Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 07:23:17 UTC | #1 Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices? Can we really know, or are all positions (whether an Aristotelian-style account of logic as grounded in the structure of being, or a Rortyan emphasis on contingent factors), just intuitions bolstered by post hoc justifications? I've often found theistic presuppositional arguments interesting: the claim that logic needs a foundation or grounding in God, and the related claim that physicalism can't adequately account for intelligibility. My limited understanding of enactivism suggests that logical thinking starts from how our bodies interact with the world. Living things first learn how to deal with their environment by picking up simple patterns: what stays the same and what changes, what's safe and what's dangerous, and what can be repeated and what can't. More complex ways of thinking, including logic, then develop and build on these basic patterns of experience and action. No doubt this won't be good enough for those who see logic as revealing something more profound about the nature of reality itself (and no doubt there are variations between enactivist thinkers). But if logic originates as a social, linguistic, and normative refinement of embodied sense-making, why does it seem to map onto the world more broadly? Is this down to our particular vantage point, in the way that it appears that the sun revolves around the earth, since we are the ones situated in the middle of our own schemas and practices? ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-15 07:43:56 UTC | #2 Great OP ! [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices? [/quote] Can I pick both ? We can understand logic as a human tool for cooperative coping that is also "out there" in the way the world shows *itself.* But it's hard to do this if we presuppose that meaning and logic are "in mind stuff" that somehow hovers over "non-mind stuff." [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Can we really know, or are all positions ... just intuitions bolstered by post hoc justifications? [/quote] If beliefs are motivated, part of a private solution to the problem of existence, can they also be warranted ? My motivated belief is that warrant is itself a matter of motivated, situated judgment. I think the temporality is more tangled than "first hunch" then "legalistic case-making." Gadamer slapped me with the following thesis. A deepening knowledge of the object is a deepening knowledge of myself as knower. We always "project" a "total meaning" on the stranger, the text, the noise in the woods. As we zoom in, these projections collide with new experience, and only then do they become "visible." As *our* projections. As maybe the deepest part of us, the stuff we can't even check if we want to, *until* we collide with the object. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] But if logic originates as a social, linguistic, and normative refinement of embodied sense-making, why does it seem to map onto the world more broadly? Is this down to our particular vantage point, in the way that it appears that the sun revolves around the earth, since we are the ones situated in the middle of our own schemas and practices? [/quote] If you think of its evolution as toward the world making sense, then it weirdly makes sense that we can't tell the world apart from our telling of the world. Except that the process described above continues. Our telling of the world becomes "visible" as "error" --- as "just us" and "not the not-us world" --- when it collides with the unexpected. Even this division of "us" from "not us" looks like part of that telling of the world. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 08:08:09 UTC | #3 Great stuff, thanks for your response. [quote="j_j, post:2, topic:1009"] If you think of its evolution as toward the world making sense, then it weirdly makes sense that we can't tell the world apart from our telling of the world. [/quote] That's nice and seems obvious once stated. [quote="j_j, post:2, topic:1009"] If beliefs are motivated, part of a private solution to the problem of existence, can they also be warranted ? My motivated belief is that warrant is itself a matter of motivated, situated judgment. [/quote] Interesting. Can you tease this out a little more? [quote="j_j, post:2, topic:1009"] Can I pick both ? We can understand logic as a human tool for cooperative coping that is also "out there" in the way the world shows *itself.* But it's hard to do this if we presuppose that meaning and logic are "in mind stuff" that somehow hovers over "non-mind stuff." [/quote] Yes, please pick both if this works. What is your response when someone said logic needs to be grounded in something outside of human contingencies? ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-15 09:02:43 UTC | #4 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:3, topic:1009"] That’s nice and seems obvious once stated. [/quote] Thank you ! It was fun to watch it pour out. To me there's jazz in philosophy. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:3, topic:1009"] Interesting. Can you tease this out a little more? [/quote] Sure. People often talk of warrantedness as if an "absolute" or "a-perspectival" property that a belief does or does not have. But to me it's a judgement, which needs a judge. A judge is situated and motivated, always prejudiced. Which is just to have a "stand-point," a singular "view" on the judged situation, which is "there" in the way the situation "shows itself" to that judge. Do claims exist in some *other* way ? As "heard by no one" or by a witness without prejudice ? But a witness without prejudice is no longer a witness we can understand, if prejudice is understood in a neutral sense of "the past as it approaches the present in terms of a desired-projected future." [quote="Tom_Storm, post:3, topic:1009"] Yes, please pick both if this works. What is your response when someone said logic needs to be grounded in something outside of human contingencies? [/quote] Is the desire for a human-transcending authority a flight from time itself ? A desire to cancel or possess the power of the future ? When philosophers invoke divine immaterial logic or automated critical thinking, what do they want ? To settle a few issues **forever** ? From "something there is that doesn't love a wall" to "a wall there is that never fails." Or: *Not I but Logic through me.* "Anti-philosophers" highlight this flight from time and chance, and then install their own divine logic, like "difference." The anti-systematic congeals into another system. But weirdly the impulse is plausibly explained pragmatically. Wouldn't it be nice to have an indestructible tool that remains useful forever? And this is a nice gift to offer your tribe. "Anti-philosophy" has purchase as philosophy, as claims intended to endure in their virtue. Within and as part of present human contingencies we dream of something beyond them, and perhaps that "beyond" is tacitly the stormy future of human contingencies that have not arrived and can't be predicted. Logic is like the *form* of all *possible* experience. If I can find that form *now*, then I die knowing the "essence" of the future. Even explicitly "temporal" thinkers like Heidegger couldn't resist this project, even as they understood it. Their understanding it was a practicing of that very project, a hunt for the logic of logic. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 09:02:40 UTC | #5 That was like jazz. I really appreciate how you frame ideas. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-15 09:25:11 UTC | #6 Thank you. I think we largely create ourselves in conversation. Where do these words come from ? We don't know where we will end up when we start. "It" speaks and we have to take responsibility for what it says, which means letting "it" add to the pile. Related to the OP and my gratitude for your kind response: > Orientation of the word toward the addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the 'one' in relation to the 'other'. I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor. a quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin ... Just discovered this thinker, but his concrete sense of the speech act very much matters for your OP, as I see it. The presupposed goal for some seems to be a speech *by* No One that is *for* Everyone. ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-15 10:12:21 UTC | #7 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices? [/quote] How do we ascertain the nature of 'reality itself' so as to determine whether logic is part of it, or not part of it? Consider that many of the foundational works of philosophy, Aristotle's included are precisely attempts to ground logic in the nature of reality. But then, this seems to come up against related questions of the nature of meaning, how language gets its purchase, whether sensory perception is veridical --- many large philosophical questions are thrown up by this question. I resist the appeal of 'contingency', the idea that logical norms are simply conventions determined by consensus. I think the way I would see it is that logic *imposes* itself on us. We are obliged by it to assent to certain structures of thought, and not as a matter of choice. And I can't see how logic can be ascribed to our physicality, as it must be inextricably dependent on the ability to speak and understand basic concepts. Those are ideas that we grasp 'as surely as our hand grasps a pencil', as Frege once said. They're not constructed by us but recognised as such, and are not subject to our will. we cannot make them or wish them otherwise. As for the relationship between the divine intellect and truths of reason, obviously a deep subject, and fundamental to the Western metaphysical tradition, stretching back to Pythagoras and Parmenides. Not that I will embark on a dissertation, other than to say that there's a thread running throughout the Greek texts, which connects sagacity or wisdom with the ability to *see what is truly so* -- the implication being that we, the hoi polloi, generally don't, for the want of philosophy. A related theme is that the eidos, the idea, in Platonic phillosophy, is where thinking and being become one, in that to see what something truly is, is for the mind to be conformed to it. From there, the sense that the forms or principles of particular things are universal ideas in the divine intellect is not so remote as it nowadays would often be depicted. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 11:46:09 UTC | #8 [quote="Wayfarer, post:7, topic:1009"] I resist the appeal of 'contingency', the idea that logical norms are simply conventions determined by consensus. [/quote] I would think it amounts to more than that. More like my simplified summary of the enactivist model. But I get your point. [quote="Wayfarer, post:7, topic:1009"] Those are ideas that we grasp 'as surely as our hand grasps a pencil', as Frege once said. They're not constructed by us but recognised as such, and are not subject to our will. we cannot make them or wish them otherwise. [/quote] Yes, I imagine there are constraints on how we are able to apprehend and construct reality. I'm thinking along lines closer to Kant: that the structure of our cognitive apparatus necessarily conditions experience through certain forms or categories, time, space, etc. [quote="Wayfarer, post:7, topic:1009"] As for the relationship between the divine intellect and truths of reason, obviously a deep subject, and fundamental to the Western metaphysical tradition, stretching back to Pythagoras and Parmenides. [/quote] I suppose I'm ultimately dubious, though agnostic about notions such as a divine intellect, which to me can sometimes seem like a concept straining to explain what may simply be beyond explanation. But I respect this perspective regardless as it belongs to a longstanding tradition with a significant literature and I'd want to know something of the best of this tradition. [quote="Wayfarer, post:7, topic:1009"] A related theme is that the eidos, the idea, in Platonic phillosophy, is where thinking and being become one, in that to see what something truly is, is for the mind to be conformed to it. [/quote] Quick question, in idealism, if being is fundamentally mental or consciousness, what distinguishes consciousness from reason? Is reason merely an activity within consciousness, or is rational structure itself constitutive of reality? Does that make sense? ------------------------- Chelydra | 2026-05-15 13:10:28 UTC | #9 We fight over where logic comes from. But we already inside world. World shows up. We notice. Many logic, all make that happen. No logic, nothing shows up, no one there to notice. Logic not come from mind. Mind must follow logic. Logic older than mind. Logic what makes anything show up at all. First, not eternal. Reason just logic moving. ------------------------- Materialist | 2026-05-15 13:55:25 UTC | #10 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] But if logic originates as a social, linguistic, and normative refinement of embodied sense-making, why does it seem to map onto the world more broadly? [/quote] Semantics maps onto the world. Logic is semantics. A true propostion maps directly onto some aspect of reality. Valid logic describes semantic relations between propositions. Conclusions map to the world because valid logic is truth preserving. ------------------------- Jay | 2026-05-15 13:57:59 UTC | #11 Great OP and subsequent conversation, thanks. Here's a fairly simple way of posing the logic/world problem: Is the law of non-contradiction (If A, then not ~A) obligatory for us as thinkers because we cannot not *think* this way, or because we cannot not *see the world* this way? In other words, is the non-contradiction meant to describe the laws of rationality, or how things behave in the world? -- "If that's a rock, it can't also not be a rock." (Obviously we're ignoring nuances of ambiguity; assume *ceteris paribus*.) What we want to say is, Well, both! or Badly formed question! or How could we tell? And all of those may be good responses, but what's important in posing the question this way is to see that there is no obvious, correct way to understand what "A or ~A" *refers* to. Enter the idea of "propositional content" . . . ------------------------- Joshs | 2026-05-15 17:13:04 UTC | #12 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices? [/quote] If we think of the world in terms of lawful processes, and of features of reality that maintain factual identity even when the human perceiving them changes their perspective on that reality, then it would seem that the aim of knowledge is to do justice to those realities by attempting to capture, mirror, approximate them. From this vantage, formal and mathematical logic in some sense capture the very language of the real. S is P reflects the fact that the world consists of relations between persisting identities. But if we believe that the structure of reality ‘itself’ never sits still, that it consists of constantly changing relational configurations of sense that human beings contribute to, then it will appear that what formal logic and mathematics is doing is not describing the world but throwing a garb of abstractions over its continually changing senses of meaning. That doesn’t make these formal approaches wrong , it makes them thin, impoverished ways of making sense of a changing world rather than direct windows into the foundations of reality. Fortunately, formal logic isnt the only kind of logic we can use to make sense of a world in constant motion. For instance, rather than thinking of sense-making in terms of what is true or false, correct or erroneous, we can view it more fundamentally as the attempt to anticipate future events on the basis of expectations derived from the patterns we discern in prior ones. We are goal-oriented creatures, and what makes sense is defined by its relevance to our current purposes. ------------------------- Leontiskos | 2026-05-15 16:33:44 UTC | #13 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices? [/quote] At minimum I would say that logic reveals something about the structure of human beings themselves, and is not merely a human tool. This is because illogical statements always come home to roost soon or later. It is a kind of law of nature. An illogical position cannot be societally sustained on the basis of tool-based justifications. Humans are naturally averse to illogical positions. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Can we really know, or are all positions (whether an Aristotelian-style account of logic as grounded in the structure of being, or a Rortyan emphasis on contingent factors), just intuitions bolstered by post hoc justifications? [/quote] If you read someone like Aristotle you will find that he rejects the notion that first principles are known in the same way that conclusions are known. In the Metaphysics he says explicitly that there is no proof for the law of non-contradiction. ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-15 22:24:11 UTC | #14 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:8, topic:1009"] in idealism, if being is fundamentally mental or consciousness, what distinguishes consciousness from reason? Is reason merely an activity within consciousness, or is rational structure itself constitutive of reality? [/quote] Notice the impicit distinctions being made between 'being', 'reason', and 'reality itself'. I think that reflects an underlying sense of the subject-object division. We picture ourselves as the subject in a domain of objects and other beings. This situates reason 'in here', in the mental domain which is ostensibly 'subjective' or 'in the mind', distinguished from the objective, external domain, 'the world'. The difficult point about that is that this division itself is the fundamental construct (in Schopenhauer's sense of 'vorstellung'.) The self-world or self-other distinction underlies every conscious act. But then, logical laws are also said to be the 'laws of thought'. So the question presents itself where are these laws? In what medium do they inhere? They don't seem to be 'out there somewhere' in the so-called 'objective world'. They must be 'in here', internal to thought. And if existence is divided this way, into the subjective and objective realm (and we tend to think this is pretty well exhaustive) they're the only two options. And here again we notice the echo of the Cartesian division. But maybe these principles are actually constitutive of the structure within which the subject-object distinction is made in the first place. And that is, within the structure of consciousness itself. The difficuly being, again, that this is not something we can get outside of, or properly objectify. And this is what I think transcendental idealism recognised; that they transcend the subject-object division which thought tends to fall into. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 22:24:50 UTC | #15 [quote="Materialist, post:10, topic:1009"] A true propostion maps directly onto some aspect of reality. Valid logic describes semantic relations between propositions. Conclusions map to the world because valid logic is truth preserving. [/quote] Of course there are philosophers who do not believe in mapping at all - In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty famously argues that philosophy should abandon the "mirror of nature" view that propositions and knowledge represent reality objectively. ------------------------- Jay | 2026-05-15 22:34:52 UTC | #16 [quote="Wayfarer, post:14, topic:1009"] But maybe these principles are actually constitutive of the structure within which the subject-object distinction is made in the first place. And that is, within the structure of consciousness itself. [/quote] This seems like an important formulation. I want to be sure I understand it. "Principles" here refers to the laws of thought, or logical laws, yes? So you're saying that logical laws constitute the structure within which the subject/object distinction is first made. And finally, that another name for this structure which is constituted by logical laws is "consciousness itself." Have I got that right? (Preview of my next question: "Constitutive" is doing a lot of work here; in what sense can logical principles constitute something?) ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 22:37:10 UTC | #17 [quote="Joshs, post:12, topic:1009"] We are goal-oriented creatures, and what makes sense is defined by its relevance to our current purposes. [/quote] Yes, I think this is pivotal. [quote="Joshs, post:12, topic:1009"] But if we believe that the structure of reality 'itself' never sits still, that it consists of constantly changing relational configurations of sense that human beings contribute to, then it will appear that what formal logic and mathematics is doing is not describing the world but throwing a garb of abstractions over its continually changing senses of meaning. That doesn't make these formal approaches wrong , it makes them thin, impoverished ways of making sense of a changing world rather than direct windows into the foundations of reality. [/quote] There's an entire thread in this. [quote="Leontiskos, post:13, topic:1009"] At minimum I would say that logic reveals something about the structure of human beings themselves, and is not merely a human tool. [/quote] Nice. [quote="Leontiskos, post:13, topic:1009"] This is because illogical statements always come home to roost soon or later. It is a kind of law of nature. An illogical position cannot be societally sustained on the basis of tool-based justifications. Humans are naturally averse to illogical positions. [/quote] Can you provide a juicy example so I can see this in action? [quote="Wayfarer, post:14, topic:1009"] But maybe these principles are actually constitutive of the structure within which the subject-object distinction is made in the first place. And that is, within the structure of consciousness itself. The difficuly being, again, that this is not something we can get outside of, or properly objectify. And this is what I think transcendental idealism recognised; that they transcend the subject-object division which thought tends to fall into. [/quote] Subject--object distinction seems to be a fundamental organising principle, and I'd be interested in a sketch of how this could be overcome. I assume you'd point to practices aimed at exploring higher consciousness rather than philosophy itself? ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 22:45:15 UTC | #18 [quote="Jay, post:11, topic:1009"] Here's a fairly simple way of posing the logic/world problem: Is the law of non-contradiction (If A, then not \~A) obligatory for us as thinkers because we cannot not *think* this way, or because we cannot not *see the world* this way? In other words, is the non-contradiction meant to describe the laws of rationality, or how things behave in the world? -- "If that's a rock, it can't also not be a rock." (Obviously we're ignoring nuances of ambiguity; assume *ceteris paribus*.) [/quote] Yes, that is interesting. If the law of non-contradiction does not hold in every case, as some thinkers maintain, then what does this mean for a "law" of logic? It seems to me this suggests that such laws may themselves be contingent at some level. Or perhaps logic can be understood in a more dynamic and less ossified way, which seems somewhat antithetical to such principles. This is a subject that requires an expertise I do not have. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 22:53:09 UTC | #19 [quote="Joshs, post:12, topic:1009"] Fortunately, formal logic isnt the only kind of logic we can use to make sense of a world in constant motion. For instance, rather than thinking of sense-making in terms of what is true or false, correct or erroneous, we can view it more fundamentally as the attempt to anticipate future events on the basis of expectations derived from the patterns we discern in prior ones. [/quote] I'm assuming you don't think that the traditional emphasis on formal logic is still adequate for contemporary philosophical and practical needs. Are we currently in a transition period? ------------------------- Jay | 2026-05-15 22:55:11 UTC | #20 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:18, topic:1009"] If the law of non-contradiction does not hold in every case, as some thinkers maintain, then what does this mean for a “law” of logic? [/quote] But let's even say it did hold in every case. (Again, you have to exclude fuzzy formulations and assume we're discussing statements, or phenomena, that have clear yes/no alternatives.) The question is, In what kind of domain are these cases to be found? What does the term "A" in "Either A or ~A" refer to? Is A a piece of language? A state of affairs in the world? Or something called "propositional content"? Maybe all of the above? To repeat my earlier point: We don't have a ready-made, obvious answer to the question of what "Either A or ~A" is meant to refer to. That's why the "Is it thought or is it the world?" conundrum can continue to puzzle us, I'd say. ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-15 22:57:04 UTC | #21 [quote="Jay, post:16, topic:1009"] "Principles" here refers to the laws of thought, or logical laws, yes? So you're saying that logical laws constitute the structure within which the subject/object distinction is first made. And finally, that another name for this structure which is constituted by logical laws is "consciousness itself." [/quote] I think I'm on firm ground saying that logic provides the 'laws of thought'. That's pretty well textbook, isn't it? One of the essays I encountered in the very early days of forums was Tyler Burge, [Frege on Knowing the Third Realm](https://philosophy.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Burge-1992-Frege-on-Knowing-the-Third-Realm.pdf) from which: > Thought contents exist independently of thinking "in the same way", (Frege) says, that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. (The artificial character of pencils plays no role in his understanding of the analogy, as other examples indicate.) He says that thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents---"just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets" But on the other hand, they're not really objective, in the sense that the distinctions that logic rely on are not inherent in the objective domain to which they are applied: > Just as the geographer does not create a sea when he draws boundary lines and says: the part of the ocean's surface bounded by these lines I am going to call the Yellow Sea, so too the mathematician cannot really create anything by his defining. Nor can one by pure definition magically conjure into a thing a property that in fact it does not possess---save that of now being called by the name with which one has named it. So that essay states throughout Frege's confidence that 'mathematical primitives' (real numbers for instance) are 'objective'. But is 'objective' the right word? They're not 'inherent in the object'. I would rather think that mathematics is more frequently utilised to determine *what* is more or less objective. Hence a contemporary of Frege's, Bertrand Russell, makes this point about universals: > Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create \~ Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy, [The World of Universals](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm#link2HCH0009:~:text=Consider%20such%20a%20proposition%20as%20%27Edinburgh). 'Apprehended by thought but not created by it' is key to this. Such distinctions, I say, underlie nearly all our conscious acts - we see the world 'through' them, so to speak, but they're not part of the world. They're embedded in the way the mind 'constructs' its world. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 22:58:17 UTC | #22 [quote="Leontiskos, post:13, topic:1009"] If you read someone like Aristotle you will find that he rejects the notion that first principles are known in the same way that conclusions are known. In the Metaphysics he says explicitly that there is no proof for the law of non-contradiction. [/quote] Coming back to this, do you support his view and is one reading of this that logic isn't grounded? ------------------------- Joshs | 2026-05-15 23:09:38 UTC | #23 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:17, topic:1009"] Subject–object distinction seems to be a fundamental organising principle, and I’d be interested in a sketch of how this could be overcome. I assume you’d point to practices aimed at exploring higher consciousness rather than philosophy itself? [/quote] This is how Husserl overcomes the distinction. Subjective consciousness is an empty zero-point of activity, like the way my body is the zero point for my perception of spatial objects (here and away, close and distant, up and down). Think of this zero point of consciousness as the NOW, which has a horizon of memory trailing away behind it and a horizon of anticipation pointing ahead of it. This whole structure of retention-now-anticipation moves as one in a constant temporal flow. This retention -now-protention structure of consciousness is always aimed at (intends) something new. It is always about something. It singles out (synthesizes, constitutes) something in the flow based on similarity with previous experience. It anticipates durther dimensions of likeness and in this way gradually constitutes patterns from experience that it elaborates and refines into self-identical objects. It doesn’t discover these objects as though they were already there as unitary identities, it constructs out of the flux these identities by reading into the phenomena concepts like ‘self-identical object’. It then builds on and uses the abstractions it constructs, compares its constructs with those of others, and from that intersubjective comparing produces the idea of the empirical object, available to everyone identically. So objectivity is a fabrication based on the relatively harmonious way we subjectively experience patterns of phenomena. In sum, new phenomena are flowing into experience every instant of time via our synthetic activity of intending. But the difference between the objective pole of our intending and the idea of an empirically objective world is that the latter is a useful fabrication based on how we synthesize the senses of meaning which enter into the now. The subject isn’t separated from the object, subject-object simply IS the activity of constitutive synthesis. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 23:07:31 UTC | #24 [quote="Jay, post:20, topic:1009"] But let's even say it did hold in every case. (Again, you have to exclude fuzzy formulations and assume we're discussing statements, or phenomena, that have clear yes/no alternatives.) The question is, In what kind of domain are these cases to be found? What does the term "A" in "Either A or \~A" refer to? Is A a piece of language? A state of affairs in the world? Or something called "propositional content"? Maybe all of the above? To repeat my earlier point: We don't have a ready-made, obvious answer to the question of what "Either A or \~A" is meant to refer to. That's why the "Is it thought or is it the world?" conundrum can continue to puzzle us, I'd say. [/quote] Yes, which is a much better way of putting my initial questions about the nature of logic. And to me there seems to be a further question underlying all of this: in what way does language map onto the world? Does language mirror the structure of the world? My very limited understanding of Wittgenstein suggests that (in his later work at least) he thought of logic as a product of language, a set of practices that allow us to act. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 23:21:39 UTC | #25 [quote="Joshs, post:23, topic:1009"] his whole structure of retention-now-anticipation moves as one in a constant temporal flow. This retention -now-protention structure of consciousness is always aimed at (intends) something new. It is always about something. It singles out (synthesizes, constitutes) something in the flow based on similarity with previous experience. It anticipates durther dimensions of likeness and in this way gradually constitutes patterns from experience that it elaborates and refines into self-identical objects. It doesn't discover these objects as though they were already there as unitary identities, it constructs out of the flux these identities by reading into the phenomena concepts like 'self-identical object'. It then builds on and uses the abstractions it constructs, compares its constructs with those of others, and from that intersubjective comparing produces the idea of the empirical object, available to everyone identically. So objectivity is a fabrication based on the relatively harmonious way we subjectively experience patterns of phenomena. In sum, new phenomena are flowing into experience every instant of time via our synthetic activity of intending. But the difference between the objective pole of our intending and the idea of an empirically objective world is that the latter is a useful fabrication based on how we synthesize the senses of meaning which enter into the now. The subject isn't separated from the object, subject-object simply IS the activity of constitutive synthesis. [/quote] Wow. I need to mull over this. It's complex. And while this isn't exactly recent thinking, it seems clear that the implications of this have not really entered mainstream discourse. It flies in the face of many philosophical approaches advocated here. [quote="Joshs, post:23, topic:1009"] So objectivity is a fabrication based on the relatively harmonious way we subjectively experience patterns of phenomena. [/quote] If objectivity is a construction based on the relatively harmonious way we subjectively experience patterns of phenomena, does it follow that it would be helpful to disrupt this approach because it holds back our "development" and perhaps encourages dualistic, overly concrete and judgmental thinking? ------------------------- Joshs | 2026-05-15 23:27:45 UTC | #26 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:25, topic:1009"] If objectivity is a construction based on the relatively harmonious way we subjectively experience patterns of phenomena, does it follow that it would be helpful to disrupt this approach because it holds back our “development” and perhaps encourages dualistic, overly concrete and judgmental thinking [/quote] Yes, we can disrupt it by enriching it with the senses of meaning it obscures and flattens. This was the subject of the recent book ‘The Blind Spot of Science’. ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 00:50:10 UTC | #27 Excellent topic. @j_j's approach has much to admire, a refreshing change to the usual pat stuff. But having said that, I must admit to finding it quite difficult to read. No doubt this is a result of my more analytic background. But @Jay's suggestion shows a way forward. The first observation I would make is that in modern formal logic, the law of noncontradiction does not occupy a sacred place, in the way it did in older logics. Logic is no longer seen as a monolithic whole, but as a series of tools, some, but not all, of which include LNC. Its metaphysical significance has been replaced by a semantic significance. So we have a choice of logics, some of which include LNC. There is then the potential to talk about the world using a logic that does not presume the usual truth-functional negation or that involve more truth values than just T and F. And what this demonstrates is that logic does not tie us to a binary metaphysics. Now choosing a binary logic of true/false might well commit one to a binary metaphysics of being/non-being, involving identity and difference, substance and property, object and subject; but we are not obligated to begin with a binary logic. Then the first point I'd make is that logic does not tie us to a particular metaphysics. [Next](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/the-grounding-of-logic/1009/32?u=banno) ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-15 23:50:43 UTC | #28 [quote="Banno, post:27, topic:1009"] Logic is no longer seen as a monolithic whole, but as a series of tools, some, but not all, of which include LNC. Its metaphysical significance has been replaced by a semantic significance. [/quote] Would this be a controversial claim with some? [quote="Banno, post:27, topic:1009"] And what this demonstrates is that logic does not tie us to a binary metaphysics. [/quote] This is an import part of my OP. How "solid" is logic and where does this lead us? [quote="Banno, post:27, topic:1009"] Then the first point I'd make is that logic does not tie us to a particular metaphysics. [/quote] But I am assuming that the type of logic one privileges does lead towards some forms of metaphysics (or not)? If you had to define what the laws of logic mean to humans as thinkers, how would you describe them? As part of a language game? ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-15 23:54:29 UTC | #29 [quote="Joshs, post:23, topic:1009"] [quote="Tom_Storm, post:17, topic:1009"] Subject--object distinction seems to be a fundamental organising principle, and I'd be interested in a sketch of how this could be overcome. I assume you'd point to practices aimed at exploring higher consciousness rather than philosophy itself? [/quote] This is how Husserl overcomes the distinction. Subjective consciousness is an empty zero-point of activity, like the way my body is the zero point for my perception of spatial objects (here and away, close and distant, up and down). Think of this zero point of consciousness as the NOW, which has a horizon of memory trailing away behind it and a horizon of anticipation pointing ahead of it. [/quote] I would like to think that there is not a radical discontinuity between what I posted above from Frege and Russell, with wha you are saying here. The difference being that Husserl explicitly sees logic and mathematics as 'structures within consciousness'. From SEP entry on Husserl > Logic is not an empirical science and is not concerned with the genesis of spatiotemporal objects or processes, but with the validity of ideal structures and laws. Psychology by contrast is an empirical science that investigates the empirical nature of consciousness. Whereas the domain of logic is characterized by certainty and exactness, the domain of psychology is characterized by the same mere probability as all empirical sciences. A further mistake made by psychologism is that it doesn't distinguish sufficiently between the *object* of knowledge and the *act* of knowing. Whereas the act of knowing is a subjective process that elapses in time and has a beginning and an end, the objects of logic, the logical truths, theories, principles, propositions, sentences, and proofs are not subjective experiences with temporal duration, but atemporal idealities. When I think of the theorem of Pythagoras and when you think of it, we must be able to think about the same theorem, even if our respective thought processes are different. If the content of our thought was reducible to our processes of thinking, we would never be able to repeat and retain the same content across numerically different acts. And Russell makes an almost identical point: > It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think *of* a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then *in one sense* it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted ... also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the *object* of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their *object*, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. Husserl: 'When I think of the theorem of Pythagoras and when you think of it, we must be able to think about the same theorem, even if our respective thought processes are different' Russell: 'Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice.' This is what I meant above by saying that the idea (eidos) a where thought and being coincide. Eidos are preserved in Husserl, not as static objects in the so-called platonic realm, but as invariant structures within thought or consciousness. It's a more dynamic interpretation but still preserves something of the Platonic insight. ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 00:00:47 UTC | #30 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:28, topic:1009"] Would this be a controversial claim with some? [/quote] :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Wait and see. Small steps. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 00:03:41 UTC | #31 [quote="Wayfarer, post:29, topic:1009"] Eidos are preserved in Husserl, not as static objects in the so-called platonic realm, but as invariant structures within thought or consciousness. It’s a more dynamic interpretation but still preserves something of the Platonic insight. [/quote] I see the value in this. But could we see these "invariant structures" as things in the shared world ? We "perform" the identity of the river, by synthesizing its many manifestations to each of us. The identity of the river is "ideal" in something like a normative sense. Logic is normative. The telling of the world is not apart from the world, if we don't presuppose that "ideas" are "mental stuff." We "live ideas" in our deeds in the world, including the sounds and marks we trade. ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 00:50:49 UTC | #32 The second point I would make is a directly analytic one, and not unrelated to my first point. It is to do with individuation, with what the world is made of, which things our logic is to be about. And again, we choose. What counts as a simple, an atom, an individual changes with our purpose. The arguments here should I hope be familiar. Quine's "gavagai" argument and Wittgenstein on simples, at around PI §48., and the "myth of the given" form Wilfrid Sellars. What counts as an individual is not given, but a choice. Of course, not just any choice will do. Our choices are constrained. Perhaps the best way to understand "the world" is as that which imposes that constraint. Nevertheless, our ontology is not entirely fixed; it is underdetermined by the world. [Next](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/the-grounding-of-logic/1009/38?u=banno) ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 00:14:10 UTC | #33 [quote="Wayfarer, post:29, topic:1009"] I would like to think that there is not a radical discontinuity between what I posted above from Frege and Russell, with wha you are saying here. The difference being that Husserl explicitly sees logic and mathematics as 'structures within consciousness'. [/quote] Wouldn't it be fair, however, to say that Husserl brackets most metaphysical questions such as survival after death and idealism proper as lying beyond the scope of his method? And don't you see this approach as a first step toward moving beyond physicalism and toward a more Hindu or Buddhist style ontology? ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 00:16:10 UTC | #34 [quote="Banno, post:32, topic:1009"] Of course, not just any choice will do. Our choices are constrained. Perhaps the best way to understand "the world" is as that which imposes that constraint. [/quote] I have sometimes pondered a frame very close to this, myself. [quote="Banno, post:32, topic:1009"] Nevertheless, our ontology is not entirely fixed; it is underdetermined by the world. [/quote] Well, this could lead some into much more extravagant notions than others, right? ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-16 00:19:13 UTC | #35 [quote="j_j, post:31, topic:1009"] But could we see these "invariant structures" as things in the shared world ? [/quote] Sure. If I ask you for two of something, you will know exactly what I mean. [quote="j_j, post:31, topic:1009"] We "live ideas" in our deeds in the world, including the sounds and marks we trade. [/quote] Right. That's pretty well what I'm getting at all of the time. The construction we have of our 'otherness' to the world, while it's in some sense fundamental and unavoidable, it's also the source of existential angst. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:33, topic:1009"] Wouldn't it be fair, however, to say that Husserl brackets most metaphysical questions such as survival after death and idealism proper as lying beyond the scope of his method? [/quote] Sure - but that's also the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Ancient Greece was 'the axial age' where those questions were front and centre. As for whether that is 'idealism proper' - I don't know if Platonism can even really be called 'idealism' without it being anachronistic. Idealism as a term in the philosophical lexicon only came into being in the early modern period. 'Consciousness' was a term coined by the Cambridge platonists. Looking at Greek philosophy through our modern eyes, it may seem 'idealist' but that is not a term they would have understood. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 00:25:25 UTC | #36 Cool. I guess I wanted to separate transcendental idealism from a more Schopenhauer-like form of metaphysical idealism, which makes more specific claims. ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 01:21:25 UTC | #37 For me the provenance of logic is the most central question about our, and sentient animal in general, relation to the world, and as such it is the most important and fascinating question. Just as sex is the dance from which all dances come, so this question is the question from which all questions come. The way I think about it life originates with the membrane―the strict separation between inside and outside. Sentient beings must be able, at least functionally if not consciously, to enact this separation, or perhaps better: living organisms are functions of this separation. Thus begins the primordial identification of difference, of "self and other". To survive as living beings we all must be able to identify things in the world―sources of sustenance, prey and predator and so on. Identification only works for us and the other organisms if it is unambiguous. Processes of unambiguous identifications of things are the forerunners and constitute the structural underpinnings of language with its dualistic, binary character; a thing either is "whatever" or it isn't. The Law of the Excluded Middle and the Law of Non-contradiction are the elaborated exemplars of what is necessary in the context of pre-linguistic perception and action, and thus by extension to its linguistic expressions. This can also be seen in the common parlance of "making sense". What is logical makes sense, what is illogical not so much. So a thing as identified cannot be both itself and something else. There is no room in the local context for such ambiguity. But then the abstractive, abstractional character of our language enables us to analyze and introduce ambiguity. On reflection we come to understand that when we see a thing, we do not see all of it. Science informs us that all the things of the perceptual world, even the apparently most stable, are all changing. Thus enters the insoluble puzzle of identity and difference, of being and becoming. Kant (perhaps not the first) introduces the logical distinction between the thing as perceived and the thing in itself. There seems to be a contradiction now―we see the thing and yet we do not see the thing. In the world of perception there cannot be any ambiguity―the LEM and the LNC rule! But Kant has pointed to another "context"―the "in itself"―and between the "for us" and the "in itself" ambiguity insinuates its unsettling tendrils. The best formulation of this I have come across (found in reading Brook Zyporyn's *Being and Ambiguity*) is (referring to the determinability of the everyday object) "It is locally coherent, but globally incoherent." Ziporyn's idea is that that every local determinacy is accompanied by global indeterminacy. Zyporyn is a scholar of Daosim and Buddhism and he relates this ambiguity to the Tiantai Buddhist conception of 'Provisional Positing vs. Emptiness'. So, this ambiguity originates in a mixing of contexts―the familiar context of perception and judgement and the (imaginary) "context which is no context" or to relate to an alcoholic reference some may be familiar with: the "Clayton's" situation―"the situation you are having when you are not having a situation". ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 01:53:15 UTC | #38 The third point is even more broadly based, with a background stretching from Husserl to Davidson, with all stations in between. The world is always, already, interpreted. We can't step outside our representations of the world. One corollary of that is that there is no neutral ground from which we might choose between the logics available to us. Another corollary, if we accept that language is inherently communal, is that our representations of the world are also inherently communal. And from *that* we might welcome a preference for those representations, those explanations, that are more *widely* accepted, that are not true for one, but true for many. Not the view from nowhere but the view from anywhere. [Conclusion](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/the-grounding-of-logic/1009/42?u=banno) ------------------------- Count_Timothy_von_Icarus | 2026-05-16 01:30:08 UTC | #39 We had a few threads on this on the old forum. One difficulty is the potential for equivocation. Today, as an academic subject, logic is strictly "formal logic" (really to the exclusion of material logic, which gets rolled into "application"). Interestingly, you can find plenty of scholarship on the well-developed 'logic' of Indian thought. Yet it is notable that Indian logic, AFAIK, never makes the strong distinctions between form and content, syntax and semantics, that you see in the West due to Aristotle. As such, it remains even more firmly epistemic and ontic. Contemporary formal logic is sort of on the opposite side of the spectrum. But I don't think the advocates of any sort of "thick" grounding of 'logic' generally mean to appeal to any particular aspect of contemporary formal logic. Actually, they normally want to roll mathematics into these arguments, or even all causal inference, or even the possibility of any noetic content to thought at all. This is why I think 'logos' might be a better term for these discussions than logic. Just a thought though. That doesn't really tilt things in any direction either. Generally, what someone thinks about the grounds of logic is fairly informative about what they think about the grounds of mathematics, or the need to ground causality and the intelligible whatness (quiddity) of thought. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 01:38:48 UTC | #40 [quote="John, post:37, topic:1009"] For me the provenance of logic is the most central question about our, and sentient animal in general, relation to the world, and as such it is the most important and fascinating question. [/quote] Yes it struck me as a fundamental question too and so much else seems to fan out from it. Hence this: [quote="Count_Timothy_von_Icarus, post:39, topic:1009"] Generally, what someone thinks about the grounds of logic is fairly informative about what they think about the grounds of mathematics, or the need to ground causality and the intelligible whatness (quiddity) of thought. [/quote] [quote="John, post:37, topic:1009"] Science informs us that all the things of the perceptual world, even the apparently most stable, are all changing. Thus enters the insoluble puzzle of identity and difference, of being and becoming. [/quote] You seem to take an enactivist approach? [quote="John, post:37, topic:1009"] So, this ambiguity originates in a mixing of contexts―the familiar context of perception and judgement and the (imaginary) "context which is no context" or to relate to an alcoholic reference some may be familiar with: the "Clayton's" situation―"the situation you are having when you are not having a situation". [/quote] Ha! I remember those ads. Just so I'm clear are you saying it's much ado about nothing or something far more subtle? ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 01:42:47 UTC | #41 [quote="Banno, post:38, topic:1009"] The world is always, already, interpreted. We can't step outside our representations of the world. [/quote] I guess this point is where some of the tensions begin. Isn't the point of higher awareness and contemplative traditions about stepping outside, if not beyond? I'm assuming your response to that might be similar to what you already wrote here: [quote="Banno, post:38, topic:1009"] Another corollary, if we accept that language is inherently communal, is that our representations of the world are also inherently communal. And from *that* we might welcome a preference for those representations, those explanations, that are more *widely* accepted, that are not true for one, but true for many. Not the view from nowhere but the view from anywhere. [/quote] ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 01:44:01 UTC | #42 So we have [quote="Banno, post:27, topic:1009"] ...logic does not tie us to a particular metaphysics. [/quote] [quote="Banno, post:32, topic:1009"] ...our ontology is not entirely fixed; it is underdetermined by the world. [/quote] [quote="Banno, post:38, topic:1009"] We can't step outside our representations of the world. [/quote] Perhaps these observations put us in a position to see some problems with the questions asked in the OP. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] ...the structure of reality itself... [/quote] This phrase ought to give us pause. We have seen that we cannot step outside our representations of the world. If that is so, then there can be no "structure of reality itself", but only a structure within some representation. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] ...is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices? [/quote] Given that we can choose from amongst many logics, yes, it is a tool, used to model how things are. Logic governs validity, forming a grammar in which we can talk coherently about how things are. Our ontology is not entirely fixed, but not just any model will do. Some inferences will be invalid. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Can we *really* know... [/quote] *Really?* What work does that word do here? We cannot step outside of our representations in order to achieve a "really". What we can look for is coherence and agreement in *our* representations. They are far from arbitrary. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] God [/quote] Those who cannot abide having a choice of logics sometimes insist that one true logic was handed down by god. It's a pretty poor position. If nothing else, it seems to place undue limits on what god is capable of. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] enactivism [/quote] Our logic and language are inherently part of the world; which is to say again that the world is what imposes constraints on our words - but more, on what we can and cannot do. What we say about the world is part of what we do in the world. One way or another, it is enacted. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] ...if logic originates as a social, linguistic, and normative refinement of embodied sense-making, why does it seem to map onto the world more broadly? [/quote] Why does a Philips head fit so well into a Philips screw? Not just because of design, but because the one makes no sense without the other. We can only do what is available to us to do. The very idea of an unconceptualised structure is incoherent. What looks like a map is also the territory. All of the above is pretentious shit, of course. It's what we do that is important. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 01:45:17 UTC | #43 [quote="Count_Timothy_von_Icarus, post:39, topic:1009"] We had a few threads on this on the old forum. One difficulty is the potential for equivocation. Today, as an academic subject, logic is strictly "formal logic" (really to the exclusion of material logic, which gets rolled into "application"). [/quote] Coming back to this. As a non-philosopher with no expertise in logic or metaphysics what would you say to me is the most truthful way to understand logic? ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 01:48:13 UTC | #44 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:41, topic:1009"] Isn't the point of higher awareness and contemplative traditions about stepping outside, if not beyond? [/quote] Sure. But if you step outside, then you can't *say* anything. That's the error made so often here - to pretend to talk about the ineffable. And the purpose of pointing to what we do. What cannot be said can be done, and so shown. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 01:53:36 UTC | #45 [quote="Banno, post:42, topic:1009"] Perhaps these observations put us in a position to see some problems with the questions asked in the OP. [/quote] Good. I am not committed to anything in the OP, I'm just restating views I encounter. [quote="Banno, post:42, topic:1009"] We have seen that we cannot step outside our representations of the world. If that is so, then there can be no "structure of reality itself", but only a structure within some representation. [/quote] See my previous reply to you. I like how you put it. When I use the term reality I guess I mean by this the reality we seem to experience. Which is, perhaps a structure within some representation. Your view is obviously that it is futile to look for an exit? [quote="Banno, post:42, topic:1009"] *Really?* What work does that word do here? We cannot step outside of our representations in order to achieve a "really". What we can look for is coherence and agreement in *our* representations. They are far from arbitrary. [/quote] Shit. There's another whole thread in this alone. I get constraints, I get representations. But isn't it a kind of "giving up" not trying to work to push metaphysics further? Not that I can do this. I'm also still curious are the laws of logic for you part of a language game? ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 01:56:13 UTC | #46 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:45, topic:1009"] Your view is obviously that it is futile to look for an exit? [/quote] Yes, because we are not actually *in* anything to begin with if there is no *out*. ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 02:05:50 UTC | #47 The process of explanation, like the process of doubt, depends on a background that is already understood. *Something* must be taken as certain. But it need not - ought not - be the very same thing in all cases. What we hold to be the case can change as we do different things. The selected logic is the formal structure of the language game; or if you like it's an explication of its coherence (or lack thereof). It doesn't ground the game from the outside. Again, that "a bishop is no more than that piece which moves only diagonally" only makes sense within the game. There is no bishop-in-itself, and no diagonal without the board. ------------------------- Joshs | 2026-05-16 02:13:34 UTC | #48 [quote="Wayfarer, post:29, topic:1009"] Husserl: ‘When I think of the theorem of Pythagoras and when you think of it, we must be able to think about the same theorem, even if our respective thought processes are different’ Russell: ‘Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice.’ This is what I meant above by saying that the idea (eidos) are where thought and being coincide. Eidos are preserved in Husserl, not as static objects in the so-called platonic realm, but as invariant structures within thought or consciousness. It’s a more dynamic interpretation but still preserves something of the Platonic insight. [/quote] Husserl’s method is to trace every abstract object of thought back to concrete constituting processes within subjectivity. Rather than taking logical universals as irreducible a priori’s, he begins with the question ‘how are pure idealities, which are the same for everyone despite variations in psychological circumstances, synthesized in my consciousness’? To answer this question , he brackets and reduces these universal idealities to more fundamental constituting processes in subjective consciousness. Just as the subject constitutes the idea of a self-identical spatial object, he constitutes in consciousness that which can be repeated identically again and again. Logical ideality doesnt drop into the subject’s lap, it is formed in order to achieve specific goals. It isnt logic which is fundamental, it is associative synthesis. ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 02:23:41 UTC | #49 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:40, topic:1009"] Yes it struck me as a fundamental question too and so much else seems to fan out from it. Hence this: [quote="Count_Timothy_von_Icarus, post:39, topic:1009"] Generally, what someone thinks about the grounds of logic is fairly informative about what they think about the grounds of mathematics, or the need to ground causality and the intelligible whatness (quiddity) of thought. [/quote] [/quote] I think that feeling the need for grounds is a very human thing. It seems obvious to me that we have our (evolutionary) foundations in the pre-conceptual world of perception and judgement. A different question is whether we can find grounds, in the sense of intellectual justifications, for our beliefs there, and I think no unequivocal answer to that is possible. I say "unequivocal" because any answer will be an argument based on premises which are not themselves grounded by the argument. This is the Gödelian problem in a nutshell. An argument cannot be consistent and complete, or as I would rephrase it in the present context "consistent and globally unambiguous". [quote="Tom_Storm, post:40, topic:1009"] You seem to take an enactivist approach? [/quote] I do find enactivist ideas attractive, within certain limits. The idea that the subject constructs or enacts the world for me has some truth, but then I think the world is left out. I would say everything, including the subject is enacted by the world. We don't consciously construct the world, but the whole process of world and embodiment is really not separable, except in abstraction. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:40, topic:1009"] Ha! I remember those ads. Just so I'm clear are you saying it's much ado about nothing or something far more subtle? [/quote] In one sense it is much ado about nothing, and in another sense it is absolutely central to everything human. There's that wonderful ambiguity again―where would we be without it? ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 02:19:51 UTC | #50 [quote="Joshs, post:48, topic:1009"] It isnt logic which is fundamental, it is associative synthesis. [/quote] Nice. So logic is the "result" and gets mistaken as foundational. ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 02:41:04 UTC | #51 I agree with this but would add that "associative synthesis" is not fundamental or foundational either, in that it cannot stand alone. Essentially I'm saying that if anything is fundamental then everything or nothing or no-thing is fundamental, and even it is not unambiguously so. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:45, topic:1009"] I get constraints, I get representations. But isn't it a kind of "giving up" not trying to work to push metaphysics further? [/quote] "Constraints" and "representations" are themselves highly ambiguous, and the idea that we cannot get outside of them even more so. I think you know I have long argued that metaphysics is not a determinable activity with determinate results, yet it doesn't follow that it is a waste of time. We "push it further" not by means of empirical or formal logic, but by abandoning those "lifejackets" (or straitjackets) and swimming in the refreshing waters of allusion, allegory and metaphor. Metaphysics is more akin to poetry than to science or mathematics. ------------------------- Joshs | 2026-05-16 02:36:55 UTC | #52 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:50, topic:1009"] [quote="Joshs, post:48, topic:1009"] It isnt logic which is fundamental, it is associative synthesis. [/quote] Nice. So logic is the “result” and gets mistaken as foundational [/quote] Yep. Derrida gives a sense of what sorts of prior constructions are being ignored when logic is taken as fundamental. > “… only "composed" logical notions can be defined without referring to psychological genesis; these notions are mediate and hence insufficient. They are already constituted, and their originary sense escapes us. They suppose elementary concepts like "quality," "intensity," "place," “time," and so on, whose definition cannot, in Husserl's eyes, remain specifically logical. These concepts are correlative to the act of a subject. The concepts of equality, identity, of whole and of part, of plurality and of unity are not understood., in the last analysis, through terms of formal logic. > > If these concepts were a priori pure ideal forms, they would not lend themselves to any definition; every definition supposes in fact a concrete determination. This determination cannot be pro-vided except by the act of actual constitution of this formal logic. Thus, we must turn toward concrete psychological life, toward perception, starting from which, abstraction and formalization take place. An already constituted logical form" cannot be rigorously defined without unveiling the whole intentional history of its constitution. > > If such a history is not implied by all the logical concepts, these become unintelligible in themselves and unusable in concrete operations. Thus, Husserl maintains against Frege that one has no right to reproach a mathematician with describing the historical and psychological journey that leads to the concept of number, One cannot “begin" with a logical definition of number. The very act of this defi-nition and its possibility would be inexplicable. Thus, all that can be asked of a mathematician is to begin with a concrete description of the genesis of the notions they use and thus to bring to light the sense of these notions for a consciousness.” (Derrida, The Problem of Genesis) ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 02:44:17 UTC | #53 Is there more to what @Joshs is saying than that logic is always a logic *of* something, always embedded in a language game? If so, then I'll go along with them. But I've no clear idea what an "associative synthesis" might be. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 02:57:03 UTC | #54 [quote="Banno, post:53, topic:1009"] If so, then I'll go along I'm looking for a range of perspectives here. If I knew more about the subject I'd probably be of more use. 😉 [/quote] I'm looking for as broad a range of ideas as possible. I just wish I had more expertise so I could be of more use. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 03:00:16 UTC | #55 [quote="Banno, post:53, topic:1009"] But I've no clear idea what an "associative synthesis" might be. [/quote] I'm assuming logic is the synthesis or result of our sense making process , creating regularities. ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 03:03:50 UTC | #56 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:55, topic:1009"] I'm assuming logic is the synthesis or result of our sense making process , creating regularities. [/quote] Do we create regularities or discover them? ------------------------- Banno | 2026-05-16 03:16:39 UTC | #57 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:54, topic:1009"] I'm looking for as broad a range of ideas as possible. [/quote] I'll try to pull back on the critique then. ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-16 03:23:15 UTC | #58 [quote="Joshs, post:48, topic:1009"] Logical ideality doesnt drop into the subject's lap, it is formed in order to achieve specific goals. It isnt logic which is fundamental, it is associative synthesis. [/quote] I really do get that - but it points towards a more modern and more refined understanding of the role of 'eidos'. > Husserl called his position "transcendental" phenomenology, and Tieszen makes sense of this by claiming that it can be seen as an extension of Kant's transcendental idealism. The act of cognition constitutes its content as objective. Once we recognize the distinctive givenness of essences in our experience, we can extend Kant's realism about empirical objects grounded in sensible intuition to a broader realism that encompasses objects grounded in categorial intuition, including mathematical objects. > > > The view is very much like what Kant has to say about empirical objects and empirical realism, except that now it is also applied to mathematical experience. On the object side of his analysis Husserl can still claim to be a kind of realist about mathematical objects, for mathematical objects are not our own ideas (p. 57f.). > > This view, Tieszen points out, can preserve all the advantages of Platonism with none of its pitfalls. We can maintain that mathematical objects are mind-independent, self-subsistent and in every sense real, and we can also explain how we are cognitively related to them: they *are* invariants in our experience, given fulfillments of mathematical intentions. The evidence that justifies our mathematical knowledge is of the same kind as the evidence available for empirical knowledge claims: we are *given* these objects. And, since they are given, not subjectively constructed, fictionalism, conventionalism, and similar compromise views turn out to be unnecessarily permissive. The only twist we add to a Platonic realism is that ideal objects are transcendentally constituted. > > > We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense ... . They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them. (p. 13). Phenomenology, Logic and the Philosophy of Mathematics, Richard Tieszen ([reviewed](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/phenomenology-logic-and-the-philosophy-of-mathematics/)). So that 'associative synthesis' still culminates in the grasping of something which is not in itself constructed. So while you say 'he brackets and reduces these universal idealities to more fundamental constituting processes in subjective consciousness', I say it's more than just subjective, in the sense of pertaining to an individual. They are necessary structures within consicousness itself, not yours or mine. Which is why it is still a form of transcendental idealism. ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 03:35:47 UTC | #59 [quote="Wayfarer, post:58, topic:1009"] They are necessary structures within consicousness itself, not yours or mine. Which is why it is still a form of transcendental idealism. [/quote] I cannot see any more warrant for talking about "necessary structures of consciousness" than I can of talking about "structures of the perceived world". Or even any warrant, in that consciousness as a "no-thing" does not seem to be anything it would be appropriate to speak of in terms of "necessary structures". ------------------------- Leontiskos | 2026-05-16 04:06:07 UTC | #60 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:17, topic:1009"] Can you provide a juicy example so I can see this in action? [/quote] Hmm, you can definitely see it when political leaders or governments try to enforce a law or policy that doesn't make any sense. They will be swimming upstream, and the strength of the current will depend on how illogical the policy is. Giving concrete examples risks creating tangents in the thread, but a relatively uncontroversial example might be the Soviet Union's claim that they had created a kind of utopia within the country. Given the actual state of affairs, such a claim contravened the law of non-contradiction and could not be sustained over time. You can also see it when individuals try to maintain a highly illogical position or double standard within their life. It will take a toll on their social relationships, their ability to think clearly, and their mental health. Trying to live out a contradiction exacts a high price, and no one seems to escape that sort of situation unscathed. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:22, topic:1009"] Coming back to this, do you support his view and is one reading of this that logic isn’t grounded? [/quote] I think Aristotle was right. For Aristotle the paradigm of logic isn't self-grounding. So if "grounded" is defined as "logically grounded" then logic would not be "grounded." Among good philosophers it isn't controversial to say that logic doesn't ground itself, so you're right to ask about what the state of logic is with regard to groundedness. If you search the old forum for "Stromberg" you will find an Aristotelian answer to that puzzle. But could we simply say that logic is ungrounded and leave it at that? I don't think so, and this is because those who are concerned with logic are concerned with groundedness. To be concerned with logic while simultaneously being unconcerned with the grounding of logic would be like an engineer who is concerned with the structural integrity of bridges, but who is indifferent to the manner in which bridges are anchored into the ground. This does not make sense, because the purpose of a bridge is to stand firm, and a bridge that is not anchored into the ground cannot stand firm. (Note that the variety of Analytic who is only concerned with axioms and disregards all questions of first principles is like the engineer who cares not about anchors into the ground.) ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 04:21:16 UTC | #61 [quote="John, post:56, topic:1009"] Do we create regularities or discover them? [/quote] Not sure I would know. My intuition says that they are perhaps a function of perception and intellectual models, language, etc, the panoply of contingent factors, with some constraints thrown in from the "reality" we find ourselves in. Your thoughts? ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-16 04:29:34 UTC | #62 [quote="John, post:59, topic:1009"] I cannot see any more warrant for talking about "necessary structures of consciousness" than I can of talking about "structures of the perceived world". [/quote] If I ask you to give an arithmetical answer, *you are obliged* to give the right answer, if you can. [quote="Tom_Storm, post:61, topic:1009"] My intuition says that they are perhaps a function of perception and intellectual models, language, etc, the panoply of contingent factors, with some constraints thrown in from the "reality" we find ourselves in. [/quote] ![image|382x382](upload://lVsgsD9MnTla1KkeKrr3Dwfb2Ww.png) 'What we call "reality" symbolised by the letter "R" in the diagram consists of an elaborate paper-maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of obseervation' \~ John Wheeler, 'Law without Law'. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 04:53:13 UTC | #63 [quote="John, post:51, topic:1009"] "Constraints" and "representations" are themselves highly ambiguous, and the idea that we cannot get outside of them even more so. I think you know I have long argued that metaphysics is not a determinable activity with determinate results, yet it doesn't follow that it is a waste of time. We "push it further" not by means of empirical or formal logic, but by abandoning those "lifejackets" (or straitjackets) and swimming in the refreshing waters of allusion, allegory and metaphor. Metaphysics is more akin to poetry than to science or mathematics. [/quote] You may well have hit on something and the notion that we are talking about a kind of poetry or "jazz" as our friend J-J has said is intriguing to me. [quote="John, post:51, topic:1009"] Essentially I'm saying that if anything is fundamental then everything or nothing or no-thing is fundamental, and even it is not unambiguously so. [/quote] I'm not sure I fully understand this point. Can you expand a little on it? [quote="Joshs, post:52, topic:1009"] Derrida gives a sense of what sorts of prior constructions are being ignored when logic is taken as fundamental. [/quote] Thanks for this. It's difficult, but I get a sense of the meaning. [quote="Wayfarer, post:58, topic:1009"] I really do get that - but it points towards a more modern and more refined understanding of the role of 'eidos'. [/quote] Not sure you are commenting on Joshs via Derrida, but isn't he (D) suspicious of any stable thing or alleged "essence" that underpins our language or experience? Is it possible for us to reach anything in its purity, untouched by interpretation? I guess that's one of the key questions that seems to flow from this discussion. But It seems that for Derrida this is similar to Kant, although much stronger we have appearances, but can never reach a form/essence/eidos. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 04:51:24 UTC | #64 [quote="Leontiskos, post:60, topic:1009"] You can also see it when individuals try to maintain a highly illogical position or double standard within their life. It will take a toll on their social relationships, their ability to think clearly, and their mental health. [/quote] You may be right about this, although I suspect there are some who can do it. Some people seem to have a gift for inhabiting multiple realities with concomitant immunity to contradiction. [quote="Leontiskos, post:60, topic:1009"] Among good philosophers it isn't controversial to say that logic doesn't ground itself, so you're right to ask about what the state of logic is with regard to groundedness. [/quote] Cool. I was interested in what you would say on this. [quote="Leontiskos, post:60, topic:1009"] But could we simply say that logic is ungrounded and leave it at that? I don't think so, and this is because those who are concerned with logic are concerned with groundedness. To be concerned with logic while simultaneously being unconcerned with the grounding of logic would be like an engineer who is concerned with the structural integrity of bridges, but who is indifferent to the manner in which bridges are anchored into the ground. This does not make sense, because the purpose of a bridge is to stand firm, and a bridge that is not anchored into the ground cannot stand firm. [/quote] Can I ask you then, in simple terms, what would it mean to ground logic? What follows from that idea: does it involve some kind of guarantor of logic's validity or reliability that would otherwise be missing, and without which our discourse would collapse into meaninglessness? ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-16 04:56:44 UTC | #65 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:63, topic:1009"] Not sure you are commenting on Joshs via Derrida, but isn't he (D) suspicious of any stable thing or alleged "essence" that underpins our language or experience? I [/quote] But isn't that post-modern philosophy's general aversion to meta-narratives and the suggestion of a philosophical absolute? What I'm grappling with is that ideas - by that I don't mean, whatever happens to occupy one's stream-of-conscoiusness at any given time - really are structures within consciousness. They are the necessary form that thought must take - hence the whole idea of 'logical necessity.' (But I also should add, this is not 'idolizing' logic - logic can be sound but convey nothing meaningful.) ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:00:44 UTC | #66 Yes. The beauty of [quote="Tom_Storm, post:45, topic:1009"] I get constraints, I get representations. But isn’t it a kind of “giving up” not trying to work to push metaphysics further? [/quote] I hear you. That "thrust against the limits of language" is itself a part of existence. Existence is self-transcending. We are the system trying to climb out of itself. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 05:01:44 UTC | #67 [quote="Wayfarer, post:65, topic:1009"] But isn't that post-modern philosophy's general aversion to meta-narratives and the suggestion of a philosophical absolute? [/quote] Yes. Although describing it as a "general aversion" makes it sound as if they are determined to uncover nothing in their quest, and I suspect some postmodernists are disappointed by their conclusions. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 05:07:00 UTC | #68 [quote="Wayfarer, post:65, topic:1009"] What I'm grappling with is that ideas - by that I don't mean, whatever happens to occupy one's stream-of-conscoiusness at any given time - really are structures within consciousness. They are the necessary form that thought must take - hence the whole idea of 'logical necessity.' [/quote] Yes, and you may be right. I'm agnostic on this, but I'm trying to survey the options as best I can. I can't help but be "turned on" by more anti-foundationalist tendencies, however. I don't think we can help what ideas attract us even if they scare us. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:13:32 UTC | #69 [quote="Wayfarer, post:58, topic:1009"] So that ‘associative synthesis’ still culminates in the grasping of something which is not in itself constructed. [/quote] A deep issue ! In an important sense, zero was *invented.* But for us now it is just "there" and "obvious." I did not construct 0, and I did not construct the sign "consciousness." I was "thrown" into a world where these signs were being traded. I had to learn to get myself mostly "understood" by joining in. ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 05:25:33 UTC | #70 [quote="John, post:37, topic:1009"] To survive as living beings we all must be able to identify things in the world―sources of sustenance, prey and predator and so on. Identification only works for us and the other organisms if it is unambiguous. [/quote] To anticipate a possible objection that if all coherences are globally incoherent then likewise the thesis that all coherences are globally incoherent would be globally incoherent: it's a fair challenge. Interestingly it points to the ambiguity between determinacy and indeterminacy ―to the indeterminacy of determinacy and the determinacy of indeterminacy, The global incoherence of local coherence and the local coherence of global incoherence, all of which would accord nicely with Zyporyn's own ideas I think. As I see it, it is the 'black and white', binary character of language which creates an illusion of absolute determinacy. For survival in the pre-linguistic "analogue" world of animal perception and action, determination, that is identification or recognition of things, only needs to be "good enough", that is unambiguous enough to be workable. I would certainly agree that my thesis, and Zyporyn's, cannot themselves be absolutely unambiguous. They too only need to be "good enough" to get the point across. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:21:36 UTC | #71 [quote="Banno, post:42, topic:1009"] Our logic and language are inherently part of the world; which is to say again that the world is what imposes constraints on our words - but more, on what we can and cannot do. [/quote] I agree. It's helpful to consider animals emitting this or that cry when this or that predator is near. These cries are *things in the world*, vibrations of the air. We inherit a stubborn belief in "immaterial meaning." Which casts a shadow of meaninglessness on everything else. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:22:52 UTC | #72 [quote="John, post:51, topic:1009"] Metaphysics is more akin to poetry than to science or mathematics. [/quote] Yes. And, in an important sense, the world itself is metaphorical. I mean that we "live" metaphors. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:27:25 UTC | #73 [quote="Materialist, post:10, topic:1009"] A true proposition maps directly onto some aspect of reality. [/quote] I think this view makes the most sense when applied to simple perceptions. "There's a package on the porch." But what about "[open texture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_texture)" ? But let's tackle a more difficult example. How does "a true proposition maps directly onto some aspect of reality" map directly onto some aspect of reality ? (I am assuming that you would call it "true." ) Is reality self-referential ? ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 05:31:08 UTC | #74 [quote="j_j, post:71, topic:1009"] We inherit a stubborn belief in "immaterial meaning." Which casts a shadow of meaninglessness on everything else. [/quote] A very important point! It is an anachronistic attitude that deems "mere matter' to be necessarily meaningless. There really is no mere matter without forms, and forms have all kinds of significance to all kinds of beings, but the formations of matter do not really add anything extra, since matter without form is unintelligible, unimaginable. ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-16 05:48:50 UTC | #75 [quote="j_j, post:69, topic:1009"] In an important sense, zero was *invented.* [/quote] Actually it was *discovered*, and its discovery was itself a revolution in mathematics (see Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.) That discovery, first hinted at by Babylonian tallying methods, and then formalised by an Indian mathematician, made modern mathematics possible, as previous arithmetic was hopelessy cumbersome because without it there could be no decimal notation. But it faced enormous hostility in Europe based on Aristotle's hostility towards the vacuum (something 'abhorred by nature'. India had no such prohibition possibly because of the Buddhist acceptance of śūnyatā (emptiness) which was culturally alien to Greek philosophy.) And another point is that zero was never something that could be encountered. It is the conceptual placeholder *par excellence.* ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:52:07 UTC | #76 [quote="John, post:70, topic:1009"] Interestingly it points to the ambiguity between determinacy and indeterminacy ―to the indeterminacy of determinacy and the determinacy of indeterminacy [/quote] This reminds me of Derrida, in a good way, because I like Derrida. [quote="John, post:70, topic:1009"] it is the ‘black and white’, binary character of language which creates an illusion of absolute determinacy. For survival in the pre-linguistic “analogue” world of animal perception and action, determination, that is identification or recognition of things, only needs to be “good enough”, that is unambiguous enough to be workable. [/quote] From Saussure: Every speaking of a word is unique, but it gets categorized with an iterable sound "image." So we have a function --- that we all learn to "compute" in order to hear English --- that maps an infinite domain of fugitive vocalizations to a finite set of words. This is just one aspect of "unambiguous enough to be workable." ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:54:03 UTC | #77 [quote="Wayfarer, post:75, topic:1009"] Actually it was *discovered*, [/quote] I say "in an important sense invented" and you say "actually discovered." But doesn't that assume the conclusion you prefer ? What was zero like *before* it was discovered ? ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 05:59:05 UTC | #78 [quote="Wayfarer, post:65, topic:1009"] They are the necessary form that thought must take - hence the whole idea of ‘logical necessity.’ [/quote] Another way to frame this is as a pursuit for what is constant in the flux. Imagine a 100x100 square grid of 10000 pixels. Each pixel can be on or off, white or black. But that's the only variation we allow. This grid is the "form" of our toy world, which has 2^10000 possible states. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 06:01:08 UTC | #79 [quote="Wayfarer, post:75, topic:1009"] But it faced enormous hostility in Europe based on Aristotle’s hostility towards the vacuum (something ‘abhorred by nature’. India had no such prohibition possibly because of the Buddhist acceptance of śūnyatā (emptiness) which was culturally alien to Greek philosophy.) [/quote] Yes. But doesn't this suggest construction in some sense ? Zero emerged here rather than there, because of what else was around or not around. Where or when or how exactly does sunyata become a number/numeral ? Because I see the connection. ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-16 06:09:55 UTC | #80 [quote="j_j, post:77, topic:1009"] What was zero like *before* it was discovered ? [/quote] That seems rather an odd question to me. Zero can't be 'like' anything, as it isn't anything. It is precisely the absence of anything. But before the *concept* of zero was discovered, it was impossible to develop a practical method of calculation. (I remember reading many years ago about the cumbersome nature of arithmetic in the Roman Empire. I don't recall the details but it's not hard to imagine how difficult it must have been.) But it's another point on the Platonist score-card - the *concept* of zero was available in principle all along, waiting to be discovered, and the cultures that found it first gained an enormous practical advantage from so doing. In any case, the larger question is 'maths invented or discovered?' That is a long-standing dispute in philosophy of mathematics. Suffice to say mathematical platonists believe the latter, although once having discovered the natural numbers, presumably such things as imaginary number systems can be invented. (There's a saying 'God invented the integers, all else is the work of man'.) ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 06:26:22 UTC | #81 [quote="Wayfarer, post:62, topic:1009"] [quote="John, post:59, topic:1009"] I cannot see any more warrant for talking about "necessary structures of consciousness" than I can of talking about "structures of the perceived world". [/quote] If I ask you to give an arithmetical answer, *you are obliged* to give the right answer, if you can. [/quote] I don't see the connection between question and answer here. Could you unpack it for me? [quote="Wayfarer, post:62, topic:1009"] [quote="Tom_Storm, post:61, topic:1009"] My intuition says that they are perhaps a function of perception and intellectual models, language, etc, the panoply of contingent factors, with some constraints thrown in from the "reality" we find ourselves in. [/quote] ![image|382x382](upload://lVsgsD9MnTla1KkeKrr3Dwfb2Ww.png) 'What we call "reality" symbolised by the letter "R" in the diagram consists of an elaborate paper-maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of obseervation' \~ John Wheeler, 'Law without Law'. [/quote] That diagram suggests that there are many ways we could "carve nature at the joints". And yet at the perceptual level, judging from everyday experience, we all (and even animals) seem to carve it up the same way, which suggests to me that what is being carved tightly constrains how it can be sensibly carved. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 06:27:08 UTC | #82 [quote="Wayfarer, post:80, topic:1009"] That seems rather an odd question to me. Zero can’t be ‘like’ anything, as it isn’t anything. [/quote] I get what you are trying to say, but also : 0 is an even number. It is "represented" by 64 consecutive bits perhaps in an off state. It's a position on the number line, the origin. It's the additive identity. And so on. [quote="Wayfarer, post:80, topic:1009"] But before the *concept* of zero was discovered, it was impossible to develop a practical method of calculation. [/quote] Yes. I agree. But **what are concepts ?** In this context, I suggest that a number is a **way of treating** numerals. Following Sellars, we might say that a number like 0 is a role that a mark can play to be a numeral. Not the only approach, but one rarely considered. [quote="Wayfarer, post:80, topic:1009"] But it’s another point on the Platonist score-card - the *concept* of zero was available in principle all along, waiting to be discovered, and the cultures that found it first gained an enormous practical advantage from so doing. [/quote] I like this issue. We can also say that wheel was "there" as "possible." Once we have the wheel, **the past itself has changed.** "The past isn't what it used to be." I get the appeal of a "fixed past" ---a convenient assumption for a jury --- but it often involves something like a configuration of atoms and void that **was** ( determinately ) present. From "no" perspective. Just as that grid of 10000 pixels is stripped of reference to perspective. The singular aperspectival true history of atoms and void or bits in a grid... [quote="Wayfarer, post:80, topic:1009"] Suffice to say mathematical platonists believe the latter, although once having discovered the natural numbers, presumably such things as imaginary number systems can be invented. (There’s a saying ‘God invented the integers, all else is the work of man’.) [/quote] Yes indeed, Kronecker. The positive integers are about as "intuitive" and "shared" as it gets, though even here there's disagreement about how they exist or whether "all of them" exist. Is there "already" a (completed) infinity ? What do we mean by statements about *all* positive integers ? What does this disagreement suggest about the ground of logic ? ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 06:31:41 UTC | #83 [quote="j_j, post:82, topic:1009"] I like this issue. We can also say that wheel was "there" as "possible." Once we have the wheel, **the past itself has changed.** "The past isn't what it used to be." [/quote] The wheel was there as previously undiscovered possibility, so once discovered our account of the past changes. Yet was the possibility not always there? If so, what has changed apart from our account? ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 07:48:38 UTC | #84 [quote="John, post:83, topic:1009"] The wheel was there as previously undiscovered possibility, so once discovered our account of the past changes. Yet was the possibility not always there? If so, what has changed apart from our account? [/quote] I'm not exactly settled on this issue. Mostly I "assume the fixed past" like everyone in practical life. But what is possibility exactly ? It "could" have been discovered/invented. Then why wasn't it ? "If I had a time machine, then ..." We play with the initial conditions of a mathematical model, or start the video game over and try a different strategy. Is our account a kind of "cream" that floats on top of a substrate, not really touching it ? This substrate is conceived perhaps as the evolving configuration of "atoms and void." Yet "atoms and void" is a relatively recent "wheel." I mean "quarks" are like wheels and zeros, something we project backward as discovered rather than invented. And the invention is all the more powerful *because* we do this. When phenomenology "foregrounds," this metaphor implies that what is foregrounded was lurking already in the background. It is invented as having already been there. And yet its "revelation" is crucial, or why do philosophy ? Hence "remembering." The "same" insight re-occurs. The "same enough" pattern in sayings and doings. ------------------------- Wayfarer | 2026-05-16 06:43:39 UTC | #85 [quote="John, post:81, topic:1009"] I don't see the connection between question and answer here. Could you unpack it for me? [/quote] [quote="j_j, post:82, topic:1009"] **what are concepts ?** [/quote] I was asked what I mean by 'necessary structures of consciousness'. I'm trying to argue that this is what such things as numbers and logical principles are. They are (as Frege says) the 'laws of logic'. If I ask you what two plus two equals, you are *obliged* by the laws of arithmetic to answer 'four'. But I don't want to say that, therefore, these rules are subjective, in the sense of pertaining only to an individual mind. They are the rules for any mind capable of counting - and they're real. Hence, 'structures in consciousness'. And the same can be said for all manner of intelligible objects (although I'm very wary about the use of the term 'object' in this context, as they're more acts than objects i.e. the 'act of counting'.) At issue in this is the nature of the reality of such intelligible acts. Platonists (including Aristotle) accept that intelligibles such as numbers and logical principles are real as the constituents of rational thought. Fine, most will say, but that means they're 'in the mind'. That is how we're almost bound to understand it. But they are something more than that, because they also give us massive purchase over the external world (through mathematical physics and other sciences.) They are regularities in our structured experience-of-the-world. So They're neither 'in the mind' nor 'in the world'. They oblige us to recognise something fundamental about the structure of rational cognition. ------------------------- John | 2026-05-16 06:52:42 UTC | #86 I don't deny that number is encountered in the world. It is everywhere. the world is inconceivably diverse, differentiated and structured. I was questioning the idea that consciousness per se can sensibly be said to be structured per se. We might say it is structured by perceptual experience, but perceptions are structured the way they are―we have no say in that apart from our capacity to pay attention to different aspects that present themselves. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 07:15:13 UTC | #87 [quote="Wayfarer, post:85, topic:1009"] They are (as Frege says) the ‘laws of logic’. If I ask you what two plus two equals, you are *obliged* by the laws of arithmetic to answer ‘four’. [/quote] I "feel the truth" of 2 + 2 = 4. So I get the "obligation." The metaphor "law" is fascinating. In extreme cases, they will lock you up, if you write a bad check perhaps because you don't add numbers as others do. The obligation feels "internal" but it is at least also social. Grammar school, report cards, parents called in if the student "won't get it." [quote="Wayfarer, post:85, topic:1009"] They are the rules for any mind capable of counting - and they’re real. [/quote] Is this a truism though ? To be capable of counting is to reliably follow the rules. I can't "peer at 3" through your intuition, nor you through mine. But we do the same thing with numerals. [quote="Wayfarer, post:85, topic:1009"] Platonists (including Aristotle) accept that intelligibles such as numbers and logical principles are real as the constituents of rational thought. Fine, most will say, but that means they’re ‘in the mind’. That is how we’re almost bound to understand it. But they are something more than that, because they also give us massive purchase over the external world (through mathematical physics and other sciences.) [/quote] Elsewhere I suggest "generalized numerals." If I count 65 beans in a jar, then that jar of beans "becomes" or "is discovered as" a (generalized) numeral for 65. A Platonist should perhaps agree with this, for the typical mark "65" is arbitrary, merely conventionally somehow used to "point at" the number that gives it life. Why do numbers give us power ? More precise descriptions. Measurements. Where number "connects" to perception. [quote="Wayfarer, post:85, topic:1009"] They are regularities in our structured experience-of-the-world. So **They’re neither ‘in the mind’ nor ‘in the world’.** They oblige us to recognise something fundamental about the structure of rational cognition. [/quote] I guess the issue is whether cognition is separable from the manifestation of the world. Wheels and numbers are "there in the world we share." So the "laws of logic" are the "laws of being." But for me these "laws" evolve like language. And language for me is not internal meaning stuff but like the cries of other animals. Except that our cries and marks are richly self-referential. ------------------------- RussellA | 2026-05-16 08:14:17 UTC | #88 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:1, topic:1009"] Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices? [/quote] Suppose in the world I see four rocks. Suppose I added another rock and every time the result was three rocks. Because of Enactivism, where the mind emerges from its environment, within our numbering and linguistic practices it would be logical that 4 + 1 = 3. Anyone who behaved as if 4 +1 = 5 would be sent back to school. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 08:27:07 UTC | #89 [quote="RussellA, post:88, topic:1009"] Suppose in the world I see four rocks. Suppose I added another rock and every time the result was three rocks. [/quote] That's just it. The way we've been trained, we don't know how to suppose such a thing. We can talk about this in the first place because we react to little squiggles in mostly the same way. What I will readily grant Wayf is that most cultures do something "equivalant" when it comes to positive integers. So simple math is relatively independent of particular human communities. But if there were no communities, it's not clear what would be left. And we wouldn't be here to ask the question anyway. And what is the "truth" on this matter if a reality is not being "shared" ? ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 08:35:09 UTC | #90 Your chin-rub emoji is hard to interpret. Perhaps you can share ? Was it the jar of beans as a "generalized numeral" ? I am serious about that. Recently read a history of math book, and I was especially interested in the simplest math. Hands and fingers. I hold up three fingers. I could also hold up a sign with a "3" on it. If you just want to buy the right number of tickets, it *doesn't matter* whether it's fingers or a "3." Both empirical events/gestures play the same role, and that role is the number that makes the numerals numerals. That is the claim I am floating, to see what others can make of it. ------------------------- Chelydra | 2026-05-16 08:38:44 UTC | #91 [quote="j_j, post:82, topic:1009"] What does this disagreement suggest about the ground of logic ? [/quote] The disagreement doesn't shake the ground. The ground holds. What it permits isn't fully determined. ------------------------- Chelydra | 2026-05-16 08:44:08 UTC | #92 [quote="Banno, post:46, topic:1009"] we are not actually *in* anything to begin with if there is no *out* [/quote] We are already in everything, because there is no out. Novelty isn't something that comes from outside — it's what the field hasn't foreclosed yet. A boundary isn't a limit on access to reality. It's what reality looks like from the only place anything can be. It's what I am. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 08:46:17 UTC | #93 But are there layers of ground ? Is there a ground between you and me ? You and others ? A particular situational ground, more or less articulated ? I am talking with a stranger and it's going well, but then they imply that their friend was recently resurrected from the dead, after a month in the grave. I feel the ground between us give way. And yet I still trust that we both speak English. That level of the ground is intact. ------------------------- Chelydra | 2026-05-16 09:02:53 UTC | #94 [quote="j_j, post:93, topic:1009"] I feel the ground between us give way. And yet I still trust that we both speak English. That level of the ground is intact. [/quote] Yes, the giving way is real, it is just not all the way down. ------------------------- Tom_Storm | 2026-05-16 09:18:10 UTC | #95 [quote="RussellA, post:88, topic:1009"] Suppose in the world I see four rocks. Suppose I added another rock and every time the result was three rocks. Because of Enactivism, where the mind emerges from its environment, within our numbering and linguistic practices it would be logical that 4 + 1 = 3. Anyone who behaved as if 4 +1 = 5 would be sent back to school. [/quote] No, that's missing the concept. The point is that enactivism accounts for how numerical concepts are formed through practice. It's not that reality itself becomes mathematically arbitrary. Arithmetic norms remain stable because only certain patterns of coordination succeed in our shared engagement with the world. Treating 4 + 1 = 3 would therefore reflect a failure to follow the rules, not a rival mathematical framework produced through enactivism. ------------------------- RussellA | 2026-05-16 09:14:47 UTC | #96 [quote="j_j, post:89, topic:1009"] So simple math is relatively independent of particular human communities. [/quote] Yes, 4 + 1 = 5 is probably agreed by all human communities, because adding one rock to four rocks results in five rocks. . This becomes the basis of human logic, because all human communities have evolved in this particular world. However, in a different world, where adding one rock to four rocks results in three rocks, then 4 + 1 = 3 would become the basis of the logic of an alien community. ------------------------- j_j | 2026-05-16 09:25:34 UTC | #97 [quote="RussellA, post:96, topic:1009"] However, in a different world, where adding one rock to four rocks results in three rocks, then 4 + 1 = 3 would become the basis of the logic of an alien community. [/quote] I like your imagination. I guess the issue is whether we can know what we *mean* by such a world. Can we really imagine it ? If I imagine it, then ( for instance) 2 rocks somehow vanish. I would look for an empirical cause. "Something eats rocks on this planet. An invisible-to-humans rockmuncher ? " ------------------------- Corvus | 2026-05-16 09:30:31 UTC | #98 [quote="RussellA, post:96, topic:1009"] However, in a different world, where adding one rock to four rocks results in three rocks, then 4 + 1 = 3 would become the basis of the logic of an alien community. [/quote] If you add -1 rock to 4 rocks, then it becomes 3 rocks. Is it then the logic of an alien community? ------------------------- RussellA | 2026-05-16 09:33:25 UTC | #99 [quote="Tom_Storm, post:95, topic:1009"] The point is that enactivism accounts for how numerical concepts are formed through practice. It’s not that reality itself becomes mathematically arbitrary. [/quote] Wikipedia - Enactivism *Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through interaction between an acting organism and its environment.* Yes, Enactivism shows us that 4 +1 = 5 is the basis for human logic because humans have evolved in a particular environment, this particular world, where adding one rock to four rocks results in five rocks. But Enactivism also shows us that if humans had evolved in a different environment, where adding one rock to four rocks resulted in three rocks, then 4 + 1 = 3 would then become the basis of human logic. It is not so much the case that the reality an organism lives in is arbitrary, but rather which reality the organism lives in is arbitrary. ------------------------- RussellA | 2026-05-16 09:41:24 UTC | #100 [quote="Corvus, post:98, topic:1009"] If you add -1 rock to 4 rocks, then it becomes 3 rocks. Is it then the logic of an alien community? [/quote] Yes. Alien to us. [quote="j_j, post:97, topic:1009"] I guess the issue is whether we can know what we *mean* by such a world. Can we really imagine it ? [/quote] We know about destructive interference, where 1 + 1 = 0 Wikipedia - Wave interference *Out of phase: (here by 180 degrees), the two lower waves combine (right panel), resulting in a wave of zero amplitude (destructive interference).* -------------------------