Principle: "that from which something proceeds in any way whatever" (Fr. William Wallace, OP, The Elements of Philosophy [Wipf & Stock, 2011], 44, §16.7); "the intelligible framework or conditions of change" (John Deely, Medieval Philosophy Redefined, 143).
Three principles of change in Aristotle's thought: 1) form; 2) matter; 3) privation.
Cause: "that from which something proceeds with a dependence in being" (Wallace, 44, §16.7; see also 100, §35.1) or that upon which something depends for its being.
Condition: "that which makes possible, makes ready, or prepares the way for an efficient cause to act, or for its action to be efficacious" (101, §35.3).
-the condition in which an obstacle is removed that "would otherwise block the agent's activity or render it ineffective" is called the removens prohibens.
-a condition that is an absolute requirement for the cause to function, a necessary condition: conditio sine qua non.
Occasion: "the opportunity for a cognitive agent to exercise its causality" (102, §35.4).
Four Causes (and Medieval subdivisions):
Material (Matter): "the intrinsic determinable principle that receives its actuation and determination from form" (103, §35.6); "that upon which the agent acts" (Deely, 140, fn. 6).
Efficient (or Agent or Productive): "the productive or transient action initiated by an agent [where] an agent be understood as anything capable of initiating a motion or a change" (Wallace, 104, §35.8).
Kinds of efficient causes:
1) Essential vs. Coincidental
2) Total vs. Partial
3) Principal vs. Instrumental (instrument: "something from which an effect flows by reason of its subordination to a principal efficient cause, to which the instrument ministers and by which it is moved" [ibid.]).
4) Primary vs. Secondary
5) Perfecting vs. Disposing
6) Natural vs. Non-Natural (e.g. violence, chance, artificial, voluntary)
7) Univocal vs. Equivocal vs. Analogical (depends on "metaphysical level" of the agent vs. patient)
8) Universal vs. Particular
9) Corporeal vs. Incorporeal
10) Agents that cause being vs. agents that cause becoming
(Intrinsic) Formal: "the intrinsic principle of existence in any determinate essence" or "the intrinsic determinant of anything that is determinable" (102, §35.5); "the result in or response of the material correlated with the action of the agent" (Deely, 140, fn. 6).
-Extrinsic Formal Cause (Exemplary or Ideal): that form which is introduced into matter "by an intelligent agent" according to a pattern or plan (ibid.).
1) Exemplary vs. Specificative (or Objective): that which specifies "cognition as an awareness of this rather than that object or aspect of an object" (ibid.).
(Intrinsic) Final (or Teleological): "the full development of the substance or the completion of the process itself," where "the end itself may be defined as that for the sake of which something exists or is done, or that for which an agent acts or action takes place"; "it is said to be first in the order of intention and last in the order of execution or activity"; also called the "cause of causes (causa causarum)" (Wallace, 105, §35.10); "the [intrinsic] pattern of development which an effect once produced exhibits over time" (Deely, 104, fn. 6).
-Extrinsic Final Cause (Exemplary/Ideal): "the determination or form of an effect as this is preconceived by an intelligent agent," which is "extrinsic to the effect and exerts its influence mainly as an idea in the intentional order" (Wallace, 106, §35.11); "the intention according to or purpose for which [an agent]" forms a material structure (Deely, 140, fn. 6).
Showing posts with label John Deely. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Deely. Show all posts
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Repost: John Deely, "Solipsism"
The following article on solipsism by Dr. John Deely is so fantastic and straightforward. It explains all the hesitations and frustrations I experienced while studying modern and contemporary philosophy (aside from the frustrations of actually trying to understand what was being said by the convoluted style so infamous and probably genetically passed on among philosophers). Not only does Deely provide a solution to epistemology, but he also provides a powerful framework for cultural criticism and assimilation.
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[1439] From the Latin solus ipse, “the self alone,” solipsism is the view that knowledge does not extend beyond our own subjective existence. Sometimes used to describe a pathological medical condition of a person who has lost capacity to communicate, the term is also used philosophically to name the view that all we directly know and experience reduces to a state of our own consciousness or “mind,” beyond which we have no direct access to anything at all.
[1439] From the Latin solus ipse, “the self alone,” solipsism is the view that knowledge does not extend beyond our own subjective existence. Sometimes used to describe a pathological medical condition of a person who has lost capacity to communicate, the term is also used philosophically to name the view that all we directly know and experience reduces to a state of our own consciousness or “mind,” beyond which we have no direct access to anything at all.
The term is often associated with René DESCARTES' formula “I think therefore I am” and with Gottfried Wilhelm von LEIBNIZ's formula “Monads have no windows.” Our consciousness is a kind of bubble: We have no direct awareness of anything that is not itself a product of our own mind.
The term itself seems first to occur in Alexander Campbell Fraser's 1874 edition of Selections from Berkeley: “Berkeley's reasoning implies that we can know only our own notions… thus leading, by a reductio ad absurdum, to Egoism or Solipsism” (47). EGOISM has generally come to designate self-interest, whereas solipsism has come into general use primarily in the context of modern theory of knowledge or “epistemology.” “In this respect,” [1440] Bertrand RUSSELL, in his book My Philosophical Development, summarized: “I agree with Berkeley. The starry heaven that we know in visual perception is inside us. The external starry heaven that we believe in is inferred” ([1959] 1997, 20).
The isolation of the knowing self within itself, generally traced to Descartes, is more properly traceable to William of Ockham's view on relation. As Julius R. Weinberg (1965) noted, all the moderns (Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant) adopted Ockham's view that relations have no being in the order of what exists independently of our awareness. Against this background of NOMINALISM Descartes made as his first step toward a “new beginning” in philosophy the bare certainty of our own existence as thinking things. The first unmistakable version of the problema pontis, the “problem of the bridge,” resulted: How can we cross from the cognitive states of our own subjectivity to the world of things existing independently?
John LOCKE agreed with Descartes that the immediate objects of awareness are our own ideas, “mental representations.” But Locke disagreed that our first idea was the rational idea of God. Locke argued instead that ideas of sense are first. Followers of Descartes came to be called rationalists; followers of Locke, empiricists. But both lines agreed that objects as directly apprehended or known are one with our subjective cognitive states. Immanuel KANT, “Master of the Moderns” by virtue of his synthesis of RATIONALISM and EMPIRICISM, introduced a distinction between objects and ideas. But the relations between ideas and objects he attributed wholly to the working of the mind itself (the a priori forms of reason introduced into the phenomenal appearances of sense to give us the necessities of science). Thus Kant concluded that there is no possibility of a bridge passing from consciousness to “things in themselves.”
As a term designating the study of knowledge, epistemology seems straightforward. But when we consider the context of the term's introduction, in particular the assumption that is common (albeit in varying ways) to Descartes, Locke, and Kant, that the direct object of apprehension in every respect of every case involves “ideas” or (after Kant) the “phenomenal veil,” the usage carries the implication that the realm of being as existing independently is “unknowable,” that is, closed to us in principle. Study of “knowledge” reveals a closed circuit wherein the access to “being,” and hence the prospect of ONTOLOGY, is foreclosed.
John Poinsot (1589–1644), a contemporary of Descartes who received no consideration in the context out of which mainstream modern philosophy formed, presciently warned in 1632 (Treatise on Signs, Book III, Q. 2) that any assumption of the view that all awareness terminates directly in mental representations would create an insoluble “problema pontis.” Poinsot's argument (drawn from St. THOMAS AQUINAS) is that sense perception is founded on relations directly consequent on physical interactions between our bodies and surrounding bodies. The resulting awareness does not involve mental representations, but provides rather, within perception, the basis upon which only secondarily as interpretations of direct experience mental representations are introduced. “On this principle, as in a root,” Poinsot states, is founded the knowability of being as having within our awareness a directly awareness-independent dimension concomitant with the objective interpretations that we introduce through mental representations. Otherwise, Poinsot warned, there is no way out of our mind if mental representations are the whole basis of perception within experience.
Leibniz (1704) called the modern development of epistemology “the way of ideas” precisely because of the modern denial that awareness directly involves any relations that are awareness-independent. Leibniz saw at once that, given the assumption that defines this modern path, solipsism is a logically inescapable cul-de-sac—“Monads have no windows”; hence, being is unknowable.
The proposition that the “external world” is in itself unknowable, as Percy Bridgman remarked (1959), “is usually felt to be so absurd as to constitute its own refutation.” From the time of Kant to the present day, however, many have avoided facing up to this consequent, but no one has been able to explain how, starting with the thesis that what we are first aware of is a mental representation, we can get beyond solipsism. Bertrand Russell summarized the modern “epistemological dilemma” concisely. Despite the fact that, given the [1441] assumption of modern philosophy common to Descartes on the Rationalist side, Locke on the Empiricist side, and Kant in his synthesis of Rationalism and Empiricism, “we cannot witness or observe anything else at all” except “what goes on in our heads,” yet “those—and I fear they are the majority—in whom the human affections are stronger than the desire for logical economy, will, no doubt, not share my desire to render solipsism scientifically satisfactory” (My Philosophical Development, 1959).
Solipsism, in sum, is a term that precisely summarizes in the context of modern epistemology the logical consequent of the antecedent mainstream assumption that the human mind has a direct awareness only of its self-constructed mental representations.
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Source: Deely, John. "Solipsism." New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2012-2013: Ethics and Philosophy. Ed. Robert L. Fastiggi. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 2013. 1439-441. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 11 Oct. 2014. <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|CX2762500669&v=2.1&u=gonzagaufoley&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=5eb7130d8b53c771f1c1dd6321615811>.
Sunday, August 3, 2014
John Deely on "Creationism" vs. "Evolution"
[506] This is among the most enduring, baffling, and empty of the controversies of all of history, to say nothing merely of modern times, whence it continues to rage around us long past its time.
In 1945, Antonin Sertillanges, an excellent philosopher—not a great one, but a very, very good mind—wrote an entire book, The Idea of Creation, on just this question. This book should have shown everyone once and for all that this celebrated controversy is a nominalism, empty air delivered in withering blasts. For "there is nothing to prevent us from seeing in evolution, instead of a substitute for creation", which it could hardly be anyway, "simply another perspective on the manner in which the creative fact is bound up with the facts of nature" (Sertillanges 1945: 128). But not everyone read Sertillanges, and, anyway, he wrote in French, a language most proponents of "creationism" don't know.
But the doctrinal language that he spoke was pure Thomas Aquinas, from whom Sertillanges took the idea for his book. In the time of Aquinas, it was believed that the Bible taught that the world had a beginning. Aristotle taught, quite explicitly to the contrary, that the world was eternal. This, indeed, was one of the several reasons why the medieval church authorities tried to chop of Aristotle's head as soon as it appeared in Latin, by condemning his work and forbidding that it be read.
Thomas Aquinas, who clearly read Aristotle and thought for himself besides (you would have expected that, as a saint, he would have paid a little more attention to the church authorities), commented on this controversy by pointing out that the question of God's creation of the world has no least connection with the question of when the world exists but a question of how the world exists. And any system of interacting finite beings, statically or dynamically conceived, can be shown to be possible only on the assumption of an infinite being who imparts to them at each moment, and sustains them at each moment in, actual existence. The idea of creation reduced to its essential content is not the idea of a beginning in time but of a dependency in being, a dependentia in esse.
This is what Sertillanges repeated to his modern contemporaries in 1945. Creation is purely and simply a question of does God act presupposing something besides Himself, or presupposing nothing at all? That is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one. Evolution, by contrast, is a scientific, not a metaphysical, question; and still less one that can be decided by religion.
[507] There are some matters that can be decided by neither philosophy nor religion, and the question of whether the world as a matter of fact changes over time in its basic structures and specific features is one of them. If you want to know how the world changes in its physical being over time you have to go out, gather the evidence capable of revealing this, and not refuse to look at that evidence. Aristotle can tell you that if the environment on which the earth depends does not change, then neither will the earth. But Aristotle cannot tell you whether the environment on which the earth depends changes or not. For that you have to look at that environment. To babble philosophy or to quote scripture contrary to what you find in the physical evidence is inane. Said rightly Sertillanges (1945: 142):
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Source: John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 506–507.
In 1945, Antonin Sertillanges, an excellent philosopher—not a great one, but a very, very good mind—wrote an entire book, The Idea of Creation, on just this question. This book should have shown everyone once and for all that this celebrated controversy is a nominalism, empty air delivered in withering blasts. For "there is nothing to prevent us from seeing in evolution, instead of a substitute for creation", which it could hardly be anyway, "simply another perspective on the manner in which the creative fact is bound up with the facts of nature" (Sertillanges 1945: 128). But not everyone read Sertillanges, and, anyway, he wrote in French, a language most proponents of "creationism" don't know.
But the doctrinal language that he spoke was pure Thomas Aquinas, from whom Sertillanges took the idea for his book. In the time of Aquinas, it was believed that the Bible taught that the world had a beginning. Aristotle taught, quite explicitly to the contrary, that the world was eternal. This, indeed, was one of the several reasons why the medieval church authorities tried to chop of Aristotle's head as soon as it appeared in Latin, by condemning his work and forbidding that it be read.
Thomas Aquinas, who clearly read Aristotle and thought for himself besides (you would have expected that, as a saint, he would have paid a little more attention to the church authorities), commented on this controversy by pointing out that the question of God's creation of the world has no least connection with the question of when the world exists but a question of how the world exists. And any system of interacting finite beings, statically or dynamically conceived, can be shown to be possible only on the assumption of an infinite being who imparts to them at each moment, and sustains them at each moment in, actual existence. The idea of creation reduced to its essential content is not the idea of a beginning in time but of a dependency in being, a dependentia in esse.
This is what Sertillanges repeated to his modern contemporaries in 1945. Creation is purely and simply a question of does God act presupposing something besides Himself, or presupposing nothing at all? That is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one. Evolution, by contrast, is a scientific, not a metaphysical, question; and still less one that can be decided by religion.
[507] There are some matters that can be decided by neither philosophy nor religion, and the question of whether the world as a matter of fact changes over time in its basic structures and specific features is one of them. If you want to know how the world changes in its physical being over time you have to go out, gather the evidence capable of revealing this, and not refuse to look at that evidence. Aristotle can tell you that if the environment on which the earth depends does not change, then neither will the earth. But Aristotle cannot tell you whether the environment on which the earth depends changes or not. For that you have to look at that environment. To babble philosophy or to quote scripture contrary to what you find in the physical evidence is inane. Said rightly Sertillanges (1945: 142):
Whoever does not see that has not grasped the essential import of the notion of creation. He has restricted and anthropomorphized the notion beyond what is permissible. Once that has been pointed out, moreover, we are free to return calmly to the biblical conception of an initial creation after or beyond which is a divine repose.
We henceforth know well that one can conceptualize this repose in any of three forms: as sanctioning the fixity of beings in their genus and species; as giving them over to their progressive unfolding through time; or, finally, as imparting to the latent psychism with which it has endowed them the responsibility for temporal creations more and more exuberant.
One is free to choose, awaiting further evidence. But it is to be fervently hoped that after so much vain quarreling, we Christians will cease bringing forward unjustified censures respecting this doctrine of evolution, to which, under one form or another [Deely comments: Under the second on of the three forms, as it turns out], the future seems certain to belong.The legitimate argument of the "creationists", therefore, is not against the idea of evolution but against those particular versions of evolutionary theory propounded by persons who so misunderstand the nature of the case and so confusedly grasp the ideas they propound as to think that it is enough to show that there has been an evolution to show that there is no God. Such was the actual case of the Soviet cosmonaut who went outside his space capsule and looked around, then equated the failure of his eyes to detect God with a proof that God does not exist.
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Source: John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 506–507.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Semiotics: Irreducible to an Ideology
[Logical positivism, Russell's "Theory of Descriptions," Behaviorism]: these "methods" did not merely implement a point of view, but paraded the point of view itself in the guise of a method, thereby objectifying the sign processes on which they relied in such a way as to make it appear, or at least enable one to pretend, that no other point of view on the objects considered could have legitimacy.
I distinguish then, first of all, a point of view from a method, and I want to say that semiotics, like logical positivism or behaviorism, is a point of view rather than a method. But, at the same time, unlike positivism or behaviorism, semiotics in its doctrinal foundation is not an ideological standpoint that can be disguised as a method of inquiry while in reality closing inquiry down. [...]
To be ideological and to be historically conditioned, therefore, are not necessarily the same. The latter is true of every attempt at inquiry, including semiotics. The former is true of semiotics only to the extent that and whenever the perspective proper to the sign is traded for something else in the subjectivity of the inquirer. But then this trade will inevitably reveal itself objectively in the public deployment of consequent sign-systems (for example, in the speech or writing of the inquirer), where it will become visible to others in the community of inquirers and subject to criticism with appropriate revision or rejection.
Thus, even the "method of verification", like the "method of dialectics", had need of some signs in order to deny other signs. Its illegitimacy lay not in the signs it used but in the signs it refused, to wit, the signs that would have carried the discourse beyond the arbitrarily stipulated boundaries and were covertly relied upon in order to assert the illegitimate boundaries in the first place.
What, then, are we to say the semiotic point of view is? And how is it that this point of view, unlike others, cannot properly be reduced to or converted into an ideology? To answer the questions in order: The semiotic point of view is the perspective that results from the sustained attempt to live reflectively with and follow out the consequences of one simple realization: the whole of our experience, from its most primitive origins in sensation to its most refined achievements of understanding, is a network or web of sign relations. This point of view cannot be reduced to an ideology without losing what is proper to it for the reason that its boundaries are those of the understanding itself in its activity of interpreting dependently upon the cognate interpretations of perception and sensation.
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Source: John Deely, Basics of Semiotics (Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2009), 15-16.
I distinguish then, first of all, a point of view from a method, and I want to say that semiotics, like logical positivism or behaviorism, is a point of view rather than a method. But, at the same time, unlike positivism or behaviorism, semiotics in its doctrinal foundation is not an ideological standpoint that can be disguised as a method of inquiry while in reality closing inquiry down. [...]
To be ideological and to be historically conditioned, therefore, are not necessarily the same. The latter is true of every attempt at inquiry, including semiotics. The former is true of semiotics only to the extent that and whenever the perspective proper to the sign is traded for something else in the subjectivity of the inquirer. But then this trade will inevitably reveal itself objectively in the public deployment of consequent sign-systems (for example, in the speech or writing of the inquirer), where it will become visible to others in the community of inquirers and subject to criticism with appropriate revision or rejection.
Thus, even the "method of verification", like the "method of dialectics", had need of some signs in order to deny other signs. Its illegitimacy lay not in the signs it used but in the signs it refused, to wit, the signs that would have carried the discourse beyond the arbitrarily stipulated boundaries and were covertly relied upon in order to assert the illegitimate boundaries in the first place.
What, then, are we to say the semiotic point of view is? And how is it that this point of view, unlike others, cannot properly be reduced to or converted into an ideology? To answer the questions in order: The semiotic point of view is the perspective that results from the sustained attempt to live reflectively with and follow out the consequences of one simple realization: the whole of our experience, from its most primitive origins in sensation to its most refined achievements of understanding, is a network or web of sign relations. This point of view cannot be reduced to an ideology without losing what is proper to it for the reason that its boundaries are those of the understanding itself in its activity of interpreting dependently upon the cognate interpretations of perception and sensation.
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Source: John Deely, Basics of Semiotics (Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2009), 15-16.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Medieval and Modern Meanings of Subjective and Objective
The modern meaning of these terms is what everyone is familiar with, so I'll begin there.
Subjective refers to the psychological and cognitive states in contrast to the "external world." It carries solipsistic overtones ("only in my mind" or "true for me"—hence, one can already see the relativism that will follow). Therefore, when we call a perspective subjective, its denotation (explicit meaning) is simply how a person happens to think or feel about something external at that given moment. Its connotation (implicit meaning) is that such a perspective is as valid as any other subjective perspective but useless for critical analysis, which requires "objectivity" (cf. Deely, Descartes & Poinsot (2008), 46).
Objective derives from modernity's humanism, stressing the "difference of man" (John Deely, "Primary Modeling System in Animals" (2007), 2-3; http://www.augustoponzio.com/files/12._Deely.pdf):
Subjective refers to the psychological and cognitive states in contrast to the "external world." It carries solipsistic overtones ("only in my mind" or "true for me"—hence, one can already see the relativism that will follow). Therefore, when we call a perspective subjective, its denotation (explicit meaning) is simply how a person happens to think or feel about something external at that given moment. Its connotation (implicit meaning) is that such a perspective is as valid as any other subjective perspective but useless for critical analysis, which requires "objectivity" (cf. Deely, Descartes & Poinsot (2008), 46).
Objective derives from modernity's humanism, stressing the "difference of man" (John Deely, "Primary Modeling System in Animals" (2007), 2-3; http://www.augustoponzio.com/files/12._Deely.pdf):
The quintessence of modernity in matters human was to stress “the difference of man”, and to embrace the conclusion that not only is the rational intellect superior to the rest of nature but also that the human being in possessing this “superior mind” is separate from nature as well. Whence developed the myth of the “objective observer” in that false sense of the word “objectivity” intended to signify synonymy with what is apart from any observation by which it may happen to become known, and in contrast with the systematically required sense of “objective” as simply that which is known by whatever means and regardless of any further status the known may or may not have in the physical environment as something common to all animals. The “objective” observer is a participant in the universe he or she observes, and there is no other kind of “observation”, certainly not one “detached” from the human condition as an animal among other animals. [1]Objectivity in the modern sense posits the possibility that the human mind can "go outside of itself" to observe something as though the human in its (modern) subjectivity were not observing that thing, observing something as though it were unobserved, how it is "in itself." Of course, this is impossible and is a very confused position resulting from an improper understanding of human nature when Descartes displaced "rational animal" with "thinking thing" (res cognitans). Recall that Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) argues that we have greater certainty as to our aspect as intelligent beings than beings with bodies, i.e. as being physical and hence animal. But when we are no longer animals but pure intellects, we become angels. The conclusions of our senses (our bodies) become subjectivity; our minds lead to objectivity.
All of this stems from nominalism, which denies relation as being in the order of ens reale (being that exists independently of whether it is within the awareness of a mind), reducing relation simply to ens rationis (purely mind-dependent being), for when there is no relation that exists suprasubjectively, then our connection to the "external world" is cut off, for there is no relation that takes us outside of our "subjectivity." Yet we find that we still have the capacity for "objectivity," for "going out of our minds into the world." Hence arise the curious, and strictly modern, definitions of subjectivity and objectivity and the problem of the external world (as well as epistemology) and all philosophy until semiotics took off.
The medieval notions of subjectivity and objectivity are far clearer and simpler.
Subjective refers to what exists in the order of ens reale, being either in itself (esse in se; substance), being in another (esse in alio; accidents dependent upon substance), or being towards another (esse ad aliud; relation). The subjective is that which exists regardless of whether any mind is aware of that being or not (cf. Deely, ibid., 40-41).
Objective refers to what exists in relation, being towards another (esse ad aliud), specifically when there is a terminus of a relation (an "object") and this terminus is in the awareness of the knower. A relation may exist physically (e.g. the relation between parent and child) but not objectively (e.g. the child was adopted and never was told about the adoption). The relation may exist physically and objectively (e.g. the child, under a set of circumstances, comes to realize whom its true parents are). Or the relation may not exist physically (the biological parents have since passed away) but only objectively (remaining in the memory of the child). Hence "things" with subjective being become "objects" of awareness with the relation being patterned after the thing (esse in) or, if the "object" of awareness is another relation, being patterned after the relation (esse ad) (cf. Deely, ibid., 42). It is only when there is an "object," whether the relation exists on the order of ens reale or ens rationis, that there is the objective dimension.
Anyone familiar with some of the Neo-Thomistic works will also notice that many Neo-Thomists foolishly assumed the modern usage of these terms, and many apologists today still use them as such (e.g. when talking about "objective morality" vs. "subjective morality" in trying to refute relativism, all of which ends up being another form of the same thing!), not realizing that they are what we could call "crypto-nominalists," unconsciously nominalistic, just as many believers are unconsciously fideists, separating reason from faith as Dr. Michael W. Tkacz has pointed out (cf. Tkacz, "Faith, Science, and the Error of Fideism," Logos 5, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 139-155).
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Footnotes:
1. Here should be mentioned the work of one of the great cryptosemiotians of the last century, Gregory Bateson, who (1972) identified just this view of “separateness” and “superiority” as the “original sin” of modern epistemology.
Footnotes:
1. Here should be mentioned the work of one of the great cryptosemiotians of the last century, Gregory Bateson, who (1972) identified just this view of “separateness” and “superiority” as the “original sin” of modern epistemology.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Cathexis and Prescission
For future reference (cf. John Deely, Descartes & Poinsot (2008), 32-34).
Cathexis (noun) kah-'thehk-sihss
Plural cathexes
1. Freudian use: the emotional investment of libidinal energies (Freud uses the phrase "libidnal cathexes" ("Two Artificial Groups: The Church and the Army" (1921)));
1a. Derivatively: the concentration of emotional energy on an object, idea, or person (cf. American Heritage Dictionary);
2. Semiotic use: the semiotic discrimination of a significate (an object of awareness) as desirable (+), undesirable (–), or safe to ignore (ø), producing "object-oriented affect" (Parsons and Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (1951), 10), i.e. affects that form the foundations of relations terminating in objects evaluated according to the above division, which in the concrete order is given simultaneously with the cognition of the object but is analytically separable.
Cathect. Trans. v. [not entirely sure yet]
Cathection. Noun.
Cathectic. Adj.
Cathectically / Cathecticly. Adv.
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Prescission (noun) pronunciation? [still unclear, but I suspect it is equivalent to "precision"]
1. Semiotic use: the act or process of prescissing, i.e. abstracting (in the sense of separating, demarcating, dissecting) an object into analytically distinct conceptions, usually for the sake of clarity of distinction (or, for establishing "precision") (cf. Peirce, "Issues of Pragmaticism," The Monist 15 (October 1905); Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce 5.449).
Prescind. Trans. v.
Presciss. Noun.
Prescissive. Adj.
Prescissively. Adv.
Cathexis (noun) kah-'thehk-sihss
Plural cathexes
1. Freudian use: the emotional investment of libidinal energies (Freud uses the phrase "libidnal cathexes" ("Two Artificial Groups: The Church and the Army" (1921)));
1a. Derivatively: the concentration of emotional energy on an object, idea, or person (cf. American Heritage Dictionary);
2. Semiotic use: the semiotic discrimination of a significate (an object of awareness) as desirable (+), undesirable (–), or safe to ignore (ø), producing "object-oriented affect" (Parsons and Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (1951), 10), i.e. affects that form the foundations of relations terminating in objects evaluated according to the above division, which in the concrete order is given simultaneously with the cognition of the object but is analytically separable.
Cathect. Trans. v. [not entirely sure yet]
Cathection. Noun.
Cathectic. Adj.
Cathectically / Cathecticly. Adv.
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Prescission (noun) pronunciation? [still unclear, but I suspect it is equivalent to "precision"]
1. Semiotic use: the act or process of prescissing, i.e. abstracting (in the sense of separating, demarcating, dissecting) an object into analytically distinct conceptions, usually for the sake of clarity of distinction (or, for establishing "precision") (cf. Peirce, "Issues of Pragmaticism," The Monist 15 (October 1905); Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce 5.449).
Prescind. Trans. v.
Presciss. Noun.
Prescissive. Adj.
Prescissively. Adv.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
John Deely's Introduction to the Importance of Relation
The following is a video of a very engaging talk that Dr. John Deely gave at the University of Oregon introducing the universality and importance of relation in our world, for the future of our understanding, and the development of philosophical thought.
Cautionary note: Dr. Deely is a bit intentionally provocative. Some of his examples and language are graphic and vulgar.
“Objective Reality and the Physical World: Relation as Key to Understanding Semiosis” — John Deely
Cautionary note: Dr. Deely is a bit intentionally provocative. Some of his examples and language are graphic and vulgar.
“Objective Reality and the Physical World: Relation as Key to Understanding Semiosis” — John Deely
Semiotics: The Matrix For All Sciences
[S]emiotics pertains to a renewal of the foundations of our understanding of knowledge and experience across the board, and hence to a transformation of the disciplinary superstructures culturally distributing that understanding (the traditional disciplines as currently founded). Semiotics also pertains to the renewal of any single currently established discipline within, say, the humanities, but only by way of achieving a proper understanding of semiosis itself in some particular. It is thus not just a question of putting aside the ill-advised or, as Culler more mordantly muses (1981: 20), "futile attempt to distinguish the humanities from the social sciences". It is, rather, a question of new foundations for the "sciences" in the ancient sense of the whole panoply of disciplinarily diversified human knowledge - be the object of the diversity "human", "natural", or "social" (in the current description). Semiotics is a perspective concerned with the matrix of all the disciplines, precisely as they are offsprings within experience of anthroposemiosis.
This claim is at the heart of semiotics' so-called "imperialism". It is not a question of imperialism, however, but of recognizing the role of experience as the ground of understanding throughout and the centrality of history in making of that ground a rich soil. It is more a question of recovering from the imperialism of the natural sciences, physics in particular, as the distinct heritage of positivism, and of seeing the subsets of semiosis within anthroposemiosis for what they are in relation to the whole.
Floyd Merrell makes the point nicely, in a note on his recent text (1988: 262 n. 12):
This is the governing insight of the semiotic enterprise integrally conceived in all its phases and periods. Semiotics provides a perspective on the whole of experience in what is proper to it as experience. In achieving this, it becomes "first" among the sciences not as one among the others, such as traditional metaphysics envisaged, but as doctrina contrasts to scientia (Williams 1985; Anderson et al. 1984; Sebeok 1976a: ix) and as what is first in the understanding contrasts with what is derivative therefrom (Deely 1987, 1988, 1988a). [...]
To study the sign is to uncover semiosis, and therewith a web as vast as nature itself. The arrangement, the web of renvoi sustaining the environmental and sensible elements at each moment according to patterns that are not themselves sensible nor reducible to what is sensible, constitutes the semiotic object in its full possibilities for understanding.
This is a "reality" quite different from that prejacent given in which the mind had no part and to which the observer contributed hopefully nothing, conceived by the medievals and sought by the moderns. Nor is it a reality wholly reducible to the mind's own workings on the basis of a hidden outer realm and a hidden inner mechanism of understanding linked only by the phenomena constituted by the mind itself, as Kant concluded. Something much richer than either reduction, something more collusive even than the rapport between fly trap and fly in the realm of insects and flowers, this newer paradigm - in a phrase, semiotic reality - recognizes that the boundary between what is dependent upon and what is independent of interpretive activity can never be finally fixed from within experience because the boundary itself fluctuates in function of the development of understanding, whether "speculative" or "practical", "scientific" or "literary". [...]
This claim is at the heart of semiotics' so-called "imperialism". It is not a question of imperialism, however, but of recognizing the role of experience as the ground of understanding throughout and the centrality of history in making of that ground a rich soil. It is more a question of recovering from the imperialism of the natural sciences, physics in particular, as the distinct heritage of positivism, and of seeing the subsets of semiosis within anthroposemiosis for what they are in relation to the whole.
Floyd Merrell makes the point nicely, in a note on his recent text (1988: 262 n. 12):
. . .in general the hermeneutical movement has been beneficial insofar as it has directed attention to the role of interpretation and understanding in the humanities. However, Stephen Toulmin observes, and rightly so [1982: 99-100], that this movement 'has done us a disservice' also because it does not recognize any comparable role for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply separates the two fields of scholarship and experience. Consequently, ... the central truths and virtues of hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of false inferences and misleading dichotomies.A truly "radical hermeneutics", such as Caputo calls for (1987), must first of all come round to the semiotic point of view, for that point of view, that standpoint, achieved its first systematic expression precisely by an author (Poinsot 1632: 38/1ff., commentary in Deely 1985, 1988) realizing and thematizing the point that interpretive activity or "hermeneutics" (the privileged term for the notion then was "perihermenias", as noted in Deely 1982: 188n.16) is coextensive with the life of the mind - and, we would add today, extensive of nature itself as engendering life.
This is the governing insight of the semiotic enterprise integrally conceived in all its phases and periods. Semiotics provides a perspective on the whole of experience in what is proper to it as experience. In achieving this, it becomes "first" among the sciences not as one among the others, such as traditional metaphysics envisaged, but as doctrina contrasts to scientia (Williams 1985; Anderson et al. 1984; Sebeok 1976a: ix) and as what is first in the understanding contrasts with what is derivative therefrom (Deely 1987, 1988, 1988a). [...]
To study the sign is to uncover semiosis, and therewith a web as vast as nature itself. The arrangement, the web of renvoi sustaining the environmental and sensible elements at each moment according to patterns that are not themselves sensible nor reducible to what is sensible, constitutes the semiotic object in its full possibilities for understanding.
This is a "reality" quite different from that prejacent given in which the mind had no part and to which the observer contributed hopefully nothing, conceived by the medievals and sought by the moderns. Nor is it a reality wholly reducible to the mind's own workings on the basis of a hidden outer realm and a hidden inner mechanism of understanding linked only by the phenomena constituted by the mind itself, as Kant concluded. Something much richer than either reduction, something more collusive even than the rapport between fly trap and fly in the realm of insects and flowers, this newer paradigm - in a phrase, semiotic reality - recognizes that the boundary between what is dependent upon and what is independent of interpretive activity can never be finally fixed from within experience because the boundary itself fluctuates in function of the development of understanding, whether "speculative" or "practical", "scientific" or "literary". [...]
Furthermore (and in this it provides the matrix for natural science as well), semiotics is the field studying the process whereby any object is constituted in its full actuality as known: not simply as a process in nature, but also as the prise de conscience whereby nature becomes fully aware of itself and achieves its final totality in the transcendence over physical being. This process of transcendence begins with the historical Umwelten and is fully realized in the reflexivity of the Lebenswelt that makes of each text a prospective intertext incorporating life and fiction and the whole of nature as well through a semiosis metaphysically unlimited and even physically, though limited, not wholly determinately so.
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Source: John Deely, "Zoösemiotics and Anthroposemiotics," in Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/deely/basics/ch5.html#F.
Examples of Bio- and Anthroposemiosis
Here it will be enough to show how the ontological singularity unique to relation in the order of physical being provides the ground for the prior possibility of semiosis at the level of the experience of organisms, which is our main concern here, inasmuch as, as we have already seen, it is at the upper levels of biosemiosis that the basic concepts of semiotics have been fully established.
The common ground of biosemiosis lies in what used to be called "natural signs", but what is now more commonly divided, after Peirce, into indices, icons, and symbols (although of course not all icons or symbols are natural signs, either). A footprint in the sand is indexical of a person's passing, and of the direction of the passing, unless the footprints be the skillful work of a man passing east in such a way as to leave the impression of a man passing west, in which event the footprints remain indexically accurate to a degree but iconically misleading in another degree, and are in fact symbols of an exceptional skill.
Natural signs are essential to the survival of most if not all species of animals. They need to be taken for what they are, or, in the reverse case, mistaken for what they are intended to be mistaken for, if the animal in question is to secure its food. What happens in such a case? Precisely that the foundation for a physical relation is taken or mistaken for a corresponding objective relation, as a result of which food is provided or safety secured.
The relation of clouds to rain is a relation of cause and effect. When that relation has also been experienced, an interpretant becomes established. What was formerly a mere physical relation, a relation of secondness, acquires now, through the interpretant, a thirdness whereby that same relation functions also semiotically. Because the physical relationship as such need only be dyadic, whereas the semiotic relationship is necessarily triadic, there is the possibility of error, or misinterpretation. There is also the possibility of deception. The objective world wherein actual semiosis transpires is only occasionally the same and in large part different from the physical environment. But to the extent that it is the same, to the extent that it overlaps - and this is the extent to which every species depends for its survival on food, which is a considerable extent - that extent and that overlap result from the indifference of intersubjective being to the difference between what is objective and what is physical, as we have seen.
Thus, it is the being proper to relation that is also the being proper to signs, even though relations properly speaking need not be semiosic relations. Not all relations in the ontological sense pass through actual experience, but all relations in the ontological sense are indifferent to the order of physical existence, such that, once taken up into actual experience, they also take on an objective life relatively independent of physical being. It is in this way that they provide the raw material of biosemiosis. The actual being proper to the sign is the being of an ontological relation taken up into the experience of an organism, whether directly from the biological heritage of that organism (so-called "instinctive notions") or culled rather from individual experience, where it serves to connect objectively perceptual and sensory elements. The action of signs first arises precisely from physically related environmental factors coming to be seen objectively as related, and, conversely, from objectively related factors being presented as physically related. The uniqueness of semiosis as an activity and the detached and ambiguous quality it has as an action results from the being peculiar and proper to the ontological relation whereby, as we have seen, it can be neither directly altered nor directly perceived. The permeability of relation as such to realization in either the physical or the objective order also makes the two indistinguishable in direct experience. This is a matter not of confusion but of the reality proper to experience, wherein the objective and the physical are intertwined in the sign. This permeability is why the natural sign provides a common denominator in biosemiosis, even though it can be natural in different ways for different species.
An example of a natural sign unique to the level of anthroposemiosis may help to grasp the general point at stake here. Let us consider the case of a fossil bone. This bone may or may not be known to exist. If not, let us suppose it yet belongs to a class of bones well established among those expert in the Pleistocene. One day the bone is uncovered, but by a gardener, not a paleontologist. Since the bone is in an advanced state of fossilization, let us suppose that our gardener does not even recognize it as a bone, let alone a fossil bone. For that, a more developed interpretant is required, one proportioned more exactly to what the bone relates to in its living past. Nevertheless, a fossil bone is just what it is. Such an interpretant as is required for its recognition nowhere existed actually in the middle ages, let us say, but now, among our postulated Pleistocene specialists, it exists indeed as a common property.
What is this interpretant? Certainly not an idea psychologically considered. It is rather an idea in the semiotic sense, moreover as fashioned publically through the training of paleontologists, such that those who have by training acquired it possess in their minds a foundation or "fundament" whence will result or "dimanate", under appropriate conditions, a network of relations including that bone. But first, one of them at least will have to see the bone in question.
Supposing that occurs. Supposing that one of our students of the Pleistocene visits our gardener just as the gardener is about to deposit into a trash bin the bone which had irritatingly obstructed his gardening. "What is that you have there?" Now our gardener, being also a student of Peirce, may at this point respond, casually tossing the bone toward the trash, "A brute fact at the level of secondness."
But our paleontologist had not asked her question idly. She had spoken out of a glimmer of suspicion, a hint of recognition, as it were - she was voicing in context a low-risk abductive gamble. Into the brute fact at the level of secondness something of thirdness had already, thanks to her training, begun to enter. "Let me have a closer look", she said, moving toward the bone discarded as a peculiarly shaped rock. "This", she announces on careful inspection, "is no rock. This is a rare fossil bone, which just may revolutionize a bit of our understanding of the Pleistocene in this area." Whereupon, clutching the bone with great excitement, she ran off in the direction of the university.
What has happened here? A physical relation, recognized for what it had been, thanks to the dynamic interaction of its fundament (the bone) producing physical changes in the student of paleontology's optic nerves, became at the same moment also a sign of what had been. A transcendental relation, the bone of a dinosaur, which once had a physical relation to that dinosaur, but no more (the dinosaur being dead), yet gave rise to an objective relation corresponding somewhat with the physical relation that had been. The gardener's rock had become the paleontologist's sign.
The common ground of biosemiosis lies in what used to be called "natural signs", but what is now more commonly divided, after Peirce, into indices, icons, and symbols (although of course not all icons or symbols are natural signs, either). A footprint in the sand is indexical of a person's passing, and of the direction of the passing, unless the footprints be the skillful work of a man passing east in such a way as to leave the impression of a man passing west, in which event the footprints remain indexically accurate to a degree but iconically misleading in another degree, and are in fact symbols of an exceptional skill.
Natural signs are essential to the survival of most if not all species of animals. They need to be taken for what they are, or, in the reverse case, mistaken for what they are intended to be mistaken for, if the animal in question is to secure its food. What happens in such a case? Precisely that the foundation for a physical relation is taken or mistaken for a corresponding objective relation, as a result of which food is provided or safety secured.
The relation of clouds to rain is a relation of cause and effect. When that relation has also been experienced, an interpretant becomes established. What was formerly a mere physical relation, a relation of secondness, acquires now, through the interpretant, a thirdness whereby that same relation functions also semiotically. Because the physical relationship as such need only be dyadic, whereas the semiotic relationship is necessarily triadic, there is the possibility of error, or misinterpretation. There is also the possibility of deception. The objective world wherein actual semiosis transpires is only occasionally the same and in large part different from the physical environment. But to the extent that it is the same, to the extent that it overlaps - and this is the extent to which every species depends for its survival on food, which is a considerable extent - that extent and that overlap result from the indifference of intersubjective being to the difference between what is objective and what is physical, as we have seen.
Thus, it is the being proper to relation that is also the being proper to signs, even though relations properly speaking need not be semiosic relations. Not all relations in the ontological sense pass through actual experience, but all relations in the ontological sense are indifferent to the order of physical existence, such that, once taken up into actual experience, they also take on an objective life relatively independent of physical being. It is in this way that they provide the raw material of biosemiosis. The actual being proper to the sign is the being of an ontological relation taken up into the experience of an organism, whether directly from the biological heritage of that organism (so-called "instinctive notions") or culled rather from individual experience, where it serves to connect objectively perceptual and sensory elements. The action of signs first arises precisely from physically related environmental factors coming to be seen objectively as related, and, conversely, from objectively related factors being presented as physically related. The uniqueness of semiosis as an activity and the detached and ambiguous quality it has as an action results from the being peculiar and proper to the ontological relation whereby, as we have seen, it can be neither directly altered nor directly perceived. The permeability of relation as such to realization in either the physical or the objective order also makes the two indistinguishable in direct experience. This is a matter not of confusion but of the reality proper to experience, wherein the objective and the physical are intertwined in the sign. This permeability is why the natural sign provides a common denominator in biosemiosis, even though it can be natural in different ways for different species.
An example of a natural sign unique to the level of anthroposemiosis may help to grasp the general point at stake here. Let us consider the case of a fossil bone. This bone may or may not be known to exist. If not, let us suppose it yet belongs to a class of bones well established among those expert in the Pleistocene. One day the bone is uncovered, but by a gardener, not a paleontologist. Since the bone is in an advanced state of fossilization, let us suppose that our gardener does not even recognize it as a bone, let alone a fossil bone. For that, a more developed interpretant is required, one proportioned more exactly to what the bone relates to in its living past. Nevertheless, a fossil bone is just what it is. Such an interpretant as is required for its recognition nowhere existed actually in the middle ages, let us say, but now, among our postulated Pleistocene specialists, it exists indeed as a common property.
What is this interpretant? Certainly not an idea psychologically considered. It is rather an idea in the semiotic sense, moreover as fashioned publically through the training of paleontologists, such that those who have by training acquired it possess in their minds a foundation or "fundament" whence will result or "dimanate", under appropriate conditions, a network of relations including that bone. But first, one of them at least will have to see the bone in question.
Supposing that occurs. Supposing that one of our students of the Pleistocene visits our gardener just as the gardener is about to deposit into a trash bin the bone which had irritatingly obstructed his gardening. "What is that you have there?" Now our gardener, being also a student of Peirce, may at this point respond, casually tossing the bone toward the trash, "A brute fact at the level of secondness."
But our paleontologist had not asked her question idly. She had spoken out of a glimmer of suspicion, a hint of recognition, as it were - she was voicing in context a low-risk abductive gamble. Into the brute fact at the level of secondness something of thirdness had already, thanks to her training, begun to enter. "Let me have a closer look", she said, moving toward the bone discarded as a peculiarly shaped rock. "This", she announces on careful inspection, "is no rock. This is a rare fossil bone, which just may revolutionize a bit of our understanding of the Pleistocene in this area." Whereupon, clutching the bone with great excitement, she ran off in the direction of the university.
What has happened here? A physical relation, recognized for what it had been, thanks to the dynamic interaction of its fundament (the bone) producing physical changes in the student of paleontology's optic nerves, became at the same moment also a sign of what had been. A transcendental relation, the bone of a dinosaur, which once had a physical relation to that dinosaur, but no more (the dinosaur being dead), yet gave rise to an objective relation corresponding somewhat with the physical relation that had been. The gardener's rock had become the paleontologist's sign.
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Source: John Deely, "Chapter 4: Signs: The Medium of Semiosis," in Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990),http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/deely/basics/ch4.html.
John Deely on the Two Notions of Relative Being
We see then what is peculiar about the notion of relative being taken in its full extension thus divided: it includes everything that falls within our experience and so is difficult to grasp precisely because the implied term of opposition - nonrelative being, or absolute being - is at the concrete level a phantom of the mind, like the notion of "nonbeing" in general. It is not a question of some beings that are relative and other beings that are not relative, but a question rather of beings all of which are relative, though relative in two sharply contrasting though connected senses: Every being that exists in its own right is, by virtue of that very fact, subjectively relative throughout its existence; but, in addition to this subjective relativity according to which a being proximately depends on some things more than others and influences some things but not others, etc., there is the further relativity according to which the subjects are here and now intersubjectively connected actually to this thing rather than that, and later to another rather than to this, until such time as they cease to be. There is, in short, a twofold dimension or level to the relativity of being: on the one hand, there is an underlay of subjective relativity according to which everything ultimately implies everything else but not in equally direct or proximate ways at the level of possibility or intelligibility, even though everything is not actually related to everything else at the level of existence and physical interaction; and, on the other hand, there is at the same time an overlay of intersubjective relations, both physical and objective, according to which some things are actually interactive with some things but not with others in this or that way.
We are now in a position to answer our question about the living parent whose child has died. The parent remains a parent at the level of transcendental relation, while ceasing to be a parent at the level of physical relation, although this physical relation continues to exist objectively to the extent that the parent or anyone else thinks about it. The same relation formed now only in thought formerly existed also physically, and it is by virtue of that same relation that the parent is a parent.
Of course, if, as happens, a supposed father, say, was deceived into thinking that a child was his when in fact it was begotten by another, the objective relation according to which he was called and thought to be, perhaps even by the child, "father", continues without ceasing in any sense upon the death of the child. It is thus by the relation on its physical side that the father is in fact the father, while it is by that same relation (or by what is thought to be that relation even though it is in fact a different relation owing to the nonexistence of a physical relation for the objective relation to be the same as) that the father is called "father". Thus is the truth of dicisigns a consequence of the relations they embody according to whether what is asserted objectively coincides with or deviates from what exists relative to another order of being than the objective.
We are now in a position to answer our question about the living parent whose child has died. The parent remains a parent at the level of transcendental relation, while ceasing to be a parent at the level of physical relation, although this physical relation continues to exist objectively to the extent that the parent or anyone else thinks about it. The same relation formed now only in thought formerly existed also physically, and it is by virtue of that same relation that the parent is a parent.
Of course, if, as happens, a supposed father, say, was deceived into thinking that a child was his when in fact it was begotten by another, the objective relation according to which he was called and thought to be, perhaps even by the child, "father", continues without ceasing in any sense upon the death of the child. It is thus by the relation on its physical side that the father is in fact the father, while it is by that same relation (or by what is thought to be that relation even though it is in fact a different relation owing to the nonexistence of a physical relation for the objective relation to be the same as) that the father is called "father". Thus is the truth of dicisigns a consequence of the relations they embody according to whether what is asserted objectively coincides with or deviates from what exists relative to another order of being than the objective.
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Source: John Deely, "Chapter 4: Signs: The Medium of Semiosis," in Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/deely/basics/ch4.html.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
John Deely on Romanticizing Nature
MT: I guess part of this semioethical realization concerns what real-world consequences all our human actions have, and to what extent the human world practically – ehm – messes with a natural world that is non-human.
JD [John Deely]: Did you say ‘messes’?
MT: In search of a better word – ...or interferes in a non-human world. Isn’t part of the realization that there is not a sharp distinction between what concerns humans and what concerns others than humans?
JD: Yes, but when you start to speak about the human world as ‘messing with’ the world of nature, you’re coming from an almost Rousseauean, romantic idea of nature: that nature is what we need to just leave alone. And that’s completely naive, because we’re part of nature. They’re talking about – you know, it’s so criminal that we would eat the flesh of animals, et cetera. I like the cartoon – I think it was in The New Yorker, where there are these three characters who are very ecologically friendly, and there’s a couple of lions that are trying to eat them. And they’re up in a tree, and then two of them say to the third one: "Would you please explain to this guy [the closest lion] how much we’ve done for him?"
JD [John Deely]: Did you say ‘messes’?
MT: In search of a better word – ...or interferes in a non-human world. Isn’t part of the realization that there is not a sharp distinction between what concerns humans and what concerns others than humans?
JD: Yes, but when you start to speak about the human world as ‘messing with’ the world of nature, you’re coming from an almost Rousseauean, romantic idea of nature: that nature is what we need to just leave alone. And that’s completely naive, because we’re part of nature. They’re talking about – you know, it’s so criminal that we would eat the flesh of animals, et cetera. I like the cartoon – I think it was in The New Yorker, where there are these three characters who are very ecologically friendly, and there’s a couple of lions that are trying to eat them. And they’re up in a tree, and then two of them say to the third one: "Would you please explain to this guy [the closest lion] how much we’ve done for him?"
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Source: John Deely, interviewed by Morten Tønnessen, "Tell Me, Where Is Morality Bred? The Semioethics Interviews I: John Deely," Hortus Semioticus 4 (April 7, 2009): 56, accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.ut.ee/hortussemioticus/4_2009/pdf/hortussemioticus_4_deely.pdf.
Source: John Deely, interviewed by Morten Tønnessen, "Tell Me, Where Is Morality Bred? The Semioethics Interviews I: John Deely," Hortus Semioticus 4 (April 7, 2009): 56, accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.ut.ee/hortussemioticus/4_2009/pdf/hortussemioticus_4_deely.pdf.
The Unity of the Speculative and Practical Intellect
[St. Thomas Aquinas] made the – really quite brilliant – [observation that] what distinguishes human understanding is precisely the ability to come to know things as they are. And it’s from the knowledge of the way the things are that practical knowledge follows. So there’s not just a split between speculative and practical, there’s a sequence: The human intellect comes to understand things, and on the basis of what it understands becomes able to exercise control over what is understood. [1]
1. Aquinas’ phrase that “the speculative intellect by extension becomes practical” (“intellectus speculativus per extensionem fit practicus”) is from Summa theologiae, Prima Pars, Quaestio 79, Articulus 11, sed contra, cf. Aquinas c1252-73, and is a paraphrase of Aristotle’s statement (De anima, II, 10 433a 15) that “the practical intellect [...] differs from the speculative intellect by the end at which it aims” (“(intellectus) speculativus differt a practico, fine”), cf. Aristotle c350 AC.
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Footnotes:
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Source: John Deely, interviewed by Morten Tønnessen, "Tell Me, Where Is Morality Bred? The Semioethics Interviews I: John Deely," Hortus Semioticus 4 (April 7, 2009): 54, accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.ut.ee/hortussemioticus/4_2009/pdf/hortussemioticus_4_deely.pdf.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The Art of Scholastic Disputation
It seemed best to show beginners the form and procedure of disputation in actual use and practice. It can be briefly described as follows.
In any disputation, the first concern of the one arguing should be to propose an argument entirely reduced to form. That is to say, having stripped away everything superfluous, whether ambiguous words or lengthy declarations, the one arguing should succinctly and distinctly propose a syllogism or an enthymeme. A syllogism contains three propositions, which are called the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion or consequent, connected by the sign of illation, which is the particle "therefore." The connection itself, however, is called the illation or consequence. An enthymeme contains two propositions, of which the first is called an antecedent, the second a consequent, also connected by an illation. For example, if I want to prove that one ought not embrace a life of voluptuousness, I form a syllogism thus: "Whatever opposes true human virtue ought not to be embraced; a voluptuous life opposes true human virtue; therefore it ought not to be embraced." Or, if I wish to form an enthymeme of antecedent and consequent, I form it thus: "A voluptuous life is opposed to the arduousness of virtue; therefore it ought not to be embraced."
Hearing the formulation of the argument, the one responding should attend to nothing except to repeat integrally and faithfully the argument proposed, and meanwhile, while he repeats the argument, he should consider carefully whether each premise is true, and to be granted, or false, and to be denied, or doubtful or equivocal, and to be distinguished. He should likewise consider whether the consequence or illation is valid or invalid. Having repeated the argument once without saying anything by way of response, the one responding then should repeat and respond to the propositions of the argument taken singly, in this order: If there were three propositions and he things the first to be true, he should say: "I grant the major premise." If he things it false, he should say: "I deny the major." If he thinks it does not matter for the conclusion that ought to be inferred or drawn, he should say: "Let the major pass," although this formula should be used modestly and rarely, and not unless it is clearly the case that the proposition is irrelevant. If he thinks the major is doubtful or equivocal, he should say: "I distinguish the major," and make the distinction with few and clear words, based on the term in which there is an equivocation. Having made the distinction, he should not immediately explain it, unless either the opponent asks for an explanation, or [he himself sees how] it was not expressed clearly enough, in which case he should explain it as briefly as he can. Especially at the beginning of a disputation he should not use up time explaining distinctions, but should in no wise depart from the form itself of his argument. When the major has been granted or explained under a distinction, he proceeds to the minor premise and observes the same procedures in denying or conceding or distinguishing that we we have set out for the major premise. Then, coming to the conclusion, if it must be conceded, he says: "I grant the consequence." If it must be denied, he says, "I deny the consequence." But if the conclusion must be distinguished, he should not say, "I distinguish the consequence," but rather, "I distinguish the consequent"; for since the consequence consists in the illation itself, but not in an assertion of truth, it can be a valid or an invalid illation, and so can be granted or denied as valid or invalid, but it cannot be distinguished, because a distinction falls upon an equivocation or ambiguity in a proposition so far as the proposition has diverse senses in signifying a truth, not upon the correctness itself of an illation. The consequent, however, is the illated [or inferred] proposition, which can be certain or equivocal or ambiguous; whence, when it is equivocal, it is distinguished, and so one does not say "I distinguish the consequence," but "I distinguish the consequent." Yet if the consequent is to be conceded or denied, since this cannot be done except by conceding or denying the consequence itself, it suffices to say "I deny (or I grant) the consequence," but not to say, "I deny (or I grant) the consequent."
When a distinction has been made respecting some proposition, that same distinction should be applied as many times as the same equivocation occurs. One should not subdistinguish the sense of a distinction once that distinction has been granted unless another equivocation plainly appears which cannot be removed by the prior distinction. It is safer to deny whatever is false and not permit it to pass, unless it is certainly a case of an invalid consequence. If the one responding does not grasp the sense of the proposition, and so is unable to discern truth or falsity or equivocation, he should ask the one propounding the argument to explain its sense, and then he should repeat the explanation.
Finally, the one responding should take care to answer with few words, and to be bound only by the form of the argument. Nor should he give a reason for everything he says, unless a reason is asked of him. He should rather leave to the one arguing the entire burden of proof; for in this way the force of the argument becomes more formally clear, and it is the more quickly dispatched.
It is the part of the task of the one presenting the argument: First, not to lay down many presuppositions, nor to introduce many middle terms, nor to propose excessively long or intricate propositions, but to hold succinctly and stringently to form, not by asking many questions, but rather by setting forth proofs, except when the force of the argument devolves upon this, that he is asked a reason for the things said, or when the state of the disputation and the point of the difficulty have not yet been made sufficiently clear. Second, to proceed always with the same middle term through its causes and principles, or in deducing an inconsistency, but not to switch to another middle term, or to repeat a proof already proposed either in the same or in other words, because both are unduly wordy and tedious. Finally, he should not always use a syllogism, but sometimes an enthymeme, which proceeds more briefly and concisely and manifests less force of hidden illation, and for this reason presents a greater difficulty to the one responding.
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Source: John of St. Thomas, Tractatus de Signis, ed. Deely (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2005), 1.1, 10-12.
In any disputation, the first concern of the one arguing should be to propose an argument entirely reduced to form. That is to say, having stripped away everything superfluous, whether ambiguous words or lengthy declarations, the one arguing should succinctly and distinctly propose a syllogism or an enthymeme. A syllogism contains three propositions, which are called the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion or consequent, connected by the sign of illation, which is the particle "therefore." The connection itself, however, is called the illation or consequence. An enthymeme contains two propositions, of which the first is called an antecedent, the second a consequent, also connected by an illation. For example, if I want to prove that one ought not embrace a life of voluptuousness, I form a syllogism thus: "Whatever opposes true human virtue ought not to be embraced; a voluptuous life opposes true human virtue; therefore it ought not to be embraced." Or, if I wish to form an enthymeme of antecedent and consequent, I form it thus: "A voluptuous life is opposed to the arduousness of virtue; therefore it ought not to be embraced."
Hearing the formulation of the argument, the one responding should attend to nothing except to repeat integrally and faithfully the argument proposed, and meanwhile, while he repeats the argument, he should consider carefully whether each premise is true, and to be granted, or false, and to be denied, or doubtful or equivocal, and to be distinguished. He should likewise consider whether the consequence or illation is valid or invalid. Having repeated the argument once without saying anything by way of response, the one responding then should repeat and respond to the propositions of the argument taken singly, in this order: If there were three propositions and he things the first to be true, he should say: "I grant the major premise." If he things it false, he should say: "I deny the major." If he thinks it does not matter for the conclusion that ought to be inferred or drawn, he should say: "Let the major pass," although this formula should be used modestly and rarely, and not unless it is clearly the case that the proposition is irrelevant. If he thinks the major is doubtful or equivocal, he should say: "I distinguish the major," and make the distinction with few and clear words, based on the term in which there is an equivocation. Having made the distinction, he should not immediately explain it, unless either the opponent asks for an explanation, or [he himself sees how] it was not expressed clearly enough, in which case he should explain it as briefly as he can. Especially at the beginning of a disputation he should not use up time explaining distinctions, but should in no wise depart from the form itself of his argument. When the major has been granted or explained under a distinction, he proceeds to the minor premise and observes the same procedures in denying or conceding or distinguishing that we we have set out for the major premise. Then, coming to the conclusion, if it must be conceded, he says: "I grant the consequence." If it must be denied, he says, "I deny the consequence." But if the conclusion must be distinguished, he should not say, "I distinguish the consequence," but rather, "I distinguish the consequent"; for since the consequence consists in the illation itself, but not in an assertion of truth, it can be a valid or an invalid illation, and so can be granted or denied as valid or invalid, but it cannot be distinguished, because a distinction falls upon an equivocation or ambiguity in a proposition so far as the proposition has diverse senses in signifying a truth, not upon the correctness itself of an illation. The consequent, however, is the illated [or inferred] proposition, which can be certain or equivocal or ambiguous; whence, when it is equivocal, it is distinguished, and so one does not say "I distinguish the consequence," but "I distinguish the consequent." Yet if the consequent is to be conceded or denied, since this cannot be done except by conceding or denying the consequence itself, it suffices to say "I deny (or I grant) the consequence," but not to say, "I deny (or I grant) the consequent."
When a distinction has been made respecting some proposition, that same distinction should be applied as many times as the same equivocation occurs. One should not subdistinguish the sense of a distinction once that distinction has been granted unless another equivocation plainly appears which cannot be removed by the prior distinction. It is safer to deny whatever is false and not permit it to pass, unless it is certainly a case of an invalid consequence. If the one responding does not grasp the sense of the proposition, and so is unable to discern truth or falsity or equivocation, he should ask the one propounding the argument to explain its sense, and then he should repeat the explanation.
Finally, the one responding should take care to answer with few words, and to be bound only by the form of the argument. Nor should he give a reason for everything he says, unless a reason is asked of him. He should rather leave to the one arguing the entire burden of proof; for in this way the force of the argument becomes more formally clear, and it is the more quickly dispatched.
It is the part of the task of the one presenting the argument: First, not to lay down many presuppositions, nor to introduce many middle terms, nor to propose excessively long or intricate propositions, but to hold succinctly and stringently to form, not by asking many questions, but rather by setting forth proofs, except when the force of the argument devolves upon this, that he is asked a reason for the things said, or when the state of the disputation and the point of the difficulty have not yet been made sufficiently clear. Second, to proceed always with the same middle term through its causes and principles, or in deducing an inconsistency, but not to switch to another middle term, or to repeat a proof already proposed either in the same or in other words, because both are unduly wordy and tedious. Finally, he should not always use a syllogism, but sometimes an enthymeme, which proceeds more briefly and concisely and manifests less force of hidden illation, and for this reason presents a greater difficulty to the one responding.
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Source: John of St. Thomas, Tractatus de Signis, ed. Deely (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2005), 1.1, 10-12.
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