This sets out clearly the equivocation that you depend on so often.
Hylomorphism is the view that an object has both hyle and morphe, or substance and form, or however it is presented. On critique, the form is slowly reduced to “what determines why anything is what it is, and not something else”. The equivocation is from form as a component of a thing to form as a sort of placeholder for what the thing is. But you can’t say that “a triangle is what it is because of its nature” without committing to a metaphysics that involves the existence of a nature, a form.
And “what makes a thing what it is” is not a commitment to Hylomorphism. Hylomorphism adds that this “what makes a thing what it is” is distinct from the hyle. Your motte-and-bailey is set out for all to behold.
The alternative proffered here is that “what makes a thing what it is” is found in our practice, in what we do. A hammer is a hammer not because there is something else that makes it a hammer, but because we use it to hit stuff.
If your form reduces to “what makes a thing what it is, and not something else”, then it reduces to a question, not an answer.
I am familiar with these marvelous works. The dialogue is excellent and his Neo-Platonic followers did great work expanding it.
It seems to me you are working with a very old conception of matter. The one that argues essentially that physical stuff is “dead and stupid”.
I am trying to get to monism actually. We are part of the world, we are made of world stuff, ergo world stuff is much much more than what we intuitively take it to be.
You seem to be saying that world stuff (physical stuff) cannot judge what is true or false. I don’t see a connection. It seems the dualism you see in me can be pointed at you, you have mind and then world stuff.
When it comes to understanding modal logic, and mathematical principles, Banno is a closet Platonist. I’ve demonstrated this in a number of threads. And that’s a big problem in discussing these issues with him. When it comes to discussing some ideas, common properties like above, he’ll deny that Platonism is required. But his understanding of set theory and modal logic is purely Platonist. That is because these are based in Platonism and assume Platonist principles as fundamental axioms. Therefore they cannot be accepted without accepting Platonism. It’s a terrible inconsistency on Banno’s part.
Do you not believe that there is “a special class of things called ‘numbers’”? If so, why aren’t numbers a subclassification of the broader class, forms?
The misunderstanding of form notwithstanding (form and matter are related as act and potency in hylomorphism, but the notion of form is not unique to hylomorphism), how does this address any of the issues presented?
How could we engage in practices that make things what they are if there wasn’t already something to inform our practice?
Plus, presumably man has to already be a certain kind of thing to have the desire/impetus to engage in one sort of practice and not any other.
Artifacts are one thing, but does a star become a star in virtue of how we use it, or a squid a squid? To even be used by us they have to already be what they are.
What if the supposed identity between the subjective experience and a pattern of neural firings is absurd, because the pattern in another brain reading those same words would be quite different? Indeed, the pattern when you re-read my post may be different.
But that does not imply that reading my post does not involve some pattern in the firing of your neurons.
Rather, reading words is a different category from neural patterns.
So you set out in this thread to show that reading my posts does not consist in a certain pattern in your neural net. I won’t disagree.
But you have not shown the claim you made in your OP, “that our ability to recognise equality in particular things presupposes an intelligible principle that is not itself given in sensory experience”.
It’s what we do. Tim is over-intellectualising. That a star is a star says nothing. A star is a “star” exactly because that is how we use the word. The world is always, and already, interpreted; yet the interpretation is not a free-for-all, since some interpretations are dysfunctional—not true.
Perhaps Tim sees our words as constrained by some pre-existing intellectual structure, a natural move for a theist. How we see the world and what we do in it is supposedly constrained by this structure. But perhaps this supposed intellectual constraint is just how the world is, and is not in need of further explanation.
Tim needs a grand narrative. That’s a preference for completeness over consistency. I have a preference for consistency over completeness.
Quite right. That is the ‘multiple realisability’ argument. It isn’t discussed in this OP.
All due respect, your missing the point of the argument in the OP. It is very specifically about what is called ‘brain-mind identity’. That’s the reason I provided the reference to D M Armstrong Materialist Theory of Mind, as it is a textbook example of brain-mind identity. The two other most similar philosophers are also Australians, Jack Smart and U T Place. Their kind of ‘brain mind identify theory’ has rather fallen out of favour, but that is nevertheless the target of the argument. I acknowledge in the OP that there are other arguments for materialism, for example based on supervenience relationships. This OP is not that. It
It certainly seems this way to me but I’m open to changing my view on this. The site does seem to be split into those who require foundational justification (is that the word?) and those who don’t.
I like it but no doubt the pushback comes from more metaphysically inclined folk who deride approaches of linguistic philosophy. We’re back to “domains” of understanding.
I’d understood you more as saying that our preferences in philosophical dogma are little more than a reflection of our wider world view.
But I will continue to console myself with the conceit that my preference for small steps and consistency is a result of intellectual rigour and not mere cowardice.
The argument is, we bring the understanding of equality, size, health and so forth, to experience, in order to arrive at a judgement. The fact that we can choose things of a type assumes that the mind can do this.
Remember the man who mistook his wife for a hat? That was an example of how a physical condition can interfere with the cognitive processes which enable recognition of things, objects, people. Normally we don’t realise we’re using that ability as it occurs on the pre- or sub-concscious level. It is nevertheless a fundamental part of cognition.
I don’t see your responses as ‘cowardice’. You represent the modern view of philosophy that rejects an hierarchical picture of the nature of existence and metaphysics genrally, It was the baby that was thrown out with Hegel’s bathwater.
I have some sympathy for the hierarchy - a view espoused by my father. But were you would make it a feature of your ontology, I think it inherent in our aesthetics.
I’m finding Banno to be describing a philosophical zombie and saying prove that we are not philosophical zombies. But I think we can consider, for sake of argument, an animal that doesn’t think and consider it a philosophical zombie. Let’s say a cat and let’s also add a langur monkey. Both actually quite intelligent creatures, but entirely lacking that level of cognition that humans have to identify and use universals. They are philosophical zombies in the sense that they can only act in accordance with instinct and conditioning. They can’t think out of the box.
Now what do they see when they encounter this object?
The cat sees a fruit and is not interested in it. The monkey sees a banana and wants to eat it. Neither has any conception that it resembles a duck. Even though a cat is conditioned to recognise ducks as they are a prey species. But to a human it immediately resembles a duck. Thus illustrating that humans have an additional ability by comparison with a philosophical zombie of conscious intelligent sentience.
Banno will argue that humans consciously make a comparison of a banana with a duck. Through a kind of linguistic thinking in our heads. But for me, we see the duck instantaneously, just like the way the cat and the monkey see a banana. No thinking, or linguistic process involved. There is a more immediate unconscious cognition going on in our heads, prior to any linguistic processes. The same immediate cognition that is going in the heads of the cat and monkey. But this level of instantaneous cognition is hidden, because it is unconscious, it is assumed.
So there are two levels of cognition going on in the heads of humans;
An instant animal cognition,(cognition A)
And an intellectual linguistic cognitive process (which comprehends universals).(cognition B)
I sense there is an equivocation going on here somewhere between the two. So we do things behaviourally like picking up white paint when asked for white paint. The behaviours of asking for white paint, recognising which can contains white paint etc are cognition A. While the request for a kind of paint that is white, the understanding of this request and knowledge of which can will contain what is requested is cognition B.
Only cognition B involves language, so if a philosopher insists that everything can be reduced to language is equivocating B with A and denying that A exists.
From an Aristotelian philosopher, Jacques Maritain, a prominent Catholic intellectual of the last century:
For Empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features – that is, natures, say, the human nature – which exist in the real as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in reality).
Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is sugar or what is intruder. He lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings – only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his (the dog’s) field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free – in man – the potential infinity of knowledge.
Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize.
