nucleation

ARG-045: Simondon's account of individuation as crystallization from a metastable state, propagating from kin to kin, supports the thesis that an argument's later structure can evolve only on structure that persists

2 min read

Properties7
StatusRejected
Formanalogy
Tagsphilosophy-of-science, individuation
Linenucleating-argument
GroundsTHEORY-1276 — In Simondon's ontology, as his organization-studies readers take it, information is not a signal transmitted between finished entities but a disparity between two differently ordered domains of a metastable system, and its meaning is the new structure that transduction produces in resolving it, LIT-1648 — Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information
ConcludesCLAIM-185 — The nucleation threshold of an argument is whatever makes a structure persist: a persistent structure is available as an anchor, and more complex structure can evolve only on anchors
Rendered intodocs/arguments-by-conclusion.md

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The inference

Simondon models individuation on a crystal growing in a metastable solution. Structure propagates “from kin to kin”, each structured region serving as the principle of the next (Simondon 2005, p. 32, as quoted by Bencherki and Iliadis; THEORY-1276). CLAIM-185 holds the same of arguments: a persistent structure is available as an anchor, and later structure grows only on anchors. If Simondon’s account held of individuation in general, it would hold of arguments too.

Critical questions

  • In what respect are the cases alike? In form. Each has structure that propagates from a seed in a medium able to take it up.
  • What transfers? The vocabulary, and the warning carried by CLAIM-184 that a formed crystal can no longer be reorganized.
  • What does not? The mechanism, and this is the question that fails. A crystal grows because a surface lowers a free-energy barrier, which the record reads in Vekilov and Ostwald. Nothing shows that an argument’s anchors work by anything of that kind. Simondon generalizes from the crystal by analogy, as CLAIM-185 does, so his account adds a second analogy, not evidence. His book (LIT-1648) is unread here, and his readers use the generalization without a test (NOTE-1485).

Rejected as support. It stays an ancestor of the line’s image.

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