The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I need to take particular care in clarifying the sense in which "analogy" is to be rejected, as distinct from the senses in which it is to be accepted, even in or for a transcendental metaphysics. To some extent, I think, I have already done this by arguing: 

  1. that, if "reality" and its cognates can and must be used in all the literally different senses reflecting the logical-ontological type-differences, then even in a transcendental metaphysics it can only be a broadly "analogical" concept-term, in that it can and must be used in different, if also similar, senses to refer to all the different logical-ontological types of reality;

  2. that even properly symbolic or metaphorical uses of language based in our empirical experience can be said to be "analogical" in a broad sense, just as, conversely, so-called analogical concepts-terms based in our existential experience are, for all that, still properly said to be symbolic or metaphorical; but

  3. that the distinction between these two senses in which"analogy" is to be accepted as unavoidable even in a transcendental metaphysics and the sense in which it is to be rejected is perfectly clear-cut, in that the different senses in which properly transcendental concepts-terms are used are each literal or univocal, because (1) they each apply within their respective types, not in different senses, but in the same sense; and (2) they each have a strictly literal or univocal core of meaning in any of their different uses-so that, e.g., anything that is real in any sense whatever is so only because it is real for, and hence makes a difference to, something else that is in process of becoming real in the same general sense; and any individual whatever, whether the extraordinary, because universal individual God or any ordinary, because particular individual other than God, actualizes its individuality and so exists—whether extraordinary or ordinary—only in events that are and must be contingent rather than necessary.

But even if the substance of the needed clarification has, to this extent, already been worked out, I still have to see to it that it is clearly understood—lest my polemic against "analogy" and "categorial metaphysics" fail to carry the strictly logical point that alone justifies it.

22 September 2004

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