Ep. 336: Aristotle on Being and Non-Contradiction (Part Two)

0:07 Wes: Hey.

0:08 Mark: This is partially Examined Life, episode 336, part 2. So really the fourth weekly installment in our Aristotle Metaphysics series. We're continuing on book Gamma after an initial summary of the issues that we were going to be covering in this full discussion. We had gotten through what it is to study being qua being that it's about studying being. Something in particular that's about studying unity. The primary being is really what being is all about. And everything, whether it's descriptions about being or properties of being or anything else, pervasions of being, all those relate back to primary being. And that's why they're beings in the first place. So here we are now in chapter three of book Gamma. We're making this transition to talking about the principle of non contradiction.

0:54 Wes: So towards the end of section three, I think he's going to say, hey, okay, so we've discussed everything that falls under metaphysics. You know, we've established there is a science of metaphysics and we've established that what is it studying? It's studying substance. Now he's going to say, but it belongs to it to look at the principles of syllogism. And when I was younger, I was not prepared for what seemed like a. That left turn. Is left turn the right way to put it. That was surprising to me that he started wanting to do logic. But as Mark and I think Dylan as well have pointed out this, ultimately when he's talking about the law of non contradiction, he is going to be talking about a metaphysical principle.

So his reasoning for saying we're going to get into this is just that, you know, just a mathematician gives their axioms the things that they are going to start with that are most certain. So I think, like in geometry, for instance, right. The parallel postulate might be an example. Parallel lines will never meet for physics in contemporary terms, we might say conservation of energy and momentum, something like that. We have these fundamental principles for metaphysics. It's going to be the law of non contradiction. And despite the fact that we've pointed to the fact that this is going to end up being a metaphysical principle, it's the way things are.

It's not just about statements. Right. In contemporary terms, you'd think of this as a logical principle and maybe flowing from synonymy and truth about statements and things like that. But it's about statements. For Aristotle, it's about things. But the way he starts out is with a psychological principle. So I think there's actually a third way of thinking about this and it's through the lens of psychology. So that's his first formulation of this. It is impossible for anyone to believe the same thing to be and not to be as something Heraclitus says.

2:46 Mark: So we had raised in the first half, Is this going to be a epistemic principle? Is this going to be a metaphysical principle? Ultimately it's going to be metaphysical principle. But he sure discusses a lot in terms of knowledge and we have to arrive already knowing. So it's a priori knowledge, this principle of non contradiction before we even start talking about things.

3:07 Dylan: Well, there's a way in which he talks about it almost Kantian as a principle of non contradiction has to be true because it's a precondition for the possibility of reason. It's a precondition for the possibility of thinking itself. It's not even like that we know it a priori that we know that it's true. He talks about it for a bit as if the fact that we even think at all tells us that the principle of non contradiction is operating. That's one piece of the formulation of his demonstration by refutation. Right. As we've said, he doesn't believe it's possible to demonstrate it because it is a first principle. But the kinds of things that lead to it not being true are unacceptable. And among them is the idea that we wouldn't even it's a precondition for the possibility of reason.

3:54 Mark: I feel like, Dylan, you have in past discussions when this has come up, you have given the quote of Aristotle thinks that if you deny the principle of non contradiction, you're basically a plant.

4:02 Dylan: He says that himself.

4:05 Mark: It's a little more subtle than that, because what would be a plant is not speaking. He does have then later a sort of a reduction of if you say like everything everybody says is true, well, you're basically talking nonsense. You're basically not speaking. So you're basically a plant, but literally you're only a plant if you're just not speaking at all. And of course these people want to speak.

4:23 Wes: I'm going to back us up a little bit just to finish out section three, because I thought this was important, which is why I brought up his first formulation of the law of non contradiction is a psychological principle or logical, but what is possible for us to believe, because he thinks that that's a pretty clear thing that even his opponents will ultimately have to admit, because they'll have to admit that at least holds about the appearances the law of non contradiction. The way Section 3 ends is that he's going to argue for the psychological principle by assuming the metaphysical principle.

So his reasoning is that if you think of beliefs as properties of people, and you know that a thing can have contradictory properties, then you know that people can have contradictory beliefs. It's a really interesting way to start. So it's impossible the contrary attributes should belong at the same time to the same subject. Therefore it's impossible the contradictory opinions belong to the same human beings at the same time. This is the starting point. This is the axiom that starts things. And then he's going to get into, in, in section four.

He's going to start by telling us, okay, so now you're going to want me to prove the metaphysical principle, right guys? But I can. Even though I just proved the psychological principle from the metaphysical principle, you can't demand that I prove the metaphysical principle. There's not a demonstration of everything. We got to have something that we begin with some axiom, otherwise there'd be an infinite regress. But it can be demonstrated negatively and as Dylan points out, by showing that thought and signification are impossible without presupposing the metaphysical principle, and that if our opponent is trying to debate this issue with us, they are presupposing that thought and signification are possible.

So this is kind of a variation on the anti relativist argument in the Theaetetus, which is that the relativist right is also saying that their own relativistic theory is, is not true under some description. And in this case he thinks that if the opponent wants to argue with us about the law of non contradiction, they at least have to start out thinking that they can signify something to us.

6:34 Mark: Right? And we're going to get into more subtle, well, maybe they could be signifying something only in the world of appearance, not a real metaphysical thing.

6:43 Wes: He says one, signification is possible. We already have something definite. And I think, as Politis points out, the Greek word is horismos, which I really like. But Mark, you know, as you're pointing out, this foreshadows what he's going to get into later on in his argument against relativism. Because, because it comes down to whether we can say that there's something definite outside of us. And here he's saying that our opponents must assume definiteness, even if they deny it in the things themselves, they must admit it within the realm of discourse. And that's going to give him a lot of leverage. In other words, even if I deny that there are mind independent unities, I must say there are discursive unities otherwise, because that's a precondition of talking and

7:28 Dylan: thinking but this right here is going to be the wedge of whether or not it's effectively logical or discursive. That it may well be that this definiteness is an attribute of the way in which we speak. The fact of our speaking requires that to be true. But it's not necessarily the case that that's the way the world is. I mean, he's going to have to make an additional argument about that fact.

7:55 Mark: Right. We're just deluded. Speech is a human invention. It is just this construction that we as a group put together to make sense of a fundamentally chaotic, not understandable world.

8:07 Wes: His next step is to deduce determinacy in the things themselves from determinacy and signification and thought, which is pretty astonishing when you think about it. Right. Not something that Kant thought you could do, but Aristotle thinks you can. So this is where he starts into this proof of when you mean something, you mean one thing. If signification is possible.

8:32 Dylan: This is 1006A30, right?

8:34 Wes: Yeah. This is still the very beginning of four. Like the second page of four.

8:38 Dylan: Human being is two footed animal section.

8:41 Wes: Yes, yes. So man or human being. And he's using two footed animal, even though he knows that's not the essence of human being. He's just saying it doesn't matter what you say the essence or the definition is.

8:52 Dylan: Well, in fact, it's great that he uses an example that is not going to be true because it's illustrating his point.

8:58 Wes: Yeah, it doesn't need to be true. It's just that we need determinacy at this level. We don't need truth and we're not refuting our opponent based on the untruth of something they've said, but just based on their assumption that they can communicate at all. If signification is possible, then human being or man, anthropos means one thing. We get something determinant. And that one thing that it means under this example is two footed animal, which is to say it means that one thing for the person who's using the signifier as well. Anyway, the ultimate principle that we get out of this is one name, one meaning.

And if someone wants to say, well, words are ambiguous, things have different meanings all the time. And there's pragmatics and there's context. His response to that. Yes, but in principle we could just divide ambiguous words up into more granular signifiers and ultimately have this, you know, ideal language is really what he's talking about. And at the level of an ideal language, one signifier corresponds to one thing which is going to be important for the next step.

10:00 Dylan: Let me just read this is from the Tredennick. It's just. It's the one that's in the Loeb. He says, if on the other hand, it be said that man has an infinite number of meanings, obviously there can be no discourse, for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning. And if words have no meaning, then there is an end of discourse with others and even, strictly speaking, with oneself, because it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing. And even if this were possible, one name might be assigned to that of which we think. So when I read it in that way, part of me wants to say, well, of course we think of things.

To first doubt that just because you think of one thing in multiple ways doesn't mean you think of it as an infinite number of ways. So there's a kind of is to say, well, aren't you just catastrophizing Aristotle? You're saying if things can admit of more than one meaning and you say that immediately regresses into an infinite number of meanings. Aren't you just catastrophizing?

11:04 Wes: There's actually two steps to that argument. So he admits that words can be ambiguous, but then says does the ideal language step and says we could always just assign new words and resolve the ambiguity. What he's saying is if there were. If there were that type of ambiguity within the realm of discourse, then we wouldn't be able to signify. We wouldn't be able to use language either.

11:25 Mark: I feel like we are, though this sounds very reasonable. We have read a number of philosophers that are specifically arguing against this. And I'm trying to sum it up there. Whether it's Langer on metaphor or Wittgenstein, these folks that say no words are inherently vague. It's not possible to build an ideal language to further this. I don't have those arguments in full sort of ready to hand to say exactly which sentence here in Aristotle is wrong. But I feel like we would be lax if we don't say, yeah, there is another side to this. As obvious as this sounds, I don't know, do you guys remember anything specific that we can bring to bear to argue against what he's saying here point by point?

12:06 Wes: We accomplish a lot in language with pragmatics. And this goes to some of what Tomasello was saying. Context, right? If someone says, look at that bike and there's a whole bike rack, but one of them is bright pink, we know which bike is being pointed out. Even though just the fact that we're using universals. Right. Makes language inherently ambiguous. And to pick out particulars is not, as Russell thought. Right. Ultimately, we can't just do definite descriptions and all of that stuff, and we need pragmatics and language to do the work of picking out particulars. But I think part of Aristotle's point is that we do successfully pick out particulars to each other. But go ahead.

12:47 Mark: Can I add to that? Universal is supposed to be a metaphor. Right. I think that was Langer's point, that you're never actually picking out exact things. You're saying, these things are all like each other enough. And so with this word, I'm thus connoting other things. And it has, as Wittgenstein says, that structure of paradigm versus borderline case, that this is the way words are structured. When you're not referring to a specific thing you're talking about in a particular case, I am pointing out one individual. But a lot of times we are not just talking about individuals or we are talking about individuals qua.

13:20 Wes: To pick out a particular individual, I need to be able to pick out kinds or things that depend on kinds. This is part of his overall argument. There's no such thing as picking out particulars unless I can pick out essences. Even if bikes don't have essences, there's something on which they depend that do have essences. The ultimate point is, yeah, there must be something, some things that are actual unities and natural kinds and that could in principle be picked out, like H2O, even if we haven't already picked them out and ground our ability to pick them out at the phenomenal level.

And about that, I think he's entirely right that in order to make successful significations, we have to be able to deal with unities in some legitimate way. He hasn't gotten to the real world yet. Right. By the way, he's kind of accepting that we're only in the phenomenal realm of signification and appearances at this point. And he just wants to say there's determinacy, some sort of determinacy at work at that level, even though, yes, words are ambiguous and blah, blah, blah.

14:27 Dylan: What I find myself having to think through is the way in which uncertainty and ambiguity are preserved, even though he's making claims about underlying determinism and signification. Right. So when I say something like, there's something definite out there, let's just say looking out in a landscape.

14:47 Wes: Right.

14:47 Dylan: It may be that I'm just confused. I don't Know what the differences in the colors are, for instance, what they correspond to. That process is, you know, I have entities out there that I'm getting different colors from, but I still don't know what's going on. I don't know what those things are. And I wouldn't even presume to say that those are things, individual things, necessarily, or whatever. So I could still be in this state of ambiguity. And it's trying to think through that kind of thing when I'm reading Aristotle that I have to try to parse out, because I don't believe that he's saying that everything in the world is certain or that I know everything.

Now it has to do with. But I'm still trying to, even with his examples, get my grip on the experience of not understanding the experience of changing my mind or refining what I know about the world, even changing what entities are which entities. All of that happens. And it doesn't seem that Aristotle would deny any of that. In fact, with the way he talks about Heraclitus would be in this way. Heraclitus is talking about something that exists, but he's not talking about it in the right way.

15:56 Wes: I think at this stage of the argument. I mean, those points are very well taken. At this stage of the argument, we're still only within the realm of signification and appearance, and none of it need be true. We're not talking about what's true. We're talking about what makes meaning possible. You know, in Kantian terms, you might want to say the grounds for the possibility of experience or thinking or signification. And for Aristotle, one of the fundamental grounds is that not all words be hopelessly ambiguous. And so I think there's a good thought experiment here.

What if human being were hopelessly ambiguous? Would we be able to communicate? And the answer is no. So even if you think you know his whole stipulation, One name, one meaning is his big rule. One name, one meaning. If we're speaking in terms of the ideal language, no infinite ambiguity and no in principle, irreducibility to more granular words. One name, one meaning. Even if you think he's wrong about that, you have to agree that we would could not communicate if names were hopelessly ambiguous.

16:55 Mark: Well, I'm not sure if this clarification is necessary. But you just said it doesn't matter yet if what we're saying is true. However, truth itself is still presupposed. It will be either true or false. It's just we don't know if this particular thing I'm saying right now is true, but the enterprise of truth is presupposed.

17:13 Wes: That's a really good point because we don't get determinacy unless the enterprise of truth is presupposed.

17:18 Mark: I'm thinking about was it Davidson that was saying most of the things we say to each other have to be true for communication to take place? Right. If we were always lying to each other all the time, no one would learn language in the first place.

17:31 Wes: How do we get from this to the world? This is like. This looks a lot like a transcendental argument. It's even more robust than a transcendental argument. We just got something now true about meaning and signification. And now he's going to say by implication, law of non contradiction holds for the realm of signification, and determinacy holds for that. And now we're going to get that for the world. And the basic idea is that signification is about the world. So if the realm of signification and thought are determinant and they're about the world, then the world is determinant as well. And the law of non contradiction applies to the world as well. So it's not just one name, one meaning anymore, it's one meaning, one thing. So, yeah, does that seem right? That seems a little fishy. It rests on the idea of intentionality and aboutness.

18:19 Mark: This is why I brought up the Davidson thing, is because it's not just that the truth enterprise has started, it's that the things that we're actually saying are true in that they are related to metaphysically real things. That's what I was assuming by there is a presumption of connectivity between terms and things, real things.

18:40 Wes: Right. At this stage, I was saying at the previous stage, this is the next very discrete step in the argument, the aboutness step. So we already got one name, one meaning. Now we say, but signification is about the world. Therefore, if signification is determinant, the world is determinant as well. So he'll say, right, if there be a single meaning, it must be about a single particular, a single reference.

19:05 Mark: It seems like it is one in the same claim. I mean, definitely read the quote in a second that if I say that my word right now definitely refers to a thing, then it doesn't seem like I'm adding any more information to say, and that thing has to be a definite thing. If it wasn't, then how could I refer to it? Am I spelling out the reasoning or are those just one in the same claim that I'm making? A relation claim. And then I'm making a claim about the nature of one of the relata, one of the things related. But that was already implied by the relation claim.

19:34 Wes: No, because a meaning.

19:35 Dylan: Right.

19:35 Wes: When he said one name, one meaning. The meaning isn't necessarily the referent out there in the world. The meaning is just the mean. You know what we mean.

19:42 Mark: Oh, you're saying. You're thinking Aristotle had a notion of a distinction between sense and reference.

19:46 Wes: This is sense and reference. This is entirely. Yeah, no, I mean, he has to be saying that. That's why he's using a definition. The meaning of man is two footed animal. He wants to think of things in terms of synonymy at this point, staying within the realm of signification, because the next step is to go from there to the real world. So let's look at. This is on page 87. Let's see if I can find the relevant.

20:12 Mark: And are you now doing the Loeb, Dylan? So we're not doing.

20:14 Dylan: I have the Sachs. I have the. I have the Loeb up here.

20:17 Wes: And I thought, so this is in 1006B somewhere. So he'll say, let it be assumed then, as was said at the beginning, that the name has a meaning and has one meaning. It is impossible then that being a man should mean precisely not being a man. Okay, actually I'm a little too early on this.

20:32 Dylan: That's 106B10. Yeah.

20:34 Wes: But let me just continue reading. I think I'm a little. I'm a little too early here, but if man not only signifies something about one subject, but also has one significance, for we do not identify having one significance with signifying about something about one subject. Okay, this is actually a very complicated paragraph, since on that assumption, even musical and white and man would have had one significance. So all things should have been one, for they would have all had the same significance.

21:02 Mark: So I was trying to figure out why my translation does not have the word musical in it anywhere. That should not depend on which translation one was using.

21:11 Dylan: Yeah, I don't even remember that. Cultured is the translation in Tredennick.

21:17 Wes: Yeah. This is the paragraph where I think he's saying that signifiers correspond to particular reference in the world. This is the paragraph where I think he's breaking out. But it requires a lot of work to see that he says, let's assume one name has one meaning. We've already said that. But man not only signifies something about one subject. Right. The subject is the hupokeimenon, which he ultimately identifies with the substance with the particular so when you see the word subject, you should think particular.

21:46 Mark: I see no instances of the word subject. In Sachs, probably.

21:50 Wes: What's his word for hupokeimenon? A substrate.

21:54 Mark: No, I just can't identify where you're

21:56 Wes: 1006b, B10B20B11, 12, 13. That's the paragraph 11,006.

22:05 Mark: Now, it is not possible that being human should mean just exactly not being human, if human being not only signifies something belonging to one thing, but also one meaning. So one thing is that what he's using instead of substance. For we do not regard what belongs to one thing as having one meaning, since in that way, even educated, white and human, so educated is musical, there would mean one thing, so that all things would be one, since they are synonymous. So thing.

22:32 Wes: So Sachs is translating hupokeimenon as thing, which is what I just tried to encourage us to see the subject as the particular. So thing as in the particular, the particular referent now is what we're talking about.

22:46 Mark: I want some really analytic translator to be. Just use X for someone. X. That's right.

22:54 Wes: In other words, if man not only signifies something about one subject, which is to say one particular, but also has one significance. Right. So the has one significance. We've already said one name, one meaning. Now we're going to say one name, one subject, one thing, one particular, one. Hupokeimenon. I think the fundamental assumption here is, again, it's aboutness. It's that when we signify something, we can't do away with it being about something in the world. And if determinacy applies to the realm of significance, then it must translate into determinacy at the realm of reality.

23:29 Mark: Sounds good.

23:30 Wes: You're just going to take that on stipulation? This paragraph is horrifically complicated, and it took me a very long time to puzzle it out.

23:38 Mark: But my whole note on it is if white means the same thing as human being, then all things would be one, period.

23:46 Wes: Well, what he's saying there. So this is kind of a crazy objection he's anticipating. He's saying one thing, one particular. But that doesn't mean that there's just only one particular in the world. It's not that all meanings have to be about a single particular. Let's just read them. For we do not identify having one significance with signifying something about one subject, since on that assumption, even musical and white and man would have one significance, so that all things would. Would have been one. So he's not saying that any different meaning you might want to grab onto ultimately has the same referent. And maybe he's taking that to be an implication of the law of none, contradiction or determinacy. Right.

24:33 Mark: Looking forward, he does seem like whenever you deviate from what I, Aristotle, am saying, you end up with sort of a parmenidean. There is only one possible subject of everything, and it has all possible predicates, including those that contradict each other, which

24:49 Wes: is not apart from the contradiction part. Right. That's a Spinozan picture. It's not a bad idea per se, to say that all is one and you just have one big substance and everything is an accident on top of that. That's actually not a terrible idea, just like the unmoved mover is not a terrible idea. But Aristotle is going to concentrate on the particular sensible objects in the natural world. Yes. They get to be substances. We don't need them to be barnacles on the body of God.

25:17 Mark: These people that deny it, they do away with thinghood. They do away what it is for something to be. So again, it's all God. It's all just one big wash of. There's no things. Those are all just the veil of Maya.

25:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean, at this point, if man and not man signify the same thing, which is to say they're essentially synonymous. This is still on page, the same page, at least in my translation, then man and not man will be the same thing in reality as well. This is actually next step in the argument. If we say that one name one meaning and then one meaning, one particular. Well, among the meanings are essences, essence descriptions or natural kind descriptions, like men. Those natural kind descriptions are the things that pick out particulars. They pick out real unities.

And if we assume that we can attribute those contradictories to things, then we get indeterminacy in reality. Man and not man will be the same thing in reality as well. They'll apply to the same particular even though they signify different things. And so ultimately you do away with particularity altogether if you assume them. So if you assume you can apply two different essences or essence and indication of essence to a single particular, what collapses is particularity. But we've all. We've already seen that there must be determinacy in the world for it to be in language.

26:42 Mark: Are we up to protagoras? That is where we are in my notes. But maybe you took many more notes than I did.

26:50 Wes: Yeah. You can't respond, it's not a man, it's a white man type of stuff. It's so absurdly complicated I don't mind skipping that where he tells his opponent, you're not allowed to say that unities are just the thing with its accidental property. And that's a different thing than the thing. And so we can fast forward a few pages and get to what the point that you were just making, which is that if there is no law of non contradiction at a metaphysical level, there's no essences and therefore there's no unities and no particulars, no determinacy, all properties are accidental, and so there's no underlying particulars for our signifiers to be of. And signification fails.

27:30 Mark: Whereas Protagoras, the relativist, right man is the measure of all things. Everybody's right, hey, to me that thing looks like a battleship. To you, that looks like a human being. Well, it is true that to me it is a battleship. It is true that to you it is human being. So I think Aristotle wants to acknowledge that, okay, the subjective fact. It is the case that there is a psychological experience of you calling this a battleship and the other person calling it a human being. But someone is wrong, obviously. And the way that we can tell is that we're both referring to the same thing and we're referring to with contrary properties.

And this would again violate its thinghood. How could it both be in the same respect and at the same time? Not just it appears as a battleship, it's just a dude who's doing, you know, a shadow puppet of a battleship. And that's why it appears as a battleship. It literally is a battleship, and yet literally is not a battleship. We've now broken thing.

28:26 Wes: Where are you now? You're in section 5 is the beginning of section 5.

28:30 Mark: 10 7b 20 is where Protagoras is brought up. So this is still chapter four. I think I'm anticipating where the Protagoras is also mentioned at the very beginning of five. Yes. So this is where it got a little interesting to me is arguing that the principle of non contradiction actually applies when he's already said that it has to be presupposed for any discussion to take place is not interesting. And you know, it's interesting that he feels the need to go on for further pages going on about this. But it does get interesting to me where he says, hey, you relativists, you know, you think you have some sophisticated other version of, you know, but really what you're just stating is straight, flat up contradictions. And whether this is a charitable take on relativism or whether there is a different version of Relativism, that would be not so easy to knock down. That is interesting to me.

29:23 Wes: Yeah, it's a little confusing because at this point, the way we're ending this section before we get to the straight head on attack on relativism is right. Yes. If contradictory statements can be true, then all will be one. The same thing could be a trireme, could be a wall, could be men. You can basically affirm a denying anything of anything. Therefore everything would be indeterminate. And that's where he mentions Protagoras. The idea is that the world is fundamentally indeterminate is the view that he's attributing to Protagoras, which is why you could have things at the phenomenal level being true or true.

For me, there's two different versions of that. But you could say the phenomena are all true, and they're all true simply because they don't latch onto the world in the way into. Onto a determinant world in the way that I've said, the world is indeterminate and therefore. Yeah, you don't need. Then at the level of signification, we can say what we want, or you could say neither. He goes into that little hypothetical where they might want to say not just that it's both P and not P, or that, you know, things can be. Have two contradictory qualities that things in themselves are neither.

Right. There just are no properties as we conceive of them for things in themselves. Which is a idea that historically philosophy will take very seriously.

30:36 Mark: Sure. Is this red or not red? Well, in itself it is neither thing that it is a fact that some people experience red, but it is not red because some people experience it, it is red. And that causes people with normal faculties to experience it as red. And so epistemologically, our task is to figure out what constitutes normal. We don't ask the insane person, we don't ask the blind person, is that red? We ask somebody whose faculties we think give them the normal relation that would connect their perceptions to things.

31:10 Wes: The ancient skeptics are concerned about all the stuff about, you know, things look different, they seem to have different colors at a different distance. So the color is nothing in itself. And the way we would explain it, right, is light, which when it hits our eyes, gives us experiences of color. But it's not. It doesn't itself have color. It just has different frequencies or wavelengths. So on our account, right, on the kind of modern science, it would still be that the things in themselves are determinant and their determinacy explains the determinacy of the qualia.

But for someone like Protagoras, it's the case not just that things in themselves are neither red nor not read as qualitatively we experience it, but the things themselves are not anything. You know, they're not this wavelength or that wavelength or whatever thing in itself explanation you might want to give. You have real fundamental indeterminacy when it comes to the things themselves. Or maybe there just are no things themselves. Maybe everything is inside the text, as everything is just as text, as Derrida would put it. Before we get into the section on relativism, Section 5, he does one last little thing, which is that very common argument in ancient philosophy, which is that people who say they deny the law of non contradiction behave as if it's true because they behave as if it's true at the level of the normative.

They don't just walk over a precipice, right? Because the precipice might be called the canyon next to the precipice might just be called a green pasture. They act as if they know that some things are this way and some things are not this way. And so if they're normative evaluations, some things are good and some things are not. If they're normative evaluations admitted the law of non contradiction and our normative evaluations in practice require application to descriptive statements, right? This is a precipice. This isn't. Then they have to implicitly believe that the law of contra non contradiction holds for descriptive statements as well.

33:06 Dylan: This is a version of so you think gravity is just a text, go jump out the window is a version of that argument.

33:14 Wes: All right, section five.

33:16 Mark: Yeah, I feel like I said this. If all opinions and appearances are true, it is necessary that all things be at the same time both true and false. And if this is so, all opinions must be true, right? People who are wrong and those who right believe things opposite to each other. It's not just that my opinion and your opinion can coexist, because part of my opinion is that I think my opinion is right and yours is wrong. Yours that seems to contradict it is wrong. And so if we say we're both right, then I'm right about you being wrong and you're also right about your being right. It's a blatant contradiction.

33:49 Wes: The way he starts five is he wants to say the truth of the law of non contradiction is intimately related to this doctrine of Protagoras, which says that all opinions are true, which is that all Appearances are true in a sense, which is not entirely crazy, because when we think about the wine being sweet or not sweet, it's not crazy if you've already gone to this whole secondary property move. You're not healthy right now, you're sick. The wine tastes bitter to you, or whatever it is. The wine tastes sweet to me because I'm in a healthy state.

Is one of those. Is there such a thing as sweet in itself? No. The appearance of sweetness for me is true. The experience of not sweetness for you is true. That's the Protagorean insight. Aristotle has a more robust response coming up to that later. But what he's going to say is that's very intimately related. That idea is very intimately related to whether or not the metaphysical principle of the law of non contradiction holds. So what he says here is that even though we can't disprove the law of non contradiction, what we can do is we can show people why this Protagorean doctrine, why it's unnecessary and not needed and involves some confusions.

And if we do that, then we take away entirely the motivation for saying that the law of non contradiction doesn't hold. So why did Protagoras think this? Well, change. They look at the sensible world, see that things are changing.

35:11 Dylan: This gets down to 1010 a is because seeing all nature around us in motion, while about what is changing, nothing is true, or at least does not admit of being true about what is wholly changing. And that is just a crazy sentence.

35:26 Wes: Well, you're reading 1010 A. What?

35:28 Dylan: 1010 A 10.

35:29 Wes: My favorite.

35:30 Dylan: Yeah. So he says the beginning of this paragraph is the cause of their opinion. So people like Protagoras, right, Is that they are inquiring into the trut. But they assumed that the only beings were perceptible things. But among these, the nature of the indeterminate is heavily present and the sort of being that we describe. So basically, I mean, Wes just said the reason for this is because of change, that when we look out on the world, it is true that you can't deny that someone who says the wine is sweet, another one says the wine is bitter.

You can't deny that they're both saying something true in the sense of their processing of their perceptions in the same way that any number of other perceptions, and that also the world is changing from one thing to another. So he goes on and refers to Cratylus and Heraclitus talking about not only can you not step in the same river twice, but he also believes it's not possible to step in the same river once. And so then.

36:27 Wes: Yeah, I love that. I just love that sentence.

36:30 Dylan: The next paragraph is where he takes this on and he says, basically, you're misunderstanding the way things are changing or what we mean by change. So we will say in response to this argument, there is some reason for them to believe that what is changing, when it is changing, does not have being. It is, however, something disputable. Since a thing that is losing something has some of what it is losing. And the thing must already be something of what it is becoming. So the first point he's going to make is that, yeah, okay, I see what you kind of mean by look, if you think about this for a second, anything that's changing has to be a kind of middle term, right?

Has to be the middle term from what it was before. And it has to be a middle term to what it's going to become. And that fact points to there being a being there that is undergoing change. And in general, if something is being destroyed, there will be present something that is. And if something is coming into being, there must be something out of which it is coming into being and something by which it is generated. And this cannot go on to infinity. Let us say this, that to change in quantity is not the same as to change what sort of thing something is.

So letting something not stay constant with respect to size, we still recognize everything on account of form.

37:43 Mark: On account of its form. Yeah, we recognize. So this thing about the indeterminate being in the phenomenal realm, this was unclear to me because the way we've been talking about it is, you know, I perceive it as sweet, you perceive it as bitter. What it actually is, is indeterminate. But that would put the indeterminate not in the phenomenal realm. It would refer to the phenomenal realm, the sweetness and the bitterness. But to say it's not that everything we perceive we pick out as a particular substance. There really is a lot of, you know, the blooming, buzzing confusion that we're just struggling to carve out some things, to identify some things.

And the fact that so much of it is chaotic and we can't name it doesn't really mean anything metaphysically. This is why Plato was so down on perception, that it's just the shadows and it's just a bunch of bullshit. We gotta think. Although I think Aristotle does also make the point later in here that strictly speaking, right, sort of the point, that it's the judgments that are wrong. As you said earlier, Wes, I think, you know, the perceptions. It is true that I'm having this bitter qualia, it's true that I'm having the sweet qualia. It's only when I say this wine is bitter that I'm speaking falsely because actually the wine is sweet.

It's just my taste buds suck right now and I'm not getting the sweetness right.

38:57 Wes: And the Protagorean phenomenalist quote, unquote, as Politus says, although it's a little bit misleading, but they can admit that the law of non contradiction holds at the level of the appearances, right? It can't be sweet for me and not sweet at the same time in the same respect. So at that level we could admit that there's something to the law of non contradiction. But the Protagoreans want to say is that okay, that's fine, but it doesn't. And therefore we can speak about things. Significance works because of that. But that doesn't mean that it holds at the level of the things themselves. Things themselves are actually indeterminate, which explains why two people could disagree.

39:35 Mark: Can I just say, I would love if wine supertasters could make metaphysical discoveries that like we have both determined that this wine has a nutty aroma, but yet in the same respect does not have a nutty aroma. The law of contradiction of the phenomenal realm is false.

39:51 Wes: Full bodied but not full bodied. Hey, it's the latest thing. Only the best people drink this wine.

39:57 Dylan: At the end of five he says that. So in general, if all there is is what is perceptible, nothing would be if there were not beings with souls, since there would be no sense perception. This is 4. The perception itself is surely not of itself, but there's something else besides the perception which must be prior to the perception and for what causes motion is prior by nature to what is moved. And even if these things are meant relative to one another, this is nonetheless so. So he here is saying that I was trying to decide if it's a different response to Protagoras than what was said earlier or if it's effectively just a summary of it that look, when we have perceptions, they are going to be perceptions of something.

The perceptions aren't the primary thing and that is a better account for the blooming buzzing confusion of the world in terms of perceptions is that yes, the perceptions can be different for different people and different times, but they are perceptions of something.

40:58 Wes: He's making two different points here. One is that if only the appearances exist, this is like a Cartesian or even a Moorean moment. This Type of thing always makes me think of Moore and Wittgenstein, Moorean propositions. If only the appearances exist, then what about the person to whom the appearances are? What about the perceiver? What about the faculty of sense? What is the ontological status of that? You're assuming that. You're just assuming that exists. You're assuming that's an entity, but that would have to be reducible to an appearance as well.

The perceiving receptacle of appearances would also just be an appearance to another. So you have to postulate something that's not an appearance. You're awfully uncertain that there's a world of things out there, but you're awfully comfortable saying there are these things called perceptions, experiencing entities. Why are you so Hegel Again, doubt the doubt. Why are you so certain about that but not about what's out there? And then the second point is that even if right there were a world with no perceiving subjects, it would be crazy to say that the substrata that potentially would cause sensations in a perceiving subject, that they don't exist.

In other words, it's a whole anti Berkeleyan thing. Just because the perceivers disappear doesn't mean that the things themselves must disappear. Because when there are perceivers, when there is some kind of entity that's capable of having sensations, they have to be of something. The whole concept of perception doesn't make any sense. Politus calls this his causal theory. Of what? Causal theory of perception or something like that. But basically we need to latch onto the idea that if there is such a thing as perceptions in a perceiving entity, and let's say human beings, we can't make sense of those unless we think of them as caused by an external object or as being of an intentional object, however you want to put it.

42:51 Mark: Well, I'm a little mad at Politis, the author of the Routledge, for having a name that sounds like a Roman commentator or something. They cannot not clear that we're just talking about contemporary interpretation. I've been looking at the remaining sections because we read all the way to the end of Gamma, you know, goes through chapter eight and it seems like it is mostly just repeating things that we have already said. There's a more of a focus on truth specifically. But I'm still not actually in the parts that I pulled out as relevant quotes or as paraphrase is. I'm not seeing any real additional points being made. Is there anything that you feel like we just absolutely need to say about Gamma before we get out of here.

43:30 Wes: I mean, we already skipped so much. There's, like, a knot in my stomach with how much we skipped, but that's the nature of this. Maybe we can close read some of it, but he does a thing about excluding the middle, but.

43:41 Mark: Oh, I hated that part. Go ahead.

43:44 Wes: We don't need to do that. We don't. Yeah.

43:45 Dylan: I think we covered it. And it's true that it has this kind of richness that as you pull on it, the more it continues to give back to you and be interesting. And the Routledge does a really good job of going through that, helping out with it.

44:00 Wes: This is blowing my mind. I mean, this is really changing the way. I mean, I really wanted to get into this because I've been thinking a lot about essence and mind independence and all that stuff, but this is. Yeah, this is amazing. Coming back to Aristotle after doing a lot of other philosophy and looking at it in light of that, it's just like, wow, I did not get how awesome this was when I read it when I was 17. It was just completely confusing and a lot of it over my head.

44:27 Mark: Why did we not do this five years ago? It's because I think you, Wes, were like, oh, ethics, politics. That's what people are interested in. This metaphysics stuff. Yeah, fine. Like, non Western stuff. We'll do one metaphysical thing every two years or every year or whatever, mostly. And now you just can't get enough of it. Now it seems like.

44:47 Wes: Like Protagoras. I was an idiot back then.

44:53 Dylan: So we're doing Zeta next, right?

44:55 Wes: We're doing seven. Yeah, seven is Zeta.

44:57 Mark: Okay. All right, so extra credit if you read the in between parts, but I don't necessarily want to do that. I at least spent more time with the Routledge this time. I mean, it was three full chapters. I did not read all three, but I read enough of the first two, you know, to see. Okay, I could see how one could really make a meal of this. And I think, Wes, this is exactly what. That you completely succumb to. I will very much make a meal of this. Whereas I feel like I'm taking Aristotle a little more at its word, you know, that he's. He's pretty brief, you know, and I think rightly so in some of these.

45:31 Wes: I don't think you need the Routledge. I mean, I think the Routledge is very simple and repetitive. And if you almost want someone to knock this and clear, you could tell

45:42 Dylan: he's read a lot of Aristotle. He has a very aristotelian. Way of writing, actually.

45:47 Wes: Yeah. But I think once you do a little bit of the Routledge, I think you're often running and you know where Aristotle is coming from. And this is all pretty decipherable on its own terms. And Aristotle, yes, is so much more succinct than Politis.

45:59 Mark: Yeah, but just like it's like a

46:01 Wes: hundred pages to describe 24.4pages.

46:04 Mark: Like the distinction between the logical law of non contradiction and the metaphysical law of non contradiction.

46:09 Wes: Important.

46:10 Mark: I don't know if I'd really parse those apart considered. Why are these so different? I think I might have used that distinction against people, the logic bros, the objectivists who law of non contradiction, A equals A. This just shows that you're wrong and we reflect on that. No, no, these are logical tools. They're tools of argumentation. Garbage in, garbage out. It only gets you from premises to conclusion. It doesn't actually say anything about the world in itself. But Aristotle is saying. And this is where, you know, Ayn Rand got the idea reading Aristotle that no, it actually applies to the things themselves. And it's not just, you know, us talking about things.

46:48 Wes: So. And constitutes their mind independent determinacy, which is a really important idea.

46:53 Dylan: Reminds me of Moore, just is the kind of argument. Moore is making a very similar argument there.

46:58 Wes: So. And they're right. Say it again. They are right.

47:03 Mark: I think maybe instead of another close read a part 3. Going more into these particular pages, trying to do a little. What I was referring to of wait, let's pull back in Wittgenstein and Langer and anybody else that seems like a relativist in some sense and put it against this and think hard, you know, in a nightcap sort of format. Maybe this is the time. Maybe when we're done with Aristotle's metaphysics is the time. But I would like to. Often when we read those revolutionary thinkers, we don't know exactly what they're reacting to. Maybe they're reacting to a much simpler, dumber version of realism and Objectivism than we're seeing in Aristotle. So how do we make these sophisticated thinkers actually talk to each other? You know, preferably without rereading a whole bunch of stuff.

47:48 Dylan: I think it's a great idea, Mark.

47:50 Wes: We should do a talk show with AI versions of these guys.

47:56 Mark: ChatGPT writes the Nightcap.

47:59 Dylan: I think it would be worth. We'd have to figure out how to organize it, but a kind of reflection on it. Right. I mean, one of the fun things about Aristotle is he's engaging with his previous predecessors and contemporaries. And as we pointed out, these conversations, these disagreements aren't new. They persist till now. You know, they're representatives contemporarily for these positions. And I suspect myself that they end up answering slightly different questions or making slightly different points for one another. But I think it'd be great to go and try to. We won't be able to sum it up, we won't be right. But to reflect on it.

48:39 Mark: But we've never like read Rorty and say, wow, Rorty's actually denying the principle of non contradiction. Of course he's not denying the principle of non contradiction. He's doing something much more subtle. And so if Aristotle's only concerned maybe, or if Aristotle's, you know, characterization of relativism is so dumb, is that, you know, and maybe this is just what Protagoras himself was this dumb, that he did not have the sophistication of a Pirsig or a Rorty or something that really Aristotle was entirely correct, maybe in drawing this straight line to. From relativism to denial of non contradiction.

49:12 Wes: I actually don't think the Protagorean thing is dumb. And so I. There are good reasons to say we don't know. Not only that we don't know the things in themselves, but that maybe they're not determinant. So I don't think that Aristotle is just caricaturing the opposition. He's saying, yeah, the world. I mean, right. This whole idea of things are changing and influx. It drove Plato to his position as well. Right. And that position has its own implausibilities that Aristotle doesn't like. These guys are wrestling with a very difficult problem. And these are all live options.

49:43 Dylan: It's an indication of how live the option is that he spends so much time on.

49:46 Mark: Right. I don't know if he's charitable, but he certainly is after saying we can't actually prove this at all. We just have to assume it is a basis of things. And which is, I think what I came away remembering from last time, that, okay, there's an end to all inquiry. And I think someone like Russell maybe is satisfied with that, that you just can't go beyond a certain point. But the fact that he then goes on to spend this amount of time on this means he's definitely going through these motions in a way that I don't know how well we've motivated to listeners. How necessary if I title this defending the principle of non contradiction, like how many listeners are going to be like, oh, gosh, I got to get in and really see what that defense would be.

50:25 Wes: Is reality determinant or something like that? This idea that determinacy within signification and thought imply determinacy within reality, within a mind independent reality, which is a very Moorean argument, is profound. And if it's right, it gets us out of this little phenomenal bubble or prison, right. That many people tend to think that we're in. We're just operating according to conceptual schemes and social constructions and this and that. And reality is, you know, nothing in itself, or at least it's not knowable. All that stuff. This gets us out of that, if it's right.

So that's the central idea. The fact that we can have determinant signification and talk to each other and think about things is actually a good indication of what reality of the determinacy within reality. Hegel will say, right, that we know the world best when we know our own minds, when we know ourselves. If we want to say that, you know, as Kant said, that the categories are these constructing elements of the understanding and blah, blah, blah, well, then by looking at the structure of our own thinking, we're getting to the very bottom of things.

We're not getting farther away from things by looking at our thinking. We are getting to the foundation of things. We're getting to the ontology of the things. Those two things are. The subject and object are very closely related at some level.

51:47 Mark: Well, I'm not giving a closing because we're doing more of this book next time, and I want to do the nightcap and blah, blah, blah. So, Dylan, anything else?

51:54 Dylan: I'm not gonna say anything else.

51:56 Mark: You're just a plant, Dylan. You're like a plant. So silent. All right, so long, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this. We will stop doing Aristotle eventually. Please don't completely tune out. We love your suggestions.

52:09 Wes: This is amazing. I don't understand how you.

52:11 Mark: Yeah, I'm just being preemptively defensive. And, and. But the people I'll be defensive about that did not get to the end of this episode. So there's no. There's no point in my actually voicing this. But yes, do email us peltiallyexaminedlife.com what should we do after this? I already have an idea of the next long thing said.

52:28 Wes: We want to do that book on essentialism and science.

52:31 Mark: We got a couple short things. And then I just raised like maybe Kafka or something, you know, something completely unrelated to metaphysics. Anyway, we can talk more offline about what the next big thing is, whether we want to throw some non Western.

52:44 Dylan: I think the trial might be related, related to metaphysics and perception, actually.

52:49 Mark: All right, come back. Come back and see that. Follow us on social media. Make some comments on this episode either at the blog post associated with it or on social media. We love to hear from you. Peltiallyexaminedlife.com Good night, everybody.

53:03 Dylan: Good night.

53:04 Wes: Good night.