Frances to responding listers with thanks...
It is my intention to continue wrestling with idealist realism and its naturalist pragmatism in an attempt to find if it holds any hope of success at all as a global account of the world, including an account of things like art in the world. To that end allow me to respond to some recent replies in a kind of random point form with my tentative opinions. (My use of the term "global" is a cagey attempt to allow infinite generals and definite specials and indefinite universals to be globally final or finite within whatever identified grounds or contexts might be of interest. If this goal is even justified, perhaps a better term than "global" could be used, so my search continues.) 1. Under realist pragmatism the agent of purposive design, or fated direction and prescribed determination and final close, is claimed to be the "dispositional tendency" for stuff to act as it does out of routine habitual conduct and not by the will of some rigid mechanical source, like a god for example. If the direction is maintained and the goal is attained, despite some exploratory routes that may be bad and thus prone to correction by evolutionary traits, then this action is found and held by pragmatists to be good. Stuff tends to do the right thing and to do the thing right. Natural growth is heterogeneous and advances and expands and progresses for the better. This is an optimistic stance, but it seems to make sense. 2. To inject any degree of religiosity or deity into this theory of evolutionary bents would be unfair and untrue and unwise. To further dismiss this theory of continuation and inclination in favor of say the spontaneous accidental evolution by sheer chance on the part of nothing, or the mere nominal notions of a thinking mind, or the deliberate decisive creation by mystical choice on the part of anything, would be unacceptable illogical alternatives. Stuff evolves as it does by the laws of nature, and laws come from habits of action, and habits are pursued by inclined bents or innate traits. The determination of stuff is by disposition. 3. The "continuity" of any infinite continuum, such as eternal time or perpetual space, is clearly an objective property of that continuum, which furthermore can be potentially sensed; and if it is sensed, then that material factuality becomes a mental reality in mind. Even the mathematical laws of axiomatic geometry can be brought to bear on this as proof. For example, the "continuity" of an imagined straight line going off in both directions forever through the passage of time is an objective sensible property of the infinite line; and since this fact can be sensed, then the property of continuity and the linearity of geometry is also real. 4. The things called mathematics and logics and nature and science are made of dispositional laws, and these must all be objective facts that exist independent of life and sense and mind. They are discovered as dispositions, and not invented arbitrarily by humans. 5. The initial "desire" for any good or goodness on the part of say a reasonable thinker or rational researcher, as what should be ideal or nice or right or fair or just or true or whatever, cannot be accounted for by any kind of objective logic alone, not even by hypothetical abduction, therefore some subjective psychologism is allowed into the act of science by pragmatism to account for this originating mental state. 6. The pragmatist logic of relativity seems to prove that "relations" are an objective part of the natural world, from the passages of time to the particles of atoms to the stars of galaxies. To refute the very being of this kind of "relational" existence for stuff is likely to ignore the natural laws of dispositional evolution. 7. The constant mystical essence attributed to phenomenal stuff can be manifested as material substance in different ways to sense depending on conditions like context and ability and so on. What continues to make the constant essence of the changing substance conform to one another under all these diverse conditions is the presence of a disposed habitual law that controls the conformity as an exemplified type. The exemplified presence of the attributed essence related to the manifested substance furthermore may merely be an act of mind, in that a global class of token members is committed to memory. It seems to me that the tonal essence and the token substance and the typical presence of phenomena are all objective facts that are objectively related together.
