Maverick Philosopher

Richard Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition

The following is my contribution to a symposium on Richard Gaskin's The Unity of the Proposition. The symposium, together with Gaskin's replies, is scheduled to  appear in the December 2009 issue of Dialectica.

GASKIN ON THE UNITY OF THE PROPOSITION

William F. Vallicella

While studying Richard Gaskin’s The Unity of the Proposition (Oxford 2008), the word ‘magisterial’came repeatedly to mind. Gaskin’s mastery of the history, literature, and dialectical intricacies of the problem of the unity of the proposition in all its ramifications is in evidence on every page. More than a treatment of a particular problem, Gaskin’s book is a systematic treatise in the philosophy of language organized around a particular but centrally important problem. To my knowledge, it is the most thorough and penetrating discussion of the unity of the proposition ever to appear. The fact that Gaskin’s solution to the unity problem is set within a systematic philosophy of language contributes to the book’s depth and richness, but also makes the task of the critic difficult. In a few pages, the critic cannot properly convey the systematic underpinnings of Gaskin’s formulation of the problem and his solution to it. And when the critic evaluates, he is forced to acknowledge that he is evaluating a solution embedded in a far-flung system whose ideas are mutually reinforcing. His critical points may then appear as ‘dialectical potshots’ if he cannot, as he cannot in a few pages, bring a competing system of mutually reinforcing ideas onto the field. These caveats having been registered, I proceed to sketch Gaskin’s project and raise some questions about his formulation of the unity problem. After conceding that Gaskin has solved the problem as he understands it, I will suggest that the problem lies deeper than he recognizes, and that the linguistic idealism in which he embeds his solution is problematic.

A. E. Taylor on F. H. Bradley on Religion

The following quotations are from A. E. Taylor's "F. H. Bradley" which is an account of his relation with the great philosopher, an account published in Mind, vol. XXXIV, no. 133 (January 1925), pp. 1-12. A. E. Taylor is an important philosopher in his own right whose works, unfortunately, are little read nowadays.

Bradley as a Religious Man

I am confident that no one who knew Bradley personally at any time would have supposed him to be anything but what he actually was, an intensely religious man, in the sense of a man whose whole life and thought was permeated by a conviction of the reality of unseen things and a supreme devotion to them.

 

Bradley on Bibliolatry

In the last conversation I had with him . . . He spoke bitterly of the Christian Church in our country, chiefly on the charge of an alleged 'idolatry' of the text of the Bible, a fault not, I think, really common among Anglicans at the present. He commended the Roman Church for its discouragement of promiscuous Bible-reading, but held that it did not go far enough. He would have the Church, he said, cease to appeal to any literature from the past and insist directly upon its own inherent authority as the living voice of the divine Spirit.

Bradley on Purgatory

Possibly some of my readers who know Bradley only from his books may be surprised at a remark called from him by a passing reference in the same conversation to Purgatory. "But what do you mean by Purgatory? Does it mean that when I die I shall go somewhere where I shall be made better by discipline? If so, that is what I very much hope." In another mood, no doubt, he might have dwelt on the intellectual difficulties in the way of such a hope, but it was characteristic, or at least I thought so, that he evidently clung to it.

Bradley a Mystic

Bradley's own personal religion was of a strongly marked mystical type, in fact of the specific type common to the Christian mystics. Religion meant to him, as to Plotinus or to Newman, direct personal contact with the Supreme and Ineffable, unmediated through any forms of ceremonial prayer, or ritual, and like all mystics in whom this passion for direct access to God is not moderated by the the habit of organised communal worship, he was inclined to set little store on the historical and institutional element in the great religions.

Bradley on the Incarnation

Thus while the conception of the meeting of the divine and the human in one 'by unity of person' lay at the very heart of his philosophy, he was wholly indifferent to the question whether the ideal of the God-Man has or has not been actually realised in flesh and blood in a definite historical person. Like Hegel, he thought it the significant thing about Christianity that it had believed in the incarnation of God in a definite person, but also, like Hegel, he seemed to think it a matter of small importance that the person in which the 'hypostatic union' was believed to have been accomplished should be Jesus the Nazarene rather than any other, and again whether or not the belief was strictly true to fact. The important thing, to his mind, was that the belief stimulates to the attempt to the achievement of 'deiformity' in our own personality.

F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain

 I have argued

at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.  The agreement of Peter Lupu, however, fortified me in my adherence to it.  I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

Bradley's Regress as the Metaphysical Ground of the Unity of the Proposition: Notes on Gaskin

Having recently returned from the Geneva conference on Bradley's regress, I have much to ruminate upon and digest.  I'll start my ruminations with some comments on Richard Gaskin's work. 

In an earlier post I suggested that we ought to make a tripartite distinction among vicious, benign (harmless), and virtuous (helpful) infinite regresses. To put it crudely, a vicious regress prevents an explanatory job from getting done; a benign regress does not prevent an explanatory job from getting done; and a virtuous regress makes a positive contribution to an explanatory job's getting done.  I gave an example of a putative virtuous regress in the earlier post which example I will not repeat here.  In this post I draw your attention to a second putative example from the work of Richard Gaskin, whom I was happy to meet at the Geneva conference on Bradley's Regress.  Gaskin's proposal is that "Bradley's regress is, contrary to to the tradition, so far from being harmful that it is even the availability of the regress which guarantees our ability to say anything at all.  Bradley's regress is the metaphysical ground of the unity of the proposition." ("Bradley's Regress, the Copula, and the Unity of the Proposition," The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 179, April 1995, p. 176)  In terms of my schema above, Gaskin is claiming that Bradley's regress is positively virtuous (not merely benign) in that it plays a positive explanatory role: it explains (metaphysically grounds) the unity of the proposition.

I will now attempt to summarize and evaluate Gaskin's position on the basis of two papers of his that I have read, and on the basis of his presentation in Geneva.  (I should say that he has just  published a book, The Unity of the Proposition, which I have not yet secured, so the following remarks may need revision in light of his later work.)

Bradley's Regress and the 'Adicity' of Compresence: Is it Dyadic, Triadic, or N-Adic?

This is an addendum to Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress.  In that paper I touched upon the question whether the compresence relation is dyadic or not, but did not delve into the matter in any depth.  Now I will say a little more with the help of George Molnar's excellent discussion in Powers: A Study in Metaphysics (Oxford 2003), pp. 48-51.  Molnar draws upon Peter Simons, "Particulars in Particular Clothing: Three Trope Theories of Substance (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1994, 553-575), which I have also consulted.

Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress

This is the paper I am scheduled to present at the Bradley Conference at the University of Geneva in early December, warts and all. No doubt it needs more work.  So comments and criticism are welcome.

Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress

William F. Vallicella

1. Introduction

One of the perennial tasks of ontology is that of analyzing a thing’s having of properties. That things have properties is a datum consistent with different theories as to what properties are, what the things are that have the properties, and how best the having is to be understood. Any theory will have to provide a three-fold answer to this three-fold question. In so doing, it must show how the elements it distinguishes fit together to form the unified phenomenon of a thing having properties. Analysis is not enough for understanding; synthesis is also needed to show how the elements separated out by analysis form a unity. One of the criteria of adequacy for any theory is whether or not it can avoid the threat to unity known as Bradley’s regress.

This paper argues that trope theory may have trouble passing the Bradley test. In particular, what it argues is that (i) trope theory requires a compresence relation to account for the difference between a unified thing and its disparate property-constituents; (ii) the compresence relation is external and therefore open to Bradleyan challenge; (iii) the various attempts to defuse Bradley’s regress are unsuccessful; hence, (iv) Bradley’s vicious infinite regress is unavoidable and trope theory in its current versions may be untenable.

Is Bradley's Regress Already in Aristotle?

At Metaphysics Zeta (Book VII, Chapter 17, Bekker 1041b10-30), there is a clear anticipation of Bradley's Regress and an interesting formulation of what may well count as the fundamental problem of metaphysics, the problem of unity. What follows is the W. D. Ross translation of the passage. It is a mess presumably because the underlying Greek text is a mess. The Montgomery Furth and Richard Hope translations are not much better. But the meaning is to me quite clear, and I will explain it after I cite the passage:

Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part II

In Part I of this series I provided a preliminary description of the problem that exercises Orilia and me and a partial list of assumptions we share. One of these assumptions is that there are truth-making facts. We also both appreciate that Bradley's Regress ('the Regress') threatens the existence of facts. Why should this be so? Well, the existence of a fact is the unity of its constitutents: when they are unified in the peculiar fact-constituting manner, then the fact exists. But this unity needs an explanation, which cannot be empirical-causal, but must be ontological. The existence of facts cannot be taken as a brute ontological fact. But when we cast about for an explanation, we bang into the Regress. Let me now try to clarify this a bit further. We distinguish between an internal Regress and an external Regress, and in both cases we must investigate whether it is vicious or benign.

Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part I

I was invited to attend a workshop on Bradley's Regress at the University of Geneva this December. Francesco Orilia will also be in attendance. He and I corresponded about Bradley and facts four or so years ago. He has read some of my work and I have read some of his. This series of posts is a new attempt at understanding his position and differentiating it from mine. It is based on his "States of Affairs: Bradley vs. Meinong" in Venanzio Raspa, ed., Meinongian Issues in Contemporary Italian Philosophy, Ontos Verlag, 2006, pp. 213-238.

1. The Problem in a First Rough Formulation

A fact or state of affairs (STOA) is a contingent unity of certain ontological constituents, for example, a (thin) particular and a universal. It is this unity that is responsible for a fact's being a truth-maker, as opposed to a mere collection of entities. Obviously, it is Al’s being fat, rather than the mere collection of Al and fatness, that makes true the proposition that Al is fat. We take as given the difference between a fact and its constituents, between a's being F, on the one hand, and the set or sum consisting of a and F-ness, on the other. The difference is clear if one notes that, for example, Al and fatness can exist without it being the case that Al is fat. (The converse of course does not hold.) There is more to Al's being fat than Al and fatness. The problem is to give an account of this 'more.' What is it that makes a fact more than its constituents?