This is a topic focused on Meir Su and Celeris, focusing on the theme of contingency in the post-tanker in the way we're saying they handle it. Although, in a way, in a case of it, the The Szilagyi and critique of Meir Su is obvious. It's obvious to see what sort of objections a Szilagyi would make to Meir Su. And in fact Dionysus Christi has already written a very elegant and convincing Szilagyi critique of Meir Su's arguments in Apto Finchie.
So I'm going to try not simply to kind of reiterate things that I think are critical points that have been established, but in a way simply kind of go through Mia Su's or try to kind of quickly summarize Mia Su's argument, which will be familiar to those of you who know the book very well, so I hope it's not too tedious. and then explain in a way how Sellers in a way agrees with lots of Mia Su's criticisms of what he calls strong colorationism, but offers an alternative which avoids the problematic consequences entailed by Mayes' speculative model.
Speculative modus operandi. So the paper's going to have three big parts. First, survey of Mayes' speculative overcoming of correlationism. Secondly, a recapitulation of the modal Kant-Seller thesis. That's Robert Brandom's title for conception, it's expressive as conception of fidelity, which Brandom thinks is common to Kant and Sellers. And finally, the third part in which I'm trying to actually explain what I mean is plausible plausible with Brandon's reconstruction, but also points out some of the limitations of his reading of Severs. The aspects of Brandon's grief that I think are unsatisfactory.
Okay, so, first, May, Suspectative Overcoming Correlationism. So, as you all know, I'm sure, we've got a distinction between weak correlationism, speculative idealism, and strong correlationism, and I think, actually, as Taylor remarked, I think Meir's argument is much more plausible as a kind of abstract conceptual reconstruction of logical possibilities, which cannot really be mapped onto any kind of specific set of philosophers. Although Kant is the emblem of weak correlationism and Hegel is the representative speculative
of Hegel. Controversy is over two examples of recognition of strong correlation. Mason does give a very clear criteria for how you qualify as a strong correlation. If you deny the thinkability of things in themselves, I think preliminary or strong correlations. So he doesn't care how you arrive at this claim about the unthinkability, but if you deny that it's possible to even conceive of things in themselves, I think Meir's you would say that. The distinction is we correlation them, we can know the for us, but we can only think they in itself, not know it. Speculative Idealism would you know that what is for us is also in itself.
There's a conversion of the for us into the in itself. Strong correlation is the claim that is the critique of the speculative idealist overcoming of the correlation. Strong correlation is the claim that is a speculative identification of the for us with the in itself is only for us. This would be the rejection of what may soon call subjective, subjectalism, which is another term called speculative ideology. So, first of all, we start with three correlations. So, the critical demarcation of dogmatic absolutism, it's simply the Kantian critique of dogmatic metaphysics,
and the dogmatic metaphysical realism. This is dogmatic in a way, the kind of metaphysical realism, in a way that is still kind of alive and well. I think about living research projects and a lot of contemporary analytic metaphysics. So the claim is that in order for something to be a cognizable object, it must be correlated with the going suffrage. The reality of objects, whether things, properties and relations, becomes relativised to the correlation, and finding the in itself is a problematic postulate, as Kant says, which is a non-contradictory ground of appearances, but its structure is unknowable, it's non-objectifiable.
So, for then, categories and forms of intuition apply only to appearances, not things in themselves. Transcendental structures are necessary for knowing appearances, but they're not features of the inner self. And finally, I think this is important for MESU's argument, transcendental reflection does not reveal, according to MESU, why space and time are the only two forms of intuition, or why there are twelve categories. This is significant for BSU's argument, and people who know Kant better than I can correct me, but I believe there are places in the first critique where Kant says that you shouldn't ask why we have these two forms of sensibility or why they're just these 12 categories. He says that's something, you know, you can't deduce this from any more fundamental kind of data.
data. So no sufficient reason that counts for such advice. So therefore the transcendental is characterized by a second order contingency. Not the contingency of empirical fact, but the contingency of the condition for anything's counting as an empirical fact. And this is what Meir-Suehn calls the facticity of the correlation. Okay, so, I think although Meir's doesn't say this in his kind of in active finitude, not in active finitude, but it's clear that he never explains how you get from weak correlations to strong correlations. I think you can only get there via speculative idealism. That's the missing link that connects the two weak and strong correlations.
So, speculative idealism is a kind of what is constituent for us, a correlation also manifests in itself, which here can be a placeholder for what they would call the absolute. I realise that Mea-Su's equation of the absolute is obviously controversial from a scholarly point of view. So, traversing the cognitive moments of immediacy, mediation, and immediacy, de-mediacy, in the allows reason to think the processional identity of the for us and the in itself. And through this processional identification, reason grounds its own access to being. And this is what Meir's too called the absolutization of the correlation, which renders it unnecessary,
rather than merely factical. The correlation then is no longer factical or continuous. There is a ground. And in speculism, the correlation is temporalised or historicised, but this temporalisation is a rational structure. There is a reason or a necessity underlying the unfolding of appearances to and for consciousness, the Labradorian's phenomenology of spirit. So May-Sue's account implies that speculative idealism supersedes weak correlationism, just as strong correlationism allegedly supersedes speculative idealism. Speculative idealism relativises the critical absolute, which is the in itself of the unknown,
relativises it to the correlation, reintegrating it as the in itself of the correlates. But because the facticity of the correlation is in itself for us, we phenomenological subjects, it can be rendered known and hence known to be necessary in and for itself through us. This is speculative knowledge, the essence of the absolute. So in this regard, this is how I think according to me, the strong correlation has to, the two moves made by strong correlation. On the one hand, it has to relativise every dogmatic absolutes, every naive or pre-critical in itself to the correlation. In itself, it evolves for us.
But it also has to block the speculative absolutisation of the correlation by insisting on its contingency. So the claim is that the correlation, contingency being the claim that the correlation could could not have been, could not have existed or could have been otherwise. Its necessity must remain unknowable. The correlation cannot become in and for itself through us. So the question then is, what is it that prevents this? What is it that blocks the unfolding of the Hegelian rule? So, strong correlation is confronted by an aporia. On the one hand, against metaphysical realism, it must relativize every good man's absolute by insisting on a circle of correlation.
Every given is positive as given. But against speculative idealism, it must deabsolutize the correlation by insisting on its facticity. The correlation could have been otherwise or could not. This is also why it's not catinism. It's not possible to identify these invariant transcendental conditions, whether categories or categories. So the facticity of the correlation must be absolutized in order to de-absolize the correlation. And this is what prevents the correlation from becoming in and for itself in the game. So this is the point at which Meir Suh makes his own speculative move, his internal kind of overcoming of correlation. The non-existence
of the correlations. It's not merely epistemically possible for us, but alethically possible. It's a real possibility. This alethic possibility indexes a pure ontological potentiality uncoupled from the determinacy of substance. This is what Meir-Sue calls supercontingency or absolute time. And this is Meir-Sue's speculative of absolute foundation of activity. It's a conversion, it proceeds via the conversion of an epistemological thesis about the unavailability of reasons, reasons for why things, for why we can only know things, thus and so, not otherwise, into an ontological
thesis about the existence of a potentiality without reason. So, and this is a quote, this is a quote from a paper, for Meosu, Galen, to that minute, called Time Without Becoming, which used to recapitulate some of the main claims of after finitude. Meosu says, ultimately the matter of philosophy, according to him, or speculative philosophy for Meosu, is not being or becoming a representation of reality, but a very special possibility, which is not a formal possible, a mere logical possible, but a real and dense possible, which I call the modetto, the maybe, or the could
be, could be translated either way. And this is, on top, he insists, it was interesting, Meir-Sue here resorts to the ontological difference. He will say that this pure kind of potentiality, you know, potentiality decoupled from any kind of substantial armature, is ontological. It explains what he calls the factuality that is somehow the condition that makes every fact a fact. Something that could have been otherwise. And this is also why Mia Su calls himself a speculative materialist and not a speculative realist. Which is an important distinction.
This is Mea Sue again. What we will discover outside the correlation is very different from the naive concept of things, properties and relations. It is a reality very different from given reality. That's why ultimately I prefer to describe Anglosry as a speculative materialism rather than as a realism. because I remember the sentence of Foucault who once said, I am a materialist because I don't believe in reality. I've been unable to identify the Foucault's. I hope we didn't make it up. Now, Pete Wollongale in his 2014 article and they said that it continues to, I think really puts his finger on what I think
the obvious kind of philosophical critique of the move, the speculative move made by Mea-Su. It basically, I'll read the piece quote, The abstractness of the facticity hinges upon the overlap between epistemic modality and elitist modality when it comes to logical necessity, insofar as it converts the epistemological conditions of factual disagreement, factual disagreement about what could or could not be everything that is is a fact that could have been otherwise and you can't prove that it's necessary that's the factual disagreement but it converts us into an ontological structure, pure and ontological contingency in terms of this suggests that the inference from
absolute facticity to absolute time which we assume also wants to make by identifying this absolute potentiality with absolute time hinges upon the gap between atemporal logical necessity and temporal nomological necessity, insofar as it converts the logical possibility that things could be otherwise, into the nomological possibility that things could become otherwise. It's been beautifully formative. And this is Pete's closing into the critical question. The question that remains for critics of Mea-Sue's thesis is as whether it conflates the epistemic contingency of nomological necessity with the logical necessity
of nomological contingency. And these distinctions actually become clear in Sellers' work, which I will explore in a few minutes. So this is what I call a human issue. In Fortunian skepticism, the epistemic contingency of nomological necessity, rather all law-like necessity is rooted as contingent facts. All you have is constant conjunction, you cannot satisfactorily grow the necessity of these constant conjunctions in some kind of physical necessity. Meisou's rationalism insists that the logical necessity
of normological contingency. The contingency of law is rooted in reason, in what he calls the principle of factuality. So in a way, so human, Meissu, are like two sides of the same coin. They're just, in a way, want to kind of... And what Meissu is doing, actually, is rationalizing the kind of the absence of ground kind of exposed in human skepticism. So where human skepticism took the secret powers of things, i.e., the secret powers of things would be the sufficient reason that explains why things have these properties, and can do these things, but not these other things. These are the secret powers, which are unknowable, and inaccessible to us according to Hume.
These secret powers are unknowable because the contingency of fact vitiates the necessity of law. Mason's rationalism takes these secret powers to be knowable because the contingency of fact is the only law, according to them. So, the absence of reason for us is converted into the presence of unreason in things. Very simple. But since unreason is a positive feature of things in themselves, nature is necessarily discontinuous. So the requirements of explanatory continuity between domains of reality, physical, biological, psychological, cosmological, etc., becomes an empirical prejudice to be supplanted by the rational apprehension of necessary discontinuity.
There are no explanatory gaps, only ontological emergencies. And pure becoming, as emergence ex-nebulous, is linked, in me as soon as I come to the detotalization of being, this unity of being. Because being is not one of all, because there's no totality of entities, there can be no single sign, whether metaphysical or empirical, exhaustively destroying and explaining everything that is. But Meir-Sue needs to distinguish between explanatory continuity within what he called worlds, because nevertheless he insists on these four successive orders of emergence according to him,
and matter of life, thought and justice. And he said this thing should be the continuity within worlds and the discontinuity across worlds. And I think this is a problem for him. This is a problem that generates these difficulties for metaphysics and science. First, the ontologicalisation of scepticism renders metaphysical categorisation anomalous. Differences in ontological structure are no longer governed by logical difference. what could be called the factualisation of quiddity. Here's an example from B.S.U.'s Divide in Existence, as been revised in 2003. All quality as quality is without Y, since
none of its content refers to anything other than the advent ex nihilo of its being. I I won't read the word, I'll just read the violent passages. A red is without why because no material underpinning can ever tell us how this red is red. It's without why because there was nothing of this red in the world prior to its advent that would provide us with a reason by raising it to a pre-red where it had always been contained. So this is a kind of radical... I mean, Meir Su takes these kind of, these arguments about the kind of, you know, the irreducibility of qualia, and he just ups the ante. He makes qualia, or quality, absolutely kind of inexplicable.
Second problematic consequence in terms of science and metaphysics, the decoupling of primary and secondary consequences. which is ironic because he wants to insist on the need to rehabilitate this distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Once you've made this move, secondary qualities cannot be understood as dispositional, as resulting from the interaction between physical and biological properties, because of the stipulated discontinuity between the worlds of matter and life. So it's not as if you can account for, let's say, red or redness as something that, you know, a quality that can be dispositionally accounted for when an organism, for that kind of, with eyes, comes into contact with a certain kind of physical object.
The third and final consequence is the decoupling of description and explanation. The logical discursive explanation articulated around distinction between epistemic and elethic modality is superseded by the mathematical inscription of contingency. This is Meissou's claim that it is the meaninglessness of the mathematical letter that best describes it describes reality in itself because it successfully inscribes its factible contingency. But the unfortunate consequence, this is why mathematics is the only strictly rigorous science, it captures the pure facticity of things. The problem being that once descriptions are coupled from explanation,
conceptual changes have causes but no reason. I think this is an implausible, well, it just seems implausible to make mathematical formalization sufficient unto itself, but not answerable to non-formal material data or conceptual interpretations. Okay, so now I'm going to move on to discuss sellers, seller's thesis, and I hope that the link with this, I mean, problems and issues are going to be completed. And this, first
of all, I want to emphasize this core-strong sellers with sacrificial dispositions and and the College of Technology. This is a very long, extremely important paper published in 1957. A year, or less than a year after, he gave the lecturers a particular constitution of the philosophy of life. The motto of major science might well be. Natural philosophers have hitherto sought to understand beings. The task is to change them. This is, I think, well, apart from that, I just love the quotation, I think it's very interesting because it reveals the extent to which Seller sees himself as providing a philosophical system that, you know, in a way meets, that accounts for the second scientific revolution.
the radical transformations in physics, logic, and mathematics at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. And again, the wagers that he does this in a way more successfully than Meir's suit does. Although Meir's suit sees himself as trying to provide a speculative armature for the radical hope, the Galilean thing of the mathematicalization of nature. meanings can be changed because they are co-created by us in collaboration with the world. And this co-creation, this collaborative co-creation requires an alliance between rationalism, a counting alliance between rationalism and empiricism that I think may assume is just too quick to want to relegate to the dustbin of philosophical history.
So, Celsus' modal expressible. Here's a significant quote from the condition disposition paper. It's only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for the perceptible characteristics of molar objects, locate these objects in its basic implications that they describe at all rather than merely label. In a way, this is the gist, this is the note of Seller's account. The claim is that a lethic model concepts like necessity and possibility express lawful relations between empirical descriptive concepts such as house, cap, opera or electron. And what they express are structural
framework features conditioning the deployment of these empirical descriptive concepts. And And Brandon's book, I find his reconstruction of Serves and Model Expressism extremely persuasive. I think that's the most persuasive aspect of the book. The deployment of any empirical descriptive concept already presupposes knowing how to deploy a Lethic model concept. This is to say that terms like necessity and possibility are not first order descriptive claims. They are not describing properties of objects or states of affairs.
That's a misunderstanding of their function. They allow us to say what we are doing when we describe something. So a legal vocabulary explains why describing something as a chair, tree, human entails describing it as being. It's human, it's mortal, it's a tree, it's a plant, it's a chair, it's a physical object, etc. These modal assertions provide inference to it from one empirical characterization to another. understanding the space of implications surrounding any empirical descriptive concept, you know
what inferences you can make when applying any empirical concept. To say that A's are necessarily B, to say that swans are necessarily B, is just to say that one is justifying from the claim, this is A, this is a swamp, to this is B, this is white. So describing and explaining go hand in hand in conceptual practice for selves. This is a very important quote. So the causal principle gives expression to the fact that although describing and explaining or predicting, retributing, understanding are distinguishable, they are also, in an important sense, inseparable. The descriptive and explanatory resources of language and and to abandon the search for explanation is to abandon the attempt to improve language period.
The question is whether Mea Su's relinquishing of the causal principle is also not abandoning the attempt to search for explanation, explanation, the rational enterprise. Description involves conceptual classification, characterising X as Y, in which a justification is implicit, where labelling, by way of contrast, merely separates and groups, so differentiation according to what Brandon calls reliable responsive So the distinction between classification and labeling is central.
On the one hand, if you're classifying, you're conceptualizing, but in order to conceptualize, you need to understand what properties can rightfully be attributed to things, which is to say you need to understand the space of implications in which the deployment of empirical terms is embedded. Whereas if you're merely laboring, you don't need to understand anything. If you're just labelling objects, you're just discriminating them on the basis of physical information. This is not a non-cognitive one for both Saladin Brown. So therefore, to describe X as Y is to commit oneself to justify a description
by giving a reason explaining why it is correct to classify X as Y. Why is this a swamp world? Because it's white. So it's an essential feature of inferential relations in which descriptive concepts must stand, that they can be appealed to in explanations and justifications of further descriptions. Therefore, the expressive role distinctive of a legal vocabulary is just to make explicit these explanatory and justificatory relations. But now, a difficulty in terms of the claim that moral inferences are implicated in the meanings of ordinary empirical descriptive concepts seems to blur the line between conceptual
necessity and possibility on the one hand, and material necessity and possibility on the other. Conceptual necessity and possibility are novo a priori, or so we assume, whereas material necessity and possibility are only novo a posteriori. So does Seller's modal expressivism can make into a version of the synthetic priori that makes real necessity conceptual. And here we face it our linebacker. If conceptual classification is determined by reason independently of experience, how can it be answerable to experience? If it's determined by experience independently of reason, how can it be answerable to reason? This generates what Branden calls an inconsistent trial, and this is from Branden's cellar trip.
The trial has these three claims. 1. Physical or causal necessity and possibility are a kind of conceptual necessity and possibility. 2. Physical or causal necessity and possibility must be established empirically. 3. Conceptual necessity and impossibilities can be established in a priori. So each of these claims is incompatible with the two others. So according to random sellers must reject three, it doesn't might reject three. This has an interesting consequence that concepts are rules to which we bind ourselves, but we do not know in advance all the implications of the concepts or rules to which we are limiting ourselves. We discover what applications of empirical concepts are correct,
through the same process in which we discover which inferences connecting those concepts are correct. But as Brandon proves it, to find out what the contents of the concepts we apply in describing the work really are, we have to find out what the laws of nature are. And that is an empirical matter. This is what Brandon calls certain radical, exterosomatic sermons. So this is a quotation from Sellers which I think ratified this interpretation. While one does not inductively establish that A physically entails B by armchair reflection on the antecedent meanings of A and B,
to establish by induction that A physically entailed B is to enrich and perhaps otherwise modify the use of these terms in such ways that to understand what one now means by A and B is just to know that A physically entails B. So on this account, on this Szilagian account, Modal statements do not say that the relation of physical entailment between A and B holds. They endorse a pattern of inference from claiming X as A to claiming Y as B. The endorsement holds at the level of assertion, not of the objects of assertion.
It is expressed in discursive practice, not stated in discourse. Modal vocabulary allows a practical ratification of these patterns of inference. It stands to ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary as what Brandon calls a pragmatic meta-vocabulary. And it's pragmatic as opposed to semantic or syntactic because a pragmatic meta-vocabulary says what you must count as doing in using another vocabulary. Pragmatic meta-vocabulary explains what you must be able to do to use some other vocabulary. This is different from saying what you must be able to say, to use another example.
Brandon, between saying and doing, an elaborate investigation of all these distinctions. Okay, this is the final section, so the end is in sight. Saying and doing. So, the consequence of this is that, first of all, there's a distinction between semantic and pragmatic inference, which has interesting, I think, ramifications for the question about the status of monality, the epistemical and metaphysical status of monality. So one can give a reason by doing something as well as by saying something. And the pragmatic ratification of inferential necessity between assertions has to be distinguished from the conceptual ratification of necessary connections between objects.
So what is being done by saying something is not the same as what is being said. What is implied by saying, pragmatic influence, is the difference from what is implied by what is said, or semantic influence. This failure to pay proper attention to this distinction, according to Sellers, generates the idealist fallacy. The Agilus Fallacy being the claim that since there must be thinkers in order for there to be thoughts about the world, every thought about the world entails the existence of thinkers. This is a sentence again. We must here as elsewhere draw a distinction between what we are committed to concerning the world by virtue of the fact that we have reason to make a certain assertion, and the force, in a narrower sense, of the assertion itself.
Idealism is notorious for the fallacy of concluding that because there must be minds in the world in order for us to have reason to make statements about the world, therefore there is no sense to the idea of a world which does not include minds. The idea that things might have been such that there were no minds. But just as it throws light on the status of mind in the universe to point out that it makes sense to speak of a universe which contains no minds, So it throws light on the concept of a law of nature to point out that it makes sense to speak of a universe in which there are uniformities which, although physically contingent, are without exception.
I think this is an interesting connection that Sarah is establishing here. Intelligibility is mind-dependent, but a universe without mind is intelligent, nonetheless. The concept of physical necessity, or law of nature, requires exceptionalness. But contingent, and therefore normal-like exceptionalness, is nonetheless intelligent. So, where I think This yields, I think, a kind of reflexive facticity, which avoids the absence of a move made by the Ministry of Inspectorative Materials.
The SELOS, I think, defends the transcendental privacy of correlation, now understood as instantiated in the discursive practices of language-using animals, while acknowledging its contingency, language using animals need not have a law, as well as the contingency of physical law, without resorting to speculative absurdization. So, nevertheless, I think that Brandon's reconstruction of Seller's moral expressivism is largely persuasive, or at least I find it extremely persuasive.
But I think it has a limitation. It has a limitation because it doesn't pay attention to... Because I think it seems to inscribe the relationship between space, between saying and doing, exclusively within the space of reasons. It doesn't articulate doing something within the space of reasons, with the kinds of non-rational doings. The doings that articulate pattern-government kind of animal functioning with rule-government linguistic activity. So all saying is a kind of doing but not all doing is a kind of saying.
Sellers' distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representatives in science Which is interestingly a book that, in fact, at least it's very familiar with my book, Brandom does not pay any attention to in his book on Sellers. He just thinks, I think he just thinks it's confused from beginning to end, so he just largely ignores it. Sellers' distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representants is accompanied by a commitment to the existence of representants in themselves whose proper conceptual characterization is not guaranteed in advance. We don't know what they are. We're not already best equipped to characterize them.
The relation between representing act and represented content is not that between implicit and explicit. Non-conceptual representatives are doings that are not implicit and conceptual represented. describing and explaining that is not just a matter of explicitation, making explicit, but of empirical discovery. And this is, I think, what Salazar means when he says that the descriptive and explanatory resource for the language advanced and to man, and to abandon the search for explanation, to abandon the attention of true language. The mutual advancement of description and explanation is governed by the regulars of principles and yields of conditions under which linguistic change
becomes amenable to rational decision for Sarris. I'm not going to read the whole quote, but this is, I think, another really important passage. For Sarris writes, the relations between the new and the old meanings of A and B is a logical rather than purely historical one. As long as it is as the espousal of this new influence to get, connected A and B, retains its character as a scientific decision. So, for in spite of the fact that in science, in life, you can't go home again, one never quite returns to the old meanings, although the historian of science can unnerve them, scientific terms have, as part of their logic, a line of retreat as well as a plan of advance,
a fact which makes meaningful the claim that, in an important sense, A and B are the same properties they were before. And this is a complicated issue, but I take it that what Selvius is saying here, that it's possible to identify functional continuities across conceptual structures. This is why it's possible to say that we've discovered something new about water, and we're talking about the same thing as the Greeks and our ancestors were talking about when they used whatever term they used for what. There is no radical discontinuity across consensual structures. Okay, so anyway, it's the insistence then on this,
on the possibility of identifying these regressive principles, which I think are principles that must somehow, So, I don't know what place where you can elaborate on this in detail. Principles which explain how it's possible to identify functional invaliances across conceptual structures. Because it's by holding onto these that you can then make principled or rational decisions about how to change the meaning of a concept, or the extent to which the imperative discovery obliges you to revise the meaning of a concept. And the quote with which I began this discussion of Celler's
occurs at the very end of this passage. The motto of the age of science might well be natural philosophers are hither true so to understand meanings. The task is to change them. So, principles of conceptual change, I think, for some of the semantic self-consciousness, they are kind of rational self-consciousness. The local circuit linking perception to inference, inference to action, and action to perception, at the autogenetic or individual level, is developed within a global feedback loop, making over a species of cognitive world story I did that for the phylogenetic letter. Once the development of human language left the stage when linguistic changes that causes but not reasons, and man acquired the ability to
reason about its reasons, then, and this is a logical point about having the ability to reason about reasons, his language came to permit the formulation of certain propositions which, incapable of proof or disproof by empirical methods, draw in a part of language militant, a picture of language triathlete. Nice theological word. And the final sentence of the entire essay is a bit very prosaic, and apparently not, but it's important because I think it contains the claim that what makes reasoning about reason possible is the maintenance of regressive ideals. ideals, there must be regulative ideals that allow this reflexive capacity. And this is
his, he thinks that failure to pay attention to these regulative ideals is the fault of positivist in person. So, we discover what implications of empirical concepts are correct, so the same process in which we discover which inferences connecting those concepts are correct. That's what Brandon Crowley can really emphasize in his occurrence of Sellers' moral expressivism. But then, it seems that reasoning about reason is the unifying process through which we correct prescriptive inferences as well as prescriptive concepts. but it unfolds on the basis of relative ideals whose validity is momentarily insulated against
empirical legitimation. We're not told what it is or under what conditions these relative ideals can be secured against empirical reputation. So I'll just I'm going to end now. So I think poses, I think then, settles this pragmatic rationalism. I think it'd be usefully contrasted with dogmatic, pre-critical rationalism on the one hand, but also I think to kind of to, to me as soon as speculative rationalism, which is also kind of speculative materialism. Dogmatic rationalism simply to think
that the inner self is intelligent across, so that there is a principle of intelligibility encoded in reality as such. And the world is intelligible, but we don't, well, we can appeal to God, as a source of this intelligibility, as a ganator of this intelligibility. Speculative rationalism says that what we took to be intelligible for us, merely intelligible for us, will turn out to be an intelligible property of the end and set. But this is a speculative identification. And I think Sels' pragmatic rationalism works by exposing the conditions of intelligibility for us,
exposing the conditions of intelligibility for us allows us to revise these conditions in order to explore the concept. In other words, it means that we must, given that this, it's regular principles, which allow reasoning about reason, we have to be able to, we have to have some kind of principle procedure for identifying regular principles. I think, anyway, this is the missing, this is what I think is missing, or at least I'm not sure if Salas proposes to identify these radical principles, because although he's a Kantian
but he also has he wants to he wants to say that the principles of the understanding and the ideas the rights of ideas can't be reflexively identified in the way in which can't thought I might be wrong but maybe this is maybe this kind of perplexity on my part is simply based on not properly understanding salaries critical appropriation okay I'll stop
thanks Thank you. Well, in relation to conceptual change, which is sort of Sellers' view of induction, he says, we can say probably necessarily all A's are B's.
That is, we're entertaining an inference ticket to replace what we've got. And we're suggesting it as a high, at the end of some reflections on language games, when he talks about induction, and he says it makes sense to say probably A's are necessarily B's because it's a candidate replacement principle. So I was thinking in the fifth chapter of Science and Metaphysics when he has counterpart concepts, and the idea is that you can model the earlier theory in it, so it's an explanationist kind of thing you can explain by saying, well, Newton was getting at mass in his way,
but now we see what it really is. And you explain it in the later one. But that's the intelligibility of the transition. Yes. Yeah. I think you're right, and it doesn't say much about the regulative principles other than saying it's a regulative. We can form the idea, then, of that taking place such that, you know, we're in that current situation, there'll be an improved success, we form the regulative ideal of the conceptual scheme versus. So I guess that's, I was thinking just the regulative notion is this counter part modeling, it's an explanationist notion, and you explain the failures and successes,
and combined with the regulative ideal of that going on, you know, unendingly improving and so on. So that's why I thought the best I could do with the regulative aspect of it. But I did wonder why the non, all of that's about the conceptual, which I agree, yes, there's a story about how the non-conceptual is required to go along with that. But it sounded like in your account that played an independent role in some way, whereas I see nothing in that story requiring it. I mean, requiring that you talk about it directly in order to talk about all the things you wanted to talk about. You mean the non-conceptual representation? Yeah, that there was a certain point where you were talking about a lot of things
that had to do with induction, conceptual change, modality, and then suddenly it was crucial to talk about... Ah, OK. The non-conceptual nature of representings. Yes. I just see that as explaining how nature of cognition, giving a better explanation of language and sensibility, not as crucial to the account of the rationality of theory change and all that. OK, you're right. This is times where I want to develop this. OK, let's just accomplish that. So, Brandman is very clear in his book about what he thinks is good and bad about Selzer's project. So, he says, the Selzer's theory, you know, kind of, we get the decision of cancer grades,
the moral expressionism, that's great. But the manifest scientific distinction, distinction uh... problem the appears And sellers, importantly, you know, some of the scientific realism is within the science of the noumena, and these noumena explain the manifest appearances. They explain how the world appears to us the way in which it does.
Now, I think that in order for that to work, in order for that to be plausible for sellers, you have to get a sense of ability. You have to retain the counter-distinction between understanding and sensibility. And although the opening first chapter of science and physics, he's very careful about disintrigating intuition and sensibility. And he wants to show that conceptual intuition is a condition for our processing of the sensible manifold. but
conceptual intuition but there is something there is something a non-conceptual given there is something given to be conceptually synthesized and this is an important one because I think it anchors in other words I think that Brandon thinks that RDRDs will do all this work All you need is a distinction between rules and RDRDs to be able to have a robust kind of realism about how language using animals can be in the world and can know the world as it is and end the story. there's no complication
he doesn't see the problem about what anchors a kind of an inferential structure or conceptual structure in some kind of non-conceptual mind independent reality I think Cellerus says no you have to this is why you need again the two accounts of truth, truth as semantic assertibility on the one hand and truth as correct picture and I think the account of sensibility or at least my function is that the accounts of sensibility and of sense impressions and eventually the sensor feeds into the account of picturing because it explains how the world of appearances
the world of the sensible world things that we can do also provide us with the resources we need to generate the picturing vocabulary. The vocabulary we need to be able to establish a picturing relation. In other words, because he says, picturing consists of establishing matter-of-fact correspondences between the matter-of-factual properties of natural linguistic objects and of non-linguistic objects. What are these matter-of-factual properties? Well, I think they will be the properties, the kind of buying things.
You need the vocabulary of the proper sensibles to catalogue these matter-of-factual properties which establish the picture of the world. Well, I think just in case of those kinds of judgments, I mean, any matter-of-factual judgment for him, you would have that picturing correspondence even if it weren't the case of the convolving quality, right? Yes. I guess I was thinking that those picturing relations track the conceptual relations because the picturing relations change when the conceptual relations do so that you could write a chapter like he does on conceptual change and never talk about
picturing. But you're right, you can also write a chapter like that chapter by it and say what curse missed was the crucial picturing dimension. So I know I do a, yeah, I think we can talk about that. But just, but no, you're right that it's an incomplete, it's not, I'm not, I'm a lot of gaps in what I'm trying to say, and the thing I want to, I think that the account of sense impressions, which I think Brandon has no interest in the things that that's just a waste of time. I do think it's important. Why do you think it's important? Because I think it explains what's going on there isn't just RDR names. So in other words, you have the language using animals with certain perceptual capacities that require functioning nervous systems
that are capable of navigating the world, the perceptual world. in a way which involves some non-conceptual capacities. And that's why I think Branden is mistaken. Let's say you can amputate the appearance reality of this thing. The fact that the world gives us something that we then conceptualize. I think it's simply a mistake to try to amputate that from some of this natural kind of...
Sorry. It's because it warped up a way of framing this point, to say that Brandon is completely interested in the functional structure of RDRDs. It's like, Brandon's, the kind of RDRDs is okay as far as it goes, but crucially he never asks, like so, for instance, RDRDs might as well just spit out sentences, right? for all that he's concerned. But, crucially, when he's talking about classification, he's talking about the application of concepts, not the production of sentences, which means the application of concepts to something. So the RDRAs functionally have to have the machinery inbuilt
to individuate the things that the concepts are being applied to. And this is precisely what Sellers is obsessed with in time. Sellers is obsessed with the fact that intuition needs to be typed in something, there's got to be this, you have this red rectangular facing surface which you can net fly a concept to or whatever, right? And it's precisely all of that machinery, which you can still describe in abstract functional terms, right? that random is completely ignored, which means any idea that there is... You can see this if you look up random's account of existence in Nishinaxplisive, whereas the account of existence is basically about its quiny and canonical designators.
They're put together almost completely arbitrary. There's no understanding of where you might get these sets of canonical designators which you identify as singular terms with. Basically what that means is, say if you locate something in space and time, that's how you would exist. But that idea of location is completely non-explainable. Right, so the more kind of salazium that I'm going about is to say that that individuation and location of entities within space that you can apply concepts to fundamentally involves functional features of our perceptual systems.
I'm saying that you don't just spit out sentences. Yes. I mean, just to follow up on something I wanted to say to re-conign this to Mia Sue. Yes. What Mia Sue says is when she was because he's not interested in a mythology of middle-sized writing, things, facts, And then you go this kind of what is. You've got facts, but then you've got this absolute and pure potential attitude. In a way, Sanders is also interested in what
he wants to be able to have, he wants to be a robust empirical realist about middle-sized right figures. I also want to be entitled to about theoretical entities, or things that are purely thinkable, purely knowledgeable, because of the distinction between the perceptible, the theoretical, the methodical, any kind of theoretical entity can acquire or vocabulary can acquire reporting use. We can learn to just see, well, we can learn to see fields, particles, etc., etc.
But you have to be able to connect the perceptible and the imperceptible. And in a way, I think that this is another thing that is missing in the ASUS. It's one thing to say that there is a kind of a the world the holy world of the real appearances is just this kind of surface beneath which there is a chaotic one but you need to explain why reality appears this is Plato's problem it's a problem of participation what is the nature of the intersection between the sensibility and and I think that
sellers holds to that kind of threat, this is what needs to be explained you need to be able to explain that appearances are not what is acceptable, that is not the only reality, there's something, there's more but you also need to explain how this more manifest itself how being must appear stable culture, and that there's a connection between reality appearances and reality two appearances as such. And this, I think, means that, so this is why I think sellers have to maintain, so he has to hold the manifest in scientific or phenomenon of doing that
together. I think the price he pays for that is an insistence on kind of, it's maybe a kind of middle commitment to totality, the ideal of an absolute explanation, of an ideal conceptual structure, of complete science. I think that this actually is a problem. And I think that Compton and Porter are likely to have the right to challenge this claim that there is such a thing as a being is all, or that being is one. That everything is connected in a way which could be exhaustively described and explained
by some master in the discipline, the master of the source. and that's a claim I find infallible but I want to be able to give it up without falling into the kind of I guess the pluralism which you said all vocabularies are equal science is just another vocabulary of course, whatever vocabulary on the one hand or the claim that we need this is why there is more to you need a kind of spectrum of metaphysics to be able to describe this kind of the key total parts of chaotic being.
This chaotic kind of normal dimension. And that's something I'm very, so this is why I don't, I think Mayasus, in a way, kind of, I mean, I think he makes some kind of wrong moves, but I think the moves he makes are very instructive. And I think they're instructing you for what were like sellers. So this is why I don't just want to kind of bash their suit with sellers. And I hope that's not what I was sitting and seem to be doing. Because that would not be very painful. They're living in . Yeah? There's a tendency to treat contingency in this monolithic way, which doesn't differentiate between different forms of contingency.
I wonder if you might be able to say something about the ways in which contingency operates. May also makes this distinction between the different worlds, but then he applies absolute contingency to all of them. I think you could reasonably differentiate between how contingency is operating in all of those worlds. I agree with his framing of those worlds. But I mean, well, I was just thinking about this, your point about non-insensual representings, the way that this is a matter of empirical discovery
rather than explicitations against the brand. But that is obviously in humans, the non-conceptual representing obviously have a different kind of order from the non-conceptual representing of bees, for example, right? And I think that that could be differentiated according to the different modes of contingency that are operating in. Something could have been otherwise, is different in human behavior than the way it is in B behavior. Okay. But, because at least as I understand, Serge does not want to say,
I mean, he's not, I think, not a moral realist in the way in which Brandon wants to be a moral realist. In a sense, he wants to say that although, well, like, you know, he says, you know, the modality is real, but it's not really real. Everything he says in the manifest image is that, of course, tables and chairs are real, but they're not really real. So he says, of course, you have to kind of, you know, be a kind of empirical realist about the moral properties of manifest objects, but it's a mistake to think that there's a metaphysical property called modality, that possibility and necessity are out there in the world,
independently of us. I think he rejects that completely. So if that's the case, then how are you saying that even within the manifest world, we would have to distinguish between, well not just between the different model properties of different systems of objects, but between different kinds of model properties? Well I'd say just different levels of epistemic modality concerning our capacity to describe and explain various aspects of those. So our capacity to describe and explain physics is is different in my capacity to explain and describe biological systems. And again, different when we're talking about social systems.
I see. Okay, yes. Absolutely. No, that makes perfect sense. Thanks. That's great. This is... Next, at the end of your talk, towards the end about I forget if you were saying sellers as we do this but you ought to there's a requirement for under any concepts concept use I think you mentioned this at other times the rules rules of the rules I'm using I have to start with this
please take a question you think there might be a link between that requirement for these rules and the kind of speculative metaphysics that you think might be required? I have nothing in particular in mind, but I wonder whether linking these two things might be a way to address them. Well, OK, here's, this is something, OK, here's, of course, those who are not serving in orthodoxy, so sellers insist upon, because it's also the understanding that everything hangs together.
So you have to, of course, explain how it manifests in these distinct categorical schemes, or nevertheless can hang together. So this is why he says that you have to be able to identify. This involves a kind of categorical analysis, identifying the most fundamental categories that govern the thinking within these structures. That govern thinking within the manifest image or within the scientific image. So this involves a kind of transcendental analysis, and Seller is engaged in doing this. And he says that he does kind of investigate what he thinks in the trans lectures,
that he's done for nations for methodics and pure processes. And so he does identify, or tend to identify, some basic categories which he thinks, well, it's not that he thinks that they are just fundamental for the manifest image, or for both the manifest and scientific image. The categories of being something, some, was it being something, somehow, I think. So there's a third, Johanna Seich makes a lot of this, I guess you really have a side of this. And so these are like ultimately, you know, transcendental categories, because they're categories that govern the functioning of all lower level
or more kind of determinant categories. And it seems that if you understand the functioning of these categories, you can then establish it, you can connect, you can articulate, you manifest scientific images, you can ensure a kind of functional consistency or percumence across the images, which obviously you have to do if you want a stereoscopic integration. And the integration is going to be, he thinks, practical. So these, we have to be able to know how to deploy these concepts successfully. So that's an example, I think. So I'm not sure if this would correspond to what he calls
these regular principles here. There's a Fikin-Shtinian term for this. Fikin-Shtinian is a term. He calls them .. No, no. In the investigations, No, in uncertainty, Wittgenstein talks about these, what he calls the, not handrail things, these basic kind of informal principles. That's it. Interpractice. Yes, that's it. That's it. Yes, that's it. And I think, so, it seems that part of what Selah is saying about the principles that correspond to those things, you say hinge.
Sorry? Hinging. Hinging proposition, yes. Exactly, yeah, hinging proposition. And to identify a hinging proposition, you have to understand what's being articulated and how you can properly articulate these things. And this involves a kind of functional analysis, understanding how categories lock together, function together, how they articulate it in order to work properly. And this, Hargis involves a kind of phenomenology. He says, phenomenology in a way, a kind of, phenomenology
is a categorical analysis, as a kind of exposition of these fundamental kind of categorical schema that govern the appearing of appearances, the way in which phenomena manifest themselves to them. But he thinks that you can't simply kind of intuit them or access them by reflection, you have to do a kind of functional analysis, you have to kind of understand how language works, how we use language. So it seems that the identification of these engineering propositions or whatever you want to call them is going to be multidimensional. It's going to involve understanding the kind of category or literature
of the manifest and scientific image, and then understanding how, where they, you know, in what way they're connected, because he insists that the scientific image is still anchored in the manifest image. And this is where I think the role of sensibility, you know, also plays, you know, a role. I think that our minds are anchored in physical reality, okay, because we have nervous systems. And these nervous systems embed us in nature. And so that, you know, he said, transatlantic naturalism is, I tend to understand, for the mind's understanding of nature
is conditioned by the nature to which it belongs. So because the mind is embedded in nature, that it both, although it kind of, about nature is also conceptually kind of characterized. It's necessary to understand, to come up with a description explanation of how this characterization is itself kind of grounded in nature. And this is where he's not so far away from . Terry Kingkart makes this point, that thing that, There's two tracks, you've got the nature and the mind.
So there are these two aspects that have to be kind of particulate. If you emphasize one at the expense of the other, you get kind of an imbalance, balance, which distorts your understanding and reminds what's in nature. I want to then set up my question. You asked Dr. Dr. Reynolds, how might that be related with the spectrum of metaphysics? Well, OK. Because then this is completely, this involves a kind of, well, it involves metaphysics. But I think Seller's is a metaphysician is committed to metaphysics, but he thinks metaphysics can be, first of all, it involves
categorical analysis. So metaphysics is a theory of the category, but it's not just that the categories are in a way in us, not in us ourselves, but because they condition our cognitive access to the things themselves, they also help us understand how things themselves condition of . So it's a virtuous kind of explanatory loop so you can understand the reciprocal conditioning of . And I think this is a form and this is a speculative hypothesis that he has, but he thinks it's illuminating.
So you can do metaphysics in a kind of a so epistemically hinged metaphysics has a general epistemic hinge it can't be completely decoupled, it can't be wild speculative metaphysics, but your metaphysical speculations can be epistemic constrained once you understand, and this is the process that we're trying to understand what categories we need to forge in order to generate bridging principles or anything, I suppose. There are also people, it's possible that he, the way in which he tried to do this was like, misguided, but I do think it's not this wild kind of crazy and a real art on his parts.
He's often a character I could do. No, no, no, I just want to congratulate you on a group. I have one very quick clarification on that. With this moment, we're talking about the collective ideals that basically, with the momentarily that's in there. Yeah. What is the status of this and does it ever work in the main principle? This is it. I assume, because they would have to, I mean, I don't quite understand empiricism because he can't, because of this kind of, you know, this random semantic certainism, he felt that there will be kind of necessary truths, but there will be
necessary. There will be necessary truths, but there are necessity will be relevant. will be there, and there will be conditions under which you need to revise these necessary principles. This is how exactly this works. Well, I think some kind of example, well look, I mean, this stuff, where the process he thinks that it's a condition of something being colored, it being homogeneously colored. So if I'm experiencing red or pink, the pink must be homogeneously pink,
so that the piqueness of my intensification must be pink through and through. And it can be a kind of particular. But this is often taken to be a phenomenological claim. I don't think it's phenomenological in, it's not anything, it's nothing to do with introspection or like describing where things seem, based on categorical analysis, he just thinks if they think about a feature of a color category of paint, that it must be homogenous. So homogeneity is a categorical feature of paint, not phenomenological. It's not that you can see the homogeneity of it. said you have to, in order for it to be a candidate to function properly, in order for
me to be able to truly say, I have seen pink like that, then this, the claim, my deployment of this has to be a candidate in the wealth climate. So, he thinks, so pink has to be to be homogeneity, you think, is a kind of requirement. And therefore, all these consequences unfold. If it's because of this, but can simply have an explanatory reduction of the peak sensation to microparticles or even the components of your nervous system, if it's not a level of happiness. None of the entities deployed in explanation.
are properly related to the categorical nature of the property. So the hinge here is when you move, because I guess the reason that I was asking about the momentarily is what's happening, you don't write, unfolds on the basis of regular ideals, which is a condition of investigation. You write, insulated against a legal estimation. nation happy something close to Quine. Quine said everything. Also said that even in the law,
including non-concretion, even these things are subject to him to reversion. I can take Sertruss to be saying something like that, but he doesn't want to go the whole Quine because he wants to say you can only revise by holding on to some kind of necessary principles. The possibility, you know, if you don't know about the bulk, you have to run these basic, you can't, there has to be a kind of, some basic girders or any other, fines have to keep the bulk flow so that you can change the other fines. But this is like you were saying earlier, there must be at least some basic fines. Yes. Because there don't have to be any fines and basic fines.
Yes, exactly. Yes, that's the best way to do it. Yeah, I was about to say no, but if you. I was going to say that we're running off end, but we had a playful question. What do you make of these Marxist undertones about CESC and your own type of like seasonary. I think seasonary means for semantic production is . I think that that's absolutely intended to . It's always in. And I mean, you know, it's . That's the first stuff he read. And what does this have to do with ? Well, I think there's a connection. I think that, look, I think he's trying to make sense of scientific revolution.
He thinks that scientific revolution is principle. It's not just one down the ground for others. He thinks that it can be voluntary and rational. And he thinks, for example, you're wrong about this. And lots of people would say you're wrong about this. But I think this is what he's trying to do. He's trying to come up with a theory that will explain how semantic self-consciousness is. Oh, we can revise our understanding of the world in a reasonable way. And so that there is a kind of a world story, the continuity. And it's a very, what's remarkable about it is optimism.
It's kind of a naivety, if I know. But I think because he came on page, in an epoch where one of these extraordinary developments in science, I think he thought that also is philosophical understanding has to be live up to these ideals, these revolutionary ecostatic ideas that seems to open up possibilities that were extraordinary. I mean, what happened between 1850 and 1950, just think about the conceptual transformation.
just astonishing. And I think Selvich is, in a way, maybe the last representative of this heroic era of, like, you know, Western civilization, right? You know what I mean? And that's why he's very much out of tenor with the time. That's why he's out of sync. This kind of bold, you know, revolutionary in Ottoman, and in both cases, just like in politics, it seems that this is a very, very far, this is obviously something we share with people who are sort of . Yes, I think that's another kind of way. Also, I mean, if you present it that way, it sounds like a systemologically mature or sensible version.
Mature or sensible or ? A systemologically ramified or whatever. Yes, I think that we include into that huge Yes. I think it was revolutionary, like a humanitarian science. I don't know. I think that was really good. Thank you.