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What, fully thought out, is the import of Hartshorne's statement, "We need to distinguish between formal and material predications" (LP, 134; cf. "The
Idea of God -- Literal or Analogical?")?

Wiki MarkupIn particular, what does one do with his further statement: "Besides obviously formal and obviously material ideas about God we have descriptions whose classification depends partly upon one's philosophical beliefs. . . . according to panpsychism, psychical concepts are categorial, universal in scope. However, even so they must be different from the purely formal concepts, for example, contingency, which has a single literal meaning applicable to all cases, the meaning of excluding some positive possibilities. . . . \ [Furthermore,\] contingency and relativity apply not only to individuals but to groups of individuals, and not only to concrete, but also to more or less abstract entities. . . . Thus, even assuming panpsychism, the most general psychical terms, though universally applicable to concrete singulars, and in this sense categorial, are not purely formal in the same sense as the other categorial terms. To apply them to things, one must know on what level of concreteness the things are" (LP, 139 ff.)

One suggestion is that the "purely formal concepts" of which Hartshorne speaks here are what John Passmore speaks of as the "invariant conditions
of discourse," incompatibility with which constitutes a view or statement "absolutely self-refuting" (Philosophical Reasoning, p. 80). According to Passmore, what is presupposed in discourse is "always something formal, e.g., that there are true propositions, that these have implications, that they convey something" (Ibid., p. 77). Elsewhere he observes that "infinite regress" arguments sometimes serve the important function of bringing us to see the limits of explanation, what have to be accepted as 'brute facts,' and the limits of criteria, what distinctions have to be accepted as just recognizable. This is always something formal: that something exists, that things have properties in common, and are related to one another, that there are continuities and discontinuities, that some propositions are true and some false. These are not conclusions deduced from an infinite regress: they are, indeed, not conclusions at all. But that they are not, and cannot be, conclusions, the infinite regress argument helps us to see" (Ibid., p. 37).

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