Furthering Philippa Foot

Ethics
443

I suppose I haven’t done justice to your argument for how the enthymeme is supposed to work:

In an attempt to be concise, I would say that the nominalist is precisely committed to the position which says that judgments about species—and more broadly, essences—are illusory. What you say here makes perfect sense from a realist perspective, namely that judgments presuppose real objects. But given that the nominalist denies this very thing, therefore Thompson’s appeals to judgments, sentences, logic, and grammar are not sufficient to rule out nominalism. The issue becomes pressing beginning on page 75, when Thompson starts talking about normativity.

But it may be that I have not paid sufficient attention to pages 78-9, where Thompson seems to address the “mere grammaticist.” For example:

Now, any attempt to employ this further possibility of combination as an instrument of ‘grammatical’ or putatively formal isolation may of course be thought to raise new difficulties: perhaps the whole idea is just a theological survival. But the insistence on an independent, conscious subject who sets up the things thus ‘teleologically’ expressed presupposes that the relevant ‘sense of the question “Why?”’ is the one Anscombe and Davidson discussed. It presupposes, that is, that the intended order is the order of intention. But, of course, it is among the marks of that sense of the question “Why?” that it attaches to datable descriptions of goings-on—of ‘events in a man’s history’, as Anscombe says.[13] If a student moves behind a pillar and I ask, “What’s going on? What’s the point? Why?” and am satisfied with the response “He’s trying to avoid Professor X; he owes her a term paper”, then it is the movements hic et nunc and not elsewhere that form the object of my query. But suppose we are dissecting a living frog and—scalpel aimed at the repulsive contractions of the heart—I ask, “What’s going on? What’s the point? Why?” If I am satisfied with the response, “It’s the heart, of course, and by so beating it circulates the blood,” then, after all, I think, it was not the individual movements here and now that interested me. I was not so much pointing into the individual, as pointing into its form. I do not anticipate a different reply at a different lab bench, as I would at a different pillar. The alarming truth I apprehend and query, the ‘that’ for which I seek the ‘because’, is to be formulated in a natural-historical judgment.

(Thompson, The Representation of Life, 77-8)

That’s probably as clear a dismissal of the nominalistic or anti-Aristotelian reading as one could hope for. It verifies my suggestion above that the method of Anscombe which Thompson follows is not merely grammatical.

444

I want to be clear that the main reason I am addressing these issues at all is in response to the excesses of Tim and Leon, who repeatedly and tediously apply a particular Thomistic account to every situation.

The problems with Aristotelian essentialism are those set by Wittgenstein, followed by Davidson, and mitigated by Kripke. Heidegger, Foucault and so on also pointed to there not being an interest-free standpoint.

At the core, the problem is the supposed Aristotelian bridge from linguistic/classificatory competence to an insight into metaphysical form; the idea that correctly applying “game” or “human” or “water” is, or requires, or is answerable to, an act of intellectual apprehension of a thing’s real definition.

This is never quite stated explicitly, but it underpins their interference in threads on all topics. If I seem excessively obsessed with Aristotle, it is as a reaction to their excessive and mostly uncritical Thomism.

The response, greatly simplified, is that the “real” is already a part of that game; the difficulty for some is in comprehending this as not simply a form of idealism.

The Thompson article is a Wittgensteinian reply to Essentialism that does not quite work out. Thompson doesn’t fully dissolve the essence-question at the level of logical form. And so Foot does not get to ground ethics in naturalism using logical form.

My response is to use some of Foot and the account of recognition given in the OP. It is what does the work for which Tim and Leon require the contentious logic of quiddity.

When one looks at Aristotle Squarely, one recognises much that is embedded deeply in our approach; and one sees the limitation of the metaphysics of quiddity put on display by the Greats of the last century. He is mostly right about classification while being mostly wrong about essences. And I suspect you do not much disagree with this, Pierre. Our capacity to classify the world in which we find ourselves deluded Aristotle into accepting our classification as reflecting the way the world must be. It ain’t so.

445

As I’ve often insisted, I don’t have a deep enough interpretation of Aristotle to know whether what you’re describing is indeed “supposedly Aristotelian.” It may well be. What I do know is that the problem is widespread and important to understand. The ways we structure our world, both conceptually and physically, are constantly getting confused with some allegedly correct insight about how things must be constituted, which the structuring is supposed to reveal. This is harmless in many contexts, but almost never in philosophy.

I would add Ted Sider to your list of contemporary philosophers who can be really helpful here. As I read him, he champions a privileged metaphysical structure (what grounds what) but insists that this requires no privileged existential commitments. I think this is analogous to your description of Aristotle as “mostly right about classification while being mostly wrong about essences.” Sider is trying not to be wrong about essences in that way. (Though you might find the “privileged structure” more in language or language games than in metaphysics. Sider is not a fan of this approach, FWIW.)

I’m also learning that McDowell, like Davidson, similarly rejects a Given that is ontologically primary for us, while at the same time maintaining that our “second nature” (an Aristotelian concept, I think?) produces rational structures that are not arbitrary, that genuinely must bow to what is the case. But what is the case is not given. What is the case are facts, not things. And facts happen in a human community.

446

I finally got around to a careful read of Thompson’s “Three Degrees of Natural Goodness.” It verifies that your interpretation was correct all along, and that @Banno is misreading Thompson and also Foot. For example:

Foot’s theory presupposes, in the first instance, a certain conception of life and of the grammar of the representation of life. The representation of an individual living organism as living is everywhere mediated by an implicit representation of the species or life form under which the individual is thought to fall.

(Thompson, Three Degrees of Natural Goodness, 1)

The “species or life form” that Thompson speaks about is the Aristotelian essence with slight modifications in light of Darwinian theory.

This was particularly insightful on Thompson’s part, and I have also pointed to the relation between essences and universals at various points in the past:

Thus judgments of goodness and defect make implicit reference to the species or life form that the individual bears. Such “evaluative” judgments are no more suspicious, metaphysically, than are the “positive” descriptions: the materials on which we base the evaluative judgments are implicitly present in positive description.

(Thompson, Three Degrees of Natural Goodness, 2)

…Yet there is something interesting and revealing in Thompson’s piece. In general these discussions are often two-fold. They include the fact/value consideration but they also involve the is/moral-ought consideration—and @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus has resisted the separation or coherence of this second consideration.

In the final sentences Thompson tips his hat in a certain direction, apparently indicating that he disagrees with Foot and McDowell with respect to the second consideration, and that his theory on which Foot bases her work does not necessarily entail such a conclusion. The implication as I read it is that Thompson would stay closer to Aristotle and Aquinas when it comes to questions of the specifically “moral ought.” My hunch is that he is saying that, for Foot and McDowell, certain special virtues like justice are not rationally derivable in the same way that the life-form normativity of “logical Footianism” is. For Foot and McDowell the rationality of, say, justice, is at least thinner than the rationality of life-form normativity.

You are balking at normativity, and failing to understand that the normative is the whole point for Thompson and Foot. It’s the central feature, not a bug.

Note too that you and @Banno are the two most sanctimonious posters on TPF. Your foreboding description here is yet more of that, namely your insinuation that “this is almost never harmless in philosophy” (!). The irony is that this sort of censure actually doesn’t make any logical sense apart from the normativity you pretend to eschew. Heck, you wouldn’t even know whether to feed your cat food or poison if not for the Aristotelian normativity that Foot and Thompson are pointing up.

447

Sounds almost contradictory; no doubt the detail shows how it isn’t. I’ve no objection to such moves, well explained; my discontent is more with the constant harping back to Aristotle as if he answered every question. It has become an excuse for some here not to have to learn anything new.

448

In the other paper of Thompson’s that I pointed to above, “What is it to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” he comes close to this issue. But I think this paper was written a few years earlier than Three Degrees, and it has a broader application.

Thompson is focused on what he calls “forms of bipolar normativity,” or “forms of relation of right,” and the subject is something akin to Kantian duty. He divides up three possible approaches: Humean, Aristotelian, and Kantian. He specifically says that Foot belongs with Aristotle and Aquinas (but he does not address the issue about Foot and McDowell). It looks like an interesting paper, touching on many of our themes (e.g. first vs. second nature, cultural mores, etiquette, life forms, different qualities of normativity, etc.).

…Looking at Thompson’s academia.edu page, his most recent upload (2023) is an attempt to pave the groundwork for an argument over and against McDowell that a theory of practical reason and ethics can be grounded in first nature as opposed to second nature. This is an example of the point I saw him to be indicating at the end of Three Degrees. He calls the doctrine “practical naturalism” or else “naïve Aristotelianism.” The piece is called, “Forms of Nature.”

449

I don’t think I did Sider justice, sorry. Does anyone know of a (relatively) brief statement of his views? All I have is Writing the Book of the World, which is a great book but hard to summarize.

What I was attributing to Sider is the idea that structure can be independent of how we choose to characterize what there is. An example might be: “Atoms ground molecules; you need the atoms to get the molecules, but not vice versa.” And of course we’re using some words, some terms, to state this. However, the terms we’ve chosen do not carry over into, or somehow validate, existential claims about what an “atom” or a “molecule” is, apart from our usage. The statement is true, but it is a truth about structure, given an interpretation that quantifies over “atom” and “molecule”, not a truth about atoms and molecules.

Any help?

That would indeed be an eccentric interpretation of the history of philosophy. It’s sometimes occurred to me that a good thing to ask any philosopher might be, “What is an important philosophical question you believe remains unanswered?” If their answer is some version of “None, really,” it would be an indication that they have misunderstood philosophical inquiry.

450

He is an ontological realist; he rejects quantifier variance and deflationary theses in general; he thinks ontological disputes are genuine disagreements; he thinks philosophy inevitably involves this sort of fundamental metaphysics, even if one thinks “there can be no Russellian logically perfect language.” He is championing traditional metaphysics in the face of deflationism. In your previous thread on Sider @Banno ended up taking his usual anti-realist positions pretty quickly, saying things like, “I’m going to maintain that the domain, and hence the ontology, one way or another, is stipulated.”

The core claim is that quantificational structure is part of the distinguished, objective structure of the world.

(Theodore Sider, Ontological Realism, 28)

So whereas the Aristotelian approach we see Thompson taking commits itself to realism at the level of species or life-forms, Sider is taking a broader thesis about the structure of reality in general.

451

It’s interesting in general that modern naturalism is increasingly rejected or radically transformed across the 20th century, with popular options being linguistic idealism (or forms of deflationism that end up looking very similar), variations on transcendental idealism, or various varieties of constructivism. These are all widely accepted as licit, live options. And what is illicit about a full-throated endorsement of teleology cannot be a reliance on prior metaphysics, because contemporary thought is full of those, with abstract objects, mathematical platonism, and particularly a wide embrace of possible worlds, ontic structural realism, information theoretic ontologies, etc. So what exactly is more “out there” with classical teleology? I don’t think it’s a simple as a preference for nominalism, because some forms of realism are fairly popular.

There is another interesting feature of a lot of retrieval projects (and New Natural Law is a great example here) in that they largely focus on this sort of natural goodness we’ve been discussing, with animals and plants. Maybe that makes sense given the background dominance of mechanism—it’s important to secure some normative facts. But it does strike me thinking about them that the earlier traditions being appealed to do not think you can get ethics or politics out of these; for that you need the rational soul (logos, nous). With New Natural Law, and perhaps this is true more generally, it does seem that part of the reticence is that this is where the ordo amoris can enter the picture, some ordering of the goods, or even a summum bonum (which appears even in Ethics Book X).

I cannot put my finger on the exact relevance, but one other thing that seems indictive of this difference is that I’ve never seen a retrieval project attached to advocacy for major shifts in political thought, and that’s a bit odd when today’s dominant political norms are based on the rejection of precisely what is being retrieved, and the older tradition being retrieved had very different notions surrounding politics. And I think this is at least indictive of why the ordo is itself what is being rejected, not metaphysics as such (and I think this can be seen in which Pagan and non-Western traditions are popular and how they are received as well; the contemporary reception of Stoicism and Buddhism tend to render them more therapeutic and less firmly ordered to specific ends).

452

That’s not too far from saying the molecule consists in an arrangement of atoms, which is fine.

There are three moves I can see here. One is just to say that there are atoms and molecules. Another is to say that there are only the words and activities around atoms and molecules. The third, and I think this is the preferred approach, is to deny this juxtaposition of realism and antirealism. That there are atoms and molecules is a part of the way we use words and perform certain activities; existence claims are a part of those activities and amount to the same sort of thing. There is a world, but it is never uninterpreted.

That’s the approach of the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, and even Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. And it will be accused of nominalism by realists and realism by nominalists.

It’s also perhaps not too far from what Thompson is looking for, in replacing an ends-directed teleology with a description-directed teleology. But I still don’t think this gets Foot quite what she wants, without the addition of some form of evaluation.

The difficulty for this approach is that some evaluation is already there in the description, uncritiqued and presumed. That the wolf has sharp teeth involves changing the words to match the way things are, but it also involves interpreting the world so that the words have the uses to which they are put. The clean division of word-to-word from word-to-world form Anscombe and Searle needs the holism of Davidson. This is where my thinking is at present, that this bi-directionality is built in to our understanding, and what I have been nodding towards by saying we are embedded in the world.

Anyway, that’s the sort of conversation in which I am interested, but much of the present company are incapable of moving past Aristotle, so that doesn’t happen. We nearly moved in that direction in the Quantifier Variance discussion mentioned above. It is interesting how that article, like Russell’s work on barriers to entailment, talks of comparisons between differing models. That seems to me to be a most promising direction. Hence, Quoting Finn and Bueno

In contemporary metaontological discussions, quantifier variance is the view according to which there is no unique best language to de- scribe the world. Two equivalent descriptions of the world may differ for a variety of pragmatic purposes, but none is privileged as providing the correct account of reality.

This strikes me as close to a formalisation of Davidson’s account in “on the very idea of a conceptual scheme”, with models in the place of schemes. That thread eventually lost direction, as with all metaphysical discussions hereabouts, with the intervention of Aristotle. It would be interesting to revive it, the first hundred posts were top notch.

453

I want to think some more about the points you raise but it’s Independence Day here and I have to be elsewhere. (Not on our National Mall with the Trumpers, who are probably going get soaked anyway by a big thunderstorm.)

So just quickly – I’m always up for a good chinwag about quantifier variance, as long as you don’t ask me to agree with anything Richard Rorty says! :wink:

1 Like
454

Happy birthday to your nation - a complex, contentious celebration.

Would that I had a stronger grounding in model theory. I’ll do some work on it.

455

I tend to think it is a preference for nominalism, begun around the modern period and then ratcheted up by the two world wars. The metaphysical exceptions you mention are fairly tame. The metaphysics that attaches to, say, possible worlds is thin and easy to overlook. Sider’s ontological realism is admittedly a bit of an exception, but he is always on his heels in his presentation. He knows he is moving against the grain. Maybe a good example here is Alasdair Macintyre, who took a long time to move into more metaphysically thick ethics and political philosophy. He took a long time to move from “second nature” to “first nature.”

Basing substance primarily in organisms, as Aristotle did, is the strongest metaphysical option in my opinion. I think it is rejected for the same reasons that @Banno and @Jay reject it: it is capable of generating a substantive ethics. Ethical nominalists and moral relativists are very opposed to that possibility. Real ethics involves real ethical claims, namely the ability to bind the conscience through rational argumentation, and that whole beast is “naughty, naughty!” The liberal regime depends on an individual freedom that is unaffected by the claims of others. If ethics were amenable to reason, deliberation, and argument, this would spell disaster for the liberal.

That’s an interesting take on NNL. They do concede much in the metaphysical realm to Kantianism, and that is how I read their “reticence.” But you may be right: the teleological norms in that case are largely based on sub-human data points. In some sense it is easier to avoid arguments from the characteristically human telos, as that brings controversy and opposition.

I think there are a lot of Aristotelian retrieval projects of different forms. Michael Sandel and Peter Simpson are two that come to mind. You get a bit of “Integralism” retrieval in Catholic circles, even by someone like Adrian Vermeule. But I think the general theme is a retrieval of a pre-liberal tradition. Liberalism is unsatisfying to many of all different persuasions.

456

Thompson was not trying to give a “Wittgenstenian reply to essentialism,” or to, “fully dissolve the essence-question at the level of logical form.” You are confusing yourself for Thompson, just like you did with Foot in the OP. You have a hard time reading someone else’s words and recognizing that they might believe something different than you do.

Similarly, neither Foot nor Thompson are trying to “replace an ends-directed teleology with a description-directed teleology.”* That’s completely backwards. That’s precisely what Foot rejects. The way you read philosophers perfectly contrary to what they say is pretty amazing.

Foot and Thompson are both quite happy with Aristotelian categoricals. They cite Aristotle approvingly throughout their works. It is not Foot or Thompson who are averse to Aristotle, it is you.

* And this doesn’t even make any sense given that ‘end’ is a translation of ‘telos’.

1 Like
457

Although Ted Sider’s “ontological realism” doesn’t entail that things like ships and frogs are eliminable, this is because he views quantificational structure (where quantification ranges over physical items) as part of the world’s objective structure. Frog-hood and ship-hood then hold of particular objects in virtue of the “fundamental” structure of the world and the specifically Aristotelian idea of enduring substances with real essences is disavowed (in favor of a four-dimensional conception of objects that have proper “temporal parts”).

By contrast David Wiggins (in Sameness and Substance Renewed) denies Sider’s central commitment to the world’s fundamental ontology being physics-plus-logic. (That’s on my reading since I don’t remember Wiggins referencing Sider specifically.) For Wiggins, there is no identity, and no determinate existence claim, prior to a sortal concept supplying criteria of individuation and persistence to an object (or person or organism). So, on Wiggins’s view planets and electrons stand on the same ontological footing as ships and frogs. All continuants are individuated by sortal concepts carrying their own criteria of persistence and individuation, while acknowledging a spectrum between the discovered and the constituted (living kinds at the discovered end, since their principle of activity are most robustly real and least answerable to our purposes while artifacts sit closer to the constituted end. “Planet” may be a nice intermediate as Pluto’s recent redefinition(s) by astronomers illustrates). So you are right that Thompson commits to realism at the level of the life-form, but I’d add that Wiggins gives the general ontology of continuants within which that commitment sits, and it appears Aristotelian in just the sense Sider appears to foreclose.

I think this may connect to @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus’s causal closure worry (that I’ll revisit in more detail at another time). I had suggested that physics discloses the “realm of law” by prescinding from the forms of its objects. But the lesson from pragmatism (and from the new instrumentalism of Ian Hacking and Michel Bitbol) is that it does so while being unable to prescind from the forms of its instruments. Nothing counts as a measurement, and no law-statement gets empirical purchase, unless the apparatus is taken as an apparatus. And an apparatus, as such, is a functionally individuated bit of equipment. That functional form is presupposed by the law-statements, not disclosed by them (Haugeland’s constitutive standards, in Truth and Rule-Following and Pattern and Being, highlight that the dependence stems from our disclosing activity). Niels Bohr has a similar idea. The necessity of “classical language” thesis and the cut between “observed system” and apparatus is the place where a functional description of the arrangement becomes ineliminable. It’s impossible to push the formalism all the way to the pointer (in order to characterise the measurement process quantum mechanically) without losing the ability to say what was measured.

I suggested elsewhere that Bitbol supplies the vocabulary that makes this general (in De l’intérieur du monde, unfortunately not yet translated in English). Physics construes its objects as fully constituted by the laws governing their interactions. These are lateral relations. But those laws are disclosed to us only through our instrumental norms and practices (that include, importantly, our decisions what to abstract from for the sake of generality and at the cost of specificity). Those are transversal relations between us and our world. And this, I think, threatens to leave things like frogs stranded from our ontology, which, interestingly, tells against Bitbol’s own disavowal of Aristotelian substance. The frog looks stranded because we are reading its life-form as a set of lateral facts. But a life-form, on Thompson’s Aristotelian conception, is not a set of lateral facts. It is the transversal principle under which a lateral order (the frog’s affordance-network, its metabolic and behavioural commerce with its Umwelt) is unified and governed. It’s a transversal relation between the frog and its Umwelt.

So the very distinction Bitbol uses to dissolve the substance (the object is “nothing but” its relational role, so there is no bearer of form underneath) is what restores it once one sees that a living thing is not exhausted by any lateral role that it plays in our practices of dealing with it, but rather is the transversal unity its lateral roles presuppose. Wiggins’s criteria of individuation yield the same point: what individuates the continuant is a transversal relation to a sortal concept, not a relation among its parts.

When we find the frog’s transversal constitution of its Umwelt, we seem to treat it laterally as a structure described from outside in natural-historical judgments. If that were all we needed, the frog’s organs and behaviors would be, for us, just more intricate lateral facts. What blocks this, in my view, is that we can only disclose the frog’s affordance-field (Umwelt) as a governed field, rather than as a physical aggregate exhibiting a pattern, only because we are ourselves loci of transversal constitution and recognize the structure as such. The natural-historical judgment is laterally expressed but transversally grounded, and its very availability depends on the judger’s being a form of life whose own Welt is transversally constituted. (I am making use of the Welt/Umwelt distinction of Heidegger and Gadamer). This, incidentally, is why I think Thompson’s “enthymeme” was never really a missing premise. The aptness of natural-historical judgements is secured by the kinship of constitutive structure between discloser and disclosed.

This may be a long way back to the thread’s main topic. If the frog sits in our ontology in the way I suggest (as a transversal unity governing a lateral field, differing from us only in that it cannot express it self-consciously nor subject it to rational scrutiny) then natural goodness is not a queer normative extra laid over a value-free substrate. It is what the transversal governance of a life-form looks like when the field it governs is the self-maintaining pattern of the living thing, and what it becomes, at the reflexive tier, where (mere) flourishing becomes eudemonia. It is the answerability of a practical form of life to its own good. That’s the bridge from Thompson’s categoricals to Foot’s evaluations.

1 Like
458

Very interesting. This fills in a lot of gaps and verifies some of what I had been assuming about Sider. I will have to come back to it when I have more time.

I agree that it is clear enough that reflexivity or rationality is what makes the difference for Foot, but I am still curious about how her project relates to Thompson, and maybe you can speak to that. In her paper she says something to the effect that she feels as if she needs to add something to Thompson’s account to get where she wants to go with it. This begins on page 30 of her book.

She is pointing to the difference between what Thomists would call “essential properties” vs. “proper accidents,” and she feels as if Thompson’s account did not sufficiently distinguish the two. Now that I think about it, she is probably right. This is because the nature documentaries that Thompson leverages are as much about identifying a species as pointing to its essence qua species. Foot ends up doing what I wish Thompson would have done more of: she actually speaks to the notion of essence qua organism itself. That is, she does so directly rather than indirectly. For example, she wants to say that notions like “self-maintenance” are required in order for proper accidents to fall away and for essential properties to rise to the top. I don’t know if this is something that concerns other contemporary Aristotelians that you know of?

I am wondering if there are other differences between Foot and Thompson. I gestured towards a possible one above, when I was speaking about Thompson’s Three Degrees. Along those same lines, I have a sense that Foot is exercised by the question of justice, and more generally by the specifically “moral” part of practical reason. This comes from her recognition that justice is disinterested in a way that other forms of practical reason need not be (given that acting justly might fail to further my private interests). I’m guessing there might be a mild divergence between Foot and Thompson on such a matter, and in particular on what is required to explain it.

That’s an ongoing debate among Aristotelians, namely the extent to which “continuants” beyond organisms can properly be called substances and therefore whether they have ontological status. That’s why I said I prefer the approach which bases substance primarily in organisms.

Yes, exactly right. And when @Banno inadvertently reveals his desire to “fully dissolve the essence-question at the level of logical form,” he is basically aiming at reducing or explaining life-form in entirely Fregian logical categories, which is precisely what Thompson argues is not possible. In that case what is at stake is not a mechanistic value-free substrate per se, because the particular ontology is occluded. Instead it is a restriction to the logical methodology that flowed out of that mechanistic worldview (such as the Fregian forms that Thompson considers). But in practice it amounts to the same thing.

The relation of Kim’s work that you set out in the other thread sounds interesting, but at the same time if you, @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus, and I all agree that teleology has an irreducible quality, then it would seem that no one here has any stake in that question. Banno’s stake would only be indirect, via the presuppositions of modern logic rather than being a straightforwardly ontological question.

459

This is very close to my reading of Sider – quantificational structure, not choice of domain. The important point, perhaps, is that structure can be described correctly or incorrectly, without committing ourselves to either a required quantificational choice, or some further claims about “substances and essences.”

Ontological realism . . . defines ‘ontologically committed to Fs’ as meaning ‘believing that there are Fs, in the fundamental sense of “there are”’. This allows someone to say in English that there are Fs without ontologically committing to Fs, if English quantifiers are nonfundamental. (Writing the Book of the World, 203, my bolding)

I don’t think Sider is committed to a fundamental ontology of physics plus logic, though:

In the fundamental sense of the quantifier ‘there are’, there are tables and chairs as well as electrons. . . ; but unlike electrons, tables and chairs satisfy no monadic joint-carving predicates. It is unclear how to make these claims if we speak only of entity-fundamentality. (WBW, 165)

Looking this over, I realize again how hard it is to excerpt Sider from his elegant book-length account, so this may need elaboration.

Thanks. Words fail me, trying to describe how bizarre it is to be US citizen in 2026.

Good. The first two moves don’t satisfy me either. The third is super-complicated, as I don’t have to tell you. Leaning on Sider again, we could ask: Is quantificational structure a type of interpretation? Or is it in some sense prior to interpretation, just as a logical system may be? This is a way of asking for a paraphrase, or a filling-out, of “There is a world.” That phrase has to mean something, and “There is structure” might be a good candidate.

When we say, “That there are atoms and molecules is a part of the way we use words and perform certain activities,” this can be given (at least) a couple of construals. One would be, “That there are [read: we quantify over] atoms and molecules is part of the way . . .” etc. Construed this way, it is true, but possibly circularly true, since the sentence goes on to talk about “the way we use words,” which includes quantification.

Or we might construe it this way: “‘There are atoms and molecules’ is part of the way we use words . . .” etc. This now looks to be a claim about language, about talking, also true, but trivially so.

Don’t we need a third construal, something like this?: “That there are atoms and molecules is a result, an interpretation, of how we correctly use words to describe what Sider calls ‘privileged structure’.” I’ve added all that paraphernalia because, without it, we have no way to construe the sentence as talking about a world, as opposed to a Davidsonian coherent monism. And of course “correctly” is like a red flag to a bull, but I want to put it right out there for examination.

460

Hmm, I took another look at this and I’m not sure you’re right. Or rather, you’re right about how we can understand “natural goodness” – but is that what Foot is talking about? Is her morality the same thing as “a practical form of life answering to its own good”? Do you think Foot would regard that formulation as something we could base ethics on?

I may have you (or her) wrong here, but aren’t we still oscillating between the two senses of “good” that keep confusing discussions about ethics? Natural goodness is not a “queer normative extra” because it isn’t normative at all, ethically. It’s just a way of talking about how various individuals or species survive or don’t. In that sense, it’s “good” to be a strong healthy exemplar of your species, bad to be weak and sickly. Nothing wrong with this usage, but I don’t think this is what Foot means. She writes, “Moral judgments are normative, but so are judgments of manners, statements of club rules, and many others.” I think she would add “and statements about how a creature may be exemplary of its kind” to that list. It’s a legitimate use of “good,” and so “normative” in that sense, but not a moral judgment.

1 Like
461

For you, maybe. I’m thinking that the way this discussion is proceeding makes presumptions that are problematic. I want to step out of the Hirsch/Sider, quantifier variance, organisist/universalist discourse. And I think we can do so, given a broader look at what a domain might be. Here’s an outline of a direction in which one might head.

In natural languages we can talk about anything. In formal systems we usually simplify things by simply stipulating the domain.

And we should be clear here that quantification in a formal system is quite well defined; existential quantification is set using “or” - ∃x(fx) ≡ fa v fb v fc… for every item in the domain - and universal quantification is Ux(fx)≡ fa & fb & fc… This is the definition for all domains. The meaning of quantification does not change. It also means that both quantifications are stipulated in terms of the domain - {a,b,c…}. It follows that they cannot be distinct from the domain. They are also both stipulated within the language being used. Quantification is language-dependent.

The term “quantifier variance” is misleading; the variance is not in the nature of quantification.

Next I’d like to draw your attention back to Philosophical Investigations §48 and thereabouts, the place were Wittgenstein sets out the problems of simples, against his own use of the idea in the Tractatus. The upshot is that what is to count as a simple depends on what what we are up to. The notion of an absolute simple becomes quite problematic.

And last I’d like to drop in Davidson’s view that we can not coherently seperate out world and word, that things are always already interpreted.

So we have no simples without a practice, and no content without a scheme.

Now together this forestalls Sider, since the notion of “cutting reality at the joints” is contrary to both Davidson and Wittgenstein. Reality and the joints are already a part of the discourse, so too late. And placing the blame on quantification is also misdirected, since the issue is the domain, not the quantifier.

One last step, and perhaps the argument proper; a generalisation of diagonalisation. Given any domain, we can stipulate an item that is not a member of that domain. No domain is complete.

And together this amounts to a dismissal of the path down which Hirsch, Sider, DOre, Fine, and all are heading. No complete domains, no trans-ontic structures, no maximal quantifiers; instead, no simples without practice and no content without some schema.

Anyway, that’s were the path of this thread now for me is all but useless. It makes sense to me, at least as an outline of the fraught nature of the discussion here.

“transversal unity governing a lateral field” :grimacing:

The body of this thread is found in the first twenty-odd posts. The rest is game play.

462

I don’t see the problem here. The negation of the claim: “our language, thought, and cognitive faculties sometimes are revelatory of reality,” would be:

“our language, thought, and cognitive faculties are never revelatory of reality.”

Or if the statement is one of necessity, it still seems problematic if the structure of thought, language, and experience always has only a contingent relationship to reality.

It’s not that either of the negations couldn’t be defended, but they do themselves require a particular metaphysics of appearances and knowledge. Hence, I don’t think it’s a confusion or error to reject them. Actually, the premises required to support the negations will themselves invariably end up presupposing that thought and language can capture and convey at least something about the nature of reality, since one has to say something about the nature of language and thought to say that they are opaque vis-á-vis any prior realities.

Plus, it’s hard to sustain a reality versus appearances distinction if reality never enters the picture concretely (e.g., the other German idealists’ response to Kant). But I don’t think that is often the real issue in contemporary discussions. Often, rejections of the Enlightenment “view from nowhere” (itself an ideal based on the assumptions of representationalism) deny anything “outside/prior to interpretation/thought,” and so they do suppose that our language, thought, and experience reveal how things must be constituted, because language/thought and “objective reality” are said to be co-constituting. But if one accepts those sorts of theories as licit, but not a role for actualities and principles that are prior to thought or language, then the real issue is one of grounding (reality itself, versus man and/or his communities).