in which every concept and event set implicates all and only those it is reachable with a "-".

Quoting Number2018

The consistency that emerges is not the result of predetermined design but of the free interplay of parts.

Yes. Though I'd want to stress that {I see it as} the "free interplay" is a freedom from any external or conditioning necessity, the assemblages just is what it does, what it can do {openness, singularity}, and finally what it might do and is drawn to do {its abstract and virtual characters}, so it's "free" in the sense of being unconstrained by anything but its own nature. Including human concepts of representational adequacy.

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

I don't see why I would need to man the gates against relativism? Everything I've said is an attempt to provide a good vocabulary for the correct description of things. From my perspective, I could want nothing more than this. Especially since it's correctly assertible that things which have counted as knowledge - been knowledge - in eras past have turned out to be false.

Does the world behave as if it's full of intelligible principles? Yeah, there's loads. But there's different principles everywhere. And more than one way of describing each of those, those means of description might be inequivalent too, even if they stand on equal epistemic grounds {competing models}.

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

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

And from this we reach the conclusion of B above, that it there is no sense in which any description of or beliefs about reality can be more or less correct than any other. At best, they can be more or less correct relative to some arbitrary frame

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

BTW, this itself is also an absolute statement. To claim that "everything is relative and mutable" is no less absolute than claiming "some things are not relative and mutable."

These are very good arguments against @fdrake, and I do not see them begging the question.

Quoting fdrake

Even though I believe it's to do with the norms regarding utility and the norms regarding correct assertibility being rather different!

So what are the norms of correct assertibility?

Quoting fdrake

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary. They're provisional and often revised. My position's roughly stated in terms of the following inequalities:

socially constructed != arbitrary != false. Fallibilism != skepticism. natural != conventional.

These sorts of answers are characteristically evasive. It's a lot of words that never actually tell us what you think correct assertibility is. "Dogs aren't cats and they aren't spoons and they aren't made of lava and they aren't a numerical sum." "Er... So what are they? Telling us what they are not is no great help."

I think the criticism of @fdrake is fairly simple: he presupposes truth (correct assertibility) but his whole approach precludes it. It is that odd modern tendency to have the knowing subject so radically separate from the frame that the question of accounting for him never even arises. And fdrake even sees this better than most moderns.

I earlier spoke of utility and pragmatism vs contemplation, and my point also applies to discursive inference and other parts of discursive knowing. In order to model a duck you have to truly understand ducks, truly understand your model, and truly understand their relation. Utility/usefulness is never going to get you to truth. It presupposes it.

-

Edit: I also don't want to abandon this issue ad extra:

Quoting fdrake

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

I think there are problems with this epistemology. Change requires permanence - the two notions are co-implicative. This is why Aristotle had prime matter and we now have conservation of energy, for without that underlying stability and permanence the idea of change is incoherent.

Quoting fdrake

A background? Like a mountain is fixed relative to a path on it. I don't mean this facetiously, what type of ground do you think is required of a philosophy? And why is it required to be that?

I don't think any unique ground is necessary, even if some grounding is necessary for each context. Do you believe there is a unique, correct ground to do philosophy from? Or a metaphysical structure of the universe? Why, and what is it?

Mathematically, you are trying to say that the mountain changes less than the path, and you want to ground predications about their relation in the ? between the two rates-of-change. But "changes less" makes no sense apart from a point of fixity that exists outside both of them. "Rate of change" requires some kind of unit or measure in order for it to be coherent. Without a notion of the unchanging the notion of change can't get off the ground. This is back to @Srap Tasmaner's "conceptual priority." It also brings us back to Aristotle, who sees physics as bound up in the puzzle of motion/change.

Quoting Leontiskos

Utility/usefulness is never going to get you to truth

I don't seek to reduce correct assertibility to utility. There are correctly assertible things which aren't useful in context - like using "Luke's father is Vader" in this discussion. And there are useful things which aren't correctly assertible in some contexts, like the idea that economic growth is always exponential.

Reply to Leontiskos

It ultimately comes down to whether you see description relative to a frame as the same concept as description relative to an arbitrary frame. I don't. It seems you and @Count Timothy von Icarus do. You both seem to want something "extra", in addition to norms of truth telling, knowledge and how people discover and find stuff out in the world, as a ground for knowledge.

I reject that in two ways, firstly that a ground in the sense you mean it is necessary to begin with - the concept is inherently "unrelative", so is a presupposition I don't have and don't need to adopt unless I'm trying to argue in your terms. Secondly that frames aren't arbitrary, and can serve as grounds for correct assertibility.

We've been going back on forth on me stating a presupposition, and you stating a presupposition, but neither of us are arguing which presupposition is "better" in manner which relates our perspectives {very well anyway}. Which, as fas I understand it, was @Srap Tasmaner's point in the OP.

So let's go through why I like this perspective with a worked example or two.

I gave an example of something which is comprehensible in terms of a background which is nevertheless changing - a mountain path and the mountain. I also gave an example of correct assertibility with Ramanujan and Hardy. Which I'll go through in much more detail.

In which Ramanujan's statements prior to his collaboration with Hardy were correctly assertible but he did not assert them while following the norms of mathematical discourse at the time, and could not due to his lack of formal training - so they were not considered as true until that occurred. All there was to the truth of Ramanujan's claims was whether they were correctly assertible in accordance with the norms of mathematics taken in toto. They were, and were shown to be.

Note that "they were, and they were shown to" imputes a somewhat fixed structure of justification to mathematical discourse, like proof. But it isn't a unitary phenomenon - like published mathematical proofs tend to be formally invalid, and corrections are submittable to published and believed proofs.

So there's enough normative character to do things with, but the nature of what can be done using those norms is not totally determined by their current state of expression - only what may be expressed with them fully determines their expression {given the current state of the assemblage}. Which is basically a tautology, but no one knows the scope of those rules without knowing all the theorems. An appeal to potential development, there, is an assemblage concept that Reply to Number2018 referenced, organisation in accordance with some abstract machine.

An assemblage like that which produces mathematical knowledge has pretty strict and durable rules, but many forms of them. And those rules are identical with an idealised form of current practice. And current practice has both a potential and an actual component, as well as an idiosyncratic concreteness. People follow the rules in their own way, and improvise and revise the rules to more fully explore/extend the scope of mathematics.

The assemblage of mathematics production is also open ended in terms of its operation - if you deleted all universities and mathematical knowledge from the world, the norms would die too. That would impact the production of mathematical knowledge despite having nothing to do with the content of mathematical practice. It's also self organising, like the Langlands Program was generated within it and has ordered a lot of research and thought within it. It develops according to its own idiosyncrasies as well as its constraints, and is nevertheless sensitive to whatever milieu it finds itself in. Maths looks different if it's done on the tables of aristocrats or the laptops and whiteboards of universities and is submitted to different social forces.

Correct assertibility in that milieu has changed over time. Newton's proofs of his calculus principles were formally invalid, and it was known at the time - infinitesimals were 0 and not 0 at the same time in his proofs, at different stages. His principles were useful but not correctly assertible, but people believed them nevertheless, and just didn't give a crap about the self contradiction because the overall endeavour seemed cromulent and useful. The idea was morally true {a term in maths scholarship}.

Nowadays we could interpret the proofs as a germinal form of something formally valid - his calculus with fluxions is much the same as our nonstandard analysis or formal calculus with limits. So we can "repair" his proofs and see his results as correctly assertible, as well as being morally true at their publication.

Hopefully the above worked example illustrates that although the background can shift, that doesn't render the justifications using it arbitrary.

Quoting fdrake

The idea was morally true {a term in maths scholarship}.

Hi @fdrake, How are you? Would it be possible for you to explain to me, a non-mathematician, what that means, to mathematicians? I don't understand the underlying concept here. Is it a mathematical concept, or a moral concept? I'm not seeking to debate this point with you at the moment (though I might, in another Thread, in the future). All I'm asking for is a bit of clarification for the readers in general, including myself. Thanks in advance.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Hi fdrake, How are you? Would it be possible for you to explain to me, a non-mathematician, what that means, to mathematicians? I don't understand the underlying concept here. Is it a mathematical concept, or a moral concept? I'm not seeking to debate this point with you at the moment (though I might, in another Thread, in the future). All I'm asking for is a bit of clarification for the readers in general, including myself. Thanks in advance.

A mathematical idea, or proof, which is morally true is one which says something which is correct or ought to be correct but in an imprecise or inaccurate way. The way it's said or written also makes the statement false or misleading in some important respect.

An example of something "morally true" might be 1/0 = infinity. It suggests a right idea - that if you divide by smaller and smaller numbers you get larger and larger numbers - but is false.

Reply to fdrake Thank you very much, fdrake.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

From the triadicity of the hierarchy, flows the fourthness of the transfinite landscape.

I appreciate the thought but there is a technical difficulty that is key. My approach is Peircean and so although one, two, three is being counted off as a sequence, each next level incorporates what has come before it. So oneness is the line, twoness is the plane that includes now both length and area, threeness is the volume that includes length and area as now part of a volume. Which means that a fourthness has to continue this incorporation in a way that makes some useful sense.

Sure, you could go 4D here. Invoke a hypersphere in which the unit sphere is embedded. You could call that the infinite beyond that is some candidate next step. But my Peircean systems approach truncates at a threeness for the same kind of reasons that network theory says all possible networks can be simplified to networks of nodes with three links. Four, five or more links can reduce to 3-adic structure. And then 2-adic, or 1-adic are just to few. Therefore reality - in the logical sense of a space of relations – actually just is 3-adic as its simplest possible form.

So the mental image has to one of the number of internal convolutions involved, not some number line extension. What we are counting is the intricacy of the relational structure. And any fourth level would have to incorporate the first three in some further holistic sense.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Proceed one more step, and now you are about as aware as a rock: you have removed Firstness, you have removed your Physical First Person Perspective on the world, and it just seems like "A Thing, In Itself".

You see how this works in the same triadic fashion. Firstness is just the bare thing of first person response. Secondness is the second person point of view of two first persons in some immediate relation. Then the third person point of view is what emerges from innumerable such conversations – the generalisation over all possible first person views and the dyadic interactions that could result from there being two points of view.

The third person point of view becomes the one that incorporates or contextualises all the points of view now appearing within it. It now shapes the individual viewpoints in a positive fashion, imposing its educated structure on what would otherwise remain a confused or vague cacophony of hesitant opinion. Voices in the dark and going nowhere in particular.

So in the definite sense, the first person view doesn't even exist outside of the context of a third person framing. But when random ideas meet some dichotomous resistance, and when that clashing of views develops into a habitual community structure of understanding, then you arrive at the thirdness that incorporates everything to become the final historical something.

Quoting apokrisis

This is the fractal distribution of matter and energy that best characterises Nature. We see it in the Cosmic Web. It is the new "better" explanation for dark energy

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury? Dark Energy May Not Exist

Quoting apokrisis

The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist.

Would that comprise an 'overall increase of intelligibility'? Does that sound Hegelian? (Then again Peirce professed affinities with Hegel.)

Quoting apokrisis

So organisms arose when they stumbled across the further trick of encoding information using genes, neurons, words and numbers.

Don't they have to exist before they can stumble across anything?

Quoting apokrisis

n principle, life and mind just are expressions of the generalised cosmic desire to optimise dissipation.

Likewise, 'desire' can't help but sound teleological or anthropomorphic. Perhaps 'tendency' might be preferable.

For that matter, the capitalised Being above - does that refer to or distinguish living beings in particular? What is the capitalisation intended to signify?

Quoting Wayfarer

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury?

Yep.

Quoting Wayfarer

Would that comprise an 'overall increase of intelligibility'? Does that sound Hegelian? (Then again Peirce professed affinities with Hegel.)

Peirce called it the “growth of concrete reasonableness”. You get an evolution of the Cosmos that is the move from spontaneous chance to organised habit.

Quoting Wayfarer

Don't they have to exist before they can stumble across anything?

Language forces us into linear argument. That is both its strength and its weakness as a tool of thought. It is bad at dealing with the complexity of actual real world causality. But it is great for enforcing a mechanical mindset - which was useful even in those first cells that wanted to encode genetic programs to construct their molecular machinery.

Quoting Wayfarer

Likewise, 'desire' can't help but sound teleological or anthropomorphic. Perhaps 'tendency' might be preferable.

I have frequently noted that systems thinkers like Salthe make that distinction between tendencies, functions and purpose - three grades of semiosis to cover physics, biology and neurology.

Quoting Wayfarer

For that matter, the capitalised Being above

I was talking about Being in the classical sense of the source of fundamental existence.

My argument - as you know - is that semiosis is the mechanism that produces Being. So the cosmos, life and mind are all based on the one triadic causal logic. They are all best understood from the point of view of dissipative structure or topological order.

But life and mind add something to the mix, and that is an internal predictive model of the world. And this indeed completes the physics in a neatly ironic fashion as it is the existence of entropy that demands its dialectical “other” of negentropy or information. Life and mind had to be possible because a mindlessly dissipating universe could - by dichotomous symmetry - become entrained to an “external” control … if that control was encoded in a fashion that put it inside the body of an organism.

So this - as I’ve said often enough - is the fun realisation. Life and mind are implicit in the thermodynamic order of the universe as once the universe is a concrete system of dissipation, this in itself generates the conditions for life and mind to appear as the apparent negation of everything that mindless world stands for.

Symbol processing is inevitable once a noisy world creates the contrast it can stand against.

Physics isn’t in conflict with the existence of life and mind. It was the entropic move needed to make possible the informational counter-move.

Quoting apokrisis

Physics isn’t in conflict with the existence of life and mind. It was the entropic move needed to make possible the informational counter-move.

So might I enquire where consciousness/awareness enters the picture as you see it? Causal or consequential?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

It’s an interesting point, but a thing and its behaviors are one and the same. It’s impossible to take your eye off one in order to observe the other. There does appear to be a sort of being/behavior dualism, perhaps the result of splitting the two into subject/predicate for the purpose of language.

Quoting apokrisis

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury?
— Wayfarer

Yep.

Actually that makes perfect sense to me, little as I know about physical cosmology.

Reply to fdrake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting NOS4A2

It’s an interesting point, but a thing and its behaviors are one and the same. It’s impossible to take your eye off one in order to observe the other. There does appear to be a sort of being/behavior dualism, perhaps the result of splitting the two into subject/predicate for the purpose of language.
5h

You're saying language divides objects from their behavior, but this produces a misconception. So if we used language to describe what's really going on, would we be spouting nonsense?

Let's try. Describe how you drank coffee, but do so in a way that I won't become delusional. Is it that:

I am the drinking of the coffee.
The driving of the car drove me to work.
The sitting at the desk typing stupid shit in my phone, typed stupid shit on my phone.
The loving of philosophy has loved the philosophy. This is awesome.

Reply to frank
Quoting frank

How is conceptual judgment different from predication? You said predication was tacked onto perception, but it sounds like you've got them happening simultaneously.

Predicational judgement is one kind of conceptual discernment, and the perception one uses to draw shapes without making use of prior knowledge of objects like trees and tables is another kind of conceptual discernment.

Quoting frank

BTW, I know that any description of the visual field will be organized by ideas. My point was that the visual field itself is not driving conclusions about identification. That involves the application of discernment. Call it proto-predication.

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field. Seeing the world o e way for the purposes of drawing and another for the purposes of walking is a matter of a change in the manner of discernment.

Quoting frank

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.
— Joshs

That may be, but as you drive down the road, you're not usually aware that the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns. That would be something you'd realize via your intellect. It's a pretty sophisticated thought.

There are many things one is not explicitly aware of when one is driving, such as the physical actions involved in driving the car. One can be daydreaming about how the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns, and not remember any of the sights along the way or how one navigated the route to get to the destination. These conceptual aspects that one was not paying explicit attention to were nonetheless made use of in a implicit way. They were below the level of but never far from explicit awareness. Their proximity to explicit consciousness is demonstrated whenever something unexpected happens with the car. It may be a pothole or there may be a strange engine noise, and suddenly one’s attentional focus is immediately fixed on how one is driving , where one is , etc.

As far as seeing relative stability as absolute identity, what many fail to understand is that the experiencing of anything as absolutely self-identical over time, which traditional philosophies count on to ground ‘truth’, not only requires that a thing is qualitatively changing with respect to itself moment by moment.’, but it is the meaningful, relevant way in which it changes itself that gives us the sense of its continued identity.

Reply to fdrake

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting Joshs

Predicational judgement is one kind of conceptual discernment, and the perception one uses to draw shapes without making use of prior knowledge of objects like trees and tables is another kind of conceptual discernment.

But what is the difference?

Quoting Joshs

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field.

So again, how is this not predication? If you have expectations, you expect that x is y, or some variant of that.

Quoting NOS4A2

a thing and its behaviors are one and the same

Well, that's a question.

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

But what about there actually being a duck there? Do you model that by embedding your model into a larger model, and in the larger model the duck existing sort of switches on the model you had before? But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model.

Am I wrong about that?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reply to frank

Quoting frank

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field.
— Joshs

So again, how is this not predication? If you have expectations, you expect that x is y, or some variant of that.

The propositional statement ‘x is y’ involves the manipulation of logical symbols. Cognitive science, using the computer as its model, used to depict all cognitive processes by way of symbol manipulation inside the head. More recent approaches abandon the notions of representation and symbol manipulation in favor of embodied, contextual coping Just because we can use symbol manipulation models such as ‘s=p’ doesnt mean that the underlying cognitive processes operate this way.

Quoting Joshs

More recent approaches abandon the notions of representation and symbol manipulation in favor of embodied, contextual coping

More recent approaches abandon symbol manipulation in favor of quantum mechanics. Doesn't mean we know anymore now than we've ever known about how cognition actually works.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

What do you imagine "actually true" means?

For me, there are norms of what count as discovery. That includes actually doing things like opening the window to check the weather. The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that. Our norms of truth telling also understand things like if people stopped using a currency, it would cease to have value. See what I mean? I mentioned this in the previous thread. With @Leontiskos. That people routinely assess mind independence as part of social norms, and it's a real thing, you can go look.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that there is an important sense in which "things are what they do," can be affirmed without having to jettison the intuition that "things do what they do because of what they are." Where I believe we get into trouble is when we end up with something like: "things are what they do and what they do is unintelligible brute fact, i.e. they do what they do "for no reason at all."

But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its [I]virtus dormitiva[/I]. The "because" in "because of what they are" feels a little thin. Are we sure that talk about how something behaves and talk about what it is aren't just equivalent vocabularies?

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

(Why do ducks quack rather than chirp or croak or bark or meow -- different kind of question, I think. Similarly, why do ducks quack on particular sorts of occasions and not others. There are lots of questions about quacking we can expect substantive answers to.)

Reply to fdrake Quoting fdrake

The way I prefer to approach causality in assemblages - and this might be my own brainfarts - is that causality in an assemblage is equivalent to the behaviour of a change propagation through connected parts. Like if you had the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, if you had shitty heroin instead of good heroin it could propagate changes into needle behaviour {up the dose} addict behaviour {inject the higher dose, craving} and social stuff {complain at the dealer, buy more...}. And it's appropriate to think of that as a cause.

Though I agree that the causal order can be tangled in assemblages - if you're considering addict-heroin-socius-needle as an assemblage, it doesn't have any unique event ordering. You could have a change in addict propagating to heroin-socius-needle, then back to addict, or a change in socius propagating to addict-heroin-needle.

I understand causality in assemblages differently. Thus, your description could be seen as a successive derivation, like the synaptic transmission of nerve impulses—a modulated propagation of the impulse through various mediums. It is certainly a form of indirect causality, of the input-output type, which regularly appears in your assemblage. It looks similar to De Landa’s perspective on causality in assemblages.I would consider your case of causality within the context of Deleuze’s notion of immanent cause. As Deleuze explains, “The immanent cause is realized, integrated, and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual superposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages” (Deleuze, Foucault, p. 32).First, the needle-heroin-addict-socius complex is an aggregation of heterogeneous elements. But what makes it a concrete assemblage? Bluntly, it is repetition—a coherent reappearance of the key elements, accompanied by derivative modulations, much like what you just described. Each disparate element has its own history, its own developmental tendency, and belongs to an autonomous field of knowledge and practice far greater than the individual components in your example. The historical and contingent overlap of these fields creates a virtual prerequisite potential for the assemblage. We typically take this virtual constellation for granted, but each of its implicit components is critically important for the existence of the assemblage.Imagine, for instance, that needles are no longer used in medicine, and thus will no longer be produced. Or that a medication is invented to prevent heroin use. In either case, the immanent cause would act as the whole interplay of relations that gives rise to the identity of the concrete assemblage. Conversely, the coherence of needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage would affect the prerequisite constellation of presupposed factors.Moreover, without concrete assemblages, we cannot distinguish the fluid and variable conjunction of the generative state. In both directions, there is no direct causal interaction between the two planes. There are only indirect, mediated effects and implications. Immanent cause designates the autonomous organization of a system of implicit operative conditions, which acquires a temporal mode of self-sustaining autopoiesis. The abstract machine operates as a reciprocal feedback loop that maintains the relational unity of the two planes of heterogeneous multiplicity.By emphasizing the singularity of a concrete assemblage, the notion of immanent cause also marks the development of Deleuze’s philosophy of individuation, especially concerning the relation between the virtual and the actual.

Quoting Number2018

There are only indirect, mediated effects and implications. Immanent cause designates the autonomous organization of a system of implicit operative conditions, which acquires a temporal mode of self-sustaining autopoiesis.

That would be worth another thread. Some assemblages behave as if there is a relevant concept of sufficient cause - pool cue strikes ball, ball goes into table pocket. Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you. Things like that. The changes propagate in each case, but to the extent an assemblage can be split into distinct entities with relations, it makes sense to see the state of one relation propagating into others given a change.

Quoting Number2018

The immanent cause is realized, integrated, and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual superposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages

I read that as less a statement of arbitrary, recursive mediation and more a statement that assemblage-level laws {abstract machines, things like physical laws} are coextensive with the behaviour of their components {concrete assemblages}. It's roughly a way of saying a law of nature says nothing more than what things already do and can do.

Reply to fdrake [quote="fdrake;958184"]So there's enough normative character to do things with, but the nature of what can be done using those norms is not totally determined by their current state of expression - only what may be expressed with them fully determines their expression {given the current state of the assemblage}. Which is basically a tautology, but no one knows the scope of those rules without knowing all the theorems. An appeal to potential development, there, is an assemblage concept that ?Number2018 referenced, organisation in accordance with some abstract machine."

The explicit articulation of a system of norms or rules prescribing concrete conduct or behavior for people in a concrete assemblage has a complex and ambiguous relationship with what people actually do. Let’s return to your case of the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage. There are different degrees of conscious adherence to the rules, ranging from the complete automation of the addicts to the high degree of awareness in the social and medical staff involved. Yet, while acting, even the involved professionals do not explicitly follow a system of rules. Similarly, when playing, professional basketball players do not consciously attend to the system of the game’s rules.Shaun Gallagher notes that “When the fielder is trying to catch the baseball, she is not performing tests or sampling the environment. The brain is not located in the center, conducting tests along the radii; it is on the circumference, one station amongst other stations involved in the loop thatalso navigates through the body and environment and forms the whole” (Gallagher, "Enactivist Interventions", p. 19). Gallagher’s enactivist approach aligns closely with the framework of assemblage theory. Thus, apparent rules are situated within the environment, which possesses its own organization, and where discursive, social, and normative components constitute the clearly expressible and articulable system.On the other hand, Gallagher’s concept of the ‘body’ refers to an integration of disparate but interconnected patterns of physical and psychic states, perceptions, reactions, and behaviors. The conscious self-orientation, ‘the brain’, is just one component of the larger complex that constitutes the game’s assemblage. It primarily follows the vectors of alignment between the two planes, which can be referred to as the abstract machine of the game’s assemblage. Similarly, in your example of the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, the conscious participation follows "one station amongst other stations involved in the navigation on the loop."

Reply to Number2018 Reply to fdrake
I think the issues you raise here regarding assemblages—defined loosely as groupings or networks of interconnected elements—should be tied into one of the pioneers of "systems" type theories—Alfred North Whitehead. In the quote below, there are three views going on here (two that agree about metaphysics of process—Whitehead and his defender, the quote's author Shaviro—and Harmon, an essentialist).

Whitehead - Reality is process, but there are endurances of patterns, meaning recurring structures or configurations that maintain coherence over time and can often be seen as persistent objects. Whitehead preserves these endurances by viewing each moment of becoming as an "actual occasion," which integrates prior patterns into a unified experience. These occasions form a sequence, inheriting qualities from their predecessors, allowing stable patterns to persist even as the underlying processes continually shift.

Graham (contra Whitehead) - Reality is objectile, and each object possesses a "hidden essence" that cannot be fully accessed by other objects. For example, a stone might be perceived differently depending on its relation to a human observer, a riverbed, or geological forces, but its core essence—the quality that makes it a stone rather than something else—remains inaccessible and unaltered by these interactions.

Shaviro (agreeing with Whitehead, contra Graham) - Reality is process, and Whitehead accounted for persistence through the recognition of persistent patterns.

Here is the quote:

Quoting Shaviro

Harman rejects Whitehead’s relationalism for two reasons: 1) he worries it reduces ontology to “a house of mirrors” wherein, because a thing just is a unification of its prehensions of other things, there is never finally any there there beneath its internal reflections of others; and 2) he claims that an ontology based exclusively on internal relations, wherein entities are said to hold nothing in reserve beyond their present prehensional relation to the universe, cannot account for change or novelty. In such a universe, there would be “no external point of purchase from which structure could be transformed,” as Levi Bryant puts it (The Democracy of Objects, 209). As Shaviro is quick to point out, however, Whitehead was well aware of this potential objection (see page 35 of PR, for example), which is exactly why he amended his ontology sometime between his final editing of Science and the Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality (1929) so that becoming was understood to be atomic rather than continuous. A fair reading of Whitehead’s mature metaphysical scheme should acknowledge (despite a few inconsistent statements here and there) that his goal was to strike some balance between internal and external relations, precisely for the reasons put forward by Harman and Bryant.

In response to Harman’s first worry regarding an infinite regress of prehensions, I’d call his bluff and say that a truly aesthetic ontology (which he also claims to be seeking) would leave us with just such an infinite regress of appearances. A thing’s “style” or “allure” doesn’t need to be understood as emanating from some substantial core or fixed essence; we can also understand a thing’s “style” as Whitehead does in terms of the “enduring characteristic” realized by a historical route of actual occasions. There is nothing hidden from view by such outward qualities other than the occasion in question’s moment-to-moment subjective enjoyment of these characteristics. Which brings us to Harman’s second (I believe unfounded) worry about relational reductionism. Whitehead’s dipolar account of the process of experiential realization includes both a public moment of display and a private moment of withdrawal. Every drop of experience begins by taking up the “objectively immortal” data of its past. It then unifies this data into its own singular and private perspective on the world. It is this moment of privacy that most closely resembles Harman’s doctrine of withdrawal. The occasion in question is in this moment entirely independent of its relations. But as soon as this private, never before experienced perspective on reality is realized, it perishes into objective immortality, becoming publicly available for the next occasion of experience to inherit as it moves toward its own novel concrescent realization. “The many become one, and are increased by one.” Whitehead is able to make sense of change and novelty while at the same time preserving a non-reductive account of internal relations. It seems to me that Harman’s insistence on the irrelevance of evolutionary time for ontology is part of the reason he is unable to make sense of Whitehead’s attempted compromise (“The ontological structure of the world does not evolve…which is precisely what makes it an ontological structure” [GM, 24]). In effect, Whitehead’s entire process ontology can be understood as an imaginative generalization of evolutionary theory.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model.

I think this is quite right, and I think it feeds into the points @Count Timothy von Icarus is making against @fdrake.
(And no, you can't model switching on a model - in the relevant sense.)

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

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

No, I don't think so. I was wondering when that would come up.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

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

The problem occurs when one says, "Everything is a verb (and nouns are taken for granted)." Or for @fdrake, "Everything is a socially constructed norm (and norms of truth-telling understand that things go beyond socially constructed norms)." All Aristotle is doing is not taking the quiet part for granted.

The virtus dormitiva flies over the head of the modern, but let's apply the same thing to your duck example. Note again:

Quoting Leontiskos

Why does it speak at one time and not at another? Because it has a power to speak English.

Quoting Leontiskos

[On Verbism,] If a dog barks and a duck quacks, then we have two behaviors or verbs that are not explainable in terms of substances or nouns.

If you don't admit that the duck and its quack are two different kinds of thing, then your "commonsensical" claim that everyone knows ducks quack and that ducks are not constantly quacking, is petitio principii.

Ducks have a power to quack. Sometimes they quack, sometimes they don't. The quack comes from them. It is their quack. The noun and the verb are not the same thing, but are related as substance-accident.

Now you can say, "Yeah, duh!" But if you don't accept that substances and accidents both exist, then you're begging the question. You can't begin, "Only behaviors exist; ducks are not behavior; therefore ducks do not properly exist," and then go on to say, "But the quacking still comes from the duck." You can't annihilate ducks with your left hand (which are beings-and-not-behavior) and then conjure them up again with your right hand.

There was a very stark example of this:

Quoting fdrake

Like general principles "a being is what it does"

This is a straight up contradiction. "A noun is a verb." "A being is a behavior." It isn't. These are word games. Or poetry in search of philosophical coherence.

Quoting fdrake

The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that.

"And our norms of truth-telling understand that." This is tantamount to Banno's refusal to go beyond <"Snow is white" is true iff snow is white>. It is similar to Michael's refusal to reckon with the limitations of nominalism. You can't just appeal to poetic metaphor and pretend that it's metaphor all the way down. Norms don't understand anything. That happens to be a problem.

Quoting fdrake

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

No, we just want truth-telling, and we're pointing out that your theory doesn't get us there.

Quoting fdrake

In which Ramanujan's statements prior to his collaboration with Hardy were correctly assertible but he did not assert them while following the norms of mathematical discourse at the time

Which is proof that what is correctly assertible deviates from the norms, and this is what you keep denying. You have odd equivocations going on between 'truth', 'correctly assertible', and 'norms'.

Quoting fdrake

His principles were useful but not correctly assertible, but people believed them nevertheless, and just didn't give a crap about the self contradiction because the overall endeavour seemed cromulent and useful. The idea was morally true {a term in maths scholarship}.

"Not giving a crap about self contradiction" doesn't seem like serious philosophy to me. I don't think you can stand on that and call it a day.

I was planning something like this, but Count already did it:

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

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

However, if I am mistaken, and background frames can shift such that Adolf Hitler was the first president, then surely claims like "we need not worry to much about this shifting because it is occurring very slowly" are also liable to become false.

That's a good entry point. If everything is mutable then what about the first President of the United States?

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

Quoting Leontiskos

No, we just want truth-telling, and we're pointing out that your theory doesn't get us there.

I am interested in what else you would want? What would you like out of a theory of truth telling?

Quoting Leontiskos

"Not giving a crap about self contradiction" doesn't seem like serious philosophy to me. I don't think you can stand on that and call it a day.

It is nevertheless what happened with Newton's method of fluxions. You can even read Berkley's and Marx's criticisms of it. It was well understood that his mathematical artifice was self contradictory, and no one cared because the ideas in it were essentially right nevertheless. People do this all the time!

Reply to fdrake

When we get down to it, it seems like you want to say something like, "Yeah, my approach is contradictory. But it will work itself out in the end." Or perhaps you would just say, "But it's cromulent/pragmatic, and that's all that matters." Again: Bacon.

Reply to Leontiskos

Well I can't control how you read it or must parse it in your terms. @Number2018 seems to have no problem with it in principle! But that's probably because we come at this from similar perspectives to begin with.

Reply to Number2018 Quoting fdrake

s the whole” (Gallagher, "Enactivist Interventions", p. 19). Gallagher’s enactivist approach aligns closely with the framework of assemblage theory.

This may be a quibble, but it seems me a difference between Gallagher’s approach (and other enactivists) and Deleuze’s is that Gallagher’s model of body schema and body image is drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal intersubjectivity, whereas Deleuze is informed by Nietzsche’s critique of causality. The elements of an assemblage for Deleuze, the partial objects of desiring machines which are the basis of sense, are affective drives. By contrast, Gallagher and other enactivists partially separate the affective and the conceptual aspects of assemblages. Foucault comments:

The Logic of Sense can be read as the most alien book imaginable from The Phenomenology of Perception. In this latter text, the body-organism is linked to the world through a network of primal significations which arise from the perception of things, while, according to Deleuze, phantasms form the impenetrable and incorporeal surface of bodies; and from this process, simultaneously topological and cruel, something is shaped that falsely presents itself as a centered organism and distributes at its periphery the increasing remoteness of things.

Reply to fdrake

What do you imagine "actually true" means?

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

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

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

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

Reply to Joshs

I didn't say the quoted text. Think this is a typo on your part.

Reply to Leontiskos

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

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

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

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

This was probably covered already, but what about forbearance? I am the drinking of the tea, but am I also the lack of caring about the weather? I mean, do we always have to describe behavior in positive terms? Or can I be the not-remembering of what day it is?

Quoting Joshs

Gallagher’s model of body schema and body image is drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal intersubjectivity, whereas Deleuze is informed by Nietzsche’s critique of causality.

What should matter is how a particular theory functions, rather than the historical associations that can be made with it.
Quoting Joshs

The elements of an assemblage for Deleuze, the partial objects of desiring machines which are the basis of sense, are affective drives. By contrast, Gallagher and other enactivists partially separate the affective and the conceptual aspects of assemblages.

Indeed, at a ‘molecular’ level, D&G’s philosophy of desire considers a field of heterogeneous drives, flows, and partial objects. Desire, in this sense, is a machine—an assemblage of disparate parts that functions coherently. However, from the outset, this libidinal regime is inseparable from the socius, meaning that libido directly invests the field of molar, socio-political production. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Affects and drives form part of the infrastructure itself” (D&G, AO, p. 53). Therefore, the notion of desiring machine is later giving way to the concept of abstract machine, which designates a link between these two different levels.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, and this shows up most clearly in the realm of ethics.

Bringing this back around to the OP, we just take it as self evident that morality starts with treating a person as a subject. We do say there's a "stroke in room 9" but there's a danger in this, that a person is being treated as a piece of meat.

It's moral to remember of the people you consider, whether villains or victims, that it could be you. This is why starting the discussion with a focus on objects and whether they're stationary or just relatively stationary obscures the real issue. People have to be united subjects. The simple but mighty argument for this is: morality.

Reply to frank

Quoting frank

Bringing this back around to the OP, we just take it as self evident that morality starts with treating a person as a subject. We do say there's a "stroke in room 9" but there's a danger in this, that a person is being treated as a piece of meat.

It's moral to remember of the people you consider, whether villains or victims, that it could be you. This is why starting the discussion with a focus on objects and whether they're stationary or just relatively stationary obscures the real issue. People have to be united subjects. The simple but mighty argument for this is: morality

When you talk about treating a person as a subject, you bring into play notions of empathy, seeing things from the other’s perspective, allowing yourself to become involved in their situation. As an ethical task, this is one of life’s biggest challenges, since a personality is not stationary but a moving target. Since the movement of their experience involves a vantage that is different from yours, you must be able to navigate not just the contextually changing vicissitudes of experience as you experience them, but be able to some extent to see these changes from another’s eyes. Moral concepts can help or hinder this project depending on how well they take into account the stance-dependency of experience, and the mobility of stances in response to changing circumstances. We may accept that persons are not stationary in their attitudes, opinions and responses to the world and to each other, because our attitudes are mutually affected by interaction with each other, but we may still feel it necessary to impose stationary moral principles on the dynamics of our involvement with each other.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think so. Is the idea that if people's standards for determining what is true changed, what is true would also change.

Not quite. The idea is that people can tell whether something is dependent upon human opinion for its properties, or existence. And assessing what senses that dependence has. Assessing such dependence/independence is part of our epistemic apparatus, and is something which is correctly assertible sometimes and not others.

I understand the counterargument you and @Leontiskos are advancing against my position as follows:

Call correct assertibility of a sentence A C( A ) and truth of a sentence T.

1 ) There exists a system of norms N such that {following N in assessing if A is C( A ) forces C ( A )}.
2 ) N is conventional.
3 ) N can thus be changed to some M such that {following M in assessing if A is C( A ) forces { C( not-A ) or not C( A ) }.
4) Assume that T ( A )
5 ) Then it's possible that T( A ) and not C( A ).
6 ) Therefore C( A ) doesn't mean the same as T( A ).

Things I agree with in this argument:
A) I agree with 1.
B) I agree with 3, up to restricting the scope of which changes are appropriate given that N has actually assessed A and found C( A ) - it could very well be that no moves are possible from the current state of N such that not-C( A ).
C) I agree with 5.
D) I sort of agree with 6. I agree C( A ) doesn't mean the same as T( A ), but I don't agree it follows from the rest of the argument.
E) I could agree with 2, depending on how convention is construed.

I'm not trying to commit myself to the claim that {T( A ) iff C( A )}, moreover the inference from 5) to 6) is something I reject, since two predicates sharing an extension doesn't meaning they're used the same way {Clarke Kent and Superman}.

I think there existing M and N such that C( A ) in M and not-C( A ) in N is working as intended. This isn't logical contradiction unless M=N. I also claim that it's a good description of how things work. I've given an example of that before with Ramanujan coming to adopt the system of norms of mathematics and thus being able to correctly assert his claims, even though he couldn't correctly assert them before.

Perhaps a better example is the discovery of atomic orbitals. In ye olde days atomic physicists believe all positive and negative charges obeyed the Coulomb force rule. They also knew that this entails that electrons were attracted to the nucleus of an atom. They also knew that electrons did not collapse into the nucleus of an atom. In this regard when they adopted the coulomb force theory, they were correctly asserting something - charges attract or repel in an inverse square law - but also correctly asserting something which contradicted it - some charges do not attract in an inverse square law. The difference is in context. You might be able to think of this as a quantifier restriction on the scope of the prior coulomb law, but I'm just going to say it's different contexts of use. Regardless, people behaved as if the coulomb law had unrestricted quantification over charges and restricted quantification over charges at the same time. And this was fine, science did not implode.

It's also a case where people knew the coulomb law was not true in some absolute sense, but could be asserted without problem {correctly!} in some contexts! I'd made prior comments about the difference between truth as a concept and assertibility as a concept is that asserting a statement is true means enacting a particularly precise and pernickity form of correct assertibility.

You might say that this doesn't clear anything up, as if it's a sub case of correct assertibility you can reiterate the above argument. And there I'd agree, you can. But I don't think this is a problem.

What would be a problem was if in the same context of use something was true and untrue, or correctly assertible and not correctly assertible. Then that context of use would be committed to a contradiction of some sort. Which can be... alright, pragmatically.

Why is it that people agree on so much? I think this comes down to how norms of judgement are generated. Peoples' eyes agree on object locations very durably, so location within a room works like that. Even if they might disagree on the true locations of objects when the rulers come out - like if my coaster is 30cm or 30.005cm from the nearest edge of my desk to me. If correct assertibility is an assay, truth is crucible.

When people share the same contexts, the overwhelming majority of conduct norms about such basic things are very fixed like that. That includes various inferences, like "if you put your hand in the fire, you'll burn it", "don't put your hand in the fire" comes along with that as the judgement that burning your hand in the fire for no reason is bad is very readily caused by the pain of it.

In the latter regard, there's a room for a moral realism in terms of correct assertibility, since the conventions are so durable and there's room to claim that "needless harm is bad" is true.

But I doubt you will find any of this particularly satisfying.

Quoting Joshs

. As an ethical task, this is one of life’s biggest challenges, since a personality is not stationary but a moving target.

As a person moves and changes, it's the same person.

Reply to frank Quoting frank

As a person moves and changes, it's the same person.

People wouldn’t so much time trying to find themselves if they couldn’t lose themselves.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua Hochschild has a good article on just this divide.

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

He responds directly to Moliere's caricature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting Joshs

People wouldn’t so much time trying to find themselves if they couldn’t lose themselves.

Das Man blinds them. Wherever you go, there you are. :grin:

Quoting fdrake

I am interested in what else you would want? What would you like out of a theory of truth telling?

I think the problem is that there is no truth-telling occurring. You are allergic to the word:

Quoting fdrake

It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict.

Are you capable of using the word 'true'? Do you think it has meaning? Do you think it can be replaced with your frames and models and norms and "counts as" and "correctly assertible"?

Or as Srap said:

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model.

To "switch on" a model or proffer a model is apparently to make a claim that a model is true or represents something true. You seem to want to substitute model-play and frame-play for truth talk, and then you want to pretend that your model-play and frame-play are not simply presupposing truth in the first place.

Quoting fdrake

I'm not trying to commit myself to the claim that {T( A ) iff C( A )}

I don't think you have any clear sense of how truth is supposed to relate to the things you are trying to substitute in its place:

Quoting fdrake

The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck.

Quoting fdrake

...I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X.

More:

Quoting fdrake

I think there existing M and N such that C( A ) in M and not-C( A ) in N is working as intended. This isn't logical contradiction unless M=N. I also claim that it's a good description of how things work. I've given an example of that before with Ramanujan coming to adopt the system of norms of mathematics and thus being able to correctly assert his claims, even though he couldn't correctly assert them before.

Do you even know what you mean by "correctly assertible?" You've already vacillated a few times on whether Ramanujan's early claims were correctly assertible, actually contradicting yourself [hide="*"](here is an example where you claim his claims were correctly assertible)[/hide]. That doesn't surprise me.

Generally I would see something as "correctly assertible" in relation to some conventional norm. But this just begs the question of how the assertion relates to truth and how the norm relates to reality. We can rearrange norms, models, and frames until the cows come home, but the question remains: what do these norms, models, and frames have to do with reality? What do our statements in these languages have to do with truth?

And the pragmatist isn't shielded from truth. If he wants his combustion engine to run he will need combustible fuel. Gasoline is either combustible or it isn't, and we don't ask norms, frames, or models whether it is combustible. We ask reality. The only use of norms, frames, and models is in mediating reality.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Quoting Leontiskos

And the pragmatist isn't shielded from truth. If he wants his combustion engine to run he will need combustible fuel. Gasoline is either combustible or it isn't, and we don't ask norms, frames, or models whether it is combustible. We ask reality. The only use of norms, frames, and models is in mediating reality.

Take another look at this argument. Anything odd about it? Anything at all?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Take another look at this argument. Anything odd about it? Anything at all?

Not sure what you're getting at.

When one talks about a magnifying glass and looks at a magnifying glass while under the impression that the magnifying glass itself is the object of interest, they have misunderstood what a magnifying glass is, and how to use it. So too with norms, models, frames, etc.

• What do you see?
• A magnifying glass.
• No! What do you see!? The magnifying glass is there to help you see small things.

This sort of reification of norms is not innocuous:

Quoting fdrake

The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that.

Or to put a finer point on it, say, "The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our norms of truth telling, and our norms of truth telling understand that." This gets us a step closer to fdrake's (quasi-redacted?) idea that "counting as" has no necessary or sufficient relation to "being", and vice-versa. Which is tantamount to despair of truth.

And I realize that these problems bother fdrake. Well they should. But he keeps trying to paper over the problems and pretend that all is well and good. ...And all the while his inner engineer seems to be jury rigging a Newtonian "self-contradiction isn't so bad" parachute. :brow:

Reply to fdrake Quoting fdrake

Some assemblages behave as if there is a relevant concept of sufficient cause - pool cue strikes ball, ball goes into table pocket. Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you. Things like that. The changes propagate in each case, but to the extent an assemblage can be split into distinct entities with relations, it makes sense to see the state of one relation propagating into others given a change.

I agree that various types of causality can be relevantly applied within different assemblages. Moreover, some causal relations can even be universally applicable. However, let’s consider your example: "Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you." There are four heterogeneous elements: ‘eating,’ ‘a lethal (sufficient) dose,’ ‘cyanide,’ and ‘killing.’ One could start by asking about factors that brought these elements together. Following Durkheim, one might invoke the concept of anomie, which designates a state of degradation of the social fabric that leads to an increase in suicidal deaths. Alternatively, one could turn to the death of Socrates and examine the practices of execution in ancient Greece. In either case, the inevitable conclusion would be that the extraordinary encounter of political-social forces is necessary to assemble these disparate components.This is also true for your other examples, such as the needle-heroin-addict-socius or the pool cue-strikes-ball-goes-into-table-pocket assemblages. Moreover, what distinguishes an assemblage from a mere occasional aggregate, is a pattern of recurrence, a regularity of appearances. Therefore, it makes sense to determine a kind of causal relation that is ultimately responsible for the temporal durability of the assemblage.

Quoting fdrake

The immanent cause is realized, integrated, and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual superposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages
— Number2018

I read that as less a statement of arbitrary, recursive mediation and more a statement that assemblage-level laws {abstract machines, things like physical laws} are coextensive with the behaviour of their components {concrete assemblages}. It's roughly a way of saying a law of nature says nothing more than what things already do and can do.

It’s likely that I didn’t fully elaborate on Deleuze’s notion of immanent cause and its relevance to assemblage theory. Deleuze defines this concept in his monograph on Foucault, where he explores several concrete Foucault's assemblages such as prisons, schools, or workshops, but always within the broader framework of his philosophy of immanence and difference.Let’s consider again your examples of the needle-heroin-addict-socius and the pool cue-strikes-ball-goes-into-table-pocket assemblages. In both, it is possible to distinguish between two heterogeneous and distinguishable conjunctions, in terms of Deleuze, two ‘lines of differentiation.’ The first line consists of socially recognizable and articulable activities or outcomes. In the case of the pool example, it could represent ways of obtaining leisure, socializing, or maintaining social status. The second line involves bodily and psychic intermingling—integrated blocks of primarily ritualized or automized practices, in Bourdieu sense.In ancient Greece, for instance, it would have been impossible to inject a dose of heroin in the way we do today, meaning that the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage could not have emerged.There is no direct causal or hierarchical relation between these two 'lines'. According to Deleuze, a type of socius should emerge to establish and sustain their connection. He refers to the cause of this singular coherence as the abstract machine, which coexists with the social.
"The diagram or abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or
intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, 'or rather in every relation from one point to another." (Deleuze, “Foucault’, p32)
Here, the ‘point’ represents a concrete assemblage. For it to consistently reappear, the discernible planes of the assemblage must be doubled and reinforced by a set of primarily imperceptible social relations.

Quoting Number2018

I agree that various types of causality can be relevantly applied within different assemblages. Moreover, some causal relations can even be universally applicable. However, let’s consider your example: "Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you." There are four heterogeneous elements: ‘eating,’ ‘a lethal (sufficient) dose,’ ‘cyanide,’ and ‘killing.’ One could start by asking about factors that brought these elements together. Following Durkheim, one might invoke the concept of anomie, which designates a state of degradation of the social fabric that leads to an increase in suicidal deaths. Alternatively, one could turn to the death of Socrates and examine the practices of execution in ancient Greece. In either case, the inevitable conclusion would be that the extraordinary encounter of political-social forces is necessary to assemble these disparate components.This is also true for your other examples, such as the needle-heroin-addict-socius or the pool cue-strikes-ball-goes-into-table-pocket assemblages. Moreover, what distinguishes an assemblage from a mere occasional aggregate, is a pattern of recurrence, a regularity of appearances. Therefore, it makes sense to determine a kind of causal relation that is ultimately responsible for the temporal durability of the assemblage.

I agree that one could do that, and it would be a relevant way to study how the assemblage of eating cyanide was generated. Nevertheless, one can hold the individuating conditions for a given assemblage fixed and give an account of how it works as an assemblage. In the same way as you don't need to know the history of pool cues to describe a pool cue striking a ball.

Another way of putting it is that assemblages, once they're up and running, are often created and sustained through internalised networks rather than the ones which partook to their genesis.

I'm sure you agree with that, I'm mostly spitballing.

Reply to fdrake

Quoting fdrake

Another way of putting it is that assemblages, once they're up and running, are often created and sustained through internalised networks rather than the ones which partook to their genesis.

I'm sure you agree with that, I'm mostly spitballing

Ah yes, I think Reply to Number2018 might agree that this is what Deleuze-Guattari refer to as the molar dimension, which they argue is a surface effect of processes within molecular assemblages.

It is only at the submicroscopic level of desiring-machines that there exists a functionalism—machinic arrangements, an engineering of desire; for it is only there that functioning and formation, use and assembly, product and production merge. All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not formed in the same way they function, and the technical machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what is not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an intention. The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves.”(AO)

But who cares, there are many different kinds of assemblage theory, and I’m not suggesting you’re obliged to stick religiously to Deleuze.

Quoting Joshs

But who cares, there are many different kinds of assemblage theory, and I’m not suggesting you’re obliged to stick religiously to Deleuze.

Manuel DeLanda has the best "post-Deleuzian" assembly theory, IMHO. He takes a few elements from Mario Bunge (specifically, his concept of causality). I don't accept assembly theory myself, I prefer ontologies that are more object-oriented.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Manuel DeLanda has the best "post-Deleuzian" assembly theory, IMHO. He takes a few elements from Mario Bunge (specifically, his concept of causality). I don't accept assembly theory myself, I prefer ontologies that are more object-oriented.

DeLanda does have an interesting take on assemblages. I read Graham Harman, and came to the conclusion that his approach is a throwback to certain strands of 19th century empiricism.

Quoting Joshs

Ah yes, I think Number2018 might agree that this is what Deleuze-Guattari refer to as the molar dimension, which they argue is a surface effect of processes within molecular assemblages.

:up:

I don't like using the vocabulary since it's nuts for people who have no background in it.

Quoting Joshs

DeLanda does have an interesting take on assemblages. I read Graham Harman, and came to the conclusion that his approach is a throwback to certain strands of 19th century empiricism.

They co-authored a book together, called The Rise of Realism. It's a dialogue on several different topics. Perhaps you're already familiar with it. If not, it's definitely worth checking out.

Among other things, Harman pressed DeLanda on the concept of matter in that book, and I don't think that DeLanda's answer was an adequate one. And I say that as a materialist.

Reply to Leontiskos

Quoting Leontiskos

When one talks about a magnifying glass and looks at a magnifying glass while under the impression that the magnifying glass itself is the object of interest, they have misunderstood what a magnifying glass is, and how to use it. So too with norms, models, frames, etc

Yes, but human perception is neither a lens nor a camera.
It is not designed for observation but for guided action.

This central concern of the enactive position stands in contradistinction to the received view that perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of existing environmental information. In the enactive approach reality is not a given: it is perceiver-dependent, not because the perceiver “constructs” it as he or she pleases, but because what counts as a relevant world is inseparable from the structure of theperceiver.

A classical illustration of the perceptual guidance of action is the study of Richard Held and Alan Hein, who raised kittens in the dark and exposed them to lightonly under controlled conditions. A first group of animals was allowed to move around normally, but they were harnessed to a simple carriage and basket that contained the second group of animals. The two groups, therefore, shared the same visual experience, but the second group was entirely passive. When the animals were released after a few weeks of this treatment, the first group of kittens behaved normally, but those who had been carried around behaved as if they were blind: they bumped into objects and fell over edges. This beautiful study illustrates the – enactive – view that objects are seen not by the visual extraction of features, but rather by the visual guidance of action. Similar results have been obtained under various other circumstances and studied even at the level of the single cell.

If the reader feels that this example is fine for cats, but irrelevant for humans, let us consider another case. Paul Bach y Rita designed a video camera for blind persons that can stimulate multiple points on the skin by electrically activated vibration. Thus images formed with the camera were translated into patterned tactile sensations – with the following results. Patterns projected onto the skin had no “visual” content if the subject remained motionless.

However, if the subject directed the camera by moving his head, hands, or body for a few hours, a remarkable transformation occurred. The tactile sensations became visual perceptions, the patterns of vibration on the skin were not felt but seen as images projected into the space being explored by the bodily directed “gaze” of the video camera. Thus in order to experience “real objects out there,” it was enough for the person to actively direct the camera. This experience is an excellent example of the perceiver-dependent nature of what otherwise seems an internal representation of a perceiver-independent world of features.

Cognitive science is waking up to the full importance of the realization that perception does not consist in the recovery of a pre-given world, but rather in the perceptual guidance of action in a world that is inseparable from our sensorimotor capacities, and that “higher” cognitive structures also emerge from recurrent patterns of perceptually guided action. Thus cognition consists not of representations but of embodied action. Thus we can say that the world we know is not pre-given; it is, rather, enacted through our history of structural coupling, and the temporal hinges that articulate enaction are rooted in the number of alternative microworlds that are activated in every situation. These alternatives are the source of both common sense and creativity in cognition.

Thus it seems more and more compelling to look at knowledge – to understand understanding – in a manner that can only be called post-Cartesian: that is knowledge
appears more and more as being built from small domains composed of microworlds and microidentities. Behavioral repertoires vary throughout the animal kingdom, but what all living cognitive beings seem to have in common is know- how constituted on the basis of the concrete. Thus what we call general and abstract are aggregates of readiness-for-action.( Francisco Varela, Ethical Know-how)

Quoting Joshs

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

Looks like you need to try reading that post again.

Reply to Leontiskos Quoting Leontiskos

Looks like you need to try reading that post again

You claimed that a model or norm implies something true and pre-existing in the external world on which it is based. The quote I included argues that perception and cognition are not models or representations of a pre-existing world, they enact a world through guided action.

Reply to Joshs - Yeah, you rolled in your schtick. Model/norm != perception.

Reply to Leontiskos

Quoting Leontiskos

?Joshs - Yeah, you rolled in your schtick. Model/norm != perception

And what is your schtick? How would you characterize the role of perception?

Reply to Joshs - Not every thread is about perception. For example, this thread is not about perception.

Quoting fdrake

one can hold the individuating conditions for a given assemblage fixed and give an account of how it works as an assemblage. In the same way as you don't need to know the history of pool cues to describe a pool cue striking a ball.

Another way of putting it is that assemblages, once they're up and running, are often created and sustained through internalised networks rather than the ones which partook to their genesis.

It looks like you place strong emphasis on the synchronic aspect of the assemblage, where all its workings and functioning are fully realized in the present moment. No doubt, this perspective allows for interesting research. However, an exclusive focus on the synchronic dimension may obscure various political and ethical implications. Assemblages permeate all domains of contemporary life, and individuals involved can become completely consumed by the intensity of their assemblages' directed activities.Elaborating on this tendency, Deleuze equates the internal relations of assemblages with relations of power. For him, assemblage theory becomes an inquiry into the genesis of current power relations, how they evolve, and potentially a theory of practice regarding how to exercise or resist power.

Reply to Leontiskos

Quoting Leontiskos

?Joshs - Not every thread is about perception. For example, this thread is not about perception.

Would you say it is about cognition?

Reply to Joshs - The OP is about two related approaches to philosophical issues, the "Model Building Style" and the "Deflationary Style." It says nothing at all about perception or cognition.

Reply to Joshs

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

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

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

Quoting fdrake

What would you like out of a theory of truth telling?

Quoting Leontiskos

I think the problem is that there is no truth-telling occurring. You are allergic to the word:

Why is it that our culture is so often allergic to the idea of truth? I think it's because it can't be bought. It doesn't fit neatly in a model. And if we are the masters with our hammers, then if truth doesn't want to play ball and act like a nail, so much the worse for truth! Truth is a pain in the ass. Let it be banished!

Truth is what judges the Model Builder's model. In this case, to the model builder who wants to model only behavior, truth says, "This isn't up to grade. Your model handles quacks but it doesn't handle ducks. Back to the drawing board." The model builder might appeal to norms, or social constructions, or all sorts of other things, but all these courts of appeal defer to the Court of Truth, whether they like it or not.

Quoting Leontiskos

Truth is a pain in the ass. Let it be banished!

Did you have an account of truth you wanted to share?

Quoting Number2018

It looks like you place strong emphasis on the synchronic aspect of the assemblage, where all its workings and functioning are fully realized in the present moment. No doubt, this perspective allows for interesting research. However, an exclusive focus on the synchronic dimension may obscure various political and ethical implications. Assemblages permeate all domains of contemporary life, and individuals involved can become completely consumed by the intensity of their assemblages' directed activities.Elaborating on this tendency, Deleuze equates the internal relations of assemblages with relations of power. For him, assemblage theory becomes an inquiry into the genesis of current power relations, how they evolve, and potentially a theory of practice regarding how to exercise or resist power.

I was under the impression that, as far as assemblages are concerned, one man's synchronic is another's diachronic. Like you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of theorems and proofs and arguments. Or you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of institutions and geographies. The first guides the second and the second guides the first.
Or if you wanted to do a history of violence in the political north, you might be able to do it from the perspective of lead in paint.

If you want it in jargon, the same assemblage can be territorialised in multiple ways and have its {the} body without organs face multiple strata. I think, for historical reasons, people strongly emphasise the socius' mediating role on assemblages, even though nature plays an expansive role in that mediation. I see that as a loss of flexibility in the theory due to its usual emphasis.

Edit: "New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation.

Quoting Joshs

Yes, but human perception is neither a lens nor a camera.
It is not designed for observation but for guided action.

Then how do you know which action to perform if you haven't observed the current situation, or know that your action succeeded if you don't make an observation?

Isn't observing an action? Isn't your attention a guided observation?

It seems to me that you cannot separate observations from actions - they are part of the same feedback loop.

One might ask, "Which came first, the action or the observation?". I would say that natural selection acts on one's actions and observations (senses) (another type of action) evolved to guide one's other actions in more meaningful ways.

Reply to fdrake

Quoting fdrake

If you want it in jargon, the same assemblage can be territorialised in multiple ways and have its {the} body without organs face multiple strata. I think, for historical reasons, people strongly emphasise the socius' mediating role on assemblages, even though nature plays an expansive role in that mediation. I see that as a loss of flexibility in the theory due to its usual emphasis.

Edit: "New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation.

It depends on which brand of New Materialism you prefer.
For ‘negative’ new materialists like Graham Harman (Object Oriented Ontology) and Quentin Meillassoux (Speculative Realism) nature can be thought independently of the sociois, since matter is independent of or withdrawn from thought. By contrast, in the performative new materialism of Karen Barad and Vicky Kirby, nature and the social, ontology and epistemology are inherently co-implicated and mutually constituting. This is consistent with Deleuze’s account, which does not split nature off from the psychic or the social.(“… the plane of consistency knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural.”)

“Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic—but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.” (ATP)

Quoting fdrake

"New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation.

Not quite. Meillassoux explicitly says in After Finitude that Deleuze is neither a weak correlationist nor a strong correlationist, his philosophy is instead "subjective metaphysics".

Quoting Joshs

It depends on which brand of New Materialism you prefer.
For ‘negative’ new materialists like Graham Harman (Object Oriented Ontology) and Quentin Meillassoux (Speculative Realism) nature can be thought independently of the sociois, since matter is independent of or withdrawn from thought.

Graham Harman is not a materialist, @Joshs, nor is Object Oriented Ontology a kind of materialism. Harman is against materialism. He has an article (which is a really good read, BTW, even if I don't agree with it) called I Am Also of the Opinion that Materialism Must Be Destroyed. He has been an immaterialist ever since his first book, Tool-Being.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Graham Harman is not a materialist, Joshs, nor is Object Oriented Ontology a kind of materialism. Harman is against materialism. He has an article (which is a really good read, BTW, even if I don't agree with it) called I Am Also of the Opinion that Materialism Must Be Destroyed. He has been an immaterialist ever since his first book, Tool-Being.

I was drawing from the paper ‘ WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?’ by Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan & Thomas Nail

The second strand of negative new materialism is “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) – a term Graham Harman coined that defines a theoretical commitment to thinking the real beyond the human experience of matter. “What is real in the cosmos,” he asserts, “are forms wrapped inside forms, not durable specks of material that reduce everything else to derivative status. If this is ‘materialism,' then it is the first materialism in history to deny the existence of matter.” For Harman, the essence of beings is to withdraw from all the objects that compose it and think it. As such, being is never something anthropocentric, experienced, or relational but is something absolutely and non-relationally “withdrawn” from everything else, as though it were comple-tely “vacuum sealed.” As it happens, this essen-tialist view of identity as something radically self-contained is in fact perfectly captured by the three discrete, individually circumscribed circles, zeros, or “O's” that have become the theory's standard iconic shorthand. This view also leads Harman to affirm what he calls “a new sort of ‘formalism.'

Timothy Morton similarly argues against “some kind of substrate, or some kind of unformed matter”78 in favor of essential forms that infinitely exceed the human domain of meaning-making. For example, Morton describes “hyperobjects” such as global warming as “real entities whose primordial reality is withdrawn from humans.” For him, as for Harman and Tristan Garcia, “objects” ultimately refer to an infinitely hidden essence that never even partially reveals itself in any relation.“

Quoting Joshs

I was drawing from the paper ‘ WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?’ by Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan & Thomas Nail

Are those authors arguing that Object Oriented Philosophy is materialist? That would be a convoluted thing to argue, I suppose. Harman is explicit about his immaterialism.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Are those authors arguing that Object Oriented Philosophy is materialist? That would be a convoluted thing to argue, I suppose. Harman is explicit about his immaterialism.

I think what is important to the authors is that Harman, like the others they discuss in the paper, break away from a subject and language-centered ontology in favor of one that does not slight the agential power of non-human objects.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Meillassoux explicitly says in After Finitude that Deleuze is neither a weak correlationist nor a strong correlationist, his philosophy is instead "subjective metaphysics".

Yes. I don't think Deleuze is a correlationist. I do however think he gets interpreted as one. People tend to use his theory, I think, to highlight the social mediation of everything.

Quoting Joshs

I think what is important to the authors is that Harman, like the others they discuss in the paper, break away from a subject and language-centered ontology in favor of one that does not slight the agential power of non-human objects.

That's fair. I just wouldn't lump him in with materialists, and I say that as a materialist as well as fan of Harman's work.

Quoting fdrake

Yes. I don't think Deleuze is a correlationist. I do however think he gets interpreted as one. People tend to use his theory, I think, to highlight the social mediation of everything.

That's fair. I think that the most interesting part about Deleuze is what his ontology has to say about inorganic objects such as stones. But, then again, I like object-oriented ontologies more than subject-oriented ontologies.

I'll just quote something that Meillassoux says about Deleuze in After Finitude, which might be of some relevance to the OP:

Quentin Meillassoux:This second metaphysical strategy, which we evoked very briefly in Chapter 1, consists in absolutizing the correlation itself. Its basic line of argument may be summarized as follows: it was claimed that the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself was not only unknowable, but also unthinkable. But if so, then it seems that the wisest course is simply to abolish any such notion of the in-itself. Accordingly, it will be maintained that the notion of the in-itself is devoid of truth because it is unthinkable, and that it should be abolished so that only the relation between subject and object remains, or some other correlation deemed to be more fundamental. A metaphysics of this type may select from among various forms of subjectivity, but it is invariably characterized by the fact that it hypostatizes some mental, sentient, or vital term: representation in the Leibnizian monad; Schelling's Nature, or the objective subject-object; Hegelian Mind; Schopenhauer's Will; the Will (or Wills) to Power in Nietzsche; perception loaded with memory in Bergson; Deleuze's Life, etc. Even in those cases where the vitalist hypostatization of the correlation (as in Nietzsche or Deleuze) is explicitly identified with a critique of 'the subject' or of 'metaphysics', it shares with speculative idealism the same twofold decision which ensures its irreducibility to naive realism or some variant of transcendental idealism:
1. Nothing can be unless it is some form of relation-to-the-world (consequently, the Epicurean atom, which has neither intelligence, nor will, nor life, is impossible).
2. The previous proposition must be understood in an absolute sense, rather than as merely relative to our knowledge.
The primacy of the unseparated has become so powerful that in the modern era, even speculative materialism seems to have been dominated by these anti-rationalist doctrines of life and will, to the detriment of a 'materialism of matter' which takes seriously the possibility that there is nothing living or willing in the inorganic realm. Thus, the rivalry between the metaphysics of Life and the metaphysics of Mind masks an underlying agreement which both have inherited from transcendentalism - anything that is totally a-subjective cannot be.

Reply to Joshs Quoting Joshs

I think ?Number2018 might agree that this is what Deleuze-Guattari refer to as the molar dimension, which they argue is a surface effect of processes within molecular assemblages.

It is only at the submicroscopic level of desiring-machines that there exists a functionalism—machinic arrangements, an engineering of desire; for it is only there that functioning and formation, use and assembly, product and production merge. All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not formed in the same way they function, and the technical machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what is not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an intention. The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves.”(AO)

It is a good quote. But one might get the impression that the molar level lacks autonomy and primarily reflects the derivative effects generated by the molecular level. Differently, molar formations do possess their own regime, and they react back upon the molecular forces from which they emerge. They attempt to organize and suppress what exists on the molecular level. As a result, the non-representative desiring machines begin to form reactive structures. Yet, without some kind of causal relation between the two levels, all of this may remain at an exclusively descriptive level.

Quoting Joshs

there are many different kinds of assemblage theory, and I’m not suggesting you’re obliged to stick religiously to Deleuze.

I agree. There are interesting frameworks in systems theory and the enactivist approach. For example, Shaun Gallagher has recently attempted to expand enactivist theory by developing a concept of the assemblage of a self. In this view, the self as an assemblage is a network of recursive relations that holds together the constitutive processes. As Gallagher explains, “What we call self consists of a complex pattern of specific factors or processes (bodily processes, experiences, affective states, behaviors, actions, and so forth). A self-pattern operates as a complex system that emerges from dynamical interactions of constituent processes. Within the self-pattern there is no element that operates as a controlling agent, there is no self within a self-pattern. A self, of the sort that you are and that I am, just is a pattern.” (Gallagher, The Self and Its Disorders, p. 16). This task seems to present serious challenges. The paradoxical notion of the selfless self must incorporate several heterogeneous elements. The most difficult part is to relevantly determine the process of the appropriate synthesis, and it could be compared to the obscurity of D & G’s notion of the conjunctive synthesis producing “the subject as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, with no fixed identity, forever decentered” (AO, p. 20)

Reply to Number2018

Quoting Number2018

But one might get the impression that the molar level lacks autonomy and primarily reflects the derivative effects generated by the molecular level. Differently, molar formations do possess their own regime, and they react back upon the molecular forces from which they emerge. They attempt to organize and suppress what exists on the molecular level. As a result, the non-representative desiring machines begin to form reactive structures. Yet, without some kind of causal relation between the two levels, all of this may remain at an exclusively descriptive level.

Yes, the actual and the virtual communicate and affect each other as heterogeneities. And yet notice how Deleuze characterizes the molar as ‘false’, as a distorted surface effect , an external envelope, as hiding that which gives rise to it, which is its principle. So yes the molar has its autonomy, but it’s the autonomy of an illusion.

In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition. As for these latter instances, since they cease to be conditions, they become no more than effects of the primary difference and its differenciation, overall or surface effects which characterise the distorted world of representation, and express the manner in which the in-itself of difference hides itself by giving rise to that which covers it.

The two repetitions are not independent. One is the singular subject, the interiority and the heart of the other, the depths of the other. The other is only the external envelope, the abstract effect. The repetition of dissymmetry is hidden within symmetrical ensembles or effects; a repetition of distinctive points underneath that of ordinary points; and everywhere the Other in the repetition of the Same. This is the secret, the most ... profound repetition: it alone provides the principle of the other one, the reason for the blockage of concepts.” “ The material sense results from this other, as if secreted by it like a shell.”

“What it comes down to is that we cannot content our­selves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of deterritorialization; moreover, absolute
deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spin­offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always pri­mary and always immanent.”

Reply to Joshs It would help if you noted which text the quoted passage is taken from.

Reply to fdrake Quoting fdrake

I was under the impression that, as far as assemblages are concerned, one man's synchronic is another's diachronic. Like you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of theorems and proofs and arguments. Or you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of institutions and geographies. The first guides the second and the second guides the first.
Or if you wanted to do a history of violence in the political north, you might be able to do it from the perspective of lead in paint.

I support and share your emphasis on the synchronic dimension of an assemblage. I would even like to broaden this perspective by considering your example. When one is solving a math problem or developing a new theory, they do not consciously attend to the history of theorems, proofs, and arguments. Similarly, when catching a ball, a basketball player does not recall the rules of the game or make strategic evaluations about the state of play. Only a young student or an inefficient mathematician would intentionally turn to the scope of utilizable, ‘historical’ knowledge while solving a problem. Most often, it is applied unconsciously, as in the Bourdieu's theory of practical sense. Also, when writing a paper on the history of mathematics, one remains entirely within the synchronic dimension of a different assemblage. In general, due to the intensity of our synchronic experiences, history primarily plays a pedagogical role. Who remembers the events of Brexit or the Covid pandemic today?Deleuze and Guattari also place strong emphasis on the flattening of the assemblage, the making it one- dimensional: “An assemblage flattens all its dimensions onto a single plane of consistency” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 90). The project of A Thousand Plateaus engages history in a singular manner of leaping from one plateau to another. In this way, D&G develop their own historical method. Nevertheless, all the intensities of their plateaus are located at the surface of the body without organs of their project.

Quoting fdrake

If you want it in jargon, the same assemblage can be territorialised in multiple ways and have its {the} body without organs face multiple strata. I

Any process of new territorialization is inseparable from deterritorialization. Currently, we are likely experiencing an accelerating process of overall deterritorialization. As a result, the assemblage cannot be territorialized again while remaining the same. The prevailing deterritorialization leads to the evolving development of the assemblage’s body without organs, which opens directly to the de-stratified components of the plane of consistency. Take, for example, the second Trump presidency. Does it represent the territorialization of the same assemblage as it was in his election in 2016?

Quoting fdrake

I think, for historical reasons, people strongly emphasise the socius' mediating role on assemblages, even though nature plays an expansive role in that mediation.

Today, the socius increasingly territorializes within the technological and informational self-organizing intensities. And they play a critical role in the 'mediation'.

Quoting fdrake

"New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation.

It is impossible to situate Deleuze within the "correlationist" stereotype. He conceived assemblages as including active inorganic, organic, technological, and informational non-human components.
“The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or a-grammaticalities which supersede the signifier” (Deleuze, 2006, p.109)

Quoting Number2018

He conceived assemblages as including active inorganic, organic, technological, and informational non-human components.

Oh yes! And it is a great irony that the meticulous inhumanity of Deleuze's metaphysics gets used to imbue the universe with human affect and structures with human discourse.

Reply to Number2018 Reply to fdrake

Quoting Number2018

It is impossible to situate Deleuze within the "correlationist" stereotype

Quoting fdrake

Yes. I don't think Deleuze is a correlationist.

Who says correlationism is a bad thing? Answer: folks like Harman and Meillassoux. You may be aware that Meillassoux has been accused of positing an ontological dualism between matter and thought, and Harman has been called a rational subjectivist. In arguing against what they perceive as the subjective idealism of ‘correlationism’ they succumb to their own strains of dualistic idealism, and this prevents them from understanding that there are other ways of thinking a correlation among elements of the world besides one which assumes a transcendent subjectivity. Let’s look at Meillassoux’s definition of correlationism:

Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object 'in itself', in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object.

if we substitute for ‘subject and object’ ‘inside vs outside’, We arrive at Deleuze’s assemblages. He gives us a correlationism (connections, conjunctions, resonances, series, consistencies, diagrams, surveys) produced by non-oppositional, non-hierarchical, pre-subjective differences-in-themselves. This is not to say that Deleuzian assemblages don’t represent a kind of idealism (the virtual is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’), but it is of a quite different sort than that which reifies subjectivity.

Quoting Number2018

He conceived assemblages as including active inorganic, organic, technological, and informational non-human components.
“The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or a-grammaticalities which supersede the signifier” (Deleuze, 2006, p.

Yes, but wouldn’t these components lose their characteristics as stratified forms as they are plugged into planes of consistency, and wouldn’t this plane of consistency integrate this outside into its own pre-personal diagrammatic order?

But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization?...Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic white night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of "plan(n)ing," of
diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combinations, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.”
(ATP)

From a different thread:

De Anima, 417a 22, translated by W.S Hett:But we must also distinguish certain senses of potentiality and actuality; for so far we have been using these terms quite generally. One sense of “instructed” is that in which we might call a man instructed because he is one of a class of instructed persons who have knowledge; but there is another sense in which we call instructed a person who knows (say) grammar. Each of these two has capacity, but in a different sense: the former, because the class (genos) to which he belongs, i.e., his matter (hyle), is of a certain kind, the latter, because he is capable of exercising his knowledge whenever he likes, provided that external causes do not prevent him. But there is a third kind of instructed person—the man who is already exercising his knowledge; he is in actuality instructed and in the strict sense knows (e.g.) this particular A.

Quoting Paine

The actual existence of thinking in both passages is a confluence of circumstances. A living person must come from a particular kind of matter and become capable of actually knowing and thinking. I agree with Wang that the "activity" is not outside of the creature but think he is looking at it from wrong end of the telescope. All coming-to-be is from agency beyond the particular organism. That particular kinds of material are required is a rebuke to the Pythagorean view that Forms shape purely undetermined goo.

Yes, and this is what I was trying to point out <here>. "Forms shaping purely undetermined goo" is similar to the idea of the OP where there are just bundles of behavior (or forms). 'Behavior' is basically an instance of the "third kind" that Aristotle gives (first actuality).

Quoting Joshs

Who says correlationism is a bad thing? Answer: folks like Harman and Meillassoux.

Except for the fact that they don't say that. And even if they did, shouldn't you include Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier in that group? They are, at the end of the day, "the Founding Fathers of Speculative Realism", if you will.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich


Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Who says correlationism is a bad thing? Answer: folks like Harman and Meillassoux.
— Joshs

Except for the fact that they don't say that. And even if they did, shouldn't you include Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier in that group? They are, at the end of the day, "the Founding Fathers of Speculative Realism", if you will.

They don’t?

The loosely demarcated movement known as Speculative Realism (SR) got its title from a conference named Speculative Realism: A One-Day Workshop, held at Goldsmiths University in April 2007. [1] The speakers – and original members – were, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, even if the influence of SR has since spread well beyond the work of these respective philosophers. It would however be important to note from the outset that there are important and fundamental differences between the positions of the various thinkers that are often grouped under this umbrella term…

What is often said to almost exclusively unite all the original and current proponents of SR is their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’..both terms are to an extent similar in terms of what they critique, namely (what proponents of SR see as) the prevalent tendency within Kantian and post-Kantian thought to treat the relation between thought and world as the primary subject matter of philosophy. In making such a claim, they argue that philosophy since Kant lamentably negates the possibility of thinking or knowing what the world could be like ‘in itself’, that is, independently of our all-too-human relation to it. (On Correlationism and the Philosophy of (Human) Access: Meillassoux and Harman.
Niki Young)

Quoting Joshs

They don’t?

No, they don't. They've never used those literal words of yours, "correlationism is a bad thing". There is no article, book or any other text in which Graham Harman said "correlationism is a bad thing", nor is there any text in which Meillassoux says "correlationism is a bad thing".

The loosely demarcated movement known as Speculative Realism (SR) got its title from a conference named Speculative Realism: A One-Day Workshop, held at Goldsmiths University in April 2007. [1] The speakers – and original members – were, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, even if the influence of SR has since spread well beyond the work of these respective philosophers. It would however be important to note from the outset that there are important and fundamental differences between the positions of the various thinkers that are often grouped under this umbrella term…

What is often said to almost exclusively unite all the original and current proponents of SR is their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’..both terms are to an extent similar in terms of what they critique, namely (what proponents of SR see as) the prevalent tendency within Kantian and post-Kantian thought to treat the relation between thought and world as the primary subject matter of philosophy. In making such a claim, they argue that philosophy since Kant lamentably negates the possibility of thinking or knowing what the world could be like ‘in itself’, that is, independently of our all-too-human relation to it. (On Correlationism and the Philosophy of (Human) Access: Meillassoux and Harman.
Niki Young)

Where does it say that Harman and Meillassoux say "correlationism is a bad thing"?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Where does it say that Harman and Meillassoux say "correlationism is a bad thing"?

Ya got me there.

Quoting Joshs

Ya got me there.

But that's my point, Josh. Language can't be a sort of free-for-all game. It needs rules. And I think that those rules are something akin to what lawyers call "Letter of the Law", as something different than the "Spirit of the Law". Interpretations (Spirit of the Law) are all fine and dandy, but sometimes we just have to go back to the Letter of the Law.

Do you disagree?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich Quoting Arcane Sandwich

But that's my point, Josh. Language can't be a sort of free-for-all game. It needs rules. And I think that those rules are something akin to what lawyers call "Letter of the Law", as something different than the "Spirit of the Law". Interpretations (Spirit of the Law) are all fine and dandy, but sometimes we just have to go back to the Letter of the Law.

Do you disagree?

Could you just tell me what words you would replace “is a bad thing” with? I’m dying to know.

Quoting Joshs

Could you just tell me what words you would replace “is a bad thing” with? I’m dying to know.

There are none. No such words, I mean. I have an email by Braisser himself telling me that people always get that part wrong (among other parts that they get wrong).

There is nothing bad about correlationism. And there is nothing that can replace the word "bad" there in such a way that we would be able to say "Correlationism is to be rejected because of X".

Correlationism is a live option in today's Continental debates. It is also a live option in the Analytic tradition. There is nothing inherently wrong with it. There is nothing bad about it. The whole point of Meillassoux's philosophy (and of Speculative Realism more generally, even though 3 of the 4 "founding members" no longer feel associated with it) is to keep what is True in correlationism, and to augment it further. Perhaps some aspects of it have to be reformulated, perhaps others discarded, perhaps others reinforced. It's more like making an oil painting, instead of being like doing your taxes.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich
Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Correlationism is a live option in today's Continental debates. It is also a live option in the Analytic tradition. There is nothing inherently wrong with it. There is nothing bad about it… Perhaps some aspects of it have to be reformulated, perhaps others discarded, perhaps others reinforced.

Could you give a quote from Meillassoux supporting this assertion? All I find are claims that correlationism has been a disaster.

Quoting Joshs

Could you give a quote from Meillassoux supporting this assertion?

Why would I need one?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Why would I need one?

Have you actually read After Finitude? I don’t find a single
positive statement about correlationism in it. Do you?

Quoting Joshs

Have you actually read After Finitude?

Of course I have. I've written a book about it, as well as several different articles about it.

Quoting Joshs

I don’t find a single
positive statement about correlationism in it. Do you?

Define "positive statement". What do you mean by that?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Define "positive statement". What do you mean by that?

I mean the opposite is of negative statements. Every reference to correlationism in After Finitude pits it in a negative light. For instance:’

contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers:

we cannot get out of our own skins

every variety of correlationism is exposed as an extreme
idealism, one that is incapable of admitting that what science tells us about these occurrences of matter independent of humanity effectively occurred as described by science.

So? What's bad about it? I don't get your point. Explain it to me like I'm a dumbass.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich Quoting Arcane Sandwich

So? What's bad about it? I don't get your point

15 minutes of my life I will never get back…

Quoting Joshs

15 minutes of my life I will never get back…

Then I take it that you don't know what's bad about it.

Quoting Joshs

Every reference to correlationism in After Finitude pits it in a negative light.

And you just say that as if it were a fact, like the fact that physicists study an actual thing called "gravity"?

EDIT: Here's your proof, @Joshs:

Quentin Meillassoux:
We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined.

That, is the very first occurrence of the word "correlationism" in After Finitude. It is literally a definition. That very reference to correlationism does not pit it in a negative light, in any way, shape, or form.

Satisfied?

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Satisfied?

While I think the term is strictly speaking value neutral, I think its origin as a critical term of various strands of philosophy isn't a neutral move. So it's one of these cases, I believe, that adopting the vocabulary can prejudice your perspective. As an example, I doubt the correlationists accept the framing of the mediating role subjectivity/agency/discourse play in terms of subjectivity's/agencies'/discourse's relata. I'm aware that this is part of the framing in After Finitude too, but you don't need to accept this if you're a correlationist {or someone branded as such}. If you'll forgive me the bloviated metaphor, the ghost of the relationship between subject and object isn't seen as haunting a correlationist flavour of metaphysics from the inside. You kinda need to get tricked through argumentation into seeing the mediating medium as an object, transcendental warts and all. And that move isn't accepted by our hypothetical correlationist friends here, I believe.

Quoting fdrake

So it's one of these cases, I believe, that adopting the vocabulary can prejudice your perspective.

Ok, but we can all agree that this is a problem, right? This is what I would call "a bad thing" in @Joshs's sense of the term.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Ok, but we can all agree that this is a problem, right? This is what I would call "a bad thing" in Joshs's sense of the term.

Yeah! And I think that's how @Joshs is construing "correlationism" as a term. Right? There's a certain stodginess associated with correlationism when you call it that. You get "trapped in it". Like being "trapped" is a bad thing. You lose sight of the great outdoors, wilderness, the thing-in-itself in a substantive sense. All of those seem like bad things with that way of describing them. But you can adopt the position as if it's a good thing still, on its terms even. You probs won't though, if you're in the bucket of fans of so-called correlationist philosophers, since it seems like a distortion and a slur.

Quoting fdrake

Yeah! And I think that's how Joshs is construing "correlationism" as a term. Right?

Yeah, but it's like, I use the word "scientism" in a positive way. Mario Bunge himself championed that use, he used the word "scientism" positively. So why can't I? I believe in scientism, I have no problem saying such a philosophically loaded phrase like "I believe in scientism", because I say it as an ordinary person would (or at least, to the best of my ability to reconcile ordinary thought with philosophical thought).

So, if Bunge and I can do just that, I see no reason why correlationists can't use the word "correlationism" in a positive way. And some of them seem to be on the brink of doing exactly that. Now, I'm not the one to "give them a little push" in that direction, far from it. All I'm saying is, correlationism is something far more complicated than what Meillassoux would have you believe. That does not mean that correlationism is "a bad thing" or "a good thing". It just means that we have to study it more.

Quoting fdrake

You get "trapped in it". Like being "trapped" is a bad thing. You lose sight of the great outdoors, wilderness, the thing-in-itself in a substantive sense.

Well but hold on here a second, Mr. F. Drake. That sort of talk (i.e. "trapped in it", "being trapped", "great outdoors", "wilderness") is the talk of a Poet. If that's how you wish to formulate the problem (and it is a legitimate formulation of the problem under consideration here), then what I would say is that correlationists have stepped on their own bear trap, and now, like bears, are howling in pain in the great outdoors, the metaphysical wilderness that we call the thing-in-itself, which is arguably the Absolute in the sense of that "Great Outdoors".

So, what would you make of that? Those are surely pretty words, if I may say so myself. Do they mean anything, in a substantive sense? I don't think so.

Quoting fdrake

All of those seem like bad things with that way of describing them.

Yeah, but are they? "Bad things", that is. Honest question.

Quoting fdrake

But you can adopt the position as if it's a good thing still, on its terms even. You probs won't though, if you're in the bucket of fans of so-called correlationist philosophers, since it seems like a distortion and a slur.

But that's the point that I'm making here. The same thing happened with the word "scientism". It was a distortion and a slur. The same thing happens with ethnic slurs and racial slurs, for example. They start out as negative terms, then someone starts using them in a positive way. Sometimes there are community restrictions (i.e., you can't use racial slurs if you're not of that race yourself), sometimes there aren't (i.e., anyone can use the term "scientism", including the people that hold views that can only be described as anti-scientism).

Reply to fdrake
Would you say an AI is sentient?

Reply to frank

I don't care.

Quoting fdrake

I don't care.

But it would mean we made sentient beings. That wouldn't amaze you?

Reply to frank

No.

Reply to fdrake
Ok.

@fdrake would you disagree with Reply to what I said? Does it make sense to you, or not?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich

I don't have anything worthwhile to say on the matter I'm afraid.

Reply to fdrake What does your "gut" tell you?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich

That I'm hungry.

Reply to fdrake :rofl:

Reply to fdrake My brain tells me that I'm thinking.

Reply to schopenhauer1

Reply to schopenhauer1

Harman rejects Whitehead’s relationalism for two reasons: 1) he worries it reduces ontology to “a house of mirrors” wherein, because a thing just is a unification of its prehensions of other things, there is never finally any there there beneath its internal reflections of others;

I've only read one of Whitehead's books, but this does seem to be a problem for process philosophy in general. Of course, simply positing objects and essences does very little to fix the issue either. If the question: "why do some sorts of processes just happen to occur?" is problematic (which I'd agree it is), it seems the same sort of question would be problematic for objects, which was Srap's point earlier.

However, this is not a problem supposing objects with nature's/essences that are (perhaps relatively) intelligible in themselves and self-determining (if not self-subsistent). However, such things, being in the order of becoming, [I] are[/I] in some sense processes as well, although processes with an intelligible locus.

“The ontological structure of the world does not evolve…which is precisely what makes it an ontological structure” [GM, 24]

This is a deeper problem for process theologians from what I've seen, the inability to avoid self-refutation by making everything mutable. Also, there is a sort of move from the directed procession of the Absolute in Hegel to an arbitrary progression (because arbitrariness is "more free" and "creative."


Reply to fdrake

Why is it that people agree on so much? I think this comes down to how norms of judgement are generated. Peoples' eyes agree on object locations very durably, so location within a room works like that. Even if they might disagree on the true locations of objects when the rulers come out - like if my coaster is 30cm or 30.005cm from the nearest edge of my desk to me. If correct assertibility is an assay, truth is crucible. [/Quote]

This seems to require that what you're saying about how people's eyes and measurements agree is actually true. If it's "norms of assertibility all the way down," then everything you've just claimed is only true relative to some contexts. Is this context universal even for all human beings? Well, according to the radical skeptics, the cognitive relativists, etc. it isn't. They reject your norms because they reject your judgements.

[Quote]When people share the same contexts, the overwhelming majority of conduct norms about such basic things are very fixed like that. That includes various inferences, like "if you put your hand in the fire, you'll burn it", "don't put your hand in the fire" comes along with that as the judgement that burning your hand in the fire for no reason is bad is very readily caused by the pain of it.

Yes, but this doesn't speak to the very many cases where people don't agree, and have radically different assertibility criteria. Consider for instance, the difference between a radical fundamentalist, who thinks their literalist interpretation of the Bible or Koran is the ultimate standard of truth versus an follower of atheistic scientism. They have incommensurate assertability criteria. Are they then both speaking truth when they assert contradictory claims that meet their disparate criteria?

In the latter regard, there's a room for a moral realism in terms of correct assertibility, since the conventions are so durable and there's room to claim that "needless harm is bad" is true.

Sure, there is room to "claim" that "raping and torturing like the BTK killer is bad" is true. But there is clearly room in our modern discourse to claim the opposite, i e., that moral nihilism or extreme relativism is the case. Indeed, people claim these sorts of things all the time; they are extremely popular assertions in the context of our current norms.

So is torturing children for fun bad? Is the truth of this something that changes from time to time and place to place, based on the norms in vouge? If norms decide this, then it obviously does, since norms concerning child slaves were extremely permissive through much of human history.

@Count Timothy von Icarus what do you think of what I said Reply to here?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. A blanket renouncement of figurative language and metaphor? I don't know the context of the quote, but it certainly seems like it could be plenty meaningful, and an indictment. There is much in correlationism and representationalism's skepticism that might rightly fall into what Hegel terms the "fear of error become fear of truth," in the Preface to the [I]Phenomenology[/I].

Of course, as this thread is well an example, skepticism, doubt, and an aloofness from wonder and truth, once philosophical vices, have become a virtue in our era, the highest virtue being the "tolerance" of "bourgeois metaphysics." I don't think this is "howling in a bear trap," so much as being happy to sit in the trap, even as gangrene sets in.

A metaphorical critique can work here. For instance, the first of the damned that Dante and Virgil encounter in the [I]Commedia[/I] are the souls of those who refused to take any stand while on Earth. Barred from Heaven, they are also rejected by the rebellious demons of Hell and forced to spend eternity aimlessly chasing a banner that flees arbitrarily ahead of them all around Hell's vestibule, their ceaseless pace a parody of the vigor and conviction they lacked in life.

Pointedly, none of these are named; they have no legacy. One might be Saint/Pope Celestine, who abdicated the papacy, but I find it more probable and poetic that the one who "made the great refusal," is supposed to be Pontius Pilate, who, to dodge responsibility for killing an innocent man, responded to Christ—the Logos and the "Way the Truth, and the Light" itself—"but what is truth?"

See, plenty of good work to be done by metaphor and image!

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make.

I'm not sure either, that's why I'm asking for your help. Thank you for taking the time to helping me.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

A blanket renouncement of figurative language and metaphor?

Yes, in some sense. In some contexts, at least. Please hear my argument. When you go to a public library, and you go to the room or area called "silent reading room", you can't raise your voice. You can't talk like you would talk at the coffee shop down the corner. Why not? Because you can't, it's one of the rules. Is it physically impossible to raise your voice in that situation? Of course not. But we have to agree on some very basic social rules here, as a society. In that sense, I would echo Eco (see what I did there?) when he told Rorty that things cannot be pragmatism and convention all the way down. I would say here: things cannot be figurative language and metaphor all the way down. Right?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich

I would say here: things cannot be figurative language and metaphor all the way down. Right?

Sure. However, a concern with that might denote a conflation of the [I]means[/I] of knowing and communicating with [I]what is known and communicated[/I]. When we read a book about insects or French history, do we only learn about words since that is all the books contain?

To be sure, there can be figurative language that is more or less [I]empty[/I], but it is not all empty. Plato and Dante are two of the finest philosophers in history and both make extensive use of imagery and present their works in narratives packed with symbolism and drama. They are successful, in part, not in spite of this technique but because of it.

Indeed, both suggest that what they most want to speak about cannot be approached directly, through syllogism and dissertation, but must "leap from one soul to another, as a flame jumps between candles."

IMO, one of the great losses in modern philosophy is its move away from drama and verse. Nietzsche is a standout for this in our own epoch, and yet many of the older great works, from Parmenides, to Plato, to St. Augustine, to Boethius, to Dante, to St. John of the Cross to Voltaire are filled with it. Camus and Sarte it seems, were not enough to start a trend.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

When we read a book about insects or French history, do we only learn about words since that is all the books contain?

I don't think so. It depends on what genre of literature you're reading that in. If it's a work of fiction, then I wouldn't take it seriously in that sense. If it's non-fiction, that's a different story. If it's non-fiction, is it a scientific book? And if it is, who is the publisher? Is it an academic or a non-academic publisher? If it's a non-academic publisher, was the book peer-reviewed before publishing? If the book has no credentials, but it tells you basic facts, such that insects have six legs or that Paris is the capital of France, does that mean that we shouldn't believe what the book is claiming? Etc.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

To be sure, there can be figurative language that is more or less empty, but it is not all empty.

Agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Plato and Dante are two of the finest philosophers in history and both make extensive use of imagery and present their works in narratives packed with symbolism and drama.

Agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

They are successful, in part, not in spite of this technique but because of it.

Agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Indeed, both suggest that what they most want to speak about cannot be approached directly, through syllogism and dissertation, but must "leap from one soul to another, as a flame jumps between candles."

Agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

IMO, one of the great losses in modern philosophy is its move away from drama and verse.

Agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Nietzsche is a standout for this in our own epoch,

Agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

many of the older great works, from Parmenides, to Plato, to St. Augustine, to Boethius, to Dante, to St. John of the Cross to Voltaire are filled with it.

Agree.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Camus and Sarte it seems, were not enough to start a trend.

Well, they tried, and the best that they managed to produce is people wearing black clothes, that talk at coffee shops, and smoke cigarettes. That's not good enough for me. It's actually bad for me, since I don't smoke (I did smoke, and I managed to quit, but it was incredibly difficult) and I rarely drink coffee.

Well, it seems like there's quite a lot of agreement between us, @Count Timothy von Icarus. That being the case, I don't see why we can't seem to settle the philosophical point about "The Letter of the Law" versus "The Spirit of the Law". I see that debate in a reductionist way, it boils down to the following choice: literalism or spiritualism, you can't have both. Right? Or do you disagree?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I've only read one of Whitehead's books, but this does seem to be a problem for process philosophy in general. Of course, simply positing objects and essences does very little to fix the issue either. If the question: "why do some sorts of processes just happen to occur?" is problematic (which I'd agree it is), it seems the same sort of question would be problematic for objects, which was Srap's point earlier.

Harman is "democratic" with his objects- what he calls "flat ontology". All objects are of equal weight as far as how relations are concerned. That is to say, all objects present a "vicarious/sensational causation" whereby one object is "translated" with another. That is to say, everything cannot reducible to simples, or overmined as parts of an anthropic-only perspective, or composed simply of their parts. Even if a log is burned, the log's essence is still withdrawn and ever-present in this theory. This notion of objects even applies to non-physical objects like abstract concepts, fictional characters, and the like. They all have a unity, irreducibility, and can enter into relations with other objects. This allows for objects to persist beyond simply their reduced parts, or simply their relations/processes. He is even "democratic" about objects being of equal existence whether real or fictional. As for the question, "Why these objects?", I am not sure his take other than it's a brute fact of his metaphysics.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Harmon is "democratic" with his objects- what he calls "flat ontology". All objects are of equal weight as far as how relations are concerned. That is to say, all objects present a "vicarious/sensational causation" whereby one object is "translated" with another. Even if a log is burned, the log's essence is still withdrawn and ever-present in this theory. These even go down to non-physical objects like abstract concepts, fictional characters, and the like. They all have a unity, irreducibility, and can enter into relations with other objects. This allows for objects to persist beyond simply their reduced parts, or simply their relations/processes. As for the question, "Why these objects?", I am not sure his take other than it's a brute fact of his metaphysics.

Here's Mario Bunge's answer to that question:

Quoting Mario Bunge (2010)

In ordinary language, the word “object” denotes a material thing that can be seen and touched. By contrast, in modern philosophy “object” (objectum, Gegenstand) stands for whatever can be thought about: it applies to concrete things and abstract ones, arbitrary assemblages and structured wholes, electrons and nations, stones and ghosts, individuals and sets, properties and events, facts and fictions, and so on. The concept of an object is thus the most general of all philosophical concepts.

EDIT: And here is what Harman says in his book Guerilla Metaphysics:

Quoting Graham Harman (2005)

This book calls for what might be termed an object-oriented philosophy, and in this way rejects both the analytic and continental traditions. The ongoing dispute between these traditions, including the sort of “bridge building” that starts by conceding the existence of the dispute, misses a prejudice shared by both: their primary interest lies not in objects, but in human access to them. The so-called linguistic turn is still the dominant model for the philosophy of access, but there are plenty of others—phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, philosophy of mind, pragmatism. None of these philosophical schools tells us much of anything about objects themselves; indeed, they pride themselves on avoiding all naive contact with non human entities. By contrast, object-oriented philosophy holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other. For this reason, the philosophy of objects is sometimes lazily viewed as a form of scientific naturalism, since it plunges directly into the world and considers every object imaginable, avoiding any prior technical critique of the workings of human knowledge. But quite unlike naturalism, object-oriented philosophy adopts a bluntly metaphysical approach to the relations between objects rather than a familiar physical one. In fact, another term that might be employed for object-oriented philosophy is guerrilla metaphysics—a name meant to signify that the numerous present-day objections to metaphysics are not unknown to me, but also that I do not find them especially compelling.

Quoting Graham Harman (2005)

The so-called linguistic turn is still the dominant model for the philosophy of access, but there are plenty of others

I think this is significant. For the speculative realists, "correlationism" or the idea that the world cannot be accessed outside a human/animal perspective, is the enemy.

Quoting Graham Harman (2005)

By contrast, object-oriented philosophy holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other. For this reason, the philosophy of objects is sometimes lazily viewed as a form of scientific naturalism, since it plunges directly into the world and considers every object imaginable, avoiding any prior technical critique of the workings of human knowledge. But quite unlike naturalism, object-oriented philosophy adopts a bluntly metaphysical approach to the relations between objects rather than a familiar physical one.

This is also important in understanding this metaphysics. In his particular flavor of speculative realism, it seems objects have ways of either translating or not translating their being to each other. I don't get though, how something fictional can be anything outside of a human interaction. How can Gandalf be anything but human-based? According to this theory, it would seem that even if humans were necessary for Gandalf to exist, once created, Gandalf is its own object, with its own withdrawn and mysterious essence that can only be translated with other objects, including humans.

Another oddity in the theory would be, if anything can be an object, what then would not count as an object? If Gandalf, the number 3, the type "dog", a particular dog named Rex, Narnia, Middle Earth, a subatomic particle, and a brown hat are all their own individual, essentialized, independent objects, what is not an object?

Reply to Arcane Sandwich
I don't accept the pertinence of schools as presented here but do credit Harman for giving an excellent rant.

Quoting Paine

I don't accept the pertinence of schools as presented here but do credit Harman for giving an excellent rant.

I don't agree with you, but it doesn't matter (our disagreement here doesn't matter, that is). Harman has some of, if not the, best skills as a writer in 21st Century philosophy. He was a professional sportswriter in the past. It's obvious that the rest of us, his colleagues in the world of professional philosophy, don't have such a high-level prose. That's just a brute fact as far as I'm concerned. Here's an example:

Harman (2005):The carnival tent rustles in the evening breeze, disturbing the moods of those who approach. Inside the tent are swarms of humans and trained ani­mals; there are jarring sounds, strange ethnic foods, and shadows. For a few moments the music of a concealed organ is countered by the rumble of thunder, as emaciated dogs begin to whine. A small fight breaks out, soon to be halted by a sneering, scar-faced man. Suddenly, hailstones strike the roof of the tent like bullets, frightening everyone: the visitors, the for­tunetellers, the unkempt and corrupted security guards, the monkeys sparkling with costume jewelry. At long last, the organ player's morbid inner anger takes command, and he begins an atonal dirge that will last throughout the storm.
All of this can be explained by atoms.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

I don't agree with you

About the remark about schools of thought?

Quoting Paine

About the remark about schools of thought?

Yup. I think he's right about that (and about other things as well).

Reply to Arcane Sandwich
I have a problem with the encyclopedic approach to expression of ideas. Half of me roots for Harman's language while the other half objects to another victim of an accepted practice.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I think this is significant. For the speculative realists, "correlationism" or the idea that the world cannot be accessed outside a human/animal perspective, is the enemy.

Not really. Good ol' fashioned relationism poses a greater philosophical problem for speculative realism. Besides, Meillassoux and Harman criticize correlationism for different reasons. They don't agree as to what it is that correlationism gets wrong. Meillassoux sees flaws where Harman sees virtues, and Harman sees flaws where Meillassoux sees virtues.

Quoting schopenhauer1

This is also important in understanding this metaphysics. In his particular flavor of speculative realism, it seems objects have ways of either translating or not translating their being to each other. I don't get though, how something fictional can be anything outside of a human interaction.

You have to be more Latourian about that, in order to understand Harman's point, because Harman himself is a Latourian (though he doesn't agree with Latour on that specific point, yet you need to take into account what Actor-Network Theory says about that in order to understand how Object-Oriented Ontology differs from ANT in that regard).

Quoting schopenhauer1

According to this theory, it would seem that even if humans were necessary for Gandalf to exist, once created, Gandalf is its own object, with its own withdrawn and mysterious essence that can only be translated with other objects, including humans.

Not sure if this is correct, but if that's your theory, OK.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Another oddity in the theory would be, if anything can be an object, what then would not count as an object? If Gandalf, the number 3, the type "dog", a particular dog named Rex, Narnia, Middle Earth, a subatomic particle, and a brown hat are all their own individual, essentialized, independent objects, what is not an object?

Qualities. For Harman, qualities are not objects, though he suggests that under certain conditions, a quality can become an object. But that's beside the point here, because his ontology can be characterized as a four-fold: two kinds of objects, two kinds of qualities, like so:

Sensual Qualities - Real Qualities
Sensual Objects - Real Objects

These can be combined in many different ways. For example, a fictional character is a sensual object that has a real quality. Éowyn and Aragorn exists as sensual objects, not as real objects. However, they have real qualities, since, for example, they are copyrighted characters, you cannot use them in your own novel. That is in fact why the Tolkien foundation sued TSR (the old Dungeons & Dragons company) way back in the day. IIRC, a judge ruled that the word "hobbit" was copyrighted. So, instead of using the word "hobbit", TSR used "halfling".

Quoting Paine

I have a problem with the encyclopedic approach to expression of ideas. Half of me roots for Harman's language while the other half objects to another victim of an accepted practice.

I suppose that's understandable.

Reply to Arcane Sandwich
Said like an entry in a text that does not concern you.

Quoting Paine

Said like an entry in a text that does not concern you.

What do you mean?

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

I suppose that's understandable.

Reply to Paine So? How is that like an entry in a text that does not concern you?

Is not the Harmann quote appealing to those who have nothing to gain from the outcome?

Reply to Paine No idea. I don't know who the real target audience of Guerilla Metaphysics. That's by design.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Not really. Good ol' fashioned relationism poses a greater philosophical problem for speculative realism.

It doesn't seem to be as much a problem except for Harman who focuses on objects contra process/qualities-only.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Besides, Meillassoux and Harman criticize correlationism for different reasons. They don't agree as to what it is that correlationism gets wrong. Meillassoux sees flaws where Harman sees virtues, and Harman sees flaws where Meillassoux sees virtues.

Meillassoux focused more on correlationism, and found that it kept people in an epistemic circle and thus "speculative realism" is an attempt to break it, philosophically. Harman agrees partly that correlationism has some truth to it as far as how humans relate to objects, but he democratizes it such that all objects have the ability, via vicarious causation to perceive to sense the object (i.e. sensual object), via the object's translated, sensual qualities (i.e. the qualities of an object as sensed by another object). A tree and wind have an interaction that is different than a tree and a human, for example. For Harman, relations are what matters. However, it is not all relations. It may even transform its appearance, but retains its essence (like the burned log). Each object, has an essence that is withdrawn or hidden, and thus retains its independence from complete reduction to its qualities, causal factors, or behaviors.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Not sure if this is correct, but if that's your theory, OK.

I am interpreting Harman, so not my own theory per se.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Qualities. For Harman, qualities are not objects, though he suggests that under certain conditions, a quality can become an object. But that's beside the point here,

It's actually quite the point. If Gandalf is purely from human imagination, that would seem to undermine his attempt at saying objects have independence. Also, what is the mechanism that makes the object an object at that point? Why is it not then something else- an idea, an abstraction, etc. This then becomes a slippery slope whereby objects are so ill-defined as to not matter in any useful sense.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Sensual Qualities - Real Qualities
Sensual Objects - Real Objects

These can be combined in many different ways. For example, a fictional character is a sensual object that has a real quality. Éowyn and Aragorn exists as sensual objects, not as real objects. However, they have real qualities, since, for example, they are copyrighted characters, you cannot use them in your own novel. That is in fact why the Tolkien foundation sued TSR (the old Dungeons & Dragons company) way back in the day. IIRC, a judge ruled that the word "hobbit" was copyrighted. So, instead of using the word "hobbit", TSR used "halfling".

I think you are misapplying Harman's notion of sensual object/qualities here. Sensual qualities, as far as I see, are only tied with sensual objects. Sensual objects are "tree-for-x" (human let's say). The sensual qualities would be the appearance of the tree-for-x (rough, brown, tall, etc.). The real object is the tree's essence which is withdrawn, independent of relations with other objects, and not fully comprehensible. The real qualities, might be things selected out as what composes the real object (but apparently never exhaustive), like the molecular structure let's say. Whatever form that particular tree takes in its relations with others, the essence always holds, though not fully knowable, though some real qualities can be picked out.

Thus Gandalf and Eowyn and Aragorn are always sensual objects with sensual qualities, as they are objects only ever relational to humans.

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology

Coupling Heidegger's tool analysis with the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl, Harman introduces two types of objects: real objects and sensual objects. Real objects are objects that withdraw from all experience, whereas sensual objects are those that exist only in experience.[30] Additionally, Harman suggests two kinds of qualities: sensual qualities, or those found in experience, and real qualities, which are accessed through intellectual probing.[30] Pairing sensual and real objects and qualities yields the following four "tensions":

Real Object/Real Qualities (RO-RQ): This pairing grounds the capacity of real objects to differ from one another, without collapsing into indefinite substrata.[31] This tension thus refers to "a real or indescribable object" encrusted with "real properties" that cannot be experientially understood.[32] Harman refers to this as "essence".[33]
Real Object/Sensual Qualities (RO-SQ): As in the tool-analysis, a withdrawn object is translated into sensual apprehension via a "surface" accessed by thought and/or action.[31] This tension thus refers to "the multiple facets [an object] displays to the outer world, and whatever [real, withdrawn] organizing principle is able to hold together [those] features."[34] Harman identifies this as "space".[35]
Sensual Object/Real Qualities (SO-RQ): The structure of conscious phenomena are forged from eidetic, or experientially interpretive, qualities intuited intellectually.[31] This tension thus refers to "a perfectly accessible [object] whose features are withdrawn from [total] scrutiny",[34] Harman dubs "eidos"[36]
Sensual Object/Sensual Qualities (SO-SQ): Sensual objects are present, but enmeshed within a "mist of accidental features and profiles".[37] This tension thus refers to "an enduring sensual object and its shifting parade of qualities from one moment to the next", which Harman identifies as "time".[38]
To explain how withdrawn objects make contact with and relate to one another, Harman submits the theory of vicarious causation, whereby two hypothetical entities meet in the interior of a third entity, existing side-by-side until something occurs to prompt interaction.[39] Harman compares this idea to the classical notion of formal causation, in which forms do not directly touch, but influence one another in a common space "from which all are partly absent". Causation, says Harman, is always vicarious, asymmetrical, and buffered:

Quoting schopenhauer1

It doesn't seem to be as much a problem except for Harman who focuses on objects contra process/qualities-only.

Exactly, which is why Speculative Realism is not a homogeneous set of basic beliefs. There are core differences between its "Founding Fathers", if you will. For example, the reason why Meillassoux rejects correlationism is not the same reason why Harman rejects it. To say that they are united against correlationism is like saying that materialism and idealism are united against absolutism.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Meillassoux focused more on correlationism, and found that it kept people in an epistemic circle and thus "speculative realism" is an attempt to break it, philosophically. Harman agrees partly that correlationism has some truth to it as far as how humans relate to objects, but he democratizes it such that all objects have the ability, via vicarious causation to perceive to sense the object (i.e. sensual object), via the object's translated, sensual qualities (i.e. the qualities of an object as sensed by another object). A tree and wind have an interaction that is different than a tree and a human, for example. For Harman, relations are what matters. However, it is not all relations. It may even transform its appearance, but retains its essence (like the burned log). Each object, has an essence that is withdrawn or hidden, and thus retains its independence from complete reduction to its qualities, causal factors, or behaviors.

So what's your point here? It went over my head, if there was indeed a point to be made here. To me it sounds like you're just describing a state of affairs, and you're doing so in a neutral way.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I am interpreting Harman, so not my own theory per se.

But maybe your interpretation is different from mine.

Quoting schopenhauer1

It's actually quite the point. If Gandalf is purely from human imagination, that would seem to undermine his attempt at saying objects have independence. Also, what is the mechanism that makes the object an object at that point? Why is it not then something else- an idea, an abstraction, etc. This then becomes a slippery slope whereby objects are so ill-defined as to not matter in any useful sense.

I have published a paper where I say that for Harman, all ideas are sensual objects, but not all sensual objects are ideas. He doesn't say that himself, but in one of the emails that he sent me, he seemed to agree with what I said about him on that specific point.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I think you are misapplying Harman's notion of sensual object/qualities here. Sensual qualities, as far as I see, are only tied with sensual objects.

You'd be wrong. A real object can have sensual qualities, just as a sensual object can have real qualities. There's an article that Harman himself published in response to one of my own articles. In my article, I press him on the topic of hobbits vis a vis the topic of matter, and he explicitly says, in print, that hobbits are sensual objects that have real qualities, and that the same is true of matter, in his view.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Sensual objects are "tree-for-x" (human let's say). The sensual qualities would be the appearance of the tree-for-x (rough, brown, tall, etc.). The real object is the tree's essence which is withdrawn, independent of relations with other objects, and not fully comprehensible. The real qualities, might be things selected out as what composes the real object (but apparently never exhaustive), like the molecular structure let's say. Whatever form that particular tree takes in its relations with others, the essence always holds, though not fully knowable, though some real qualities can be picked out.

Thus Gandalf and Eowyn and Aragorn are always sensual objects with sensual qualities, as they are objects only ever relational to humans.

Then your argument is with Harman himself, not with my interpretation of his philosophy.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

So what's your point here? It went over my head, if there was indeed a point to be made here. To me it sounds like you're just describing a state of affairs, and you're doing so in a neutral way.

Yep.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

I have published a paper where I say that for Harman, all ideas are sensual objects, but not all sensual objects are ideas. He doesn't say that himself, but in one of the emails that he sent me, he seemed to agree with what I said about him on that specific point.

:up:

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

You'd be wrong. A real object can have sensual qualities, just as a sensual object can have real qualities. There's an article that Harman himself published in response to one of my own articles. In my article, I press him on the topic of hobbitsvis a vis the topic of matter, and he explicitly says, in print, that hobbits are sensual objects that have real qualities, and that the same is true of matter, in his view.

Fair enough, but then:
Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Then you're argument is with Harman himself, not with my interpretation of his philosophy.

And that would be true, but are you defending Harman with these objections or do you see them as well?

Quoting schopenhauer1

And that would be true, but are you defending Harman with these objections or do you see them as well?

My sentiments on Harman's philosophy (and he knows this himself, since we've been exchanging emails for almost 10 years now) are mixed, precisely because I'm a materialist and he is not, and because I endorse scientism and he does not. He values science, but he places no stock in scientism. I, on the other hand, place stock in both. Despite these differences, Harman and I are realists. So there is important common ground there. And there are many more similarities and differences, but those that I just mentioned would be the core differences between us.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

My sentiments on Harman's philosophy (and he knows this himself, since we've been exchanging emails for almost 10 years now) are mixed, precisely because I'm a materialist and he is not, and because I endorse scientism and he does not. He values science, but he places no stock in scientism. I, on the other hand, place stock in both. Despite these differences, Harman and I are realists. So there is important common ground there. And there are many more similarities and differences, but those that I just mentioned would be the core differences between us.

Interesting. I rarely see people "embrace" the label "scientism". What is that definition for you? There was a thread about this not too long ago:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15525/the-empty-suitcase-physicalism-vs-methodological-naturalism/p1

But as far as what I brought up, do you know of his answers, or would you have a defense? Specifically I am talking about how and when something becomes an object. It seems like a Deus ex machina to say Gandalf is thus an object. Is Gandalf an object at the first thought of a Gandalf-like character? The name Gandalf? The writing of pen to paper about Gandalf? The neural connections? It just seems oddly misplaced to call it an object even with the appellate "sensual". It also has to me, obvious connections to the essentialism of Kripke in Naming and Necessity, and Putnam with ideas of scientific kinds. Does Gandalf obtain in all possible worlds? Etc.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Interesting. I rarely see people "embrace" the label "scientism". What is that definition for you?

The word "scientism" originally had a negative connotation, and then some people (like Mario Bunge) started using it in a positive sense. For example, take a look at the title of one of his articles: In Defense of Realism and Scientism

Quoting schopenhauer1

But as far as what I brought up, do you know of his answers, or would you have a defense? Specifically I am talking about how and when something becomes an object.

In one of his last emails, Harman suggested to me that perhaps there is no change at all. Here is a fragment from his email, I don't think he would have any objections against me sharing the following specific line with you. Here is what he told me:

Harman (personal communication): (...) For me, of course, all change is purely sensual, and involves shifting qualities. What I think happens is not change, but composition or synthesis between previous separate entities. (...)

So, I would say that nothing "becomes" an object in the strict sense for OOO, I would say that objects instead emerge according to OOO.

Quoting schopenhauer1

It seems like a Deus ex machina to say Gandalf is thus an object. Is Gandalf an object at the first thought of a Gandalf-like character? The name Gandalf? The writing of pen to paper about Gandalf? The neural connections? It just seems oddly misplaced to call it an object even with the appellate "sensual". It also has to me, obvious connections to the essentialism of Kripke in Naming and Necessity, and Putnam with ideas of scientific kinds. Does Gandalf obtain in all possible worlds? Etc

Again, your argument is not with me then, but with Harman himself. My theory of fictional characters is mostly inspired by Bunge, not Harman. There are other parts of my personal philosophy that are more inspired by Harman than Bunge, but this is not one of them.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

The word "scientism" originally had a negative connotation, and then some people (like Mario Bunge) started using it in a positive sense. For example, take a look at the title of one of his articles: In Defense of Realism and Scientism

Cool, I'll check it out. As a lark, @Wayfarer should take a look.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

So, I would say that nothing "becomes" an object in the strict sense for OOO, I would say that objects instead emerge according to OOO.

This just seems to open up more problems, no? For example, is Gandalf not Gandalf at time 1, but is at time 2? What is the proto-object that "emerges" in the transition stage between non-object and object? Is that proto-object an object? This suggests to negate essentialism as a continuum, more a non-discrete field or spectrum.

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

Again, your argument is not with me then, but with Harman himself. My theory of fictional characters is mostly inspired by Bunge, not Harman. There are other parts of my personal philosophy that are more inspired by Harman than Bunge, but this is not one of them.

I am not arguing with your theory but Harman, and am seeing if you also agree with my objections, nothing more. The problem with essentialist theories is where the delimiters are for certain objects. You can get away with it perhaps if you are a materialist because then you can delimit where the boundaries are by some sort of material composition. However, if you give all potential things status of objects, it can be stretched out to a continuum, and thus not an object so much as a continuous monism of indefinite beginning or end, as is the problem with something like Gandalf.

Quoting schopenhauer1

This just seems to open up more problems, no? For example, is Gandalf not Gandalf at time 1, but is at time 2? What is the proto-object that "emerges" in the transition stage between non-object and object? Is that proto-object an object? This suggests to negate essentialism as a continuum, more a non-discrete field or spectrum.

But these problems are not exclusive to Object-Oriented Ontology, they also arise in the analytic metaphysics of Ordinary Objects.

And they also arise in the context of Bunge's ontology.

Quoting schopenhauer1

and am seeing if you also agree with my objections,

I don't know if I agree with them or not, I would need more details from you. I'm not even sure what your objections are to begin with.

Quoting schopenhauer1

The problem with essentialist theories is where the delimiters are for certain objects. You can get away with it perhaps if you are a materialist because then you can delimit where the boundaries are by some sort of material composition. However, if you give all potential things status of objects, it can be stretched out to a continuum, and thus not an object so much as a continuous monism of indefinite beginning or end, as is the problem with something like Gandalf.

This is the problem that I personally call "The Hard Problem of Identity". Think of it like the "Hard problem of consciousness", but in metaphysics instead of philosophy of mind. One possible candidate for identity, is spatiotemporal continuity of form under a sortal. That solution, however, crashes into the problem of Material Constitution, particularly with the case of the Ship of Theseus (I think that the Ship of Theseus paradox should be classified as a problem of indeterminate identity, not as a problem of material constitution, but that's beside the point).

Quoting Arcane Sandwich

This is the problem that I personally call "The Hard Problem of Identity". Think of it like the "Hard problem of consciousness", but in metaphysics instead of philosophy of mind. One possible candidate for identity, is spatiotemporal continuity of form under a sortal. That solution, however, crashes into the problem of Material Constitution, particularly with the case of the Ship of Theseus (I think that the Ship of Theseus paradox should be classified as a problem of indeterminate identity, not as a problem of material constitution, but that's beside the point).

I'd agree that indeterminate identity does become a problem when delimiting where "objects" begin and end. I don't think this is as much a problem with other forms of metaphysics like process philosophy. But I get the reasons for wanting an object-oriented metaphysics, giving objects-proper ultimate priority, and irreducible to simples.

Reply to schopenhauer1 :up:

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

I found a really useful text for your thread: Paul Vincent Spade's, "The Warp and Woof of Metaphysics: How to Get Started on Some Big Themes."

It is a professor's informal introduction to Aristotelian essentialism for his students, using Quine and modalism as a jumping-off point. He construes modern approaches and bundle theories as a form of Platonism vis-a-vis the Timaeus (which makes sense). He then contrasts Aristotle's approach to the Platonic approach, which reveals the two deep metaphysical approaches on offer.

Beyond that, I think the focus on Assemblage Theory in this thread has functioned as an elaborate excuse to avoid the issues of the OP, despite the fact that there are <ways to engage the OP with approaches like Deleuze's>.