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p.11 Aristotle defined the function of what we now call metaphysics... It is to define the meaning of reality, what it is to be real.
[JLJ - The real is perhaps what we ought to concern ourselves with, in order to 'go on'. In this way, certain 'things' become real - such as the Dow Jones index or the inflation rate, because they become part of our practical efforts to 'go on.' Notice how the things we 'ought' to concern ourselves with is a matter of opinion. Therefore, perhaps what is real is a matter of opinion. The problem is that our human nature likes to categorize things, perhaps out of necessity, in order to develop notions of the driving forces, in order to play them out, in order to 'go on.' Ironically, we must imagine, in order to 'go on' practically within the real. What is factually real does not necessarily help us to determine how to best 'go on', within the real.]
p.11 an important metaphysical problem, the distinction between what is sometimes called the phenomenon or that which appears, and the noumenal or fundamentally real object.
p.12 Aristotle says you can't get on in the world without recognizing the difference between the actual and the possible... Haven't the possibilities some sort of quasi-reality? ...It is an issue as to what reality possibilities possess. Aristotle found that they have a great deal of reality about them.
[JLJ - Perhaps, expanding on my own comments from p.11 above, things become real when they become a part of, or can impact, your scheme to 'go on.' A consideration of the possibilities is a practical necessary to effectively 'go on', so in a sense, they totter on the verge of reality.]
p.13 Metaphysics is concerned with what you mean by the term reality, or what it is to be real.
[JLJ - Many people have happy successful lives without concerning themselves obsessively with what is real. What is real impacts your scheme to go on, but does not substitute for a scheme, or immediately reduce to a scheme. Concerning yourself with what is real is a necessary part of life, but should be done so as part of a scheme to go on, which calls for this action. Consider playing a video game, such as Doom 2016. Is this game real? Well no, but what if you desire to play the game and conduct the mission? Well, you now have to concern yourself with what is real in the game, but as part of a scheme to go on, which involves scheming to solve the puzzles and obstacles, and of course, acquiring ammunition, weapons, keys, and of course, killing the 'demons' whenever or wherever necessary or practical. My point is that the practical scheme to go on should call for paying attention to certain cues, and not so much to others, and this can happen even in the 'unreal' environment of a video game.]
p.18 I desire to show you that you yourself have some of the characters that may be said to belong to a group of men.
p.19 The so-called individual man is in certain respects a social group. He consists of various selves. Anybody is more or less a multiple personality.
[JLJ - ...perhaps because it is the internal conversation which best helps us to determine how to 'go on.']
p.19 You must remember a past life, you must look forward to a future life... every man has a past life and future as an essential part of him.
[JLJ - Yes, but it is best to think of this observation on human nature as being part of the input to us deciding how to 'go on.']
p.20 In view of what I have so far done and undertaken and of the present situation, hereupon I proceed to the next, to adjust myself to the future.
p.20 The self is a being who just now connects its past with its future... In any case, the self consists at any moment, if it is active, of an attempt to bring its past into a coherent connection with its future... I call the self a social group for excellent reasons. These three selves are constantly communicating with each other... Every man is a society of at least three selves
[JLJpast - This note is from the past JLJ - we are ignoring the important comments that we have previously made.
JLJpresent - No we are not - we are simply adding to them, that is all.
JLJfuture - The two of you are wasting (your? our?) time. No one will read anything you (we?) have written anyway. Why not just watch cat videos on youtube?
JLJ - Do you see what I have to put up with?]
p.23 the thisness of the this
[JLJ - Welcome to philosophy, where anything goes.]
p.25 A self is a self by virtue of some coherence of a plan.
p.25 There is no ideal activity of man which is too lofty to be interpreted by a community of interpretation.
p.29 What has mind is real.
p.33 There are three forms and sorts of knowledge:
Perception, which shows us data of sense and reveals their reality.
Conception, which shows us meanings.
Interpretation, which shows us other sorts of realities.
[JLJ - In my opinion, knowledge is anything useful in order to 'go on.' Knowledge is a lever that is grasped improvisationally in a predicament to favorably move forward in time into the continuation of the predicament as it unfolds.]
p.35 Percepts are in the form in which all the valuable knowledge appears, while concepts are guides to experience, devices for a purpose, and have a character which notes and bonds represent in the commercial world.
p.35 Perception and conception give you two kinds of knowledge: perceptual and conceptual facts.
p.40 The only sort of revelation about the world which you can hope for is about the results that will come from further experience of contact with the world. You get it in the form of tendencies to reaction, expectation of the result, and then verification of those expectations. You know the world in the form of a sort of guidance due to sense-impressions and to the training of your centers. Then you test the resulting knowledge by its success in guiding your further action, and this process goes on indefinitely
p.40 James was later led to the generalization: ideas are true so far as they work, so far as they successfully guide to the sort of experience that the possessor of the ideas has been led by previous experience to expect. Knowledge consists in possessing the ideas that are successful, in getting the guidance that leads to what meets the ends of that percipient.
p.40-41 Our ideas are copies in virtue of our interest in certain things, as guides to our activities. An idea can better be expressed as a plan of action.
p.41-42 The theory which dwells upon a third sort of knowledge distinct from both perception or conception involves a new feature not present in James's pragmatism... interpretation... The question of finding out how to use one of these types of knowledge so as to guide you to a genuine acquaintance of the real, brings before you metaphysical questions.
p.42 The doctrine of pragmatism gives us a union of perception and conception.
p.43 To summarize:
- Perception may be illusory. For a perceiver, that which he perceives may turn out to be an illusion...
- Conceptions may be subject to logical defects, or if their combinations are in question... the inferences may be incorrect inferences.
- In the union of perception and conception with which you are constantly dealing according to the pragmatists, your search for truth may at any time fail.
Precisely similar considerations may arise in the account of knowledge by interpretation... Interpretation is not a type of knowledge so superior to perception and conception that your interpreted knowledge will infallibly be true... There is no royal road to correct interpretations. Everything which is said to be known through interpretation must be tested.
p.51 Everybody admits that in a greater part of our scientific thinking today we deal with inductions and not deductions. These processes go hand in hand, but a considerable part of our work is of the inductive nature. What guides us in our indictions?
[JLJ - Inductions are simply tricks that work, nothing more. We grasp at them pragmatically, because that is what our mind is programmed to do.]
p.59 I shall try to show you that the idea of truth is essentially a social idea... When you make a judgment, you, as a fact, appeal ideally or literally to somebody. When you assert that a proposition is true, you are actually making an appeal to somebody... Thus the idea of truth has this social character.
[JLJ - Not exactly so, I can make judgments to myself that are effectively private opinions that I do not share with others. Such judgments are not necessarily social. For example, I can have the private opinion or make the judgment that Pluto is in fact a planet - but not share that with others.]
p.60 Reality is a concept involving interpretation.
[JLJ - Reality simply is. You can choose to make an interpretation of it or not, that does not change the fact that it is. All the collected interpretation of reality will not tell you how to 'go on' within it, which is really all that matters to the cognitive mind. You need a plan or a scheme, or several, that can be executed. Human children imitate adults or older peers and so borrow their schemes for going on, which perhaps we then adopt as our own.]
p.61 In my volume entitled William James and Other Essays, you will find one essay entitled "The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion," ...In it I mention that the ideas of truth and reality are essentially interpretive ideas, depending upon interpretation.
[JLJ - More so, I would think, they are both simply claims. The truth is, there are only truth claims. ]
p.66 In general, I get practically no response to this contention of mine as to the social nature of truth.
[JLJ - If truth does indeed have a social nature it is because man lives in an entangled, complex web of interaction with his fellow man, and cannot do one thing without it impacting others. If truth does not have a social nature, then it is practically of lesser importance, not less true.]
p.83 If you say the only datum which guides us is the present moment, what do you mean by the present moment?
[JLJ - A fear of consequence in the future also guides us, as does the fear of missed opportunity and the fear of a misguided assessment. We content ourselves that our practical schemes for 'going on' are the best way to proceed, so we execute them, because we have no better way to operate so as to maneuver towards our goals. Again, Royce is missing the concept of strategy - operations and investments in the present so that the future - when it arrives and whatever it is, is somehow better for us.]
p.85 If there were no problem, then one would have no inquiry into what the world is.
p.101 When you change in the world of existence, you as existent embody or exemplify that which is the existence of a different essence; but the essence of you doesn't change... All changes which occur in the world involve essential changes, but the essences themselves don't change.
p.109 The essences are a good deal; they are precisely what we are interested in when we consider plans, projects, agreements, constitutions, and laws. When we try to get something done, we face the problem of how to give a certain essence a certain sort of existence. When we get it done, nothing happens to the essence, for that was in our mind when the plan was stared. The distinction between the existents and the essences is a conceptual distinction.
p.113 Relations are characters or qualities or features belonging to a member of a collection. The relations in general are forced upon a thing by the order of nature, by the existence to which it belongs.
p.119 Inductive inquiry can give only probable results. In the realm of history there are no propositions which are better than propositions of a probable sort. Historical propositions may be highly probable; they aren't certain.
p.130 Whoever says he can prove the existence of somewhat by certain evidence, inevitably, when he tells you what his evidence is, sets forth the essence of something.
p.130 In view of the essence of a relation, some object of the sort in question must exist.
p.131 I think you can say that if you know all the relations of a thing, you know everything about that thing... The nearest you come to the immediate is the presented insofar as it is the presented, but everything else is more or less relational and you know it mediately. One doesn't know one's own being or essence immediately.
[JLJ - I would add, that you need to know the 'scheme' the thing has for going on, including private and past activities.]
p.163 Our purposes, like the rest of our lives, shift with the moment.
[JLJ - Hopefully, there is an overriding scheme which is being executed which shifts purposes according to some higher level plan and has a reasonable expectation of working.]
p.165 There are a good many things in the world that present themselves to us as so profoundly changing in their character that it appears as if change belonged to the very essence of the thing.
[JLJ - Or alternatively, such a 'thing' possesses the property or quality of adaptive capacity.]
p.168 One's insight into the essences depends upon and involves interpretations, because it is of their very nature to be interpretations.
p.169 Aristotle... Where he couldn't recognize the growth of things, he failed to deal with the problem they presented to him.
p.169 The world turns out to be describable only in terms of fluent topics of interpretation.
p.169 Any use of evidence requires an interpretation of the essence of existence; it requires considering that the grounds why things are in the world of existence are grounds that are due to the essence of existence... Experience presents to us types, universals, characters, sorts, and therefore entities that are not merely perceptual, but entities that are also infected by the conceptual character.
p.175 In James's Introduction to Philosophy, the case for pragmatism is stated entirely in terms of the observation that we are always lacking the knowledge that we seek, and we are guided, as we have to be, by the methods of a science - the fashions of inquiry that belong to our research for the real.
p.192 this perception that we never get is the goal of our knowledge
p.197 Were perception unlimited, so that we had no need of conceptions, then we should be relieved of the difficulties that pragmatism emphasizes or that conceptualism or realism has been emphasizing for us... But one could have a perfectly definite view of what it is to look for such perceptual knowledge, and one would from that side have perfectly definite ground for saying that if one comes on that which "is," one can tell in advance that which is to be... What do you learn about the world by asserting such a doctrine? Well, you have learned what illusion, what error, what deceit is, what it is to be misled by phantoms or by phenomena.
p.205 One does not sufficiently get the whole story by approaching the matter from any one side.
p.205 One can say that the attitude of perception is a receptive attitude.
p.230 I regard the nature of a thing as so closely bound up with its relationships that I repeatedly say that if things were totally independent each of the other, then they couldn't have any qualities in common, any characters that were real characters really in common... "What a thing is, its essence, its qualities, its character as this thing, depends upon its relations in such wise that if you changed the relations of things, you would change their character."
p.235 Life daily puts before you the problem of where you shall find the next stage of the self-expression in which you live and of which your whole appreciation of your world will consist. All that a course of metaphysics can do will be to make this process a little more coherent and selfconscious than it would be otherwise.
[JLJ - Yes, it is a question of how to 'go on.']
p.237 What is a possibility?
[JLJ - We often have to 'go on' by making judgments of possibility, from the cues and clues available to us, including diagnostic test of various kinds, and arranging fallback positions and alternative courses of action. The need for adaptive capacity requires that we examine the possibilities that are present in our predicament, and concern ourselves with our potential ability to 'go on' if that possibility becomes real.]
p.239 Almost any letter of recommendation will refer to a man's capacities. On that basis we get our promotions, our appointments, our elections, our friendships... You estimate men by their possibilities... Men don't always live up to their possibilities.
p.240 Can we get on without using the terms of possibility? What would it be to reduce ourselves to the barren statement of realistic fact?
p.241 the conception of Being must include the conception of possibility... When we recommend a man because of his capacities, we recommend him for the being of those possibilities, which consists in the truth of the proposition that he possesses them.
[JLJ - More than likely, it is not the truth of the proposition, but the likelihood of the proposition. Perhaps some heuristic test, such as grades in school, trustworthiness demonstrated on x and y occasions, evidence of responsibility, etc., indicated the possibility. The National Football League (NFL) is full of prospects (players) who for some reason, did not perform up to their predictions. Every business selling shares of stock on a stock exchange is trumpeting their prospects. In the practical world we often do not have the luxury of truth. Often there are only the perceived possibilities, the shameless self-promotions and the ticking clock of time, and the fleeting opportunities. In a complex and confusing world we often must reach out and grasp - not for the truth - but for that which our practical and experienced scheme to 'go on', dictates.]
p.253 Metaphysics turns not on a perception of the real, nor on a conception of the real, but on an interpretation of the real.
p.253 the real puzzle of Being... you never quite get the whole situation before you.
[JLJ - The real puzzle of being is to construct, and then to execute, a practical and effective scheme for going on that can handle the emergence of just about anything from the unclear real that we face each day, including the seizing of unexpected opportunities that perhaps briefly present themselves to us. Consider a bear in a stream by a waterfall, looking for fish. The bear cannot point to where each fish is, at the current moment, but places itself where a fish will likely emerge, perhaps jumping into the air or swimming nearby. The scheme of the bear is effective because it produces opportunities to feed, which the bear takes advantage of. The bear did not invent this scheme all by itself, it likely watched another bear - perhaps its mother or a rival execute the scheme and receive results. Perhaps the bear then began to mimic the successful scheme and adopted it as its own.]
p.260 You don't get the real merely by looking for what has the form of a presence in Being.
p.266 we who have minds can define objects only in terms of our minds
p.267 whoever talks about any reason why he ought to think it true that so and so is there in the world speaks of some essence which has a close connection with existence... If you have any reason for supposing that what is not immediately present exists, your reason is in terms of a whole situation whose essence requires that sort of thing to Be.
[JLJ - See comment below.]
p.267 The problem of metaphysics may be defined as the problem, What essences are such that the existence of the corresponding objects is required? ...You are constantly speaking of that of which you know something concerning its essence, and you are always getting the result that this fact, which you can state with regard to the essence of the thing, throws light on the existence of the thing, so that this is required, rather than that, to fulfill an account of the real world.
[JLJ - 22 April 2017 So... for game theory, I would say that the essence of the matter of playing a complex game of strategy is the scheme of construction, using heuristics, of a diagnostic test of the adaptive capacity to mobilize coercion, which we grasp in order to 'go on' in the playing of the game, as in making the (required) moves. The 'questions' we ask and answer ourselves, as we construct this diagnostic test, are of the human form, very specifically 'inspired articulations of wonder.' For a machine, such 'inspired questions' can only be constructed by a scheme to manage attention, and by using heuristics which produce nearly the same answer as that of a human playing, effectively allowing us to proceed in the same manner. A machine can be made to 'play' a complex game of strategy because it can be made to function 'as if' it were an inspired human asking - and answering - questions about how it might proceed, including a perceptive managing of attention. It is the essence of our carefully constructed diagnostic test of the adaptive capacity to mobilize coercion, that something that is not immediately perceived to be present - an indirectly perceived coercive pressure - exists and is useful for playing the complex game of strategy. In other words, there is a close connection between such a test which indicates, and the existence of a useful coercive pressure.]
p.270 Even so trivial a process as that of the player of any game involves an undertaking to gain victory even through defeat... The lover of the game loves the paradox of seeking success through being thwarted.
p.270 Throughout the whole realm of the expression of meaning you will find the same thing holding. An idea is not expressed simply; it is expressed in some sort of tension, conflict, opposition, over against that which hinders or thwarts it.
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