The concept of “Ontic Vagueness” caused my ears to prick-up when Adam Weisberg shared a link, asking for review comments on Mastodon a week ago:
Ontic Vagueness – The Argument From Freedom
Adam Weisberg – January 2025
The idea that things are much less well-defined than their accepted definition(s) might imply, is long-standing and oft-repeated here:
Ref: quite separate warnings by Dan Dennett (“hold your definition“) and Anatoly Levenchuk (“definition as a coffin“) about being wary of definitions generally, and my own #GoodFences arguments that all definitions are essentially one or more overlapping binary chops this-not-that, each of which involves arbitrary choice that can be refined or re-purposed once understood
But I’d mostly seen this as essentially human – semantic, epistemological – about current / imperfect knowledge used to make those definitional choices. In terms of orthodox science, this is no problem of course, quite the opposite, definitions evolve as knowledge evolves.
But then again, the closer one’s metaphysics gets to the map being the terrain – that fundamentally information is what everything consists of – however well we humans know it. As I’ve said about myself before, my own ontology is epistemological – about what can be known, whatever our current state of knowledge.
So for me the Ontic vs Semantic case is moot. They’re both epistemic. One about what can be known and the other about what we mean / understand / intend by what we believe we know.
I mentioned this in a bookmarking post a few days ago and AJ Owens had already responded with his own recent post linked there too.
My notes (so far) on “reviewing” Weisberg’s paper:
I really got 2 things out of it:
Identity. Self-Identity – several references to things being “self-identical” represented by the (tautologous?) “X=X” threw me at first. Makes sense if read with the qualifying “for all cases for all time, at all levels of detail from gross to quantum”.
Freedom. Weisberg’s argument against this is “from freedom”, that the universe itself is free to evolve, and not “pre-defined” by any creative hand of god nor by any brute-fact “laws of nature” that happen to be the case from its inception.
So, if you already have a “process” or “interaction” ontology – like Whitehead or Pirsig – then none of this is a surprise. Identity is dynamic and evolves like everything else. Plus:
Unger? – Interestingly Weisberg uses a Peter Unger (1984) “concrete worlds” reference, whereas I’ve used Roberto Unger (2015 with Lee Smolin) “singular universe” for the idea that even laws of nature are evolved in this world (and only inherit any level of pre-definition from boundary conditions in the pre-existing universe in which our big-bang occurred). Unger & Smolin specifically, and Unger more generally.
Identity Generally? Written lots before on identity being defined broadly and narrowly and with purpose (ie politics). Identity without Definitions and Identity Generally.
Owens’ paper (fellow Whiteheadian) and the comments below have a couple of interesting angles for me too:
Dynamical Systems? – can systems be any other kind? (I’m always sceptical of those that qualify their various systems theories and “sciences” for marketing (management consulting?) purposes. All are systems and all systems are dynamic. (Systems all over the blog for 25 years.)
Capra? – I also mentioned Capra very recently and also because some 21st C writers are referencing him in serious systems contexts, even though I’d personally left him behind as unoriginal.
None of which counts as a “review”. All too closely related to what I’m already writing 🙂
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Thanks for the link!
There may have been a misunderstanding; I haven’t even opened the “Ontic Vagueness” paper. (I’ll get around to it!) A topic I was working on, about dynamical systems and simple location, happened to touch directly on the question of identity, or “A=A,” so I mentioned it on your earlier post. For my own thoughts on identity, see my “Reflections on the Dialectic.” Identity theory was the focus of my 2nd-year logic course at McGill, under Prof Anil Gupta. (At the time he had much longer hair!)
I’m sure you’re right about the adjective “dynamical” being redundant. The point of Gomez-Marin and Arnau’s paper was to suggest that systems theory, as we usually find it, tends to make what they and Whitehead regard as the metaphysical error of “simple location.” A systems theory that is not subject to this “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” seems conceivable, as far as I know.
Thanks so much for the read and for these notes.
Peter Unger comes up because modal realism can be floated as another way we might imagine the universe to be free, while retaining the potential for self-identity. The argument I want to stand up – and shoot down – is, “there are no constraints; every possible world is real.” David Lewis doesn’t really endorse this himself, so I invoke Unger just as an example of someone who (nearly, at least) makes the stronger claim. (It’s also made in speculative physics – eg Krauss’s multiverse argument at the end of A Universe from Nothing.)
So the idea with Unger is I just need to state the argument clearly before I argue that the modal realism / multiverse alternative does not work. I have to do that b/c the first half of the Ontic Vagueness paper amounts to an argument from exhaustion that there are no credible arguments that would support holding onto a universe that can have both freedom and self-identity.
(The second half starts with “ok, let’s reject self-identity. It’s a human idea about reality; and it’s wrong. What else would that mean about reality?” So then I get to start exploring the rules of vagueness: without self-identity, there isn’t logic or mathematics – so observed identities and mathematical relationships all have to be emergent. Why should that happen? … )
I keep trying to post something, but it’s not showing up. Is it in some limbo at your end?
What I was trying to post is actually a not-very-kind analysis of the first part of the paper, written late last night. Probably just as well that it hasn’t shown up! Later, if I can find a moment, I ‘ll try to tone it down and explain more sympathetically where I see problems with it. Meanwhile if last night’s post appears anyway, well, brace yourself!
Ha. No sign of it 🙂
OK, let’s try again.
Beginning around page 12, I started feeling uneasy with the argument that the universe taken in its entirety must be free because it cannot logically have any constraints. My instinct was that, at this point, the idea of a constraint becomes meaningless, and at precisely the same point the idea of freedom also becomes meaningless. When we push terms, or concepts, beyond their functional boundaries, strange conclusions can follow.
The problem appears to be at Stage 1, Step 2 on page 11: “if the universe is U, when it could just as well have been N, then the universe features brute facts — a form of constraint.” I guess my point would be that the distinction between U and N constitutes a constraint on complete freedom, in that, because it is demonstrably not N, the universe is constrained to be U. The “brute fact” here is the very existence of the universe, and this brute fact is actually asserted as a premise at Step 1, but in the form of a question: “I ask why the universe is U rather than N — a form of, ‘why is there something, rather than nothing?.
So far this has nothing to do with the question of identity, and by page 13 I was wondering why Premise 2 (that “If self-identity is possible at all, then an empty universe N – conceived as self-identical nothingness – presents a coherent alternative to reality as we know it”) was even brought up. On page 14, at 2.3.2, the explanation is provided: without Premise 2 we could contest that U is a constraint, by supposing that N is impossible. If the logical possibility of N can be established, then the idea that the universe is constrained to exist is defeated, because logically, it doesn’t have to exist. To prove the logical possibility of N, it’s a simple matter of invoking identity theory: if being self-identical is possible, and this property is shared by both U and N, then both U and N are possible.
This meant to free U from the constraint of existing — as if U could not exist, and therefore, with equal logical consistency, it could be N. But U cannot be N. I think this is where things go off the rails. I don’t think you mean to say that because the universe is completely free, it can both exist and not exist, but this is what the confusion about the “constraint” of the brute fact of its existence amounts to. From here we could argue that it’s untrue that the universe must either exist or not exist. From that it would follows that it is not self-identical. If it were self-identical, then it would have either to self-identically exist, or self-identically not exist. But since it is fee to have the property of being and also non-being, it is under no such constraint.
If the universe is free to exist and not exist, then of course its self-identity would be a glaring problem (as would any other proposition). But I don’t accept that a universe that actually exists is, in any interesting sense, free from the brute fact of its existence.
But thanks for bringing it up. I always enjoy a good logical puzzle.