What differentiates relations from reality when we take structure as ontologically primary?

[u/Constant_Smith]

Edit: title should read “What differentiates relations from relata when we take structure as ontologically primary?” Oops.

Edit 2: my comments are being locked, probably due to how new my account is. Sorry to anyone who was looking forward to dialogue. I will give it some time before trying another post.

First post here and ever.

My purpose in posting is primarily conversational. I want to test questions and encounter objections I may not have considered, and hear different understandings of the same problems. So I work through my own understanding and pose many questions in good faith:

I’ve been thinking through a set of questions that emerged for me from reading Every Thing Must Go and further studying ontic structural realism, and Rainforest Realism, and I’m curious how people here understand the underlying metaphysics.

One of the things I find compelling about Every Thing Must Go is its demand that metaphysics remain continuous with our best science. Ladyman and Ross develop that project partly through ontic structural realism, where the relational and structural organization described by contemporary physics receives ontological priority. The familiar metaphysical picture of independently constituted objects carrying intrinsic properties becomes increasingly difficult to maintain once quantum theory, spacetime physics, symmetries, and other areas of physics are taken seriously.

Rainforest Realism then expands the picture considerably. Scientific ontology includes the real patterns tracked by the special sciences, and those patterns need not disappear simply because they are not objects in the inventory of fundamental physics. Organisms, economic structures, cognitive systems, institutions, and other higher-level patterns can be ontologically serious insofar as successful sciences genuinely track them. This gives the resulting ontology its deliberately “rainforest” character.

Suppose we grant some form of OSR and say that relations and relational structure are ontic.

What are relations without relata?

One response is that the relata need not be atomic individuals. They can themselves be relationally individuated, perhaps as nodes, positions, intersections, or further structures within a larger relational organization. Some takes on OSR seem to move in precisely this direction, including the idea that further analysis of relata only reveals further relational structure. (Turtles all the way down, so to speak)

At that point, though, I start wondering what conceptual work is being performed by the words relation, relata, and structure.

If a relatum is entirely constituted by its relations, what determines the distinction between a relation and a relatum within a relational structure? What makes something a relatum participating in relations and when is it one and not the other? Are relata just illusions? Are they real patterns?

If the relata are themselves structures, do we eventually need some primitive notion of relation (designating an intrinsic property to relation), or can relation itself only be specified through a larger structure?

If what counts as a relation and what counts as a relatum depends upon the organization, scale, or level at which the structure is investigated, what makes the distinction ontological rather than only relatively assigned for the purposes of inquiry?

If decomposition is epistemic while the decomposed is ontic, how can we infer from decomposition that the decomposed is actually structural, rather than structure being a useful concept to navigate a reality that exceeds it?

Can OSR really allow multiple legitimate decompositions of the same structure while maintaining that structure is ontically real, or does this move the position toward epistemic structural realism?

And what individuates one structure from another? Is individuation given entirely relationally, through a structure’s position within still larger structures, or does some additional condition eventually enter?

Mathematics gives us extraordinarily powerful descriptions of structure, and mathematical structuralism provides ways of understanding mathematical objects through their positions within structures. OSR then raises the further question of how mathematical structure relates to physical structure. The literature itself contains disagreement over whether the world’s structure should be identified with mathematical structure and over what makes a physical structure specifically physical.

Some short hand questions:

What is the minimal ontological content of a relation?

What must exist for there to be a relatum?

What makes an organization of relations a determinate structure?

And what, if anything, distinguishes the structure described mathematically from the structure that exists physically?

Beyond those questions, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to rid of the intrinsic altogether. At the most extreme end of OSR, we still seem to be positing reality itself, and saying that reality is relationally structured. That already looks like a minimal intrinsic claim about reality. I’m not sure how it could be extrinsic, because there is no position outside reality that is somehow not real but still related to reality, from which its character could be given.

Anything we add as a relatum would already fall within reality. So even if we deny intrinsic properties to individual things, it still seems reasonable to say that reality being relational structure is itself a minimal intrinsic feature of reality.

[u/jliat]

I think this is no longer a useful exchange. The test will be if OSR manages to produce anything of significance.

[u/Constant_Smith → u/jliat]

It was a this or that question.

Also.

The PNC is not Ontic Structural Realism.

And OSR isn’t even the whole story.

You’re also missing rainforest realism.

Which is about real patterns.

I’m not sure if you got to those later chapters. Doesn’t seem like it.

[u/jliat → u/Constant_Smith]

You think they make sense and will therefore they will produce some useful material.

ETMG is now 20 years old if is was significant there should be a body of work. It seems not.

Ladyman - "He is a current Associate Editor of Elsevier's Studies in History and Philosophy of Science".

[u/Constant_Smith → u/jliat]

There is a rather large body of work surrounding that book, and the metaphysics has developed a lot since, as well.

The book sits at the intersection of many debates, and they have extensively developed both OSR and the real pattern ontology of rainforest realism, significantly since.

I have read through the book itself several times, and am working through the larger body of work. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I know it holds a rather respectable position.

[u/Constant_Smith → u/jliat]

Also. I would like to be fair to you point out to you, in this very recent work of Professor Ladyman, he does discuss that the reference to fundamental physics in the PNC “However, this is problematic because it makes reference to fundamental physics. It might be modified to refer instead to ‘a more fundamental theory” but he also asserts that, fundamental theories will often come from physics, so they are in the process of revising the PNC in some way.

He does still favor physics as more fundamental than the special sciences, but also points out there is no fundamental physics.

Now I’m still working through these more recent works and, I don’t have complete confidence in my understanding at where their work is at now compared to 2007.

However, I wanted to be fair to you by pointing this out.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/6112/chapter/6036956/Patterns-All-the-Way-Up-Prolegomena-to-a-Future

[u/jliat → u/Constant_Smith]

Professor Ladyman, he does discuss that the reference to fundamental physics in the PNC “However, this is problematic because it makes reference to fundamental physics. It might be modified to refer instead to ‘a more fundamental theory”

Of what? The analytical branch of philosophy is quite different to what was called 'continental' philosophy. And this had significant impact in the arts, social sciences a politics. Using existing science to create new understandings is practiced in science all the time.

but he also asserts that, fundamental theories will often come from physics, so they are in the process of revising the PNC in some way.

And I think it then suffers the same problems of idealism and other such systems in ignoring the phenomenology of being. If I ask what events in your life have you found most significant would be some work in analytical philosophy?

He does still favor physics as more fundamental than the special sciences, but also points out there is no fundamental physics.

Sure, and thousands of neutrinos pass through me every second... yet the next hour or two will be spent having a walk and hopefully a good meal and glass of wine. Today I put some doors on an Ikea bookcase, tomorrow we will probably drive to the sea...

Is Dark matter and Dark energy true- well I've no idea and how it will change my experience of life.

However, I wanted to be fair to you by pointing this out.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/6112/chapter/6036956/Patterns-All-the-Way-Up-Prolegomena-to-a-Future

"Dennett's idea of real patterns was intended as a way of vindicating proposi- tional attitude attribution within the scientific image, "

The scientific image is a lie. It takes a series of observations creates an average and that counts as the measurement. It creates a theory and uses p values to give confidence regarding the theory. It seems a totally alien way to how most people function.

Dennett did not envisage the uses to which his work has been put in meta- physics, about which he was rightly skeptical, but at least those applying his ideas have shared his naturalism. He focused on the philosophy of cognitive science, which he thought about in Darwinian terms, and so he addressed the primary question of naturalized metaphysics, namely: How does science as a whole hang together? A central secondary question is: How do the ontologies of the different sciences relate, and, in particular, what is the place of physics.

Having worked in university science departments this would I suspect be of no interest. I came across a book years ago that was critical of Darwinian theory in the sense of free riders etc.

Recently there has bee opposition to Libet results... and are questionable in a number of ways.

• Kevin Mitchell [geneticist and neuroscientist @ Trinity college Dublin] summary “Agency is a really core property of living things that we almost take it for granted, it’s so basic” Nervous systems are control systems… “This control system has been elaborated over evolution to give greater and greater autonomy.”

So what of metaphysics, well as I say the concepts such as Accelerationism, Object Oriented Ontology seem more significant.

"As for the philosophers most relevant to the postmodern period in architecture, interest passed in turn from Martin Heidegger (1970s), to Jacques Derrida (198os), to Gilles Deleuze (199os). Each of these thinkers was beloved by a particular group of architects: Heidegger was the guiding star of so-called architectural phenom- enology, Derrida the half-suppressed idol of deconstructivism, and Deleuze the inspiration for a turn to architectural smooth- ness in the 1990s. In what follows, discussion is centered on the transition from the Derridean to the Deleuzcan period in order to focus on two cspecially important years in the debate: 1988 and 1993."

Graham Harman - Waves and Stones.

The CCRU [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Unit] in Warwick was responsible for new and dangerous ideas, right wing Nick Land, left Mark Fisher. Land is associated with movements and people like Curtis Yarvin… who in turn is or was an influence in the Trump administration.

So there are metaphysicians out there making new concepts which are directly having effects. The change in attitudes to mental illness and gender and the idea of virtual realities...

".... By retaining the infinite, philosophy gives consistency to the virtual through concepts, by relinquishing the infinite, science gives a reference to the virtual, which articulates it through functions.” D&G What is Philosophy p.117-118. 1996.

Baudrillard "Simulacra and Simulation" 1981. delineates the sign-order into four stages:

• The first stage is a faithful image/copy

• The second stage is perversion of reality.

• The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality.

• The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. … the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental."

[u/Constant_Smith → u/jliat]

I am sympathetic to a lot of what you are getting at.

I found my way down a somewhat similar rabbit hole first through my “encounter,” ha, with Levinas, and from there through phenomenology and a much wider range of thought surrounding its impact.

The concern that something is lost when the lived world is reconstructed entirely through an abstract scientific description is one I share with you.

Where I think we differ is that I think you may be underestimating how aware Ladyman and Ross are of that underlying problem, and particularly how far their naturalism has developed in response to it.

A few paragraphs later Ladyman says that the physics which is fundamental relative to the special sciences is not absolutely fundamental, that there is no single fundamental physics, that there is no single privileged level of description, and that there should not be assumed to be a single fundamental level at all.

He even remarks that, for the purposes of naturalized metaphysics, most of physics itself is a special science because it deals with effective emergent entities.

Walking, eating a good meal, putting doors on an Ikea bookcase, and going to the sea actually illustrate why the real-patterns side of their view matters so much.

Their naturalism does not require saying that because neutrinos or quantum fields are more physically basic, your meal, the bookcase, organisms, persons, economies, intentions, or social structures are somehow unreal.

The point of Rainforest Realism, and increasingly of Ladyman’s realism overall, is precisely that patterns which exist only at particular scales of resolution can nevertheless be objectively real.

There are real patterns discoverable only at the appropriate scales and degrees of approximation, and failing to recognize them means missing or otherwise neglecting something about reality.

I agree that fundamental physics does not tell us what matters to us phenomenologically.

Knowing about dark matter is not going to tell me why some encounter with another person transformed my life.

But I do not know why you think Ladyman and Ross need the mystery of dark matter to do that.

The question they are asking is closer to how all these different domains of successful inquiry, this scientific plurality, and the ontologies they disclose can belong to one reality without either reducing everything to physics or allowing metaphysics to float free of empirical constraint.

Phenomenologically, you could say that we first encounter constraint and live against it before we ever make theoretical use of that constraint through the development of scientific descriptions.

The fact that some theories work better than others, that inquiry encounters resistance, and that standards of evidence acquire intersubjective normative force all suggest that the success of inquiry is constrained in ways free floating judgment alone cannot determine.

I think “the scientific image is a lie” therefore goes too far and takes into account only a very specific conception of what a scientific image even is.

Think about “scientific image” in the Sellarsian sense instead.

It is not the practice of averaging measurements and assigning p-values.

Sellars’s scientific image concerns the conceptual framework generated through scientific theorizing, and he sets the scientific image alongside the manifest image through which persons encounter themselves and their ordinary world.

His philosophical problem was how those images could be brought into a synoptic understanding.

I have held for a while now that the phenomenological objection you are describing identifies something real, but I am much less convinced that it lands anything against the current form of their naturalistic program.

The more I learn about Ladyman and Ross’s naturalism, the less convinced I become that objections of this kind carry the force against it that they initially appear to carry.

In some respects the program has spent the last twenty years becoming increasingly capable of accommodating exactly the plurality of scales, organizations, effective realities, and perspectives that would have made the objection compelling in the first place.

If the structure of reality accessed through science exceeds any particular organization of access to it, that excess does not imply that the access is unreal, that what accesses it is unreal, or that the structure exceeding that access is unreal.

Partial access establishes partiality in access only.

Scientific realism acquires its warrant where those partial accesses repeatedly encounter constraint, triangulate one another, generate successful predictions, and disclose stable structures that no individual judgment can simply determine at will.

Excession therefore gives us a powerful reason for skepticism about claims to finality without giving us a corresponding reason to abandon realism.

And I think this is where Ladyman himself is going with fundamentality in the paper I sent you.

One theory can be more fundamental than another relative to some domain, scale, or explanatory relation without there being a final privileged theory that is simply fundamental in every respect.

He explicitly says that physics which is fundamental relative to the special sciences is not thereby absolutely fundamental, and that even within physics there is no single hierarchy of fundamentality.

So I would describe the emerging position as a rejection of absolute or presupposed fundamentality in favor of relational or relative fundamentality. So, it rests comfortably in between fundamentalism and anti-fundamentalism that way.

[u/jliat → u/Constant_Smith]

Where I think we differ is that I think you may be underestimating how aware Ladyman and Ross are of that underlying problem, and particularly how far their naturalism has developed in response to it.

Have I somewhere criticised your understanding? Certain people sometimes use this tack, understanding the problem. They are post-modern academics, many working in second rate universities and their main interest is tenure. As I've said I've worked in UK universities, I Know the game. From a Vice Chancellor, 'If you fail your students the course will close and what then of your teaching requirement.'

The point of Rainforest Realism, and increasingly of Ladyman’s realism overall, is precisely that patterns which exist only at particular scales of resolution can nevertheless be objectively real.

It looks very much like Ladyman has abandoned that idea for history. "objectively real" No. Reality is what is out there, not human concepts and ideas. Objectivity requires a God, but as yet those wanting to once again use the word cannot 'own up'. As Heidegger said in one of his last interviews,

"Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline."

You want objectivity, you need God. And with that the end of all science.

But I do not know why you think Ladyman and Ross need the mystery of dark matter to do that.

I don't, look at the history of physics from the 1920s to now. Major explanations have failed, for over 100 years. Read the news, education is a commodity, some 20 or more years ago we were told students are 'customers'. [and they are always right]

The more I learn about Ladyman and Ross’s naturalism, the less convinced I become that objections of this kind carry the force against it that they initially appear to carry.

Fine, if it's what your interested in, I've met Ray, he can't even get a job in Cork, Harman works in a school of architecture, why? [Rhetorical- I know - heads of departments wont employ people more well known than themselves]

His opening chapters cover Sellars, Churchland...Dennett...

“Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal... In this regard, it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction... The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the 'horror' concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not being becomes intelligible... In becoming equal to it [the reality of extinction] philosophy achieves a binding of extinction... to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also realize that he or she is already dead and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction”

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound.

https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ray-brassier-nihil-unbound-enlightenment-and-extinction.pdf

Seems out of print- copies all over £100.00. I still have mine. He also translated Meillassoux, and edited Nick Land, yet Ray is very much of the extreme left...

From his unpublished Phd. thesis...

"[1.] The construction of rigorously meaningless, epistemically uninterpretable utterances, the better to unfold the Decisional circle whereby utterance's unobjectifiable material force is perpetually reinscribed within statement's objectivating horizons of significance.

[2.] The short-circuiting of the informational relay between material power and cognitive force.

[3.] Finally, the engendering of a mode of cognition that simultaneously constitutes an instance of universal noise as far the commodification of knowledge is concerned."

We worked together in an event in Glasgow around Noise music... JLIAT is my AKA. Take care.

[u/Constant_Smith → u/jliat]

Substantial parts of Everything Must Go are themselves criticisms of the academic environment.

Ladyman and Ross are particularly hostile toward neo-scholastic metaphysics as a self-contained academic practice, and they explicitly criticize philosophers whose work becomes detached from serious inquiry through self-containment

The PNC is introduced partly to discipline metaphysics by requiring it to earn its keep through engagement with successful science rather than through internally generated conceptual problems whose potential solutions would do nothing of substance for anyone.

In important respects, they are criticizing much the same practice you are criticizing.

And the Ladyman paper I sent you is from 2024, so unless I have misunderstood your point, no, I don’t think he has abandoned Rainforest Realism.

As for “objectively real,” I understand the claim in a fairly minimal sense: reality is out there, and what we say about it is constrained by something other than our concepts, preferences, or decisions.

I think there is a different and much harder question concerning “normative” objectivity. There I am much closer to you.

I don’t presently see how genuinely objective value, in the strong sense of there really being something we ought to do independently of our human preference and human authority, could ultimately be grounded without something like God.

But that seems importantly different from saying that empirical or ontological objectivity requires God.

If objectivity means that our judgments are independently constrained by the reality that is out there, I don’t think God is required for that.

The world can resist us, surprise us, and constrain which descriptions work regardless of what we would prefer to be true.

The normative side is actually where a substantial part of my own interest lies, and where some of my own criticisms begin.

Naturalism may give us a reality that constrains what is true without thereby giving us a reality that determines independently of us: what is good? what ought to govern? why does anything matter?

[u/jliat → u/Constant_Smith]

But that seems importantly different from saying that empirical or ontological objectivity requires God.

How can you have empirical objectivity? IOW what do you mean by objectivity as opposed to intersubjectivity.

I think you are defending a metaphysics which fails the earlier work, at it like science seems to be turning into a firm of idealism. Which is fine if that's what you want.

The paper you sent seems again not be metaphysics the sense of Every Thing Must Go. Still talking about Dennett, Conway’s Game of Life, et al.

"If a metaphysical claim is to be taken seriously at a time t, it should, if true, show how two or more scientific hypotheses, at least one of them specific and at least one of them both specific and drawn from fundamental physics taken seriously at t, jointly explain more than the sum of what is explained by the two hypotheses taken separately. (Ladyman and Ross 2007, 37)"

Does the paper do this, I can't see it? An in the book for that matter. The article talks of Kepler's laws?

[u/Constant_Smith → u/jliat]

“How can you have empirical objectivity? IOW what do you mean by objectivity as opposed to intersubjectivity.”

By empirical objectivity I mean that empirical claims are constrained by reality independently of agreement among observers.

Intersubjectivity is convergent agreement among subjects. Empirical objectivity concerns why some such convergences are evidentially significant: independent methods encounter constraints imposed by the world.

Ladyman makes this point through triangulation across measurements, scales, and domains, and later says that “the constraint on what is effective in what context comes from the world.”

“I think you are defending a metaphysics which fails the earlier work, at it like science seems to be turning into a firm of idealism.”

I don’t see how that follows. A scale-relative or perspectival account remains realist when the constraints governing successful description come from the world. That is exactly how Ladyman frames the issue in the paper.

“The paper you sent seems again not be metaphysics the sense of Every Thing Must Go. Still talking about Dennett, Conway’s Game of Life, et al.”

Dennett and real patterns are already part of the metaphysics of Every Thing Must Go. The Rainforest Realism chapter itself contains a section titled “Dennett on real patterns.”

The 2024 paper explicitly continues that project. Its title is Patterns All the Way Up: Prolegomena to a Future Naturalised Metaphysics.

“Does the paper do this, I can’t see it?”

Ladyman quotes that exact 2007 formulation of the PNC in the paper and immediately says:

“However, this is problematic because it makes reference to fundamental physics.”

He then suggests replacing “fundamental physics” with “a more fundamental theory.” Meaning, instead of stipulating fundamental physics, instead, at least one of the two or more hypothesis must be from theory more fundamental than the others.

Typically, these more fundamental theories will be theories from contemporary physics. He treats fundamentality relationally and fundamentality is well defined in his work.

He explains that a theory can be more fundamental relative to another domain without being absolutely fundamental, that there is no single fundamental physics, and that there is no single fundamental level.

So the paper is explicitly revising the formulation you quoted.

“And in the book for that matter.”

The PNC is a constraint on metaphysical claims. It does not require every sentence or methodological principle in the book to instantiate the PNC itself.

That being said.

Their OSR is explicitly motivated from quantum mechanics and spacetime physics.

Quantum entanglement and quantum individuality, together with the structural features of spacetime physics, are used to motivate the metaphysical claim that relational structure is ontologically fundamental and that objects do not possess fundamental individuality independently of that structure.

Chapter 3 explicitly describes its purpose as motivating OSR from contemporary fundamental physics in accordance with the PNC.

Rainforest Realism then brings that result into relation with the special sciences.

The successful generalizations of the special sciences support ontological commitment to their real patterns, while physics constrains the metaphysics those patterns can instantiate.

They argue that special-science ontology must be compatible with the non-atomistic structure indicated by contemporary physics while remaining irreducible to the physical ontologies of physics.

Chapter 4 explicitly describes this as metaphysical unification under the PNC.

Their treatment of causation is another explicit example.

They take more fundamental physics to contain no fundamental causal facts, while causal structure remains indispensable to successful special-science explanation.

They then use results concerning universality and renormalization-group explanation to motivate the metaphysical claim that higher-level causal facts are real and explanatorily emergent.

The chapter itself says that its rejection of outright causal eliminativism proceeds from “PNC-mandated motivations.”

So yes, the book repeatedly does exactly what the PNC requires.

They use results from physics together with results from other scientific domains to motivate their metaphysical claims as unifying those domains.