The following is a comment by Eric Levy in a recent trope thread. My responses are in blue.
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Might I revert to the problem of compresent tropes constituting a concrete particular? Heil well formulates it: “One difficulty is in understanding properties as parts that add up to objects” (2015, 120). The whole business seems to me riddled with equivocation, epitomized by Maurin’s formulation: “. . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance.”
BV: We agree, I think, that standard trope theory is trope bundle theory, a one-category ontology. This version of the theory alone is presently under discussion. John Heil puts his finger on a very serious difficulty. I would add that it is a difficulty not only for trope bundle theory but for every bundle theory including the theory that ordinary particular are bundles or clusters of universals, as well as for Hector Castaneda's bundle-bundle theory. On Castaneda's theory, an ordinary particular at a time is a synchronic bundle of "consubstantiated" "guises" with a particular over time being a "transubstantiated" diachronic bundle of these synchronic bundles.
Intellectual honesty requires me to say that the theory I advance in PTE also faces Heil's difficulty. For on the view developed in PTE, ordinary concrete particulars are facts or states of affairs along Bergmannian-Armstrongian lines. On this theory Socrates is not a bundle but a concrete truth-making fact which has among its ontological constituents or parts his properties.
Generalizing, we can say that the difficulty Heil mentions is one for any constituent ontology that assays properties as ontological parts of the things that, as we say in the vernacular, 'have them.'
Anna-Sofia Maurin is entirely right in her explanation of trope theory but as far as I know she would not admit that Heil's difficulty really is one.
For example, on the one hand, properties are immaterial and interpenetrable abstracta. On the other hand, these immaterial and interpenetrable abstracta somehow constitute, through compresence, an enmattered, impenetrable object. Let us consider a red rubber ball and then a bronze statue. There is the rubber ball – the triumphant consequence of compresent tropes. One trope is to be construed, as we earlier agreed, as an appropriately extended red or redness. Another trope is to be construed as an appropriately diametered spherical contour. Another trope – the hardness trope – is to be construed as an appropriately calibrated resistance to deformation. But then we reach the rubber trope; for we are talking about a red rubber ball. What are we to posit here: an amorphous chunk of rubber appropriately qualified by its compresent fellows? How does trope theory account for the rubber in the red rubber ball?
BV: Excellent question(s), Eric. Well, the chunk or hunk of rubber cannot be amorphous -- formless -- for then it would be materia prima rather than what it is, materia signata. It is after all a hunk of rubber, not of clay, and indeed a particular hunk of rubber, not rubber in general. The parcel of rubber is formed matter, hence not prime matter. It is this matter, not matter in general. Your question, I take it, is whether this rubber could be construed as a trope in the way that this redness and this hardness can be construed as tropes. The latter are simple property particulars. But this rubber is not simple, but a hylomorphic compound. So it would appear that this rubber cannot be construed as a trope.
Even if the property of being rubbery could be construed as a trope, it is hard to see how the stuff, rubber, could be construed as a trope. For tropes are simple while stuffs are hylomorphic compounds -- prime stuff aside. Tropes are formal or akin to forms while stuffs are matter-form compounds. Mud is muddy. But the muddiness of a glob of mud would seem to be quite different from the stuff, mud.
My desk is wooden. The property of being wooden is different from the designated matter (materia signata) that has the form of a desk. Harry is hairy. He has hair on his back, in his nose, and everywhere else. He is one hairy dude. His hair is literally a part of him, a physical part. His being hairy, however, is a property of him. If this property is a trope, then it is (i) a property particular that is (ii) an ontological part of Harry. But then what is the relation between the ontological part and the physical part? Can a clear sense be attached to 'ontological part'? As has often been noted, ontological parts are not parts in the sense of mereology.
Here then is one question for the trope theorist: How do you account for the designated matter of a material thing? Is it a trope or not? How could a trope theorist deal with matter? A trope theorist might say this. "There is no matter ultimately speaking. It is form 'all the way down.' A hunk of rubber is not formed matter. For this matter is either prime matter, which cannot exist, or just a lower level of form."
A second question: if tropes are immaterial, how can bundling them 'add up' to a material thing? A trope theorist might respond as follows.
You are assuming that there are in ultimate reality irreducibly material things. On trope theory, however, material things reduce to systems of compresent tropes. So, while individual tropes are immaterial, a system of compresent tropes is material in the only sense that stands up to scrutiny. We trope theorists are not denying that there are material things, we are telling you what they are, namely, bundles of compresent tropes. Material things are just bundles of immaterial tropes. The distinction between the immaterial and the material is accommodated by the distinction between unbundled and bundled tropes. And while it is true that individual tropes interpenetrate, that is consistent with the impenetrability of trope bundles. Impenetrability is perhaps an emergent feature of trope bundles.
Now let’s move to the bronze statue. What does trope theory do with the bronze? This is, after all, a bronze statue. Is bronze, then, a trope or “property particular” of the statue? And if so, how are we to construe this trope? Is it material or immaterial?
BV: A trope theorist might be able to say that there are two trope bundles here, the lump of bronze and the statue. Lump and Statue are arguably two, not one, in that they have different persistence conditions. Lump exists at times when Statue doesn't. So they are temporally discernible. They are also modally discernible. Even if in the actual world Lump and Statue exist at all the same times, there are possible worlds in which Lump exists but Statue does not. (Of course there are no possible worlds in which Statue exists and Lump does not.)
And to what do we assign the trope of shape: the bronze or the statue? As Lowe point out, “the bronze and the statue, while the former composes the latter, are exactly the same shape. Do they, then, have numerically distinct but exactly coinciding shapes . . .” (1998, 198)? Or does the shape as form pertain to just one candidate? Lowe suggests that the shape, as form, belongs or pertains to the statue, not the bronze, and that the property concerned is “the property of being a statue of such-and-such a shape,” not the property of the statue’s particular shape. The reason for this distinction is that the form (being a statue of such-and-such a shape) is identified with the statue itself.
In this example, in the context of trope theory, how can there be a property, “being a statue of such-and-such a shape,” when the statue itself is constituted? Trope theory cannot account for this property, because trope theory cannot distinguish between the shape of the bronze and the shape of the statue. It cannot make this distinction because, as you point out in PTE, in trope theory there is no distinction between compresence and the existence of the object (Vallicella 2002, 87). One of the tropes in that compresence can be a shape trope, of course. But it cannot be the trope of “being a statue of such-and-such a shape,” because, in the wacky world of trope theory, the statue itself must be constituted before it can be a statue of such-and-such a shape. In other words, no trope in the compresent bundle can be the trope of “being a statue of such-and-such a shape,” because, until the tropes compresent, there cannot be a statue. This is what happens in a one-category ontology that recognizes only property particulars. If there were a trope of “being a statue of such-and-such a shape,” it would have to qualify the statue after the statue had been constituted.
BV: The last stretch of argumentation is not clear to me. Please clarify in the ComBox.
That was superbly heuristic, Bill.
Yes, regardless of nomenclature – materia signata, materia formata, materia secundo prima – matter must be part of the ontological picture. Yet for trope theory, matter is the elephant in the room. To admit its presence would be to introduce another category into the one-category ontology of trope theory. But if there are to be concrete objects, properly endowed with impenetrability, there must be matter: that is, concrete objects must be hylomorphic. As one philosopher said, you can’t hold properties (or property particulars, particularized properties, abstract particulars, or property instances).
In my opinion, that lump of bronze cannot properly be construed as a trope. As (particularized) properties, tropes are interpenetrable and predicable. The lump of bronze is impenetrable and impredicable. Moreover, the lump of bronze is a bearer of properties, whereas no trope is a bearer of (first-order) properties. In my view, trope theory ignores matter. It abstracts properties from the object, subjects them to compresence, and then claims to have constituted the object out of tropes alone. The type of abstraction involved is one of those cited in your prior post, “Sense of ‘Abstract’ with a Little Help from Hegel”: “it is to abstract from the full reality of thing in order to focus on one of its determinations.” Heil concurs: “A particular billiard ball’s sphericality is abstract, not in the sense of its falling short of being fully ‘concrete,’ but in the sense that its ‘separation’ from the ball is a matter of abstraction, Locke’s ‘partial consideration,’ an exercise of our capacity for considering the ball’s shape as distinct from considering its color or considering the ball itself” (2015, 119).
Trope theory attempts to enmatter tropes. As Maurin indicates, it renders them hylomorphic, composed of matter and form: “. . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance.” As Heil suggests, in the ontological project of D.C. Williams, the father of trope theory, “[t]he role of substances is to be filled by spatiotemporally ‘concurrent’ particularized properties” (2015, 119). Just as, according to Windelband, Leucippus [with his atomism] “shatters in pieces the world-body of Parmenides, and scatters its parts through infinite space” (1901, 48), so Williams shatters in pieces the Aristotelian substance, scattering properties (suitably refurbished as tropes), each of them qualifying, in Maurin’s view, as a “kind of substance.” Thus the trope becomes an ontological factotum, fulfilling two roles at once.
The insistence on ignoring matter leads trope theory to equivocation regarding parts and properties. Of course, properties and (physical) parts are distinct. The former can co-occupy a given region without limit, as with your recent example of the red dot – the site of at least three compresent tropes: red, circular, and extended. The latter (that is, parts) cannot co-occupy a given region. Instead of compresence, their aggregation entails juxtaposition. However, in constituting the object by compresent tropes (each of which is merely a property particular or particularized property), trope theory vainly attempts to achieve a concrete, material object, endowed with ontological independence. But it cannot do so. Parts are not properties. Parts combine mereologically to constitute that of which they are parts. They are not parasitic on the object they constitute. In contrast, in the conventional view of the relation between substance and property, as Campbell indicates, “[t]ropes are at best parasitic” (1981, 479). MacDonald concurs: “Independence was associated here with permanence, the sort of feature that substances or continuants have while events, accidents, etc., have, at best, only in a derivative sense, in virtue of being parasitic on substances” (2012, 19). In this context, I would like to requote Simons observation that tropes are not things, but of things: “But they are not THING-like, if by that we mean substance-like. They are not res, they are rei or rerum” (1994, 565, upper case in original).
I note that, when giving examples of tropes, trope theorists always refer to immaterial properties, like colour, shape, contour, weight, and so on. This comes out very clearly in Simons’ account of an airplane (also quoted earlier):
How something is is something about it, but not a part of it. Examine all the parts of a complex artifact, like an airplane. You will find its wings, its radar systems, its engines, its ailerons, etc., down to smaller parts like bolts, rivets, transistors, and bits of cable. You will not find its being 1005 tonnes in weight among them. Parts is one thing, properties another (and properties of parts something else again). (Simons, 1994, 563)
An airplane constituted solely by immaterial tropes such as weight, length, shape would never fly. In my opinion, one-category trope theory does not fly either.
Something more now about that lump of bronze. How did it get shaped? If, for the sake argument, we agree that the lump can qualify as a trope, what transformed it from a lump (which it must be to enter into compresence) to a statue? We cannot say that some trope or group of tropes transformed the lump, because tropes as abstract properties are causally inert.
I think that two types of abstraction are behind trope theory. The first is one of those you mention: detaching one aspect from a totality or whole and focusing on it to the exclusion of the others and the whole to which they pertain. The second type of abstraction behind trope theory is one not included in your extremely instructive discussion. I refer to the type of abstraction which detaches, from a group of particulars, some trait or feature common to all of them. Hegel refers to this as the “operation of abstracting and collecting together what is common to the objects . . . .” Inwood characterizes it as “forming concepts by abstracting from those respects in which a group of individuals differ from each other and retaining those features which they have in common” (2002, 366-67). Whitehead elaborates: “There are simplicities connected with the motion of a bar of steel which are obscured if we refuse to abstract from the individual molecules and there are certain simplicities concerning the behaviour of men which are obscured if we refuse to abstract from the individual peculiarities of particular specimens” (1978, 16-17).
In my opinion, trope theory, by means of the first type of abstraction cited in the preceding paragraph, abstracts properties from the object or concrete particular, construes them as tropes, and combines them in compresence. All these tropes, in virtue of both their own nature and the operation of abstraction which detaches and collocates them, are immaterial. Of necessity, the object constituted (or reconstituted) by this compresence of abstract(ed) tropes, is an immaterial object, not a material one.
This point can be reinforced by consideration of the second type of abstraction mentioned earlier: detaching a feature common to many particulars. In this case, with regard to the compresent tropes, the feature common to all of them is compresence. Each one is together with all the others. Thus compresence itself is an abstraction of abstractions. How can a material object result from that?
Posted by: Eric Levy | Thursday, April 07, 2016 at 09:15 PM
>>In my opinion, that lump of bronze cannot properly be construed as a trope.<<
I don't think anyone would say that. I was suggesting above that the lump might be taken to be a bundle of tropes. A bundle of tropes is not a trope. The immateriality of individual tropes does not entail the immateriality of trope bundles.
Still, I think we agree that trope theory is incoherent, chiefly for the reason that little or no sense can be attached to the notion of an item that is indissolubly both a property and a substance, a predicable item and an impredicable item.
Posted by: BV | Friday, April 08, 2016 at 04:28 PM
But how, then, is the trope-bundle pertaining to the lump to be related to the trope-bundle pertaining to the statue? And how can the required relation be related to its own relata without invoking Bradley's Regress?
Posted by: Eric Levy | Friday, April 08, 2016 at 08:16 PM