A thing can be multiple things. This observation is uncontroversial. We recognize in it simply a statement of the many true things we can say of any one given thing. “This is an utterance and this is a sentence.” “This object is both a bookend and a decoration.” It is a very direct demonstration of the essential way distinction is part of our reality. In drawing a distinction on a thing, we see the thing as yet something else, and however one explicates the terms of the conversation, such as “thing”, “can be” and “multiple”, the evidence of the observation remains.
Multiplicity in things, however, is not a principle applied with abandon. We don’t say, for example, “this utterance is multiple sentences”. In this we again have distinction, for we are discerning—as one with a discerning palate—in our application of distinction, seeking to equate things only among those varieties that carry some true unity.
These two senses are in opposition. If distinction alone is our first principle, abandon seems to rule, and there is no constraint on the division and equation that must ensue. Yet, a distinction held is a particularly fixed thing—by its very grasp, its diversity is withdrawn from contest.
It should perhaps be no surprise we find ourselves drawn to two extremes in our analysis of life. There is the skeptical extreme that relinquishes the struggle to conclude anything, seeing all as arbitrary, possibly even the judgment ‘all is arbitrary’. There is the fatalistic extreme of determinism, in which all is necessary and in which conclusions are again undermined, in this case by the independent bareness of pure fact. But points between extremes do find elucidation in meaning and interdependence. Caprice comes at a price, and even the best vagaries beset themselves. If, in our analysis, we wish to resolve all reality into some single underlying principle, as we do with reality as distinction, we must find this meaning, this consequence found between extremes, within that principle. We will observe here that the diversity of a thing being both arbitrary and fixed is in fact the essence of meaning. This is a diversity in distinction itself. We find a bootstrap in distinction too being both arbitrary and fixed, and in that, nothing any more controversial than the principle that a thing can be multiple things—a thing in abandon and a thing in constraint.
Modeling
Considering philosophy to be description of the world focuses our attention on the terms of the description. The principal term considered here is distinction. It may be felt that recognizing reality as really just a lot of distinction misses the point. Isn’t it that reality can be proposed to be, in its true essence, many different things, and it is what we distinguish in these possibilities that tells us which is correct? That distinction is after the fact? We demonstrate that two things are indiscernible, and therefore the same. We highlight a distinction between two things to show that they are not the same. We point out that a given misunderstanding is explained by the mistaken drawing of an inessential distinction or the failure to draw a distinction that is essential.
It is our thesis here that the erecting and demolishing of distinctions in this way explains how meaning and implication are mediated. So, if not for the pervasiveness of distinction in our deliberation, and the pervasiveness of deliberation in the experience of reality, then for its value in explaining what meaning we may take in the majority of our philosophical endeavors not based upon distinction as first, distinction is compellingly first taken as first.
Meaning and implication
Meaning and implication are closely related. Meaning is implicit in expressions and events. We ask, “what do you mean—what are you implying?” That the two are mediated by distinction can be seen from the circumstance of two individuals communicating. What does the first person discern in the second’s exposition? The second has made discernible impact on the first if successful in communicating something. What has been distinguished is the meaning taken from the discourse. We say, however, that the meaning is taken or mediated, and that this requires some explanation. Discerning something alone does not provide explanation of meaning. We find distinct in a discourse perhaps sounds or letters. Within these objects we discern yet other things like words. Within these we discern ideas, and with those we may discern attributions, and among those, and indefinitely on, we can discern further meaning. This discernment, at face value, is really metadistinction. As a thing distinct from pure distinction, metadistinction destroys the unity of our theory. Left out from our description of reality as distinction is metadistinction—or multiply applied distinction. It is in facing this that we recognize something similar to the multiplicity discerned in any distinction as characteristic of distinction itself. Distinction—like things discerned—is distinguished and multiple. The contact of the various layers of distinction is essential to meaning, and requires explanation.
To understand how meaning is mediated we may examine implication by association. When one is bolstered or takes offense at a comment regarding some group with which he or she associates, how is that attribution to the group transferred to the member? “You may not have said I am φ, but you implied it.” We have in the multiplicity of things that the attribution was indeed of the member, in that the member is not merely associated with that group, the member is that group. This is the dropping of the distinction between the member and the group. At that same time, association is between things, so the distinction of member and group does hold.
The view of distinction that puts the self as individuated choice and the external world as the fixed fact of absolute truth provides us again implication as multiplicity in distinction. We seem not to be able to find implication in absolute truth alone, for the truth of a conclusion is simply true, regardless of any antecedents we may prefix to it. Implication in an internally created truth cannot be found, for any truth whatsoever may be taken to be the consequent, again, regardless of particular antecedents. But we have in implication via conditional, ‘A implies B’, both possibility and certainty. We want the absolutely determined A and B, to have possible alternates demonstrating B to depend on A. And distinction is exactly those two things: things necessarily fixed and things arbitrarily contradicted. That we can distinguish in both ways at once is simply a multiplicity in our distinction.
The possible and actual
One type of variation in proposition we may use to determine an implication is the interpretation. We imagine either a collection of possible worlds or some imagined univers of possible domains of discourse. We test a proposition for truth, it having various determinations in various worlds or interpretations. In this way too we draw a distinction that we alternately drop. We view the expression of a proposition as some distinct interpreted entity, and drop that distinction and attribute subsequently derived logical conclusion of the original expression.
In a less mathematical sense, we say we may drop the distinction between counterfactual things and actual things. By so doing we remove the difficulty of attributing something of a thing that isn’t. We must resurrect the distinction to mean something in particular—something in contradistinction to what that thing is not.
Naming
In naming we have designators and designees. We hold them distinct, and in so doing create the conundrum of how their meaning is mediated. However, observing we are able to speak with and of sentences, we may be compelled to recognize that our designators and our domain of discourse are the same. And in this we find something more palatably mediative. Two things from among the same domain are effortlessly—implicitly—substituted for each other when we draw no distinction between them. At the same time, we retain the freedom to separate our names from their objects, in that circumstance in which our meaning is accepted and uninvestigated, to avoid of the equally unpalatable prospect of passing around among participants in discourse the very bits of the world we discuss.
Philosophical nominalism provides explanation in the dropping of the distinction of abstraction. In this is the pragmatic benefit that we are less likely to misattribute character to our things otherwise given independent existence. If “apple” and “the apple” are two different things, where does one find “apple”? Does “apple” have extent? Of the person found in a particular body we may ask, can this soul meander the world independently of this body? However, we may discuss “apple” or soul independently as concepts and descriptions, so we do, if only in net-effect in nominalism and its opposing views, draw the distinction, holding the abstraction as separate from yet substitutable with its description. This effect is well-taken to be the meaning and implication of our apprehension.
Where meaning falls
Misattribution points us to a valuable source of information as to where we hold something fixed in relation to its varied alternates. Our mistakes, when taken not to be mistakes, recover the many missing alternates from our actuality. By example, when we ask about the strange particularity of our discovered physical space—its three dimensionality or continuity—we can look to what we attribute as error in our discourse for nearby alternates, the context of which remove the appearance of particularity.
Suppose two people to be having a conversation on a stroll, the second interrupting the first to ask, “Exactly where you are going?” meaning to question the purpose in the first's line of reasoning. The first may answer, “to the garden,” thinking the second to be wondering, to what location in space he is directing himself in the stroll. “To the garden” and “to a demonstration of the value of temperance” both fit as answers to a question of where. And in this we may say the demonstration is only metaphorically apt as a destination. The use of destination in space is first and foremost. But perhaps destination in space is merely first and foremost to the person considering it the most relevant meaning to a given question. To the questioner, destination in space is merely alternative and the destination in demonstration was the most apt. The fact that we can simultaneously have as destination a demonstration and a physical location should point out to us that not all things exist in a physical space—that alternates to continuous, three dimensional space are immediately before us.
In selection bias too we have an informative fallacy. When we see an error in the breaking of a convention we can at least admit that, if only in a contrived sense, those breaking the convention simply have a convention of their own. Here we have a multiplicitous truth meeting objections from all sides, “but that is not what is we mean.” If we introduce an objective third party to sample the behavior and determine the true intended meaning, we still have an arbitrary result, for errant results will simply be written off as examples of selection bias. The ostensibly objective party is deciding the truth of the convention all over again, in meaning one population to be the correct one. Treating the error not as error—dropping that distinction—gives us alternates by which to determine dependency, and holding the error fixed gives us the final truth.
The anthropic principle exemplifies the dropping of selection bias as error. Simply discovering all the facts, as in a Copernican view, and simply necessitating the facts by our presence, as in a Ptolemaic or anthropic view, both deprive our facts of meaning. However, if both the finder’s bias, and the arbitrariness of what is found fixed are taken together, we find what is implied by our presence.
The existence of absolute truth in the light of the most skeptical considerations is secured in this view. An internally created view such as the anthropic one brings with it a sense of reality as completely lacking in absolute truth. We may say, the laws of physics could have been B rather than A, if only it had been something other than me investigating the laws. But finding meaning in various finders of the universe, we have still the certainty that ‘I imply A’ and that ‘it implies B’. ‘I’ and ‘it’ are, of course, distinguished presently by one of their alternates (you or me), showing the entire enterprise to admit of possible variation, and those variations to admit of absolute truths.
Hume proposed that in the understanding there can exist necessary connections, genuine dependencies of consequent on antecedent, but that in the empirical we have only concomitance in any relation of distinct things—conjunctions of particulars but no genuine necessity that any given particulars be conjoined. Kant fixed upon a transcendental boundary between these two, the understanding and the empirical. This is quite similar to the division we draw here. The understanding is of the self, and the empirical is fixed externally. In a sense, Hume drops the distinction of meaning in external things, and Kant restores it. However, for both of them, necessary connection, or in Kant’s terminology, a priori cognition, resides already in the understanding by first principle. In reality as distinction, even things determined true a priori are fixed, and therefore essentially external. From what we propose here, the a priori as a source of such judgments is perhaps well seen to be in the transcendental—or at the boundary between the fixed and unfixed in any case.
Kant does consider this option, and in the process shows us a fallacy that allows us to investigate where our meaning falls. He, according to the Cambridge edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in a note in his personal copy at the head of Transcendental Analytic, First Book, The Analytic of Concepts, asks whether a priori principles are themselves transcendent. In making an experiment of a universal proposition, if the empirical judgment sought does not stand under a universal rule for judging, the concept of this endeavor is a vicious fallacy.
This fallacy, unlike our previous errors, is of the vicious variety. Indeed we do find in the terms of meaning given here something like a paradox. While we say that distinction as both abandon and constraint is simply portraying that uncontroversial feature of a thing being multiple things, we do see the two things as contradictory. If distinction is to be found in the resolution of contradictions, in this particular case we seem to be asking ourselves to both resolve and not resolve it. And perhaps, in this, we have explanation for why we cannot, in the case of knowledge, hold what we hold with certainty. In holding meaning, we insist that we not resolve the underlying distinction.
Our theory, as distinct from its object, is expected, no matter how much more elucidating than our intuitive common sense it may be, to describe also this matter of fact world that is its object. We want to say a rainbow isn't a colored arch in the sky, but an interference pattern of photons resulting from the water droplets through which they pass. But we want also our theory to leave the undeniable fact, that a rainbow is a colored arch in the sky. We want to see things in their most ideal aspect, recognizing even logic is just what we choose to single out. But we want to see, nonetheless, if ‘A’ and ‘A implies B’, then however we might wish to single this out such that ‘not B’, we are stuck with the conclusion B. We want to see all human conflict as a matter of confusion and that in some context all disagreements are resolved. But we do not want to lose our footing by misapplying this principle, giving in to our impositions in contexts in which they are not resolved. We want to see that reality is what we find in it, as by our will. But we must also see, that external impositions do exist. This theory is expected to remove conflict, but the multiplicity it must describe implies that this improvement must come while embracing the conflict. And we have from this embrace meaning itself, which is, after all, what we seek in our theories.
We have application to conflict here in the meaning we appreciate. It may on occasion appear that we never appreciate a thing until it is gone. This, if it were a universal rule, would be entirely unacceptable. If a thing cannot be appreciated until it is lost, there is no point in acquiring it in the first place. We do appreciate things. We can strive to acquire and appreciate what can be kept. Perhaps we need only remember that taking something for granted is itself losing the thing, for the loss of our sense of its possibly being otherwise deprives us of its meaning. We can keep the objects of our desire by simply appreciating their meaning—holding on to that simultaneous possession of mere possibility and absolute certainty. The intermittent threats to that certainty can be seen as welcome reminders, the value of what they secure for us outweighing the conflict they inflict upon us.