Matthew Arnatt

The paper works roughly as follows. I first quote Crispin Wright as motivating, for discrete purposes, a limitive relaxing of quantificational stricture as prelude in setting up a discussion of a position in Michael Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics which follows a line Dummett takes that seems to offer a contraction on content. The contraction is explicit in the middle of LBoM when Dummett introduces, by way of examples worked on proofs, a ‘harmony’ constraint operative on proofs. The contraction is in something like a conception or conceptions of explicitness as product of achievable constraint. I’m not sure about that and work towards outlining this Dummettian content as rather actually relating constraints stricturing under posed consideration, in Dummett in homologated consistencies holding together across formal and explanatory situation. In connection to that, I show that F. H. Bradley in The Principles of Logic, referred too to a type of qualified formatives, operative in a completed conditioning of objective sources of content. As Bradley saw it, available even in immediate extraction from (period appropriate) formally compelled contents. I take this, as in connection with Dummett, as suggestive of some otherwise available provable in a result that was not a product of idiom. I see both philosophers as attempting compelling a result reinforced in some way in associating mediums with restrictive access bought through that. Both take content to consist in result of application made to some authority in that form by which it was properly compelled. Lastly, I point out that a ‘cores’—residual content—analogy, is suggestively literally accommodated projected in the ‘grammaticalization’ tradition in modern and contemporary linguistics.

I argue that the Bradley of the 1883 The Principles of Logic marks and separates contents under tension in judgments. The separation comes in attending to content as a device for recuperation of scale. For Bradley that involves scaling material of immediate presentations under limits. As unrealised commitments of so- called real and ideal are an exclusionary condition of singular comprehension, singularity of judgments is mark of singular reflex with privative force; not some singularity in objects taken in episodic correspondence forming distinctively in singular judgment. The distinguishing input, as it were, to judgment forms is via content in some consequential and fact-like limitive facing of the real. I want to approach Bradley in this slightly negative sense as imposing via inversion some sensible restrictions under some conditions of scaling rather than in direct contact with materials to which one stands in some act of obversion, finally.

One theoretical charge (of Optimality Theory in its early conception) must have been to retain that sense of qualitative particularity as affecting as constraining theory relevant to a proscribed field when clearly a motivation was to divine in circumscriptions operational consequences conceived on a deferred abstractive level. An attraction of the theory's embodying results of constraint interactions as responsive to theory-internal qualitative implementation, as being in fact supplementarily transparent to co-ordinations of variously language specific implementations, qualitative identifications, was apparent naturalistic coordination of defined features taken here—in OT—at one fell-swoop. Differently put, the uses of analyses of the relevant types of spaces (‘primitive from the viewpoint of linguistic theories’) will (latterly) involve a period of time-stretch or compression over a previously normal (I take it) process of embeddings in a new theorised and recursively enacted invocation/re-invocation of base as digestively present in results of corrected theories. Or as Prince and Smolensky have it 'What we have done, in essence, is to replace the iterative procedure (act/evaluate, act/evaluate,... ) with a recursive scheme: collect the results of all possible actions, then sort recursively.' OT, 16.

It might be that the phrase ‘local holism’ covers a range of explanatory possibilities spreading to consistencies of theories generally, that we can take something from Peacocke’s caution about delimiting and differentiating modes of support for abstracts to sort something in the varieties of tensions at work in settling contents of theories self-determined to be consistent (facing a barrage of neo-consistencies). The subject-matter becomes then a holism in its entirety in self-consistent self-representation underpinned by that recognition operating over items formulated in a vocabulary supporting consistent representations and operations. In A Study of Concepts scenarios—described by me as ‘containers’— associate a type of primitive to a grammar worked on transitions paralleling a proposed familiar egocentric type of orientation’s handling of objects in a vicinity. The value of scenarios though is distanced from origination, it lies in the depiction of support for and delineation and record of separable coordinate valuations and conceptual transcribing.