Siris' Journal

Dashed Off I

http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2013/12/dashed-off-i.html

As always, what it says on the tin: dashed off; so take with a grain or two of salt. I'm very behind on these, so this will be a series.

collective vs distributive interpretations of each modality

Treating logic in a purely syntactical way increases rather than reduces interpretive assumptions, because inference and proof are not a kind of syntax.

Rigid & nonrigid designation show that there is a modal component in every term.

If you take seriously Hume's claim that his account of causation covers matter & form, you get something like a process ontology.

You can tell the philosophers whose arguments are most dangerous to Nietzsche's claims: they are the ones with whom his responses become most epigrammatic and scathing, without consideration of details. This is the Nietzschean cunning: to pass lightly over what is dangerous.

the promissory sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony, and Orders -- all involve promising God something. Note that these are the three character sacraments plus the quasi-character covenant of Matrimony (all the character sacraments involve the sealing of a covenant, just as Matrimony does; they only differ in the covenantal structure)

Pictures are capable not merely of denoting but of quasi-exemplifying (cp Goodman on metaphorical exemplification).

vagueness as superposition of at least apparent possibilities

Exemplification, as in swatches and paint chips, is quasi-conventional, relative to a classification and conventions of use or regard.

Nothing seems actually to fit Goodman's criteria for a notational system; the closest one gets is practical equivalence for certain functions.

A musical score is a recipe.

The composer's score is an authoritative recommendation, not definitive of works or performances.

The performer plays in the tradition of the composer.

monomane and yugen in the hana of the Christ-like life; the myo of the saints, the rojaku of the ascetics

"A trading country is the habitat of Socinianism." Newman

entropy as a measure of distinguishability

the iconic economy and its relation to the sacramental economy

II Nicaea bases Tradition on the promise of Christ
II Nicaea lists as examples of the lawful traditions: the Book of the Gospels, the image of the Cross, the pictorial icons, the holy relics of martyrs; it specifically and explicitly attributes the same account to the first three

The Church in its Tradition is a seal of the righteousness of faith, in testimony of God's grace towards us, to the confirming of faith and the imprinting of the promises of God on our hearts; it is a testimony of God's love, founded on the promise of Christ, to be with us always.

Scripture as evangelical proclamation, icon of Christ, and sacramental whose office is to prepare one for any and all sacraments (thus being part of the catechetical/doctrinal/magisterial, iconic, and sacramental economies of the Church, and binding them all together)

possible world semantics & the problem of modal overdetermination.

We see the meaningfulness of the universe reflected in human beings around us as the image of God; without the latter, we have no clear sight of the former.

Affability is the virtue of speaking the language of friendship in deed and word.

the passage of time itself as playing a role in cognition

symbolic participation in divine providence

the Sabbath as a day for cultivating affability

curation of ideas

The tendency to act and accomplish is more fundamental than the tendency to self-preservation.

Aristotle's eleven virtues as a template for civilized life

a political community shares
(1) money: liberality, magnificence
(2) honors: ambition, magnanimity
(3) social interaction: truth, eutrapelia, affability
(this leaves courage, mildness, justice, & temperance; c, m, and temp all deal with basic aspects of human passional life: fear, anger, pleasure and pain; justice has a regard for the political structure itself)

modality -> mereotopology -> geometry

Pain is an entire portfolio of responses to the world.

Baptism is the primary and principal means of transmitting the faith; indeed, in a sense the entire Christian life is the sacrament of Baptism, the rippling out in sign and thing of the rite of sign and thing.

plausibility
..by coherence (direct)
....internal
....external (including inference to best explanation)
..by analogy (derivative)
....precedent
....metaphor
(both of these show that plausibility is a consistency with cognitive consequences)

mortal apings of immortality

"Counterpart theory" is applicable whenever we can talk about a topic entirely in terms of similarity, quantification, and mereology. Formally it applies just as much to organizational counterparts in organizations as individuals in worlds.

Aesthetics needs something like a doctrine of the mean that allows us to evaluate beyond the capacities of our language. Clearly there is a sort of mean in art, but it doesn't seem to be stable, in the way that virtues are stable means, i.e., grounded in definite and consistent features of the agetn as such. It seems to be now in this, now in that.

Causes as we usually think of them are able to specify the initial conditions of a system; laws as we usually think of them are not. Causes pertain to being, laws to order.

Dt 30:10-14 & the purpose of Torah

The fear of the Lord is His law in us and in our actions.

The purpose of the parable of the Good Samaritan is to block attempts to justify oneself.

Governments, more than any other institutions, are in danger of becoming parasitic on fears and hopes when they should be reducing the harm of them.

Hell is being unable to get past Good Friday, Purgatory is waiting through Holy Saturday, and Heaven is the Paschal Day of Resurrection.

"every effect is a sigh of the cause, an exemplate of the exemplar, and a path to the end" Bonaventure

effects lead to causes (Bonaventure)
(1) by proper representation (natural similitude)
(2) by prophetic prefiguration (Scriptural type)
(3) by angelic operation (mediated theophanic works)
(4) by superadded institution (sacrament)

"to the Church is entrusted the care of all the sacraments, but in a special way of matrimony, because of the variations which may occur in relation to it, and because of the concomitant disease." Bonaventure

Scripture as four-dimensional: breadth (canon), length (salvation history, creation->judgment), height (theological scope, God-creatures), depth (manifold sense)

Gandalf before Black Rider V.4 // Gandalf before Balrog II.5

the structural principles of Aquinas's account of virtues
(1) acquired vs infused (the Summa discusses infused virtues)
(2) doctrine of the mean
(3) the seven major virtues
(4) the mereology of virtue

accessibility relations as representation relations (possible world semantics as a system of signs)

Every sign is an exemplate effect tending to an end.

Internal structure is not sufficient for distinguishing natural kinds.

laws as identifying exemplar causation: exemplate as that which follows according to intrinsic law

Natural selection is primarily a matter of differential chemical response; everything else follows from this. We should think of it less on the biological level (which over-assimilates it to artificial selection) and think of it more as a statistical feature of chemical interaction with a complex environment.

It is not mere measurement but recorded organizations of measurements that scientific inquiry uses.

Economic transaction is built out of the products of the liberal arts.

Nobody who does not recognize that the natural end of sex is friendship can do justice to the evil of rape; part of what makes rape a perversion is that it is an intimate betrayal.

OT:nature :: NT:character (cp Schelling)

The baptism-chrismation link is the Easter-Pentecost link.

The syllogism is not the structure of discovery but of scientia in the soul.

Reinach's pure law is to natural law as Platonic forms are to Aristotelian forms.

The Church receives Scripture as a gift and imposes it canonically by promulgating it, by continually interpreting it, and in and through preaching, prayer, and practice of it, and also by upholding it in matters of dispute.

money as a form of hypothetical honor

Stein's account of the state shows its weakness in her discussion of international law

The criteria used in historical Jesus studies establish firmness of historicity; none of the standard ones are suitable for determining non-historicity.

Money does not make things commensurable strictly, but it makes them commensurable enough for exchange.

liturgy as combinatorial symbolism

intelligibility, verifiability, provability
value, exchange, market
node, edge, graph
agent, relation, network
grace, sacrament, sacramental economy
combinator, combination, combinatorial set
term, proposition, argument
claim, inference, inferential system
intending, inferring, narrating

"a sign is something knowing which we know something more" Peirce

the consensus gentium of philosophical tradition

When people talk about pragmatics, they really mean modes of practice.

Grice's conversational maxims are maximal propositions or topoi for specific kinds of means-end reasoning, based on four ends of communication. Gricean pragmatics is a teleology.

Vico's languages of gods, of heroes, and of men are in fact the three layers of all human language.

the Sacred Heart as synecdoche of the Word made flesh, and thus metaphor for all that pertains to the Incarnation

"The implicit philosophy of any phenomenology of religion is the renewal of a theory of reminiscence." Ricoeur

Pr 8:7 // Cant 2:3
Ps 19:10 // Cant 4:11

One must beware of attempts to appeal to 'Ockham's Razor' to argue that looking at a thing stupidly is better than looking at it with one's whole mind.

Real knowledge is always layered.

abduction as recognition of phenomena as an icon of a symbol (a likeness of a general conception) (Peirce EP 2:287)

abduction leading to conclusions in interrogative mood

abduction as concerned with economy of money, time, thought, and energy (Peirce CP 5.600)

abduction : inference through icon :: induction : inference through index :: deduction : inference through symbol

abduction as divine: NEM 3.206; CP 8.212; CP 6.476-477 MS 843.7
(cp Peirce on agapistic evolution)

abduction as guided by the notion of good

Tropes are all ways of keeping to the conversational maxims as much as literal language is; tropical intent is often posited to preserve relevance, informativeness, etc.

the sacraments as objective correlatives

The mimetic theory of art, properly understood, is a theory of art as a generative power of the mind.

We think the mirror inverts only by a sort of mental sympathy with our own image. What we have in a mirror is not inversion, properly speaking, but reflected congruence.

All of Eco's arguments for saying that mirrors do not produce signs are wrong, being based on an equivocation with presence and absence and a false assumption, or at least a dubious one, about the contingency of signification.

remote-view & close-view examinations of philosophical problems

corrective & restorative duties

The periodic table is in essence a combinatorial analysis, although slightly complicated by principles governing electron orbits.

Human remembering is not in itself an ordering process, although we can order events in light of it.

superposition as indicative of real possibility

using the good things that pass to hold fast to the good things that endure forever

relics as indicators of saints-as-icons

Arguments can be coded into other arguments by analogy.

Humean virtue ethics is semiotic: acts as signs of character
Humean virtue ethics already includes everything considered by situationism in its account of artificial virtues and utility; but it diversifies situations rather than considering them as fi they were all the same kind of thing.

Old works in philosophy are often full of eccentric arguments on curious topics; but in working out their underlying rules one often finds treasures.

prayer as the breath of the Church, both inspiration and expiration

Confirmation gives us not just grace within, but an atmosphere or ambience of grace (all anointing sacraments do so in their own way).

the counterparts of Aristotle's eleven virtues for the Republic of Letters

forms of inquiry that require an ambience of reason to survive

judgments about character as necessary to testimonial evidence

Marriage is constituted not by vow but by consent.

closely binding contexts vs loosely binding contexts (the need for positive reason to generalize out of closely binding contexts)

more generalized forms of Gricean maxims as maxims of charitable interpretation

Syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics are all abstracted from original intelligibility; each is that one intelligibility considered in a particular light.

"A verse is never freed from its peshut." Rashi

the Decalogue as a guide to Scriptural interpretation

More obviously than any other virtues, temperance and its secondary virtues must be *grown*.

partial lending & borrowing of virtue (this is most obvious with prudence, through counsel, but temperance and fortitude both require cultural effort and can in some sense be communicated or participated in at remote)

type of existence proof // type of argument for God's existence
necessary rational posit // ontological I
probable rational posit // ontological II
direct empirical presentation // religious experience
indirect empirical presentation by causal inference // cosmological
indirect empirical presentation by implication of confirmed model // teleological
pragmatic requirement // moral

A good liturgy intimates wisdom (tablets of law, lamps), power (rod, altar), goodness (pot of manna, shew-bread).

They are most suitable to being moved by the Spirit through Scripture who strive through reason to know themselves.

"Opposition not only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner seeks opposition." Hume SBN 434

mimesis, catharsis, and rhaumaton as the elements or dimensions of plausibility

Historical scholarship begins with principles of evidence and paradigms thereof, not with skepticism; if it did not, it would never get either to history or to scholarship.

sophological vs eschatological makarisms (both concern kinds of trust)

Prophetic oracle is by its nature a riot of connections, a flood of weighty interrelations.

liturgy as covenant festival memorializing theophany under the supervision of cultic officials

The reasonable question with documentary evidence is not, "Do these agree or disagree?" but "How dot he causal lines resulting these relate to each other?"

The rise of written tradition does not kill off oral tradition, but it does make it possible for it to be assimilated into a tradition of reading.

tradition 1 Cor 11:23ff; 15:1ff

Ascension as accession

Sins of lust are such that even being uncovered is often a natural punishment for them. (This uncovering has to be distinguished from indirect revelation; they can be distinguished by how evidences are handled.)

Shame is an imagination of disgrace.

chastity as an 'integrity of the powers of love and life'

It is straightforward nonsense to expect people to maximize communicative efficiency.

Gricean pragmatics is really concerned with deriving principles of communication from more general principles of cooperative activity.

Grice's maxim of manner is defective: it should be 'be appropriate', thus subsuming Gricean manner, style, and Leech's principle of politeness.
(1) be truthful
(2) be helpful/just
(3) be relevant
(4) be appropriate
(3):(4)::end:means; i.e., have the appropriate subordinate subordinate ends, have the appropriate means to all the ends.
->public vs private ends of communication
->justice generically structures cooperation, truthfulness specifically structures rational communication

Divine knowledge exceeds any enunciable specification.

distortions of finite time limits for moral reasoning

To consider: The diffusion of innovations is related to teh structure of the innovations themselves.

Julian of Norwich: the privation theory of evil implies that evil cannot be recognized "except by the pain caused by it" (13.27.406)

4th Lateran Council on privation theory of evil

Depravity springs from deprivation.

In Julian's account, divine immutability is absolutely central to atonement.

the paradox of tragedy and the problem of evil

The extent to which religions have converged historically is quite remarkable given the sheer diversity of them. Part of this is moral, since moral principles are grounded in reason; part of it is aesthetic, since symbolisms expand and human beings pursue beauty; part of it is dialectical, since the arguments of others cannot always simply be ignored; and part of it is metaphysics, since reality constrains the mind in all things, however roomy the space for mental freedom may be.

Cryogenic freezing would freeze one's interests in an unfrozen world.

A great deal of consensus in any fast-moving inquiry or discipline is negotiated as a way of sustaining research interests -- the beginning, so to speak, and not the result, of inquiry.

Consequentialism is either circular or based on self-evident moral principles of reason.

problem mitosis

Human experience again and again shows that despair is a greater evil than pain.

Civilizations degrade by trying to compensate for sin with sin.

pain "purifies, and makes us to know ourselves and to ask mercy" (Julian 11.27)

prophetic discourse as discourse in direct address contending against the spirit of the age, particularly as found in structures of power, in light of God's ends (cp Westphal)

'Health' is necessarily a moral term, grounding obligations to others as well as moral excellences.

Depending on the method of analysis, a change can be analyzed into objects, actions, capabilities, relations, parts and boundaries, and any number of other things; this does not mean, of itself, that change is any of these things.

Hume's causal relation has to be temporal because temporal contiguity is the only directional kind of association in his account (resemblance and spatial contiguity are both symmetric)

similitude and order terms in a broader mereology

the metaphysical foundations of the preconditions for explanation

politics as the personation of diagnoses and treatments

Hobbes's Trinitarian personations as symbolic appropriations based on mission

Coming-to-know may be a cultural artifact without what is known being so.