1. Our own Peircean-Nevillean formulation of the normative mediates between the
descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative describes our local semiotic
environs and seems to have its macro-cosmic-level equivalent, which, in more
classical terms, would be that the axiological mediates between the cosmological and
the ontological to effect the teleological.
Put alternatively, there is some correspondence between the classical accounts of
causation, such as in the distinctions drawn between instrumental causation, efficient
causation, material causation, formal causation and final causation, all of which,
interestingly, have led to individual proofs of God as philosophers and theologians
grappled with problems of infinite regression, circular referentiality, causal
disjunction and similar paradoxes. For example, C.S. Lewis advanced a moral
argument based on axiological insights. Aquinas, Anselm and others authored other
proofs. For example, we have also been presented with various cosmological
arguments (to stop an infinite regress of efficient causes), ontological arguments (to
address various modal distinctions between this material or substance versus that,
such as the necessary or self-subsisting versus the contingent), and teleological
arguments (the design inference or final causation).
We have very roughly associated in this equivalency, then, the normative with
instrumental causation and the axiological (since the instrumental is associated with
extrinsic values), the descriptive with material and efficient causation and the
cosmological (since this perspective has been appropriated positivistically by
empirical science, even to the exclusion of other types of causation), the interpretive
with formal causation and the ontological (since this is the perspective "relegated" to
metaphysics), and the evaluative with final causation and the teleological (since these
ultimate concerns are more so associated with the intrinsic values and final causes of
the Creator Spirit).
Another point is to suggest that our existential, moral, and axiological orientations
(normatively experienced) derive from but are irreducible to our cosmological
(scientific) and ontological (metaphysical) constitutedness and correspond and give
shape to our theological imperatives (a telic design we awaken to through ongoing
conversion). In short, our movement from what we are (the cosmological and
ontological) to what we will become (the teleological) is mediated by what we ought
to be (the axiological).
In this approach, form does not describe the structure of identities, but, rather,
the relations between identities, where formal causes meld with the material,
efficient, instrumental and final. As such, a formal cause refers to a top-down
donation of initial, boundary and limit conditions (constraints) by an emergentist
system to an emergent identity, while a final cause refers to a top-down donation
of autopoiesis, agency & autonomy (freedom) by an emergentist system to an
emergent identity, which is nonstrict and temporally asymmetrical (internally
related to its past but externally related to its future), precisely due to ongoing
donative relations (creatio continua) between emergent indentities, which can
then simultaneously be both de novo emergent identities as well as probabilities of
identities yet to emerge (with concommitant intrinsic values that accrete through
time).
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2. This is not a robustly metaphysical account (relying on any given root metaphor) but a
vague phenomenological approach that employs an emergentist perspective.
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