transcendent determinacy

Posted On March 25, 2024

[Will clean this up later. This is a very important concept in Ross’s work.]

• NOTE: With this notion Ross explains why a form cannot be a pure function of the sort he adduces as proof that human thought has an immaterial aspect. On the contrary, to be transcendently indeterminate a nature must be satisfiable by an infinite number of incompossible referents. Thus it cannot be determined by logic alone but only by concrete reference to real things.
• [From Footnote 17 in “The Immaterial Aspects of Thought”] All thought, as content, is immaterial in two other ways. (1) It lacks the transcendent determinacy of the physical. A true judgment, “someone is knocking on my door,” requires for its physical compliant reality a situation with an infinity of features not contained (or logically implied) in the true judgment. Thus, an infinity of determinate but incompossible physical situations could make the same statement true. (2) Any physical-object truth requires its truth-making reality to overflow the thought infinitely in the detail of what obtains. So every compliant reality is infinitely more definite than anything contingently true we can say about it. It takes a lakeful of reality for one drop of truth. A second argument: Products of physical processes are transcendently determinate. But no product of the understanding has an infinity of content, not contained therein logically. So no physical product can ever be such a content of the understanding. Some thinking is as much physical as it is immaterial. My walking, as an action, is as much a mode of thought as it is a mode of movement; yet no movement, however complex, could ever make a thought. Leibniz says in section 17 of the Monadology (in Philosophical Papers and Letters, Leroy Loemker, ed. and trans. 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), p. 644) that, if perception were supposed to be produced by a machine, we could make the machine on large scale and walk around in it like a mill; we would never find a perception, only the movements of wheels, gears, and pulleys. Similar reasoning is given in Leibniz’s Conversation of Philarete and Ariste (Loemker, p. 623). I thank Margaret Wilson for pointing these passages out to me. A third argument: The present cases concern the definiteness of the form of the thinking. A third, parallel argument can be constructed from the definiteness of the content of thought, that thought is definite among incompossible contents in a way no physical process can ever be. Similar underdetermination arguments apply. Machines do not process numbers (though we do); they process representations (signals). Since addition is a process applicable only to numbers, machines do not add. And so on for statements, musical themes, novels, plays, and arguments