135. Universals and individuals

Previously in this blog, in items 16 and 17, I criticized universals that are taken as immutable absolutes, applying everywhere and always, and I pleaded for more modest, temporary, mutable universals, with room for deviance of particulars, individuals, in a variety of contexts, which causes universals to shift. 

We do need universals. Without them we could not make inferences, in science, in generalizations, in laws or regularities that apply across contexts. It is not clear to me how Eastern philosophies deal with this. How does science fit in Eastern philosophy? There is a strong tendency there to shun ‘conceptual thought’ in favour of intuition or ‘direct perception of reality’. For me, that is not good enough.

To resolve the problem of individuals and mutable universals, we need a theory of how the dialectic between them works, and I don’t see that Eastern philosophy, with its view of ongoing change, with a variety of particulars, provides it, except for the Taoist notion of Yin and Yang, in cyclical processes of production, reproduction and transformation, in opening and closing. I will expand on that in the following item of this blog.

Here, I want to recall my earlier proposal (items 36 and 37) of change according to the hermeneutic circle. From specific events in specific contexts, we abstract notions for generalization, shedding context-specific detail. We need this to transfer experience from one context to another. The generalization, when applied in a new context, needs to be enriched with context-specific details. It may fail in the novel context, and then is falsified, and needs to be revised or replaced, tapping from the new context. That is the process of pragmatist experimentation.

Here, use is made of the notions of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. Paradigms are the universals, expressed in words, which have a repertoire of possible meanings. In a syntagm paradigms are configured into sentences, where meanings of words are picked out from repertoires of meaning, triggered by the context at hand. Syntagms are modified, in reconfigurations of familiar entities, until sense is seen to be made in the context. When this fails, novel meanings of existing paradigms or tentative novel paradigms may arise. This can be seen as a process of first closing, eliminating detail in the construction of a universal, to step away from context, and then opening up a universal for new content from a new context. A question is whether this may have some relation to the cycle of Yin and Yang, which I will consider in the next item.

Another challenge, related to the above, is to resolve the old issue in sociology of conceptualizing the reciprocal relationship between structure and agency. The structure of institutions (macro) that enable and constrain actions is somehow reproduced or transformed by those actions (micro). For example, markets enable agents to engage in supply and demand, but the institutions that enable or constitute markets are modified or broken down by entrepreneurial or political action. Here one can think of laws of property or liability, regulations concerning safety, health and the environment, technical standards, advertising, distribution channels, and deeply seated sentiments, meanings, habits and intuitions). I will return to markets later on in this blog.