Maverick Philosopher

John Anderson: "We are all bothered by different things."

One of the nasty roots of political disagreement. Over at Substack

We are Bothered by Different Things

Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 141:

Melbourne intellectuals came to regard [John] Anderson 'as the man who had betrayed the Left, a man who had gone over to the other side.  Melburnians wanted Anderson to answer a simple question: was he or was he not interested in the fact that some were very rich and some were very poor?'  To this question Anderson replied that 'we are all bothered by different things.  That finished him with the Melburnians'. [Kennedy quotes Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Melbourne, 1991, p. 193]

"We are all bothered by different things."  And even when we are bothered by the same things, we prioritize the objects of botherment differently.  Now suppose you and I are bothered by exactly the same things in exactly the same order.  There is still room for disagreement and possibly even bitter contention: we are bothered to different degrees by the things that bother us.

"It angers me that that doesn't anger you!"  "It angers me that  you are insufficiently angered by what angers both of us."

Here then is one root of political disagreement.  It is a deep root, perhaps ineradicable.  And it is a root of other sorts of disagreement as well.  We are bothered by different things.

Are conservatives bothered by gun violence?  Yes, of course.  But the Americans among them are bothered more by the violation of the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. Liberals, even if they are slightly bothered by the violation of these rights, assuming they admit them in the first place, are much more bothered by gun violence.  Now there are factual questions here concerning which agreement is in principle possible, though exceedingly unlikely.  For example there is the question whether more guns in the hands of citizens leads to less crime.   That is a factual question, but one that is not going to be resolved to the satisfaction of all.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about the facts.  Each side sees the other as having its own 'facts.'

But deeper than facts lie values.  Here the problem becomes truly intractable.  We are bothered by different things because we differ about values and their ordering.  American conservatives and presumably most liberals value self-reliance but conservatives locate it much higher up in the axiological hierarchy.  This probably explains why liberals are more inclined to rely on professional law enforcement for protection against the criminal element even while they bash cops as a bunch of racists eager to hunt down and murder "unarmed black teenagers" such as Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri fame.  (Brown was unarmed, but tried to arm himself with the cop's gun. This is an important detail conveniently left out of the biased mainstream media accounts.)

As for what finished Anderson with the Melburnians, he was apparently not sufficiently exercised by (material) inequality for the tastes of the latter despite his being a man of the Left, though not reliably so due to his iconoclasm.

Does it bother conservatives that there is wealth inequality?  To some extent.  But for a(n American) conservative, liberty trumps equality in the scale of values.  With liberals it is the other way around.  Liberals of course cherish their brand of rights and liberties and will go to absurd extremes in defending them even when the right to free expression, a big deal with them, spills over into incitement to violence and includes the pollution of the culture with pornography.  Of course, this extremism in defense of free expression bangs up against the liberals' own self-imposed limit of political correctness.  The trashers of Christianity suddenly become cowards when it comes to the trashing of Islam.  That takes more courage than they command.  And they are easily cowed by events such as the 7 January 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.  Liberals are also absurdly eager to spread the right to vote even at the expense of making the polling places safe for voter fraud.  How else do you explain their mindless opposition to photo ID? But not a peep from liberals about 'real' liberties and rights such as gun rights, the right to private property, and the right to freedom from excessive and punitive taxation.

Is material inequality a problem?  Not as such.  Why should it be?  

As I recall John Rawls' Difference Principle, the gist of it is this: Social and economic inequality is justified ONLY IF the inequality makes the worse off better than they would have been without the inequality.  Why exactly?  If I'm smarter than you, work harder, practice the ancient virtues, avoid the vices, while you are a slacker and a screw-up who nevertheless has what he needs, why is my having more justified ONLY IF it makes you better off than you would have been without the inequality? (Yes, I know all about the Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance, but I don't consider that an argument.)

At the root of our differences are value differences and those, at bottom, are irreconcilable. 

On that cheery note, I punch the clock. Have a pleasant weekend.

Working Draft: The Case Against Facts

Comments appreciated if you are en rapport with the subject matter.

 

The Case Against Facts

 

Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 296 + xxvii

 
If Buridan's contribution to the bestiarum philosophorum was the ass, and David Armstrong's the ostrich, Arianna Betti's is the hedgehog bristling with spines. The hedgehog is an appropriate totemic animal inasmuch as her book too bristles with sharp distinctions and prickly arguments designed to inflict pain upon the friends of facts. In this penetrating and beautifully organized volume Professor Betti deploys her distinctions and arguments against two sorts of facts, compositional and propositional, as she calls them. The states of affairs of David Malet Armstrong's middle period (Armstrong 2007) are examples of the first kind of fact. These items are the main target of Betti's animadversions in the first part of her two-part book. She does not go so far as to claim that Armstrongian facts do not exist; her claim is the rather more modest one that we have no reason to posit them, since the work they do, if it needs doing at all, can be done just as well by a certain sort of mereological sum. (101) Betti ignores, however, Armstrong's very different later conception of states of affairs or facts. (Armstrong 2009; Armstrong 2010, 26-34; Vallicella 2016) This later conception also counts as compositional in her sense and ought to have been discussed for the sake of completeness, especially since it in some ways approximates to Betti's mereological  position.

 

One might wonder how a fact could fail to be compositional. Facts are complex or composite items, after all, not simples. So they must all have some internal composition or other, whether they be truthmaking facts or facts of the Chisholmian-Plantingian sort. At a bare minimum, a's being F is composed of a and F-ness. Thus I find less than felicitous Betti's talk of propositional facts in contrast to compositional facts as “noncompositional objects at the level of reference.” (24) She makes it clear, however, that she is using 'compositional' in a narrow sense that implies that compositional facts and their constituents are “part[s] of the furniture of the world.” (37) We shall soon see that being in the world involves being real as opposed to being ideal. An example of a compositional fact is the fact of Guido's being hungry. This fact has Guido himself, all 200 lbs of him, as a constituent. An example of a propositional fact is the putative referent of the that-clause in a sentence like 'Guido sees that Francesca is serving spaghetti puttanesca.' This putative referent is the fact that Francesca is serving spaghetti puttanesca. This propositional fact is like a (Fregean) proposition, though it is not a proposition, in that it does not have Francesca herself as a constituent, but rather an abstract surrogate that represents her. (170) (This fact-of vs. fact-that terminology is mine, not Betti's. I got it from Milton Fisk.)

 

Betti describes in marvellous detail seven features of compositional facts (18) and five of propositional facts (170). I will speak of C-facts and P-facts. Here are some salient differences. C-facts are in the world, and thus suited to play the truthmaking role whereas P-facts are not in the world and hence not fit for truthmaking. To be in the world is to be real where to be real is to exist “through time and in time as causes or effects in a causal chain.” (22) So C-facts are real while P-facts are ideal. The ideality of P-facts, however, is not that of propositions since P-facts are not propositions. Betti is greatly and rightly exercised by the curious in-between status of these “ghostly critters” (114) that are neither truthbearers nor truthmakers and yet are championed by such distinguished philosophers as Roderick Chisholm, Alvin Plantinga, and Kit Fine. These “ghostly critters” are not truthbearers because they are neither true nor false. But while they are not bivalent in terms of truthvalue, they are 'bipolar' (my term): while all exist, some of them obtain while some do not. They are not truthmakers since truthmakers are real and 'monopolar': if they don't exist they are nothing. Thus the fact of Guido's being hungry does not exist at all if Guido is not hungry. Propositional facts are neither fish nor fowl. The conclusion Betti arrives at strikes me as correct: “Propositional facts collapse into true propositions.” (179) Propositional facts are thus not a distinctive category of entity. We need them, she thinks, as little as we need compositional facts. Actually, her position is far more radical than this since she denies that that-clauses are referential parts of speech. So her position is best expressed conditionally by the following quotation: “If there were nominal reference to facts, facts would be true propositions . . . . (113) Her view, if I understand it, is eliminativist not identitarian: she is not saying that there are propositional facts and that what they are are true propositions; she is saying that that there are no propositional facts.

 

Leaving propositional facts to languish in their ghostly realm, the rest of this article will take issue with Betti's critique of compositional facts, the ones dear to my heart, the facts involved in the flux and shove of the real order. On a personal note, I want to thank Professor Betti for her very close attention to my articles on the topic.

 

The Case Against Compositional Facts

A compositional fact, as opposed to a propositional fact, is an entity fit to play the role of truthmaker. The truthmaker role may be introduced as follows. Consider the assertive utterance of some such contingent sentence as 'Tom is sad.' If true, this assertively uttered sentence cannot just be true: if true, it is true because or in virtue of something external to it. This use of 'because' is not causal which is why philosophers reach for the weasel phrase 'in virtue of,' which, despite its slipperiness, may well be indispensable for metaphysics. I say it is indispensable. (Or do hedgehogs eat weasels?) Roughly, there has to be something that 'makes' the sentence true. This external something cannot be another declarative sentence, even if true. More generally, a truth is a true truthbearer (a Fregean proposition, say, or perhaps an Aristotelian proposition, see pp. 31-32 for Betti's helpful explanation of the difference) and no true truthbearer is made true by another such item in the specific sense of 'makes true' in play in truthmaker theory. Nor can someone's say-so be what makes true a true truthbearer. The truthmaker has to be something 'in the world,' something extralinguistic and mind-independent in the realm of reference as opposed to the realm of sense. The friends of truthmakers are realists about truth: they are convinced that at least some truths are in need of an ontological ground of their being true.¹

 

Truthmaker maximalists hold that all truths need such grounds, but one needn't be a maximalist to be a truthmaker theorist. As for 'makes true,' this is neither entailment nor causation. Not entailment, because entailment is a relation between propositions, assuming that truthbearers are propositions, whereas truthmaking is a relation between extra-propositional reality and propositions. So if x makes true y, then y is a truthbearer, but x is not. If someone says that the proposition expressed by 'Snow is white' makes true the proposition expressed by 'Something is white,' then that person, while talking sense, is not using 'makes true' in the specific way in which the phrase is used in truthmaker theory. Truthmaking is not causation for a similar reason: causation does not connect the extra-propositional to the propositional whereas truthmaking does. As Armstrong says, truthmaking is “cross-categorial.” (Armstrong 2004b, 5) It links the extra-propositional to the propositional.

 

It is important to note, however, that while truthmakers cannot be Fregean or Aristotelian propositions, and thus must be extra-propositional, they must also be proposition-like on Armstrong's approach. This is a point I think Betti misses. Speaking of compositional facts, she tells us that “facts are neither linguistic nor languagelike entities at the lowest level of reference. (28, emphasis in original) But this is certainly not Armstrong's view, the view that is supposed to be the target of Betti's critique of compositional facts. His view is that the world is a world of states of affairs, a “totality of facts not of things” (Wittgenstein) and “sentence-like rather than list-like.” (Armstrong 2010, 34) If the world is sentence-like, then, pace Betti, it is language-like. Armstrong was profoundly influenced by his teacher in Sydney, the Scots philosopher John Anderson, who held that “reality, while independent of the mind that knows it, has a 'propositional' structure.” (Armstrong 1997, 3) Armstrong goes on to say that “the propositional view of reality which he [Anderson] championed is the facts or states of affairs view of reality.” (Armstrong 1997, 3-4) That Armstrongian facts are proposition-like and thus language-like is fairly obvious when we consider the truthmakers of contingent predications of the form 'a is F.' The truthmaker cannot be a by itself, or F-ness by itself, or the mereological sum a + F-ness. It must be a-instantiating F-ness, which has a proposition-like structure. Armstrongian facts have a logos-like and thus logical articulation contrary to what Betti says in opposition to Kit Fine. (28) But now I am getting ahead of myself.

 

Suppose you accept the legitimacy of the truthmaker role and the need for some type of entity to play it. It doesn't follow straightaway that the entities needed to play the role must be what Betti calls compositional facts or what David Armstrong calls states of affairs. This is so even if we confine ourselves to the really clear examples of truthbearers in need of truthmakers, namely, synthetic, contingent predications such as 'Guido is hungry' or the propositions expressed by assertive utterances of such sentences. Nevertheless, a powerful argument can be mounted for compositional facts as truthmakers. The argument Armstrong and I consider powerful, however, Betti calls “unsound.” (106) Surprise!

 

Although she is skeptical of the need for truthmakers, she is willing to grant the need arguendo, insisting only that if we need truthmakers, a certain type of mereological complex can do the job thus rendering Armstrong's facts, as unmereological complexes, unnecessary. (102) This is why she thinks the truthmaker argument for Armstrongian facts is unsound. As she sees it, compositional facts are not givens, but theoretical posits, and unnecessary ones at that. They were invented to solve a problem, the unity problem, that arises only because of certain optional assumptions about relations and properties that one is not bound to make. (94-95) Compositional facts are an ad hoc, indeed a “maximally ad hoc,” solution to a pseudo-problem. (64)

 

Now let me say something in exposition of Armstrong's argument for facts or states of affairs as truthmakers on the assumption that the truthmaker role is legitimate and needs to be filled by some category of entity or other. I will then consider Betti's counter-proposal.

 

If it is true that Tom is sad, could the truthmaker of this truth be the item that Betti calls (8) the sentence-subject of 'Tom is sad,' namely, Tom? No, since Tom needn't be sad. So Tom by himself cannot be what makes true 'Tom is sad.' The same goes for the property of being sad. By itself the property cannot be the truthmaker of the sentence in question. (I am assuming, with Armstrong, that properties are immanent universals. Immanent, in that they cannot exist uninstantiated; universal, in that they are repeatable.) Now if Tom exists and sadness exists, then so does the mereological sum Tom + sadness. But this sum cannot be the truthmaker either. For the sum exists whether or not Tom is sad. How so?

 

Suppose that Tom is not sad, but Shlomo is. If properties are immanent universals, then sadness cannot exist uninstantiated; suppose it exists in virtue of being instantiated by Shlomo. So Tom exists, sadness exists, and their sum exists. But this does not suffice for Tom's being sad. There is a missing ontological ingredient: something to connect sadness to Tom. You might think that the missing ingredient would have to be the worldly correlate of the 'is' of predication. But if you take this correlate to be an exemplification/instantiation relation then you ignite Bradley's relation regress which is unfortunately vicious. Other moves invoking Strawsonian nonrelational ties, Bergmannian nexus, Fregean unsaturated concepts, and benign fact-internal infinite regresses (see Vallicella 2010), are equally unavailing. The unifier of a fact's constituents cannot be a further constituent or anything internal to the fact. This leaves two possibilities: (i) the unifier is external to the fact, which Betti rejects, and (ii) Armstrong's middle-period suggestion that facts are entities in addition to their consituents and it is they who hold fact-appropriate constituents together so that they can exercise the truthmaking function. Betti has mastered the dialectic and considers the least bad solution to be Armstrong's: facts hold their constituents together. Although she doesn't say so, she considers my solution in terms of an external unifier to be the worst. The extant putative solutions to the unity problem of course presuppose that it is a genuine problem. Betti thinks it isn't.

 

Betti's Dissolution of the Unity Problem

 

After rejecting the extant putative solutions to the unity problem, Betti proposes to dissolve it by collapsing the distinction between “relations that relate relata and relations that do not: all relations relate relata and carry out their own unifying work.” (95) She means this to apply to properties as well. All properties qualify their bearers and carry out their own qualifying work. Thus there needn't be anything to hold the constituents of a relational or as monadic fact together: nothing internal to the fact, nothing external, and not the fact itself. Betti's point is that there is no need for Armstrongian facts, facts as entities in addition to their constituents. (Cf. Armstrong 1997, 117) Her point is not that there are no facts. There may well be facts; it is just that if there are, they are a special sort of mereological sum. Perhaps we can say that she is an identitarian about compositional facts, not an eliminativist, whereas she is an eliminativist about propositional facts, not an identitarian. More on this in a moment.

 

What Betti has to do is block a possibility like the following. In the actual world, call it Charley, Tim loves Tina. In a merely possible world w in which Tim and Tina both exist, Tim does not love Tina, but Tim loves Toni. In Charley we have both the relational fact of Tim's loving Tina and the mereological sum Tim + loves + Tina. In w, we have the sum Tim + loves + Tina but not the corresponding fact. This implies that there is more to the fact than the sum of its constituents: the sum can exist without constituting a fact. The something more is that which makes of the constituents a real truthmaking unity. Call it the unifier. Betti thinks that the least bad of the extant proposals as to what the unifier is is Armstrong's: facts hold their constituents together; facts are unmereological complexes over and above their constituents. In short, what Betti needs to do is counter the seductive thought that in an actual relational situation such as that of Tom's loving Tina, the constituents can exist without forming a real truthmaking unity. What she needs to maintain is that, necessarily, if all the constituents exist, then the relatedness exists. If the mere existence of the constituents ensures their connectedness, then there is no need for Armstrongian facts. You would then have real unity on the cheap, real truthmaking unity from mereology alone, or rather from mereology operating upon the right sorts of constituents. The mereological principle of the extensionality of parthood would hold for all complexes. Nice work if you can get it!

 

Betti can achieve her end if she holds that relations are relata-specific where “A relation is relata-specific if and only if it is in its nature to relate specific relata.” (89) Suppose that the relation loves as it figures in the sum Tom + loves + Tina is necessarily such that, if it exists, then it relates Tom and Tina. Then there would be no distinction in reality between loves as a relating relation and loves as an inert relation that is merely a constituent but not also a unifier of the complex into which it enters.

 

Betti's contention, then, is that all relations, just in virtue of existing, are relating relations, active ontological ingredients if you will, and none are inert ingredients. A relation cannot exist without actually relating its relata. If so, there cannot be a difference between the mereological sum a + R+ b and the fact of a's standing in R to b. Given the constituents, the fact is given: it is not an ontological extra, something over and above the constituents. There is no possibility of the constituents existing without the fact existing. It follows that there is no need for facts as unmereological compositions, facts as “additions to being,” in a phrase from Armstrong. If a fact just is a mereological complex, then it is an “ontological free lunch,” to employ yet another signature phrase of the late Australian. Of course, not just any old mereological sum is a fact; only those with the right constituents.

 

And the same goes for properties: all properties, just in virtue of existing, qualify their bearers. There is no need for a tertium quid such as an instantiation relation to tie a property to its bearer. Nor is there any need for monadic facts as entities in addition to their constituents to do this unifying work. There is no difference between the sum a + F-ness and the fact of a's being F. For this to work, all properties have to be “bearer-specific.” “A property is bearer-specific if and only if it is in its nature to be had by specific bearers.” (90) Suppose it is true that Hargle is happy, and that being happy is “bearer-specific.” We can display the property as follows: __(H) being happy. '__' indicates that the property is unsaturated or incomplete or gappy in something like Frege's sense: if it is had by an individual it is had directly without the need of a connector such as an instantiation relation or Strawsonian nonrelational tie or a Bergmannian nexus. '(H)' indicates that the property is bearer-specific or rather bearer-individuated: if the property is had, it is had by Hargle and nothing else. That the property is had follows from its existence: necessarily, if the property exists, then it is had, had by Hargle and nothing else, and had directly without the service of a tertium quid. What this all implies is that the mereological sum Hargle + __(H) being happy suffices as truthmaker of 'Hargle is happy.' There is no need for a fact over and above this sum. Indeed, as Betti points out, the property alone suffices as truthmaker since it cannot exist unless Hargle exists. (101)

 

Questions and Objections

 

1. Why is Betti's proposal superior to Armstrong's?

 

Betti presents us with an alternative way of thinking about truthmaking facts, namely, as mereological sums whose parts include relata-specific relations and bearer-specific properties. Betti's main point is that “mereological complexes are viable as truthmakers; facts are not needed for the role.” (101) When she says that facts are not needed, she means Armstrongian, middle-period facts. She is not denying that there are truthmakers. Nor is she is denying the existence of facts as long as they are assayed as mereological complexes. If a fact is a complex entity that functions as a truthmaker, then her mereological complexes containing relata-specific relations and bearer-dependent properties are facts, though not in Armstrong 's robust sense. She is denying, or rather refusing to countenance on grounds of theoretical economy, facts as unmereological complexes. Her claim is that there is no explanatory need for facts as the middle-period Armstrong conceives of them, namely, as “additions to being.” Betti may bristle at my use of 'facts' in describing her position but surely there is an innocuous and nearly datanic, as opposed to theoretical, use of 'fact' according to which an individual's having a property, or two or more things standing in a relation, is a fact. Indeed, she needs this use of 'fact' just to state her theory, according to which the fact aRb is identical to the sum a + R + b, when R is relata-specific. On her view facts are a proper subset of mereological sums. That is not a denial of facts, but an acceptance of them. Unfortunately, Betti sometimes expresses herself in a misleading way. She tells us, for example, that “the thought that the world is a world without facts – one in which there is no difference between facts and sums – is shown to be perfectly sensible.” (88) This formulation equivocates on 'fact.' What she wants to say is that the world is without Armstrongian facts, not that the world is without truthmaking facts. It is the latter that are no different from sums, namely those sums whose constituents include relata-specific relations and object-dependent properties.

 

Betti thinks her theory is preferable to Armstrong's. I question whether she is justified in this preference. We face a tough choice. Armstrong's theory violates the extensionality of parthood and countenances unmereological complexes. This is a strike against it. Betti's theory avoids unmereological complexes, thereby upholding the extensionality of parthood, but accepts relata-specific relations and bearer-dependent properties. How plausible is it that all relations are relata- specific and all properties bearer-dependent? Are these notions even coherent? Let's consider the coherence question.

 

2. Against Relata-Specific Relations and Bearer-Dependent Properties

 

Suppose Argle is two feet from Bargle. There is nothing in the nature of either relatum to necessitate their standing in this external relation. Each can exist apart from the relation. And as I see it, there cannot be anything in the nature of the relation itself to necessitate that it be precisely these two critters that the relation relates. So on my view a relational situation such as Argle's being two feet from Bargle involves a double externality: there is nothing in the nature of the terms to dictate their standing in the external relation in question, and there is nothing in the nature of the external relation to dictate the terms. But as Betti sees it, it is the nature of this relation to relate Argle and Bargle and nothing else: the relation cannot exist/be instantiated without relating precisely these two. This implies that “as soon as” (105) the relation exists, it relates Argle and Bargle. If this conception is coherent, it has the desired consequence of undercutting Bertrand Russell's distinction between actually relating relations and those same relations as inert, and with it the distinction between a fact as a real unity of fact-appropriate constituents and the 'mere' mereological sum of those very same constituents. If this works, it puts paid to Armstrong's commitment to unmereological complexes: mereology suffices for truthmakers provided the parts of the sums include relata-specific relations or bearer-dependent properties.

 

It seems to me, however, that the notion of relata-specificity reduces to absurdity by way of the following argument in which R is any relata-specific dyadic external relation, and a and b are its individual relata. (See also my critique of D. W. Mertz in Vallicella 2004.) Generalization beyond the dyadic case is straightforward but unnecessary. Betti's definition of 'external relation' is standard and perfectly serviceable: “A relation is external if and only if it is not grounded in corresponding properties of its relata, that is, is an entity over and above its relata.” (89) An internal relation is then one that is grounded in corresponding properties and is not an entity in addition to its relata. Now to the argument:

 

P1. R is entirely dependent for its existence on both a and b. (Betti's theory of relata-specificity)

 

This is because (i) R cannot exist without being instantiated and thus cannot exist without actually relating some pair of individuals or other, and (ii) R cannot, as relata-specific, relate any pair of individuals other than a, b. If dyadic R were an immanent universal, then it could not exist without relating some pair or other; but it would not necessarily have to relate the precise pair, a, b. R's existence would then not depend on its relating a and b. But as it is, R is a particular (an unrepeatable), not a universal (a repeatable); it is a non-transferable relational trope. It is as particular as the particulars it relates. Its being or existence is exhausted by its particular occurrence, unlike an immanent universal the being or existence of which is not exhausted by its instantiation in a particular case. So R, as a relational trope, is entirely dependent for its existence on the exact relata it has: its being or existence is exhausted by its relating of those exact relata, the individuals a and b. Therefore,

 

C1. R is not distinct in reality from the particular relatedness aRb: R = aRb.

 

Of course, R can be thought of in abstraction from aRb. But R in reality is identical to aRb. You cannot say that they are different because aRb has constituents a, b while R does not. For R exists when and only when it is relating a and b. Apart from them it is nothing at all.

 

P2. The particular relatedness or relational fact aRb is identical to the mereological sum a + R + b, given that R is relata-specific. (Betti's theory) Therefore,

 

C2. R is identical to the sum a + R + b. (from C1 and P2 by Transitivity of Identity)

 

P3. No proper part of a mereological sum having two or more members is identical to the sum of which it is a proper part. (Principle of mereology) Therefore,

 

C3. R is not identical to the sum a + R + b. (from P3) Therefore,

 

C4. R is and is not identical to the sum a + R + b. (from C2, C3) Contradiction! Therefore,

 

C5. Either P1 or P2 is false; either way, Betti's theory fails.

 

Betti will presumably reject (C1). But how? She tells us that it is the nature of R to relate exactly a and b. Now if it is the nature of R to relate exactly these relata, then it is intrinsic to R that it do so. But then R is intrinsically relational, relational in and of itself. If this is neither contradictory nor magical, then it involves importing mind (intentionality) into the bowels of R. For if it is intrinsic to R that it relate exactly a and b, then R, quite apart from actually relating a and b, 'pre-selects' a and b as its relata. But this is what mind in its intentional states does. Such states are intrinsically relational: it is their nature to be of or about items that need not exist for the states to be of or about them. But surely there is no intentionality within the non-transferable relational trope R!

 

But what is the alternative? Will we be told that a and b are constituents of R? But then R is identical to aRb, when it cannot be given that aRb is a + R + b.

 

Now let's consider bearer-dependent properties. Suppose we grant, along with Armstrong (2004, 49), that some mereological complexes are truthmakers. Is it not also the case that some are not? Suppose that Gargle is lachrymose but Hargle is not. Then the following sum exists: Hargle + __(G)being lachrymose. The sum exists because its two parts exist. But the parts are not connected to form a truthmaker. This implies that on Betti's account there are two sorts of mereological sum: those that are truthmakers and those that are not. It also implies that what makes a mereological sum a truthmaker is not its being a mereological sum. What makes a sum a truthmaker is the nature of its members. Thus what makes Hargle + __(H)being happy a truthmaking sum is its second member.

 

But this second member has a rather intricate and puzzling structure. It is a bearer-individuated property, a property that exists only if instantiated by Hargle. Hargle can exist without being happy, but the property in question cannot exist unless Hargle exists. It is in the nature of the property to qualify precisely Hargle “as soon as it exists,” (105) i.e., as soon as the property exists. But when does it exist? When Hargle instantiates it. So it is not as if the property has its individuated nature apart from its being instantiated; rather, it receives its individuated nature by being instantiated by Hargle. It is only the existing Hargle that can make the property individuative of precisely Hargle and nothing else. So Hargle supplies the nature that makes the property Hargle-specific, or rather Hargle-individuated.

 

Does this not smack of absurdity? The nature of an entity is intrinsic to it; it cannot consist in a relation to an item external to it. So it cannot be instantiation by Hargle that gives the property its nature. If, on the other hand, Hargle were a constituent of the property in question, namely, __(H)being happy, then it would make sense to say that it is the nature of the property to be instantiated by Hargle. But Hargle is not a constituent of the property; otherwise the property would not be a property but the fact of Hargle's being happy.

 

Betti seems to face a dilemma. Either Hargle is not a constituent of the property or he is. If Hargle is not a constituent of the property, then the property has no nature that makes it dependent on precisely Hargle and nothing else. But if Hargle is a constituent of the property, then the property is a fact.

 

If Betti's account is incoherent, as I have just argued that it is, then it cannot be superior to Armstrong's even if Armstrong's is also incoherent. I should make it clear that I am not defending Armstrong; I admit that his view of facts is problematic. In fact, I argue that it is incoherent in Vallicella 2016. My point is that Betti's theory is not an acceptable replacement for it. Even if her theory is not incoherent, it is problematic as I will now further demonstrate.

 

3. Digging Deeper: Further Questions about Betti's Theory of Relations

 

Betti faults me (92-93) for failing to distinguish between externality and relata-unspecificity. A relation is external just in case it is not “grounded in corresponding properties of its relata . . . .” (89) “A rela tion is relata-unspecific if and only if it is not in its nature to relate specific relata.” (90) I fail to distinguish externality from relata-unspecificity in that I hold that, in Betti's words, “A relation is external if and only if it could have related another pair (or triple, quadruple, etc.) of relata.” (93, citing Vallicella 2002, 14-15, 31; 2004, 164). As I see it, no external relation has a nature that dictates that it relate only a particular pair, triple, quadruple, etc. of relata. As against this, Betti envisages the following possibility: an external relation such as being two feet from that holds, if it holds at all, between Argle and Bargle but cannot hold between any other pair of relata. The relation is external in that there is nothing in the natures of the relata that dictates that they stand in the relation in question; the relation is relata-specific in that there is something in the nature of the relation to dictate that, if it holds, it holds only between Argle and Bargle.

 

Now if Betti's scenario is possible, then I have blundered by conflating externality and relata-unspecificity. But while I grant that Betti's 'possibility' is combinatorially possible given her definitions, it is not metaphysically possible. I gave an argument above. So my conflation of externality and relata-unspecificity strikes me as justified.

 

I found Betti's theory of relata-specific relations (which draws on the work of her student Jan Willem Wieland) obscure and in need of further development. One intriguing suggestion is that “relata-specific relations can still be universals.” (91) Now there is a wholly uncontroversial sense of 'relata-specific universal' which Betti does not intend. Consider the universal taller than. This is a dyadic relation that is instantiated by ordered pairs of objects, but not just by any old pair. The pairs must be pairs of things having height. Taller than is thus specific to all and only such pairs and not to pairs of numbers or pairs of sets or pairs of propositions or pairs of angels or pairs of acts of thinking. But Betti means something different. She is apparently envisaging the possibility of a relation that is universal but that, say, relates only Guido, Francesca, Giacomo, and Maria in respect of height. Unfortunately, she gives no exemples and I am not sure what she is driving at. She brings this up because she thinks that her solution to the unity problem works whether or not one assays properties as universals or as tropes. (91) But this is all very obscure and here is a lacuna that needs filling.

 

Conclusion

 

My interim verdict with respect to compositional facts is that Betti has not provided a viable mereological alternative to the admittedly untenable facts or states of affairs of Armstrong's middle period.

 

 

REFERENCES

 

Armstrong, D. M. 1978. Nominalism and Realism: Universals and Scientific Realism, vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Armstrong, D. M. 1983. What is a Law of Nature? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Armstrong, D. M. 1989a. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder: Westview Press.

Armstrong, D. M. 1989b. A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Armstrong, D. M. 1993. “A World of States of Affairs”. Philosophical Perspectives, vol.7, 429-440.

Armstrong, D. M. 2004a. “How Do Particulars Stand to Universals?” In D. W. Zimmerman, (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 139-154.

Armstrong, D. M. 2004b. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Armstrong, D. M. 2009. “Questions about States of Affairs”. In M. E. Reicher (ed.), States of Affairs. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 39-50.

Armstrong, D. M. 2010a. Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Armstrong, D. M. 2010b. “Reinhardt Grossmann's Ontology”. In Cumpa, J. (ed.), Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 29-43.

Baxter, D. 2001. “Instantiation as Partial Identity”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1979, 449-64.

Bergmann, G. 1967. Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Butchvarov, P. 1979. Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence, and Predication. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Butchvarov, P. 1986. “States of Affairs”. In Bogdan, R. (ed.), Roderick M. Chisholm. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 113-133.

Butchvarov, P. 2010. “Facts”. In Cumpa, J. (ed.), Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 71-93.

Chisholm, R 1976. Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study. La Salle: Open Court.

Cumpa, J. and Tegtmeier, E. (eds.), 2009. Phenomenological Realism Versus Scientific Realism: Reinhardt Grossmann-David M. Armstrong Metaphysical Correspondence. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.

Frege, G. 1960.”On Concept and Object”. In P. Geach and M. Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 42-55.

Frege, G. 1976. “Der Gedanke”. In G. Patzig (ed.), Logische Untersuchungen. Goettingen:Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 30-53.

Grossmann, R. 1974. “Bergmann's Ontology and the Principle of Acquintance”. In Gram, M. S. and Klemke, E. D. (eds.), The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 89-113.

Grossmann, R. 1983. The Categorial Structure of the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Grossmann, R. 1984. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Grossmann, R. 1990. The Fourth Way: A Theory of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Grossmann, R. 1992. The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology. London: Routledge.

Mulligan, K., Simons, P. and Smith, B. 2009. “Truth-makers”. In Lowe, E. J. and Rami, A., Truth and Truth-Making. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 59-86.

Mumford, S. 2007. David Armstrong. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Plantinga, A. 1974. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Strawson, P. F. 1950. “Truth”. In Aristotelian Society Suplementary Volume 24, 136-137.

Vallicella, W. F. 2000. “From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument”. International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 48, 157-181.

Vallicella, W. F. 2002. A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Vallicella, W. F. 2004. “Bradley's Regress and Relation-Instances”. The Modern Schoolman, vol. LXXXI, no. 3, 159-183.

Vallicella, W. F. 2010. “Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition”. Dialectica 64, 265-277.

Vallicella, W. F. 2016. “Facts: An Essay in Aporetics”. In Calemi, Francesco F. ed, Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong. Boston/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 105-131, esp. 115-126.

 

1It is an interesting question whether one could be an idealist and also a truthmaker theorist. Consider a Kantian who holds that phenomenal objects and events are “empirically real but transcendentally ideal” to employ a signature Kantian phrase. It seems to me that such a philosopher could maintain a need for truthmakers for some truthbearers, namely those synthetic aposteriori, and thus contingent, judgments about empirical objects and events. It seems one could combine realism about empirical truth with transcendental idealism.

 

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John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism

The Australian philosopher John Passmore (1914 - 2004) is described in his Telegraph obituary as "an Andersonian radical, swept away, though not to the point of unquestioning devotion, by his Scottish-born philosophy professor, John Anderson . . . ."  The influence of Anderson on Passmore is very clear from the latter's Philosophical Reasoning (Basic Books, 1969; orig. publ. 1961).  The Andersonian Chapter Three, "The Two-Worlds Argument," is the cynosure of my current interest, in particular, the distinction Passmore makes between what he calls entity-monism and what he calls existence-monism. (Anderson, as far as I know does not use these terms and, as far as I know, they have found no resonance among the epigoni.   The terms are not found in the index of A. J. Baker's Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986.  And Quentin Gibson, The Existence Principle, Kluwer, 1998, p. 14, dismisses 'existence-monism' as a misleading label for Anderson's view.)

In this entry I will present the distinction and then comment critically upon it.

Passmore tells us that

Entity-monism is the doctrine that 'ultimately' there is only one real entity. What we normally regard as distinct things -- whether they be chairs, or musical compositions, or human being -- are, all of them, appearances of this one entity. (38)

[. . .]

Existence-monism is difficult to define in general terms.  But we might put it thus: when we say that something exists, or that things of a certain kind exist, this exist or exists has an invariant meaning whatever the 'something' or the 'kind' may be, i.e. there are not sorts, or  levels, or orders of existence.  More accurately, what is asserted by 'X exists' can always be asserted by a proposition which contains an 'is' which has, in this sense, an invariant meaning.  Existence-monism, unlike entity-monism, does admit of varieties.  Philosophers might say, and have said, that to exist is to be perceived, or to be in process, or to be spatiotemporal, or to be a possible subject for physical investigation, or to be a thing with properties, and do on. (39, bolding added)

I have two criticisms.

1. There is first of all a slide from a semantic thesis, a thesis about meaning, to an ontological thesis, a thesis about being.  Passmore conflates the semantic claim that 'exists' and cognates have an invariant meaning or sense with the ontological claim that there are no sorts or kinds or levels or orders or modes or ways of being/existence.  But as I see it, one can consistently maintain both that (i) 'exists' and cognates is univocal in sense across all its uses and that (ii) there are different modes of existence.  For this reason, (i) and (ii) are distinct theses.

Let me give a quick illustration.  Carpets exist and bulges in carpets exist.  In the sentence immediately preceding 'exist' is invariant in sense across both occurrences (both tokenings).  And yet it makes good sense to say that carpets and bulges exist in different ways.  A carpet can exist with or without a bulge; but no carpet bulge can exist without a carpet whose bulge it is.  If a substance is defined as an entity logically capable of independent existence, then a carpet is a substance.  But surely no bulge in a carpet is a substance.  For no carpet bulge is logically capable of independent existence. It is rather an accident of the carpet as substance.  Carpet and bulge exist in different ways: the carpet exists in itself; the bulge in another.  Or: the carpet exists independently; the bulge dependently.  To think of carpet and bulge as Humean "distinct existences" strains credulity.  What we have here are not two Hume-distinct items that stand in a causal relation.  Nor do they stand in a logical relation if such relationsd are defined over propositions.  What we have here is irreducible existential dependence: the bulge depends in its existence upon the carpet, but not vice versa.  To make sense of this example we need to speak of two different modes of existence.

Suppose you accept this.  Surely the acceptance is logically consistent with saying that both carpets and bulges exist in the same sense of  'exist.'  And what sense is that?   It is the sense expressed by the so-called existential quantifier.  A better name for it is 'particular quantifier.'  In 'Some items are carpets' and 'Some items are bulges,' the predicate 'Some items are ___' has the same sense.  And yet carpets and bulges, like faces and smiles, exist in different ways.  Or at least one can with no breach of logical consistency maintain this ontological thesis while also holding to the semantic univocity of 'exists' and cognates.  Just don't confuse the ontological with the semantic.  Don't confuse ways of existing with senses of 'exists.'

Well, I hope you followed that.  Now on to the second criticism where the going gets tougher.

2. Passmore clearly sees that one could not sensibly maintain that to be = to be water. "Nobody could now win credence who asserted that to be is to be a quantity of water, however plausible that doctrine might have looked to Thales." (39)  And the reason would not be that we now know that water is not an element, or that there are stuffs other than water.  The reason lies deeper.  If to exist is to be water, then 'Water exists' would be equivalent to the tautology 'Water is water,'  when it  obviously isn't.

It seems clear that there is no kind of thing or kind of stuff that we could invoke to give descriptive content to existence in general.  There is no K such that it will come out true that to be = to be a K or a quantity of K.  No one will maintain that to be is to be a lump of coal or to be a cat or to be a quantity of hydrogen.  There are two problems here.  First, if to be = to be a K, then only Ks could exist.  If to be is to be a cat, then only cats could exist: everything would be a cat.  Not good!  Second, even if there is some K that everything is, being K and existing are not the same.  For to say that Ks exist is not to say that Ks are Ks.

What about: to be is to be spatiotemporal?  One problem with this naturalist proposal is that it is circular.  A thing cannot be spatiotemporal unless it exists in space-time.  But then the proposal comes to this: for x to exist is for x to be spatiotemporal and exist.  This point about circularity is equivalent to the second point I just made.  To say of a spatiotemporal thing that exists is not to say that it is spatiotemporal.  To give it a modal twist: it is necessary that spatiotemporal items be spatiotemporal, but contingent that any exist.

So it comes as a surprise when Passmore says, with respect to "To be is to have a place in Space-Time," that "this sort of difficulty does not arise," namely the difficulty in the water example.  Why not? Because, "Space-Time is not the sort of thing to which existence is ascribed or which is used to distinguish one thing from another." (39)  But surely we do ascribe existence to spacetime.  And it is question-begging to say that spatiotemporality does not distinguish one thing from another: it distinguishes concrete things from abstract things.  Granted, it does not distinguish items in space time, but neither does being a cat distinguish cats from one another.

So is seems to me that 'To be is to be water' and 'To be is to be spatiotemporal' are on a par.  The only difference is that 'water' picks out a natural stuff-kind while 'spatiotemporal pickls out a mode of being.

Pace Anderson and Passmore, being cannot be identified with being spatiotemporal.

What then becomes of existence-monism?  Existence-monism amounts to the claim that there is a single way of being or existence as opposed to two or more ways.  Thus existence-monism is taken by Andersonians to rule out Plato's two-world theory according to which Forms exist atemporally while the phenomenal particulars that participate in them exist in a temporal way.  But as I pointed out in my first criticism, one cannot validly infer a single way of being from a single use of 'exists.'  Univocity at the level of sense doesn't entail modal sngleness at the level of being.

What reason, then, do we have to think that there is a single way of being? Well, you might say that it is evident to the senses that there are things in space and time.  Fine, but that doesn't show that there is a way of being that is their way of being, even with the addition of the premise that everything that exists exists in space and time.  That is, it does not show that we must distinguish between nature, existence, and mode of existence.  Why can't we eke by with just nature and existence?

Besides, if there is exactly one way of being, and spatiotemporal items, which we know to exist, exist in that way, does it not follow that to be = to be spatiotemporal, that existence reduces to spatiotemporality?  But we saw above under #2 that that can't be right: there is no F such that to exist = to be F. (Wel, there is one case, but it is a very specila one idneed!)

I suspect that we cannot speak of a way of being at all unless we speak of two or more ways of being.  For what could motivate the tripartite distinction among nature, existence, and mode, if not examples like that of the carpet and the bulge where it is highly plausible to say that the items distinguished exist in diferent ways?  I am assuming that one has not made the mistake exposed in #1 above, namely, the mistake of confusing senses and modes and sliding illicitly from the univocity of 'exists' to the singleness of mode of being.

There are three positions that want distinguishing:

Existence-Monism:  There is exactly one mode of being.

Existence-Pluralism: There are two or more modes of being.

Existence-Nihilism: There are no modes of being.

The real debate is between the pluralists and the nihilists.  The monist position of the Andersonians is the result of confusion.  Or at least that is the way it looks at the moment.  But we press on.

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We Are All Bothered by Different Things

Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 141:

Melbourne intellectuals came to regard [John] Anderson 'as the man who had betrayed the Left, a man who had gone over to the other side.  Melburnians wanted Anderson to answer a simple question: was he or was he not interested in the fact that some were very rich and some were very poor?'  To this question Anderson replied that 'we are all bothered by different things.  That finished him with the Melburnians'. [Kennedy quotes Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Melbourne, 1991, p. 193]

"We are all bothered by different things."  And even when we are bothered by the same things, we prioritize the objects of botherment differently.  Now suppose you and I are bothered by exactly the same things in exactly the same order.  There is still room for disagreement and possibly even bitter contention: we are bothered to different degrees by the things that bother us.

"It angers me that that doesn't anger you!"  "It angers me that  you are insufficiently angered by what angers both of us."

Here then is one root of political disagreement.  It is a deep root, perhaps ineradicable.  And it is a root of other sorts of disagreement as well.  We are bothered by different things.

Are conservatives bothered by gun violence?  Yes, of course.  But they are bothered more by the violation of the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. Liberals, even if they are slightly bothered by the violation of these rights, assuming they admit them in the first place, are much more bothered by gun violence.  Now there are factual questions here concerning which agreement is in principle possible, though exceedingly unlikely.  For example there is the question whether more guns in the hands of citizens leads to less crime.   That is a factual question, but one that is not going to be resolved to the satisfaction of all.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about the facts.  Each side sees the other as having its own 'facts.'

But deeper than facts lie values.  Here the problem becomes truly intractable.  We are bothered by different things because we differ about values and their ordering.  Conservatives and presumably most liberals value self-reliance but conservatives locate it much higher up in the axiological hierarchy.  This probably explains why liberals are more inclined to rely on professional law enforcement for protection against the criminal element even while they bash cops as a bunch of racists eager to hunt down and murder "unarmed black teenagers" such as Michael Brown of Ferguson fame.

As for what finished Anderson with the Melburnians, he was apparently not sufficiently exercised by (material) inequality for the tastes of the latter despite his being a man of the Left, though not reliably so due to his iconoclasm.

Does it bother conservatives that there is wealth inequality?  To some extent.  But for a(n American) conservative liberty trumps equality in the scale of values.  With liberals it is the other way around.  Liberals of course cherish their brand of rights and liberties and will go to absurd extremes in defending them even when the right to free expression, a big deal with them, spills over into incitement to violence and includes the pollution of the culture with pornography.  Of course, this extremism in defense of free expression bangs up against the liberals' own self-imposed limit of political correctness.  The trashers of Christianity suddenly become chickenshits when it comes to the trashing of Islam.  That takes more courage than they command.  And they are easily cowed by events such as the recent terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.  Liberals are also absurdly eager to spread the right to vote even at the expense of making the polling places safe for voter fraud.  How else do you explain their mindless opposition to photo ID? But not a peep from liberals about 'real' liberties and rights such as gun rights, the right to private property, and the right to freedom from excessive and punitive taxation.

Is material inequality a problem?  Not as such.  Why should it be?  

As I recall John Rawls' Difference Principle, the gist of it is this: Social and economic inequality is justified ONLY IF the inequality makes the worse off better than they would have been without the inequality.  Why exactly?  If I'm smarter than you, work harder, practice the ancient virtues, avoid the vices, while you are a slacker and a screw-up who nevertheless has what he needs, why is my having more justified ONLY IF it makes you better off than you would have been without the inequality? (Yes, I know all about the Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance, but I don't consider that an argument.)

At the root of our difference are value differences and those, at bottom, are irreconcilable.

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God as an Ontological Category Mistake

John Anderson's rejection of God is radical indeed. A. J. Baker writes:

Anderson, of course, upholds atheism, though that is a rather narrow and negative way of describing his position given its sweep in rejecting all rationalist conceptions of essences and ontological contrasts in favour of the view that whatever exists is a natural occurrence on the same level of existence as anything else that exists.  From that position it follows, not merely that the traditional 'proofs' of the existence of God can be criticised, but that the very conception of a God or a supernatural way of being is an illogical conception -- God is an ontological category mistake as we may say. (Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986, 118-119)

If someone said that the average thought has such-and-such a volume, you would not say that he was factually incorrect; you would say that he had committed a category mistake inasmuch as a thought is not the sort of item that could have a volume: it is categorially disbarred from having a volume.  Someone who says that God exists is saying that there exists something whose mode of being is unique to it and that everything  other than God has a different mode of being.  But the idea that there are two or more modes of being or two or more levels of reality, according to Anderson, is 'illogical" and ruled out by the exigencies of rational discourse itself.  To posit God, then, is to involve oneself in a sort of ontological category mistake, in the words of A. J. Baker.

Let's see if we can understand this. (This series of entries is booked under Anderson, John.)

The Andersonian thesis is an exceedingly strong one: the very concept of God is said to be illogical.  It is illogical because it presupposes the notion, itself illogical, that there are levels of reality or modes of existence or ways of being.  What makes the argument so interesting is the implied claim that the very nature of being rules out the existence of God.  So if we just understand what being is we will see that God cannot exist!  This is in total opposition to the tack I take in A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002) wherein I argued from the nature of existence to (something like) God, and to the tack taken by those who argue from truth to God.

The Andersonian argument seems to be as follows:

1. There is a single way of being.

2. The single way of being is spatiotemporal or natural being.

3. If God exists, then his way of being is not spatiotemporal or natural.

Therefore

4. God does not exist.

Note that the argument extends to any absolute such as the One of Plotinus or the Absolute of F. H. Bradley or the Paradigm Existent of your humble correspondent. Indeed, it extends to any non-spatiotemporal entity.

The crucial premise is (1).  For if  'way of being' so much as makes sense, then surely (3) is true. And anyone who accepts (1) ought also to accept (2) given that it is evident to the senses that there are spatiotemporal items.  So the soundness of the argument pivots on (1).  But what is the argument for (1)? 

Note that (1) presupposes that 'way of being' makes sense.  This is not obvious.  To explain this I first disambiguate 'There are no ways of being.'   Someone who claims that there are no ways of being could mean either

A. There are no ways of being because there is a single way of being.

or

B. There are no ways of being because the very idea of a way of being, whether one or many, either makes no sense or rests on some fallacious reasoning:  either a thing exists or it does not.  There is no way it exists.  We can distinguish between nature (essence) and existence but not among nature, existence and way of existence.  What is said to belong to the way a thing exists really belongs on the side of its nature. A drastic difference such as that between a rock and a number does not justify talk of spatiotemporal and non-spatiotemporal ways of being: the drastic difference is just a difference in their respective natures.

Many philosophers have championed something like (B).  (See Reinhard Grossmann Against Modes of Being. Van Inwagen, too, takes something like the (B)-line.)  If (B) is true, then Anderson's argument collapses before it begins.  But I reject (B).  So I can't dismiss the argument in this way.

Anderson's view  is (A).  The problem is not with the concept of a way of being; the problem is with the idea that there is more than one way of being.  This is clear from his 1929 "The Non-Existence of Consciousness," reprinted in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, wherein we read, "If theory is to be possible, then, we must be realists; and that involves us in . . . the assertion of a single way of being (as contrasted with 'being ultimately' and 'being relatively') [a way of being] which the many things that we thus recognise have." (SEP 76)  Thus what Anderson opposes is a duality, and indeed every plurality, of ways of being, and not the very notion of a way of being.  One could say that Anderson is a monist when it comes to ways of being, not a pluralist.  To invoke a distinction made by John Passmore, one to be discussed in a later entry, Anderson is an existence-monist but not an entity-monist.

Now what's the argument for (1)? As far as I can tell the argument is something like this:

5. Truth is what is conveyed by the copula 'is' in a (true) proposition.

6. There is no alternative to 'being' or 'not being': a proposition can only be true or false. 

Therefore

7. There are are no degrees or kinds of truth: no proposition is truer than any other, and there are no different ways of being true. (5, 6)

8. (True) propositions are concrete facts or spatiotemporal situations:  propositions are not intermediary entities between the mental and the extramental.  They are not merely intentional items, nor are they Fregean senses.  The proposition that the cat is on the mat just is the concrete fact of the cat's being on the mat.  And the same goes for the cat: the cat is identical to a proposition.  Anderson's student, Armstrong, holds that a thick particular such as a cat is a proposition-like entity, a state of affairs; but Anderson holds the more radical view that a cat is not merely proposition-like, but is itself a proposition.  But if a cat is a proposition, then

9. Being (existence) = truth.

Therefore

1. There is a single way of being. (from 7, 9)

Therefore, by the first argument above,

4. God does not exist.

Critique

A full critique is beyond the scope of this entry especially since brevity is the soul of blog, as some wit once said.  But what I am about to say is, I think, sufficient to refute the Andersonian argument.

If everything exists in the same way, what way is that? Anderson wants to say: the spatiotemporal way.  He is committed to the proposition that

A. To be is to be spatiotemporally

where this is to be construed as an identification of being/existence with spatiotemporality.  Good classical metaphysician that he is, Anderson is telling us that the very Being of beings, das Sein des Seienden, is their being spatiotemporal.

Now there is a big problem with this.  A little thought should convince you that (A) fails as an indentification even if it succeeds as an equivalence: one cannot reduce being/existence to spatiotemporality.  For one thing, (A) is circular.  It amounts to saying that to exist is to exist in space and time.  Now even if everything that exists exists in space and time, the existence of that which exists cannot be identified with being in space and time.  So even if (A) is true construed as telling us what exists, it cannot be true construed as telling us what existence is.  A second point is that, while it is necessary that a rock be spatiotemporal, there is no necessity that a rock exist, whence it follows that the existence of a rock cannot be identified with its being spatiotemporal.

Now if (A) fails as an identification, it might still be true contingently as an equivalence. It might just happen to be the case that, for all x, x exists iff x is spatiotemporal.  But then it cannot be inscribed in the nature of Being (as a Continental philosopher might say) that whatever is is in space and time.  Nor can it be dictated by "the nature and possibility of discourse" (SEP 2) or by the possibility of "theory" (SEP 76).  Consequently, the Andersonian battle cry "There is only a single way of being!" cannot be used to exclude God.

For any such exclusion of God as an "ontological category mistake" can only proceed from the exigencies of Being itself.  What Anderson wants to say is that the very nature of Being logically requires the nonexistence of God.  But that idea rests on the confusion exposed above.  For his point to go through, he needs (A) to be an identification when at most it is an equivalence.

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A. J. Baker on John Anderson: ". . . there are no ultimates in Anderson's view and in line with Heraclitus he maintains that things are constantly changing, and also infinitely complex . . . ." (Australian Realism, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 29, emphasis added)

Change is a given.  From the earliest times sensitive souls have been puzzled and indeed aggrieved by it.  "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things," Nietzsche complains in a letter to Franz Overbeck.  But are things constantly changing?  And what could that mean?

We need to ask four different questions. Does everything change? Do the things that change always change? Do the things that always change continuously change? Do the things that change change in every respect?

1. Does everything change? The first point to be made, and I believe the Andersonians would agree,  is that it is not obviously true that everything changes, or true at all. There are plenty of putative counterexamples. Arguably, the truths of logic and mathematics are not subject to change. They are not subject to change either in their existence or in their truth-value. There is no danger that the theorem of Pythagoras will change from true to false tomorrow. If you say that the theorem in question is true only in Euclidean geometry, then I invite you to consider the proposition expressed by 'The theorem of Pythagoras is true only in Euclidean geometry.' Is the truth of this proposition, if true, subject to change?

Here is an even better example. Consider the proposition P expressed by ‘Everything changes.’ P is either true or false. If P is true, then both P and its truth-value change, which is a curiously self-defeating result: surely, those who preach that all is impermanent intend to say something about the invariant structure of the world and/or our experience of the world. Their intention is not to say that all is impermanent now, but if you just wait long enough some permanent things will emerge later. Clearly, P is intended by its adherents as changelessly true, as laying bare one of the essential marks of all that exists. But then P’s truth entails its own falsity. On the other hand, if P is false, then it is false. Therefore, necessarily, P is false. It follows that the negation of P is necessarily true. Hence it is necessarily true that some things do not change. The structure of the (samsaric) world does not change.   The world is 'fluxed up,' no doubt about it; but not that 'fluxed up.'

2. Do the things that change always change? I take ‘always’ to mean ‘at every time.’ Clearly, not everything subject to change is changing at every time. The number of planets in our solar system, for example, though subject to change, is obviously not changing at every time.  The position of my chair, to take a second example, is subject to change but is obviously not changing at every time.

 

3. Do the things that change continuously change? To say that a change is continuous is to say that between any two states in the process of change, there are infinitely many – indeed, continuum-many – intermediate states. To say that a change is discrete, however, is to say that there are some distinct states in the process of change such that there are no intermediate states between them. Now although some changes are continuous, such as the change in position of a planet orbiting the sun, not all changes are continuous. If I lose a tooth or an eye, that is a discrete change, not a continuous one. To go from having two eyes to one, is not to pass through intermediate states in which I have neither two nor one.  A switch is off, then on.  Although a continuous process may be involved in the transition, the change in switch status -- 0 or 1 -- is discrete, not continuous.

 

Hence it cannot be true that each thing that changes continuously changes.

4. Do the things that change change in every respect? No; consider the erosion of a mountainside. Erosion of a mountainside is a change that is occurring at every time, and presumably continuously; but there are properties in respect of which the mountainside cannot change if there is to be the change called erosion, for instance, the property of being a mountainside. Without something that remains the same, there cannot be change. There cannot be erosion unless something erodes.  Alterational change requires a substrate of change which, because it is the substrate of change, precisely does not change. There is no alterational change without unchange.  Hence if change is all-pervasive, in the sense that every aspect of a thing changes when a change occurs in the thing, then there is no change. Compare Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 277.

In sum, I have given reasons to believe that (i) some things are unchangeable; (ii) among the things that are changeable, some are merely subject to change and not always changing; (iii) among the things that are always changing, only some are continuously changing; and (iv) there is no (alterational as opposed to existential) change without unchange.

Therefore, those who lay great stress on the impermanence of the world and our experience of it need to balance their assertion by proper attention to the modes of permanence. For example, if we are told that everything is subject to change, does not the very sense of this assertion require that there be something that does not change, namely the ontological structure of (samsaric) entities? And if a thing is changing, how could that be the case if no aspect of the thing is unchanging? Furthermore, how could one become attached to something that was always changing? Attachment presupposes relative stability in the object of attachment. Jack is attached to Jill because her curvacity and cheerfulness, say, are relatively unchanging features of her. If she were nothing but change 'all the way down,' then there would be nothing for Jack's desire to get a grip on. But without desire and attachment, no suffering, and no need for a technology of release from suffering.

It is a mistake to think that change is all-pervasive. So those who maintain that all is impermanent need to tell us exactly what they mean by this and how they arrived at it. Is it not onesided and unphilosophical to focus on impermanence while ignoring permanence?

If all being is pure becoming, then there is no being -- and no becoming either.

 

Getting back to Anderson, if his claim is that things are constantly changing, what does that mean?  Does it mean that everything that changes changes always, or continuously, or in every respect, or all three?

Clive James on John Anderson; Anderson and Rand

There is little philosophical 'meat' here, but it is useful for contextualizing the man and his thought.

I stumbled upon this while searching without success for something comparing John Anderson with Ayn Rand.  They are fruitfully comparable in various respects.  Both were cantankerous and dogmatic and not open to having their ideas criticized or further developed by their acolytes; both founded highly influential cults; both were atheists and naturalists;  both had curious and old-fashioned notions in logic; both were controversialists; both resided on the outskirts of academic respectability.

The last point of comparison merits some exfoliation and qualification.  Anderson was surely a much better philosopher than Rand: unlike Rand, he was trained in philosophy; he held academic posts, mainly at the Unversity of Sydney whose intellectual life he dominated for many years; he read and wrote for the professional journals engaging to some degree with fellow professional philosophers.  But the majority of his strictly  philosophical publications were confined to the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy and its successor the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.  Also noteworthy is that, with the exception of a few epigoni, his ideas are not discussed. 

One such epigone is A. J. Baker who has written a very useful but uncritical and not very penetrating study, Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986.  He rightly complains in a footnote on p. 62:

D. M. Armstrong, who in his Universals and Scientific Realism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, gives an account of many types of theories, curiously dedicates the book to Anderson and yet does not discuss or even describe Anderson's theory on the subject.

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Anderson Against Modes of Being: The Case of Berkeley

I'm on a John Anderson jag at the moment and I'm having a blast. (Whatever else you say about philosophy it is a marvellous and marvellously reliable source of deep pleasure, at least to those to whom she has revealed herself and who have become her life-long acolytes.)  Anderson (1893-1962) is a fascinating character both as a man and as a philosopher.  More importantly, if he is right, I am wrong.  For I am committed to modes of being both by these pages and by my published writings, chiefly, my 2002 book on existence.  Central to Anderson's position, however, is that there are no levels of reality or modes of being.  So intellectual honesty requires that I see if I can meet the Andersonian challenge. My first Anderson entry is here.  Read that for some background.

Here is an Anderson-type argument against a Berkeley-type position.

Suppose it is maintained that there are two different modes of being or existence.  There is, first, the being of perceptual objects such as the tree in the quad.  For such things, esse est percipi, to be = to be perceived.  And of course perceivedness is not  monadic but relational: to be perceived is to be perceived by someone or by something that does the perceiving.  These perceivers or knowers exist too, but in a different mode.  For their being cannot be identified with their being perceived.  Clearly, not everything can be such that its being is its being perceived.  Such a supposition is scotched  by the vicious infinite regress it would ignite.  For if the being of God were his being perceived, then there would have to be something apart from God that pereceived him.  And so on infinitely and viciously.  So if the being of some items is perceivedness, then there must be at least two modes of being.

But of course knower and known stand in relation to each other.  So the Andersonian begins his critique by asking  about the concrete situation in which I know a tree, or God knows a tree.  (Cf. A. J. Baker, Australian Realism, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 26) What mode of being does this situation have?  Does this situation or state of affairs exist by being perceived or by perceiving?  Neither.  The fact that I see a tree exists. But the existence of this fact is not  its being perceived.  The existence of the fact it not its perceiving either.  The fact exists in neither way.  It has neither mode of being.  Therefore, the Andersonian concludes, the dualism of two modes of being breaks down.  There is only one mode of being, that of situations. As A. J. Baker puts it, "that situation and its ingredients all have 'being' of the same single kind." (26)

The above argument is a non sequitur.  It goes like this:

1. There is the relational fact of my seeing a tree.

2.  The being of this fact is not its being perceived.

3. The being of this fact is not perceiving.

Therefore

4. There are not two modes of being, the being of objects of perception and the being of subjects of perception.

Therefore

5. There is only one mode of being, that of facts or situations.

Both inferences are non sequiturs.

To get to the desired conclusion one needs the premises of the following argument, premises that are far from self-evident:

 6. The smallest unit of existence is the situation (state of affairs, concrete fact).

Therefore

7. Nothing exists except as a constituent of a situation. 

8. Situations are not represented by true propositions; they are true propositions.

Therefore

9. Existence = truth.

10. There are neither degrees nor modes of truth.

Therefore

11. There are neither degrees nor modes of existence.

Therefore

12. Knowers and things known exist in the same way.

John Anderson on Levels of Reality

Call it the MOB doctrine: there are modes of being, ways of existing, levels of reality.  I have defended the MOB in these pages and in print, chiefly in "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, 45-75.  But I have yet to come to grips with John Anderson's attack on levels of reality.  I begin to do so in this entry.  The Scot Anderson (1893-1962) is not much read today, but his teaching activity in Australia was highly influential.  Central ideas in David M. Armstrong come from Anderson.  One is naturalism.  The other is the notion that the world is a world of states of affairs or facts.

1. According to Anderson, the contention that there are different kinds or degrees of truth and reality" is what distinguishes rationalism from empiricism.  Empiricism "maintains that there only one way of being." (Studies in Empirical Philosophy, p. 1.  From a 1927 article, "Empiricism." SEP was originally published in 1962 together with a helpful introduction by John Passmore.)

This is a very interesting ontological as opposed to epistemological way of distinguishing rationalism from empiricism.  I am not sure that it is adequate. (Granted, an empiricist must eschew levels of reality; but must a rationalist embrace them?  Not clear.  Many do of course.  But all?) This demarcation issue is not my concern in this entry.

2. ". . . any postulation of different orders of being is illogical." (SEP 2)

This is a very strong claim.  It is to the effect that anyone who postulates different orders of being or levels of reality embraces either a formal-logical contradiction or some sort of broadly logical incoherence.  What arguments could Anderson have that would generate such a strong conclusion?

 3. Anderson gives a couple of question-begging arguments on p. 2. (a) Nothing can transcend existence. (b) Only empirical facts exist.  These are worthless.  One blatantly begs the question if one identifies the existent with the spatiotemporal or the empirically factual and then announces that nothing can exist in any other way.

4. Anderson's main argument, however, cannot be dismissed out of hand: "The very nature and possibility of discourse" rule out any theory of higher or lower orders of being or of truth.  That there should be different levels of being is "unspeakable." (SEP 2)  Why?

The proposition is primary.  Whatever we think about or speak about we do so using propositions.  Our only epistemic access to anything is via propositions.  Therefore, ". . . we are concerned with a single way of being: that, namely, which is conveyed when we say that a proposition is true." (SEP 3, emphasis in original)

The idea seems to be that whatever is, is propositional.  Therefore, there is nothing supra-propositional and nothing infra-propositional.  There is no Absolute, but also no "mere data, not yet propositionalized."  Armstrong holds that the world is a world of states of affairs or facts, where facts are not propositions, but proposition-like entities.  Anderson's position is more radical: facts are propositions.  So, strictly speaking, we do not access the world via propositions; propositions are what we access.  In Armstrong there is a distinction between truth-bearers and truth-makers; in his teacher Anderson this distinction is not made.  Now if everything that exists is a true proposition, then to be (to exist) = to be true.  Since there are no degrees or modes of truth, there are no degrees or modes of being.

A proposition for Anderson is not a Fregean sense or a merely intentional object.  Just what it is I am still trying to figure out.

5. But isn't Anderson's a rationalist scheme? Anderson is maintaining that reality must conform to discourse and discursive reason.  We think in propositions and cannot do otherwise; therefore (?!) reality is propositional.  Nothing is real except what conforms to the way we must think if we are to think at all. Facts are propositions; for a fact to exist is for it to be true.  Since there is only one way for a proposition to be true, there is only one way to be.

And isn't there something idealist about Anderson's approach?  The only world is the world as it is for us.  Whether you pull the world into the mind, or push the mind out into the world by reifying propositions, the result is the same.  I am merely sounding a theme to be pursued in future entries.  Elaboration and clarification can wait.

There is no "getting behind the proposition to something  either lower or higher . . . ." (3)  One can neither ascend to the Absolute not descend to the raw data of sensation uncooked by categories.  Think of Kant's sinnliche Mannigfaltikeit, the sensory manifold that provides the matter that is then worked up by the categories, the forms of understanding.  Anderson's scheme rules out the sensory manifold as much as the One of Plotinus or Mr Bradley's Absolute, not to mention the simple God of Aquinas and the 'unspeakable' Tao of Lao Tzu.

6.  Let's see if we can beat Anderson's argument into a more formal and rigorous shape.  Here is one possible reconstruction:

a. Truth is what is conveyed by the copula 'is' in a proposition.
b. Propositions can only be true or if not true then false.
Therefore
c. There are no degrees or kinds of truth.
d. Propositions are facts.
e. Truth = existence.
Therefore
f. There are no degrees or kinds or levels or modes of existence, being or reality.

Right now I am merely trying to understand what Anderson is maintaining.  Evaluation can wait. 

Anderson, I think it is fair to say, is an enemy of the ineffable.  What we mean cannot outrun what we can say.  There is nothing ineffable or inexpressible.  Contrast this with the position of the Tractarian Wittgenstein.  For Wittgenstein, the Higher, home to our ethical and religious concerns,  is, but it is the Inexpressible, das Unaussprechliche.  Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliche.  There is the Unspeakable.  For Anderson, what is unspeakable is nothing at all.  Reality is exhausted by the propositional.

7.  Anderson holds that to distinguish among modes of being is "illogical." (SEP 4)  Perhaps one can argue for this as follows:

g. Law of Excluded Middle: a proposition is either true, or if not true, then false.
h. Truth = existence (being).
Therefore
i. To postulate different modes of being is to violate LEM, a law of logic, and to be "illogical."

We shall continue with this.  It is Christmas Eve, boys and girls.  Time  to punch the clock and enjoy some holiday cheer.  In moderation of course.  As I always say:

Moderation in all things, including moderation.