Elliot C. asked me about tropes. What follows is a re-post from 30 March 2016, slightly emended, which stands up well under current scrutiny. Perhaps Elliot will find the time to tell me whether he finds it clear and convincing and whether it answers his questions.
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A reader has been much exercised of late by trope theory and other questions in ontology. He has been sharing his enthusiasm with me. He espies
. . . an apparent antinomy at the heart of trope theory. On the one hand, tropes are logically prior to objects. But on the other hand, objects (or, more precisely, the trope-bundles constituting objects) are logically prior to tropes, because without objects tropes have nowhere to be – without objects (or the trope-bundles constituting objects) tropes cannot be. Moreover, as has I hope been shown, a trope cannot be in (or constitute) any object or trope-bundle other than that in which it already is.
How might a trope theorist plausibly respond to this? Can she? [My use of the feminine third-person singular pronoun does not signal my nonexistent political correctness, but is an anticipatory reference to Anna-Sofia Maurin whom I will discuss below. 'Anna-Sofia'! What a beautiful name, so aptronymic. Nomen est omen.)
What are tropes?
It is a 'Moorean fact,' a pre-analytic datum, that things have properties. This is a pre-philosophical observation. In making it we are not yet doing philosophy. If things have properties, then there are properties. This is a related pre-philosophical observation. We begin to do philosophy when we ask: given that there are properties, what exactly are they? What is their nature? How are we to understand them? This is not the question, what properties are there, but the question, what are properties? The philosophical question, then, is not whether there are properties, nor is it the question what properties there are, but the question what properties are.
On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on the standard bundle version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a nonstandard theory championed by C. B. Martin which I will not further discuss). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ 'Has' and cognates are words of ordinary English: they do not commit us to ontological theories of what the having consists in. So don't confuse 'a has F-ness' with 'a instantiates F-ness.' Instantiation is a term of art, a terminus technicus in ontology. Or at least that is what it is in my book. More on instantiation in a moment.
Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness.
It is therefore inaccurate to speak of tropes as property instances. A trope is not a property instance on one clear understanding of the latter. First-order instantiation is a dyadic asymmetrical relation: if a instantiates F-ness, then it is not the case that F-ness instantiates a. (Higher order instantiation is not asymmetrical but nonsymmetrical. Exercise for the reader: prove it!) Suppose the instantiation relation connects the individual Socrates here below to the universal wisdom in the realm of platonica. Then a further item comes into consideration, namely, the wisdom of Socrates. This is a property instance. It is a particular, an unrepeatable, since it is the wisdom of Socrates and of no one else. This distinguishes it from the universal, wisdom, which is repeated in each wise individual. On the other side, the wisdom of Socrates is distinct from Socrates since there is more to Socrates that his being wise. There is his being snub-nosed, etc. Now why do I maintain that a trope is not a property instance? Two arguments.
Tropes are simple, not complex. (See Maurin, here.) They are not further analyzable. Property instances, however, are complex, not simple. 'The F-ness of a' -- 'the wisdom of Socrates,' e.g. -- picks out a complex item that is analyzable into F-ness, a, and the referent of 'of.' Therefore, tropes are not property instances.
A second, related, argument. Tropes are in no way proposition-like. Property instances are proposition-like as can be gathered from the phrases we use to refer to them. Ergo, tropes are not property instances.
One can see from this that tropes on standard trope theory, as ably presented by Maurin in her Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, are very strange items, so strange indeed that one can wonder whether they are coherently conceivable at all by minds of our discursive constitution. Here is one problem.
How could anything be both predicable and impredicable?
Properties are predicable items. So if tropes are properties, then tropes are predicable items. If the redness of my tomato, call it 'Tom,' is a trope, then this trope is predicable of Tom. Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Tom is red.' On one way of parsing this we have a subject term 'Tom' and a predicate term '___ is red.' Thus the parsing: Tom/is red. But then the trope would appear to have a proposition-like structure, the structure of what Russell calls a propositional function. Clearly, '___ is red' does not pick out a proposition, but it does pick out something proposition-like and thus something complex. But now we have trouble since tropes are supposed to be simple. Expressed as an aporetic triad or antilogism:
a. Tropes are simple. b. Tropes are predicable. c. Predicable items are complex.
The limbs of the antilogism are each of them rationally supportable, but they cannot all be true. Individually plausible, collectively inconsistent. The conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (b) and (c) entails ~(a).
We might try to get around this difficulty by parsing 'Tom is red' differently, as: Tom/is/red. On this scheme, 'Tom' and 'red' are both names. 'Tom' names a concrete particular whereas 'red' names an abstract particular. ('Abstract' is here being used in the classical, not the Quinean, sense.) As Maurin relates, D. C. Williams, who introduced the term 'trope' in its present usage back in the '50s, thinks of the designators of tropes as akin to names and demonstratives, not as definite descriptions. But then it becomes difficult to see how tropes could be predicable entities.
A tomato is not a predicable entity. One cannot predicate a tomato of anything. The same goes for the parts of a tomato; the seeds, e.g., are not predicable of anything. Now if a tomato is a bundle of tropes, then it is a whole of ontological parts, these latter being tropes. If we think of the tomato as a (full-fledged) substance, then the tropes constituting it are "junior substances." (See D. M. Armstrong, 1989, 115) But now the problem is: how can one and the same item -- a trope -- be both a substance and a property, both an object and a concept (in Fregean jargon), both impredicable and predicable? Expressed as an aporetic dyad or antinomy:
d. Tropes are predicable items. e. Tropes are not predicable items.
Maurin seems to think that the limbs of the dyad can both be true: ". . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance." If the limbs can both be true, then they are not contradictory despite appearances.
How can we defuse the apparent contradiction in the d-e dyad? Consider again Tom and the redness trope R. To say that R is predicable of Tom is to say that Tom is a trope bundle having R as an ontological (proper) part. To say that R is impredicable or a substance is to say that R is capable of independent existence. Recall that Armstrong plausibly defines a substance as anything logically capable of independent existence.
It looks as if we have just rid ourselves of the contradiction. The sense in which tropes are predicable is not the sense in which they are impredicable. They are predicable as constituents of trope bundles; they are impredicable in themselves. Equivalently, tropes are properties when they are compresent with sufficiently many other tropes to form trope bundles (concrete particulars); but they are substances in themselves apart from trope bundles as the 'building blocks' out of which such bundles are (logically or rather ontologically) constructed.
Which came first: the whole or the parts?
But wait! This solution appears to have all the advantages of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. For now we bang up against the above Antinomy, or something like it, to wit:
f. Tropes as substances, as ontological building blocks, are logically prior to concrete particulars. g. Tropes as properties, as predicable items, are not logically prior to concrete particulars.
This looks like an aporia in the strict and narrow sense: an insoluble problem. The limbs cannot both be true. And yet each is an entailment of standard (bundle) trope theory. If tropes are the "alphabet of being" in a phrase from Williams, then they are logically prior to what they spell out. But if tropes are unrepeatable properties, properties as particulars, then a trope cannot exist except as a proper ontological part of a trope bundle, the very one of which it is a part. For if a trope were not tied to the very bundle of which it is a part, it would be a universal, perhaps only an immanent universal, but a universal all the same.
Furthermore, what makes a trope abstract in the classical (as opposed to Quinean) sense of the term is that it is abstracted from a concretum. But then the concretum comes first, ontologically speaking, and (g) is true.
Interim conclusion: Trope theory, pace Anna-Sofia Maurin, is incoherent. But of course we have only scratched the surface.
Pictured below, left-to-right: Anna-Sofia Maurin, your humble correspondent, Arianna Betti, Jan Willem Wieland. Geneva, Switzerland, December 2008. It was a cold night.
Your theory is that existence is the unity of a thing’s constituents. What I wasn’t entirely clear on is just what those constituents are. In one section of your book, you argue for the real distinction between essence and existence, which gave me the impression that existence was a constituent (rather than, as Miller would say, a component) along with essence (which seems to me the traditional compositional analysis);however, elsewhere you deny existence is a constituent. I am sure the misunderstanding is on my part, but clarification would be most helpful.
My question at the beginning of the book is: What is it for a concrete contingent individual to exist? My cat Max is an example of a concrete individual. Max exists. Nothing can exist without properties. So Max has properties. Some are essential, some are accidental, some are monadic, and some are relational. Take the conjunction of all of these properties and call it the wide essence or quiddity (whatness) of Max. Now one of my claims is that existence is not included in the wide essence of any contingent being. (Max is of course a contingent being which is to say that, although he exists, at every moment at which he exists his nonexistence is possible.) At the same time, though, existence is predicable of Max: 'exists' is an admissible first-level predicate, pace the 'Fressellians.' Barry Miller and I agree about this.
I have said enough to motivate a version of the famous distinctio realis, the real distinction of essence and existence. About anything whatsoever we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?) In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in Max there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold.
Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the distinction is real, not projected by us. The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it.
So, to answer the reader's first question, while I do hold to some version of the real distinction, I do not maintain that the existence of a contingent being is a constituent thereof. The existence of a contingent being is not a spatial, temporal, or ontological part of it. It is the contingent unity or contingent togetherness of all of its ontological parts; it could not possibly be one of them. The whole thing exists; the existence of the thing cannot be assigned to one proper part thereof. I believe I call this "The holism of existence" in my book.
To get some idea of what an ontological part might be, consider a bundle theory of ordinary concrete particulars. The ontological parts are the properties, whether universals or tropes, the bundling of which constitutes the particular. The existence of an ordinary particular, Max, for example, would then be the contingent compresence of the properties, where the compresence of the properties is not itself a property. (Exercise for the reader: explain why compresence cannot itself be a property or a relation.)
Now the bundle-approach is not the approach to constituent ontology that I espouse in my book, but it is in some ways similar. In my book I assay ordinary particulars as concrete facts, taking Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong as inspirations. The latter's thick particulars are facts of the form a's being F, where F is a maximal conjunction of properties and a is a thin particular. On this assay, my beloved Max has as ontological constituents a thin particular and a maximal bunch of properties construed as universals. The existence of Max then turns out to be the peculiar fact-making contingent unity of all of his ontological constituents, a unity that equips him to serve as the truth-maker of all the wonderful truths (true truth-bearers) about him.
There is a problem with this view and it is similar to the mess the hylomorphic constituent ontologists get into when they find that they have to posit materia prima which is, arguably, a Grenzbegriff if not an Unbegriff.
Facts are the logical objects corresponding to whole declarative sentences, or rather to some of them. When it comes to facts, Panayot Butchvarov appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of both realism and anti-realism. For the realist, there are facts. For the anti-realist, there are no facts. Let us briefly review why both positions are attractive yet problematic. We will then turn to semirealism as to a via media between Scylla and Charybdis.
Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as 'Al is fat.' Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true. There must be something external to the sentence that contributes to its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person, or anything like that. 'Al is fat' is true because there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true. There is this short man, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs. There is nothing linguistic or mental about the man or his weight. Here is the sound core of correspondence theories of truth. Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured. The 'because' is not a causal 'because.' The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat. He is fat because he eats too much. The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.' Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true -- given that it is not true in virtue either of its logical form or ex vi terminorum -- we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true. I myself, a realist, don't see how this can be avoided even though I admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear.
Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker? It can't be Al by himself, and it can't be fatness by itself. Nor can it be the pair of the two. For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, but the first does not instantiate the second. What's needed, apparently, is the fact of Al's being fat. So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory. Veritas sequitur esse is not enough. It is not enough that 'Al' and 'fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. Truth-makers cannot be 'things' or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort. (Or at least this is so for the simple predications we are now considering.)
The argument I have just sketched, the truth-maker argument for facts, is very powerful, but it gives rises to puzzles and protests. There is the Strawsonian protest that facts are merely hypostatized sentences, shadows genuine sentences cast upon the world. Butchvarov quotes P. F. Strawson's seminal 1950 discussion: “If you prise the sentences off the world, you prise the facts off it too. . . .” (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, 174) Strawson again: “The only plausible candidate for what (in the world) makes a sentence true is the fact it states; but the fact it states is not something in the world.” (174)
Why aren't facts in the world? Consider the putative fact of my table's being two inches from the wall. Obviously, this fact is not itself two inches from the wall or in any spatial position. The table and the wall are in space; the fact is not. One can drive a nail into the table or into the wall, but not into the fact, etc. Considerations such as these suggest to the anti-realist that facts are not in the world and that they are but sentences reified. After all, to distinguish a fact from a non-fact (whether a particular or a universal) we must have recourse to a sentence in the indicative mood: a fact is introduced as the worldly correlate of a true sentence. If there is no access to facts except via sentences, as the correlates of true sentences, then this will suggest to those of an anti-realist bent that facts are hypostatizations of true declarative sentences.
One might also cite the unperceivability of facts as a reason to deny their existence. I see the table, and I see the wall. It may also be granted that I see that the desk is about two inches from the wall. But does it follow that I see a relational fact? Not obviously. If I see a relational fact, then presumably I see the relation two inches from. But I don't see this relation. And so, Butchvarov argues (175) that one does not see the relational fact either. The invisibility of relations and facts is a strike against them. Another of the puzzles about facts concerns how a fact is related to its constituents. Obviously a fact is not identical to its constituents. This is because the constituents can exist without the fact existing. Nor can a fact be an entity in addition to its constituents, something over and above them, for the simple reason that it is composed of them. We can put this by saying that no fact is wholly distinct from its constituents. The fact is more than its constituents, but apart from them it is nothing. A third possibility is that a fact is the togetherness of its constituents, where this togetherness is grounded in a a special unifying constituent. Thus the fact of a's being F consists of a, F-ness, and a nexus of exemplification. But this leads to Bradley's regress.
A fact is not something over and above its constituents but their contingent unity. This unity, however, cannot be explained by positing a special unifying constituent, on pain of Bradley's regress. So if a fact has a unifier, that unifier must be external to the fact. But what in the world could that be? Presumably nothing in the world. It would have to be something outside the (phenomenal) world. It would have to be something like Kant's transcendental unity of apperception. I push this notion in an onto-theological direction in my book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated. But by taking this line, I move away from the realism that the positing of facts was supposed to secure. Facts are supposed to be ontological grounds, extramental and extralinguistic. If mind or Mind is brought in in any form to secure the unity of a truth-making fact, then we end up with some form of idealism, whether pschological or transcendental or onto-theological.
So we are in an aporetic pickle. We have good reason to be realists and we have good reason to be anti-realists. (The arguments above on both sides were mere sketches; they are stronger than they might appear. ) Since we cannot be both realists and anti-realists, we might try to mediate the positions and achieve a synthesis. My book was one attempt at a synthesis. Butchvarov's semi-realism is another. I am having a hard time, though, understanding how exactly Butchvarov's semi-realism achieves the desired synthesis. Butchvarov:
Semirealism regarding facts differs from realism regarding facts by denying that true sentences stand for special entities, additional to and categorially different from the entities mentioned in the sentences, that can be referred to, described, and analyzed independently of the sentences. [. . .] But semirealism regarding facts also differs from antirealism regarding facts by acknowledging that there is more to truth than the sentences . . . that are true. (180)
In terms of my simple example, semirealism about facts holds that there is no special entity that the sentence 'Al is fat' stands for that is distinct from what 'Al and 'fat' each stand for. In reality, what we have at the very most are Al and fatness, but not Al's being fat. Semirealism about facts also holds, however, that a sentence like 'Al is fat' cannot just be true: if it is true there must be something that 'makes' it true, where this truth-maker cannot be another sentence (proposition, belief, judgment, etc.) or somebody's say-so, or something merely cultural or institutional or otherwise conventional. And let's not forget: the truth-maker cannot be Al by himself or fatness by itself or even the pair of the two. For that pair (ordered pair, set, mereological sum . . .) could exist even if Al is not fat. (Suppose Al exists and fatness exists in virtue of being instantiated by Harry but not by Al.)
How can semirealism avoid the contradiction: There are facts and there are no facts? If the realist says that there are facts, and that anti-realist says that there aren't, the semi-realist maintains that 'There are facts' is an “improper proposition” (178) so that both asserting it and denying it are improper. In explaining the impropriety, Butchvarov relies crucially on Wittgenstein's distinction between formal and material concepts and his related distinction between saying and showing. Obscurum per obscurius? Let's see.
The idea seems to be that while one can show that there are facts by using declarative sentences, one cannot say or state that there are facts by using declarative sentences, or refer to any particular fact by using a declarative sentence. If there are facts, then we should be able to give an example of one. 'This page is white is a fact,' won't do because it is ill-formed. (179) We can of course say, in correct English, 'That this page is white is a fact.' But 'that this page is white' is not a sentence, but a noun phrase. Not being a sentence, it cannot be either true or false. And since it cannot be either true or false, it cannot refer to a proposition-like item that either obtains or does not obtain. So 'that this page is white' does not refer to a fact. We cannot use this noun phrase to refer to the fact because what we end up referring to is an object, not a fact. Though a fact is not a sentence or a proposition, it is proposition-like: it has a structure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. No object, however, is proposition-like. To express the fact we must use the sentence. Using the sentence, we show what cannot be said.
On one reading, Butchvarov's semirealism about facts is the claim that there are facts but they cannot be named. They cannot be named because the only device that could name them would be a sentence and sentences are not names. On this reading, Butchvarov is close to Frege. Frege held that there are concepts, but they cannot be named. Only objects can be named, and concepts are not objects. If you try to name a concept, you will not succeed, for what is characteristic of concepts, and indeed all functions, is that they are unsaturated (ungesaettigt). And so we cannot say either
The concept horse is a concept
or
The concept horse is not a concept.
The first, though it looks like a tautology, is actually false because 'The concept horse' picks out an object. The second, though it looks like a contradiction, is actually true for the same reason. Similarly, we cannot say either
The fact that snow is white is a fact
or
The fact that snow is white is not a fact.
The first, though it looks like a tautology, is actually false because 'The fact that snow is white' picks out an object. The second, though it looks like a contradiction, is actually true for the same reason.
It is the unsaturatedness of Fregean concepts that makes them unnameable, and it is the proposition-like character of facts that makes them unnameable.
Semirealism about facts, then, seems to be the view that there are facts, but that we cannot say that there are: they have a nature which prevents us from referring to them without distorting them. But then the position is realistic, and 'semirealism' is not a good name for it: the 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological.
Other things Butchvarov says suggest that he has something else in mind with 'semirealism about facts.' If he agrees with Strawson that facts are hypostatized declarative sentences, and argues against them on the ground of their unperceivability, then he cannot be saying that there are facts but we cannot say that there are. He must be denying that there are facts. But then why isn't he a flat-out antirealist?
Can you help me, Butch? What am I not understanding? What exactly do you mean by 'semirealism about facts'?
BUTCHVAROV RESPONDS:
Your grasp of the issue is excellent, Bill. “[T]he 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological” seems to me right; this is why it is semirealism, not realism. But it is logical semirealism: “Logical semirealism differs from both logical antirealism and logical realism much as Kant’s position on causality differed from both antirealism and realism regarding causality, and Wittgenstein’s position on other people’s sensations differed from both antirealism and realism regarding “other minds” (page 166).
The reason facts are only “semireal” in my view is that they have a logical structure. As you say in your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated, “facts could be truth-making only if they are “proposition-like,” “structured in a proposition-like way” – only if “a fact has a structure that can mirror the structure of a proposition.” The structure of a proposition is its logical structure. In Part Two of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy I argue against realism regarding logical structure, but I also reject the simplistic antirealism regarding logical structure that says “there is only language.” Surely there are no ands, ors, or iffs in the world. It’s not just that logical objects and structures cannot be perceived or even “said.” Surely words like “and,” “or,” and “if” do not stand for anything physical, mental, or other-worldly. Yet no less surely they are not merely words.
Since facts necessarily, indeed essentially, possess a logical structure, my argument against logical realism applies also to realism regarding facts but, again, I reject the simplistic antirealism regarding facts that says “there is only language.” I wrote: “[T]here is a third way of understanding facts, which is neither realist nor antirealist. It is semirealist. In general, if a proposition is in dispute between realism and antirealism, with the realist asserting and the antirealist denying it, the semirealist would differ from both by holding that it is an improper proposition, perhaps even that there is no such proposition, and thus that both asserting and denying it are improper. There is an analogy here with sophisticated agnosticism. The theist asserts the proposition “God exists” and the atheist denies it, but the sophisticated agnostic questions, for varying reasons we need not consider here, its propriety” (pages 178-9).
I would share your discomfort if a philosopher said “There are facts and there are no facts”( I can’t find the sentence in Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). But I would understand it, just as I understand Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,” and Wittgenstein’s “some things cannot be said but show themselves.” All four are puzzling. Sometimes we have to content ourselves with truths that puzzle us, make us wonder. But philosophy begins in wonder. We could, of course, invent new terms, perhaps saying that while facts do not exist they subsist, but I doubt that this would lead to better understanding.
Thanks for the response. You never say "There are facts and there are no facts." But it seems to me that you give good arguments for both limbs of this (apparent) contradiction. Because the arguments on both sides are impressive, we have a very interesting, and vexing, problem on our hands, especially if you hold, as I think you do, that there are no true contradictions.
I was under the impression that the doctrine of semirealism (about facts) was supposed to eliminate the contradiction and show it to be merely apparent. It seems to me that if we distinguish between existence and subsistence as two different modes of Being, then we could say that while facts do not exist in the way their constituents do, they are not nothing either -- they don't exist but subsist. This would seem to be a way between the horns of the dilemma. In your brilliant formulation, "There is more to the truth of sentences than the sentences that are true." On the other hand, there are the Strawsonian and other arguments against facts. On this way of looking at things, semirealism comes down to a doctrine of modes of Being.
What I don't understand however, is how this is supposed to square with Wittgenstein's say vs. show distinction.
On p. 76 of Anthropocentrism you refer to the existence-subsistence distinction. But then on p. 77 you say that this distinction is not the same as W's distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown -- though it resembles it in motivation.
So here is my criticism: you are not using 'semirealism' univocally. If a subsistent, a number say, is semireal, then that is clear to me since I myself advocate (against most contemp. anal. phils.) distinctions between modes of Being. But if you say that numbers are semireal in the sense that 'There are numbers' cannot be *said,* that the existence of numbers can only be *shown* by the use of numerals, then that is a quite different use of 'semireal.'
Why? Because one could take the say-show line while holding that there are no modes of Being, and vice versa.
So I have two problems. One is that you seem to equivocate on 'semireal.' The other is that W's say-show distinction is not clear to me. So if you explain semirealism in terms of the latter, then we have a case of *obscurum per obscurius.*
>>Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,”<<
You assimilate these to each other. But I see a crucial difference. Meinong employs a paradoxical formulation for literary effect, a formulation that expresses a proposition that is in no way contradictory. All he is saying is that some items are beingless which you will agree is non-contradictory. In other words, the proposition, the thought, that Meinong is expressing by his clever formulation is non-contradictory despite the fact that the verbal formulation he employs is either contradictory (assuming that 'there are' is used univocally) or equivocal.
But what is going on in "The concept *horse* is not a concept" is quite different. What Frege is saying in effect is that we cannot refer to concepts in a way that preserves their predicative function, their unsaturatedness. 'The concept *horse*' is a name, and only objects can be named. So when we try to say anything about a concept we must fail inasmuch as a reference to a concept transforms it into an object thereby destroying its predicative function.
Frege anticipates Wittgenstein in this. I can say '7 is prime' but not 'Primeness is instantiated by 7.'
This is similar to the problem we have with propositions and facts (which have a proposition-like structure).
As you point out, 'Snow is white is true' is ill-formed. But 'That snow is white is true' is false inasmuch as 'That snow is white' is a nominal phrase that picks out an object, and no object can be true.
At his point someone might propose a disquotational-type theory according to which 'true' in 'That snow is white is true' does not express a property of something but merely serves to transform the nominal phrase back into the sentence 'Snow is white.'
What refutes this is your point that "There is more to the truth of sentences than the sentences that are true."
I am answering two posts. As to the one about Anscombe and GeacH, I agree completely, Bill. I’ve always marveled that philosophers like Anscombe and Geach were so easily influenced by Russell’s attacks on Meinong. Russell of course did know what Meinong meant and initially even agreed with him but then invented his theory of definite descriptions that allowed him to “analyze away” Meinong’s examples.
Now I come to the other post. I am not sure there is genuine disagreement between us. Regarding existence and subsistence, we might look at [Gustav]Bergmann. He “renounced his earlier distinction between existence and subsistence, subscribing now to the seeming paradox that ‘whatever is thinkable exists.’ Yet he acknowledged that ‘the differences among some of the several existents…are very great indeed…momentous, or enormous,’ thus acknowledging the rationale for the distinction” (page 142 of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). Whether we “distinguish between existence and subsistence as two different modes of Being” or say that everything (‘thinkable’) exists though the differences among some existents are enormous seems to me a matter of words. I am uneasy about using the phrase “modes of Being” because it has had numerous other applications, e.g., matter and mind, universals and particulars, infinite and fine, and so on. As to the meaning of “semireal,” let me begin with a quotation from the Introduction: “[I]n the case of metaphysical antirealism, numerous qualifications, distinctions, and explanations are needed. No metaphysical antirealist denies the reality of everything, just as no metaphysical realist asserts the reality of everything, including, say, the Easter Bunny. The solipsist says, ‘Only I exist,’ not ‘Nothing exists.’ Berkeley denied that there are material objects, he called them ‘stupid material substances,’ but he insisted on the existence of minds and their ideas. According to Kant.... material objects are ‘transcendentally ideal,’ dependent on our cognitive faculties, but they are nonetheless ‘empirically real,’ not mere fancy. Bertrand Russell distinguished between existence and subsistence: some things do not exist, yet they are not nothing – they subsist; for example, material objects exist but universals only subsist. According to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, some things cannot be “said,” i. e., represented in language,but they “show” themselves in what can be said. Among them, he held, are those that matter most in logic, ethics, and religion” (page 15).
I try to explain Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing as follows: “The distinction has a straightforward, noncontroversial application even to ordinary pictures, say, paintings and photographs, indeed to representations generally. And the [associated] picture theory [of meaning] is merely a subtler version of the traditional theory of meaning and thought, which was unabashedly representational, ‘pictorial’: thought involves ‘ideas,’ often explicitly understood as mental images or pictures, and the meaning of an expression is what it stands for” (page 67).”
“In a painting, much is shown that is not and cannot be pictured by the painting or any part of it. For example, the painting may represent a tree next to a barn, each represented by a part of the painting, and the spatial relation between the parts of the painting that represent the tree and the barn would represent their relation of being next to each other. But nothing in the painting represents that relation’s being a relation, nothing ‘says’ that their being next to each other is a relation (rather than, say, a shape or color). Yet the painting shows this, indeed must show it in order to represent what it does represent. What it shows cannot be denied as one might deny, for example, that the painting is a portrait of Churchill. The absence from the painting of what it only shows would not be like Churchill’s absence. Of course, paintings do not consist of words, and sentences are only ‘logical’ pictures. But like all pictures, physical or mental, paintings are logical pictures, though not all logical pictures are paintings” (page 68).
You write, “What I don't understand however, is how this [the distinction between real and semireal] is supposed to square with Wittgenstein's say vs. show distinction.” My concern is with logical semirealism, and Wittgenstein applied his distinction mainly to logical expressions. If some things cannot be said but show themselves, neither calling them real nor calling them unreal would be quite right. So I opted for calling them semireal. Of course, nothing of philosophical importance hangs on what word is chosen.
You write, “if you say that numbers are semireal in the sense that 'There are numbers' cannot be *said,* that the existence of numbers can only be *shown* by the use of numerals, then that is a quite different use of 'semireal.'” I have offered no view about numbers, though Wittgenstein did include “number” in his list of formal concepts: “’Object,’ ‘complex,’ ‘fact,’ ‘function,’ ‘number’ signify formal concepts, represented in logical notation by variables, for example, the pseudo-concept object by the variable ‘x’ (Tractatus 4.1272). The properties they appear to stand for are formal, internal, such that it is unthinkable that what they are attributed to should not possess them (4.123). For this reason it would be just as nonsensical to assert that something has a formal property as to deny it (4.124).” But Wittgenstein was aware that the status of numbers is far too complicated an issue to be resolved by just saying that “There are numbers” cannot be “said.” Much later he wrote his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.
Please forgive me for resorting to such lengthy quotations. I tried to avoid them but found what I was writing inferior to what I had already written.
Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but only alphabetically.) Here is footnote 3:
Catholic philosophers have often said not that God’s existence is a consequence of his nature but that his existence and his nature are identical. This doctrine is one of the many implications of the more general “doctrine of Divine Simplicity”, according to which phrases like ‘God’s power’, ‘God’s wisdom’, ‘God’s love’, ‘God’s nature’ and ‘God’s existence’ all denote one and the same thing, namely the Divine Substance – that is, God, God himself, God full stop. The doctrine of Divine Simplicity, however, presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute (for present purposes, “Aristotelianism”). From the point of view of a Platonist like myself, the doctrine of Divine Simplicity is wrong simply because it presupposes Aristotelianism, and Aristotelianism is false.
Here is Dominik's question:
Where does that idea come from? [The idea that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology.] Seriously, I don't understand. It might be disputable whether we can reconcile Plotinus' understanding of the way the One exists with a Thomistic view about God, but divine simplicity is a core pillar of (Neo-)Platonist arguments, e.g. the argument from composition. As said, perhaps the identification of God with existence is a newer concept due to development by philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition, but prima facie I think formulating the dispute the way van Inwagen does, muddies the water. Divine Simplicity mustn't be identified with an explicitly Thomistic formulation, this just undersells the disputes the doctrine has historically surrounded [undersells the disputes that have historically surrounded the doctrine].
1) Kowalski is right that the ontological simplicity of the Absolute is at the core of Platonism and Ne0-Platonism. The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, and the God of Aquinas are all ontologically simple. The theology of Aquinas quite obviously incorporates this neo-Platonic element, along with other elements, some of which do not comport well with the neo-Platonic element. No Absolute worth its salt can fail to be simple, and the God of Aquinas is the Absolute in his system. For Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. Literally translated, God is self-subsisting To Be. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that this God concept teeters on the brink of unintelligibility. But it is defensible as a Grenzbegriff, a boundary or limit concept. See The Concept GOD as Limit Concept.
God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. In this respect God is like the One of Plotinus. There is no Many in which the One is a member. The ONE is not one of many. Similarly, in Aquinas there is no totality of beings in which God is a member. God is not one being among many. He is utterly transcendent like the One of Plotinus and the Good of Plato. And yet, God is not other than every being, every ens, for he himself is. If God were other than every being, then he would be other than himself, which is impossible. This distinguishes the God of Aquinas from Heidegger's Being. For Heidegger, das Sein ist kein Seiendes, Being is other than every being, everything that is. For Aquinas, Gott oder das Sein ist selbst seiend, God or Being is himself being. Or, as I say in my existence book, The Paradigm Existent, the Unifier, is not a being (which would imply that it is a being among beings), but the being, the one and only being (ens) that is identical to its Being (esse) . That is indeed one of the entailments of DDS: there is no real distinction in God as between God and Being and between God and his Being.
2) As for Peter van Inwagen, he, like so many hard-core analytic types, uses 'Platonism' and related expressions in a loose and historically uninformed way. He calls himself a Platonist but he certainly does not accept 'into his ontology' -- as these types say -- Platonic Forms or Ideas (eide), Platonic participation (methexis) of phenomenal particulars in Forms, and the rest of the conceptual machinery which naturally within Plato's system implies levels/grades of Being and modes of Being which Dominik, as a German speaker, can understand as Seinsweisen or Seinsmodi. In the essay in question, van Inwagen comes out unequivocally against modes of Being. (I employ the majuscule 'B' in 'Being' so as to mark the crucial distinction between Being and beings, esse et ens/entia, das Sein und das Seiende. Observing that distinction is initium sapientiae in ontology.)
Van Inwagen's main man is Willard van Orman Quine who contributed to the misuse of the good old word 'abstract' with his talk of 'abstract objects.' So-called abstract objects are not products of abstraction. Van Inwagen buys into this lapse from traditional usage along with his colleague Alvin Plantinga. Accordingly, there are properties, but they are 'abstract objects' which exist just as robustly (or just as anemically) as 'concrete objects.' So-called abstract objects are, besides being outside of space and time, causally inert. So it is no surprise that Plantinga and van Inwagen reject the DDS claim that God is identical to each of his omni-attributes or essential properties. To their way of thinking, that identity claim makes of God a causally inert abstract object, which of course God, as causa prima, cannot be.
3) When van Inwagen says that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute, what he says is true inasmuch as said ontology is a constituent ontology (C-ontology). This is what he, as a self-styled 'Platonist' objects to. I explain C-ontology in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophyentry on DDS. See section 3. Here is part of what I say in that section:
Since a Plantinga-type approach to ontology rules out DDS from the outset, no sophisticated adherent of the doctrine will adopt such an approach. The DDS defender will embrace an ontology that accommodates an ontologically simple being. Indeed, as Nicholas Wolterstorff (1991) notes, classical proponents of DDS such as Aquinas had a radically different ontological style, one that allowed for the coherent conceivability of DDS. They did not think of individuals as related to their properties as to abstracta external to them, but as having properties as ontological constituents. They, and some atheist contemporaries as well, think in terms of a “constituent ontology” as opposed to what Wolterstorff calls a “relation ontology” or what might be called a “nonconstituent ontology”. Bundle theories are contemporary examples of constituent ontology. If properties are assayed as tropes and a concrete particular as a bundle of tropes, then these tropes or abstract particulars are parts of concrete particulars when suitably bundled. Properties so assayed are brought from Plato’s heaven to earth. The togetherness or compresence of tropes in a trope bundle is not formal identity but a kind of contingent sameness. Thus a redness trope and a sweetness trope in an apple are not identical but contingently compresent as parts of the same whole. A model such as this allows for an extrapolation to a necessary compresence of the divine attributes in the case of God. Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval proponents of DDS, is of course an Aristotelian, not a trope theorist. But he too is a constituent ontologist. Form and matter, act and potency, and essence and existence are constituents of primary substances. Essence and existence in sublunary substances such as Socrates are really distinct but inseparably together. Their unity is contingent. This model permits an extrapolation to the case of a being in which essence and existence are necessarily together or compresent. Constituent ontology, as murky as it must remain on a sketch such as this, at least provides a framework in which DDS is somewhat intelligible as opposed to a Plantinga-style framework on which DDS remains wholly unintelligible. The arguments for DDS amount to arguments against the nonconstituent ontological framework.
Combox open. I invite Dominik to tell me whether I have answered his question to his satisfaction.
I have already shown that the concept prime matter is a limit concept. The same holds for the concept bare particular. Both are lower limits of ontological analysis. I will be using 'bare particular' in Gustav Bergmann's sense.
What is a Particular?
Particulars in the sense relevant to understanding 'bare particular' may be understood in terms of impredicability. Some things can be predicated of other things. Thus being black can be predicated of my cat, and being a property can be predicated of being black; but my cat cannot be predicated of anything. My cat is in this sense 'impredicable.' Particulars are subjects of predication but cannot themselves be predicated. Particulars, then, are ultimate subjects of predication. Thus my cat is an ultimate subject of predication unlike being black which is a subject of predication, but not an ultimate subject of predication. Particulars have properties but are not themselves properties. Properties may be characterized as predicable entities. The particulars I am referring to are of course concrete particulars. They are not those abstract particulars known in the trade as tropes. (This curious nomenclature derives from Donald C. Williams. It has nothing to do with tropes in the literary sense.) A trope is a particularized property; better: a property assayed as a particular, an unrepeatable, as opposed to a universal, a repeatable entity. Unrepeatability is the mark of particulars, whether concrete or abstract.
What is a Bare Particular?
First, what it is not. It is a complete misunderstanding to suppose that philosophers who speak of bare or thin particulars, philosophers as otherwise different in their views as Gustav Bergmann, David Armstrong, and J. P. Moreland, mean to suggest that there are particulars that have no properties and stand in no relations. There is no such monstrosity as a bare particular in this sense. What makes a bare particular bare is not its having no properties, but the way it has the properties it has.
A bare particular is a particular that lacks a nature or (real) essence. It is therefore quite unlike an Aristotelian primary substance. Every such substance has or rather is an individual nature. But while lacking a nature, a bare particular has properties, and it cannot not have them. This 'having' is understood in terms of the asymmetrical external nexus of exemplification. A bare particular is thus tied to its properties by the external nexus of exemplification. To say that the nexus that ties a to F-ness is external is to say that there is nothing in the nature of a, and nothing in the nature of F-ness to require that a exemplify F-ness. After all, a, as bare, lacks a nature, and F-ness, while it has a nature, is not such that there is anything in it to necessitate its being exemplified by a. In this sense a bare particular and its properties are external to each other. So, while it is necessary that bare particulars have properties, none of the properties a bare particular has is essential to it.
This mutual externality of property to bearer entails promiscuous combinability: any bare particular can exemplify any property, and any property can be exemplified by any bare particular.
Similarities between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter
S1. Bare particulars in themselves are property-less while prime matter in itself is formless. The bare particular in a thing is that which exemplifies the thing's properties. But in itself it is a pure particular and thus 'bare.' The prime matter of a thing is the thing's ultimate matter and while supporting forms is itself formless.
S2. Bare particulars, though property-less in themselves, exemplify properties; prime matter, though formless in itself, is formed.
S3. There is nothing in the nature of a bare particular to dictate which properties it will exemplify. This is because bare particulars do not have natures. Correspondingly, there is nothing in the nature of prime matter to dictate which substantial forms it will take. This is because prime matter, in itself, is without form.
S4. Bare particulars, being bare, are promiscuously combinable with any and all first-level properties. Thus any bare particular can stand in the exemplification nexus with any first-level property. Similarly, prime matter is promiscuously receptive to any and all forms, having no form in itself.
S5. Promiscuous combinability entails the contingency of the exemplification nexus. Promiscuous receptivity entails the contingency of prime matter's being informed thus and so.
S6. Bare particulars are never directly encountered in sense experience. The same holds for prime matter. What we encounter are always propertied particulars and formed matter.
S7. A bare particular combines with properties to make an ordinary, 'thick' particular. Prime matter combines with substantial form to make a primary substance.
S8. The dialectic that leads to bare particulars and prime matter respectively is similar, a form of analysis that is neither logical nor physical but ontological. It is based on the idea that things have ontological constituents or 'principles' which, incapable of existing on their own, yet combine to from independent existents. Hylomorphic analysis leads ultimately to prime matter, and ontological analysis in the style of Bergmann and fellow travellers leads to bare or thin particulars as ultimate substrata.
Differences Between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter
D1. There are many bare particulars each numerically different from every other one. They differ, not property-wise, but solo numero. In themselves, bare particulars are many. It is not the case that, in itself, prime matter is many. It is not, in itself, parceled out into numerically distinct bits.
D2. Bare particulars are actual; prime matter is purely potential.
D3. Bare particulars account for numerical difference. But prime matter does not account for numerical difference. (See Feser's manual, p. 199) Prime matter is common and wholly indeterminate. Designated matter (materia signata) is the principle of individuation, i.e., differentiation.
Bare Particular as Limit Concept in the Positive Sense
It is obvious that the concept of bare particular, in the early Bergmann at least, is a limit concept. (The item-sort distinction in the later Bergmann of New Foundations of Ontology complicates matters.) But is the limit concept bare particular negative or positive? There is no prime matter in itself, which fact makes the concept of prime matter a limit concept in the negative sense: the concept does not point to anything real beyond itself but merely sets a limit to our hylomorphic analysis of the real. Should we say the same about the concept of bare particular? Not in Bergmann's constituent ontology. If an ordinary concrete particular -- a round red spot to use an 'Iowa' example -- is built up out of more basic constituents, then the 'building blocks' must be real.
The following is from a work in progress by Tim Mosteller, posted with his permission. I thank him for his critical engagement with my work. Here are some responses. My corrections in red; my comments in blue.
One question I am discussing with Micheal Lacey is whether any sense can be attached to the notion of metaphysical explanation. I answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he can tell me whether he agrees with the following, and if not, then why not.
Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. The predicate 'red' is true of Tom. Equivalently, 'Tom is red' is true. Now the sentence just mentioned is contingently true. (It is obviously not necessarily true in any of the ways a sentence, or the proposition it expresses, could be necessarily true. For example, it is not true ex vi terminorum.)
Now ask: could a contingently true sentence such as 'Tom is red' just be true? "Look man, the sentence is just true; that is all that can be said, what more do you want?" This response is no good. It cannot be a brute fact that our sample sentence is true. By 'brute fact' I mean a fact that neither has nor needs an explanation. So the fact that 'Tom is red' is true needs an explanation. And since the fact is not self-explanatory, the explanation must invoke something external to the sentence.
This strikes me as a non-negotiable datum, especially if we confine our attention to present-tensed contingently true sentences.
I hope it is clear that what is wanted is not a causal explanation of why a particular tomato is red as opposed to green. Such an explanation would make mention of such factors as exposure to light, temperature, etc. What is wanted is not a causal explanation of Tom's being ripe and red as opposed to unripe and green, but an explanation of a sentential/propositional representation's being actually true as opposed to possibly true. The question, then, is this: WHAT MAKES A CONTINGENTLY TRUE PRESENT-TENSED SENTENCE/PROPOSITION TRUE?
Our contingently true sentence is about something, something in particular, namely Tom, and not about Tim. And what the sentence is about is not part of the sentence or the (Fregean) proposition it expresses. It is external to both, not internal to either. And it is not an item in the speaker's mind either. Tom, then, is in the extralinguistic and extramental world. Now I will assume, pace Meinong, that everything exists, that there are no nonexistent items. Given that assumption I say: VERITAS SEQUITUR ESSE (VSE). Truth follows being. Truth supervenes on being if we are talking about contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearers.
That is to say: every contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearer has need of at least one thing in the extralinguistic world for its truth. Thus 'Tom is red' cannot be true unless there is at least one thing external to the sentence on which its truth depends. What I have just said lays down a necessary condition for a contingent sentence's being true.
But VSE is not sufficient for an adequate explanation of the truth of 'Tom is red.' If Tom alone was all one needed for the explanation, then we wouldn't be able to account for the difference between the true 'Tom is red' and the false 'Tom is green.' In short, the truth-maker must have a proposition-like structure, but without being a proposition. The truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is not Tom, not is it any proposition; the truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is the state of affairs, Tom's being red. (I am sketching the Armstrong line; there are other ways to go.)
The state of affairs Tom's being red is the ontological ground of the truth of the corresponding sentence/proposition. It is not a logical ground because it is not a proposition. Nor is it a cause.
It seems to me that I have just attached a tolerably clear sense to the notion of a metaphysical explanation. I have explained the truth of the sentence 'Tom is red' by invoking the state of affairs, Tom's being red. The explanation is not causal, nor is it logical. And so we can call it metaphysical or ontological.
I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125] I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but it also got me curious about where the explanation is going on in ontological accounts (especially of properties, however construed).
I'm doing a Ph.D. in metaontology and I'm contrasting neo-Quinean (van Inwagen) and neo-Aristotelian (Lowe) approaches.
Can you direct me to where you might have written about, if indeed you have, how it is ontology/metaphysics explains?
Well, I haven't discussed the issue head-on in a separate publication, but I have discussed it en passant in various contexts. Below is a re-do of a 2012 weblog entry that addresses the question and may spark discussion. Combox open.
...........................
Let 'Tom' name a particular tomato. Let us agree that if a predicate applies to a particular, then the predicate is true of the particular. Predicates are linguistic items. Tomatoes are not. If Tom is red, then 'red' is true of Tom, and if 'red' is true of Tom, then Tom is red. This yields the material biconditional
1. Tom is red iff 'red' is true of Tom.
Now it seems to me that the following question is intelligible: Is Tom red because 'red' is true of Tom, or is 'red' true of Tom because Tom is red? 'Because' here does not have a causal sense. So the question is not whether Tom's being red causes 'red' to be true of Tom, or vice versa. So I won't speak of causation in this context. I will speak of metaphysical/ontological grounding. The question then is what grounds what, not what causes what. Does Tom's being red ground the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom, or does the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom ground Tom's being red?
I am not primarily concerned with the correct answer to this question, but with meaningfulness/intelligibility of the question itself.
Grounding is asymmetrical: if x grounds y, then y does not ground x. (It is also irreflexive and transitive.) Now if there is such a relation as grounding, then there will be a distinctive form of explanation we can call metaphysical/ontological explanation. (Grounding, even though it is not causation, is analogous to causation, and metaphysical explanation, even though distinct from causal explanation, is analogous to causal explanation.)
Explaining is something we do: in worlds without minds there is no explaining and there are no explanations, including metaphysical explanations. But I assume that, if there are any metaphysical grounding relations, then in every world metaphysical grounding relations obtain. (Of course, there is no grounding of the application of predicates in a world without languages and predicates, but there are other grounding relations. For example, if propositions are abstract objects that necessarily exist, and some of the true ones need truth-makers, then truth-making, which is a grounding relation, exists in worlds in which there are no minds and no languages and hence no sentences.)
Grounding is not causation. It is not a relation between event tokens such as Jack's touching a live wire and Jack's death by electrocution. Grounding is also not a relation between propositions. It is not a logical relation that connects propositions to propositions. It is not the relation of material implication, nor is it entailment (the necessitation of material implication), nor any other logical relation wholly situated at the level of propositions. Propositions, let us assume, are the primary truth-bearers.
In our example, grounding is not a relation between propositions -- it is not a logical relation -- since neither Tom nor 'red' are propositions.
I want to say the following. Tom's being red grounds the correctness of the application of 'red' to Tom. 'Red' is true of Tom because (metaphysically, not causally or logically) Tom is red, and not vice versa. 'Red' is true of Tom in virtue of Tom's being red. Tom's being red is metaphysically prior to the truth of 'Tom is red' where this metaphysical priority cannot be reduced to some ordinary type of priority, whether logical, causal, temporal, or what have you. Tom's being red metaphysically accounts for the truth of 'Tom is red.' Tom's being red makes it the case the 'red' is true of Tom. Tom's being red makes 'Tom is red' true.
I conclude that there is at least one type of metaphysical grounding relation, and at least one form of irreducibly metaphysical explanation.
We can ask similar questions with respect to normative properties. Suppose Jesus commands us to love one another. We distinguish among the commander, the act of commanding, the content of the command, and the normative property of the commanded content, in this case the obligatoriness of loving one another. If Jesus is God, then whatever he commands is morally obligatory. Nevertheless, we can intelligibly ask whether the content is obligatory because Jesus/God commands it, or whether he (rightly) commands it because it is obligatory. The 'because' here is neither causal not logical. It is metaphysical/ontological.
This of course a variation on the old Euthyphro Dilemma in the eponymous Platonic dialog.
I freely admit that there is something obscure about a grounding relation that is neither causal nor logical. But of course logical and causal relations too are problematic when subjected to squinty-eyed scrutiny.
I conclude with a dogmatic slogan. Metaphysics without metaphysical explanation is not metaphysics at all.
Bo R. Meinertsen, Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress, Springer 2018, 174 + xviii pp.
Summary
Professor Meinertsen's detailed treatment of states of affairs agrees with the spirit and much of the letter of David M. Armstrong's middle period as represented in his A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge UP, 1997). States of affairs in this acceptation are not abstract objects, as they are for some philosophers, but concrete denizens of the natural world of space-time. They are “unified complexes that are instantiations of properties or relations by particulars.” (1) Unlike Armstrong, however, Meinertsen is not concerned to argue for their existence (3, 13), or to show their utility in different philosophical areas. His focus is on states of affairs themselves, their main theoretical role, the nature of their constituents, and the problem of their unity.
Their main role is to serve as truthmakers. Suppose it is contingently true that Tom is red, where 'Tom' denotes a tomato of our acquaintance. (The use and justification of such “toy examples” is nicely explained on p. 5) Intuitively, such a truth is not just true; it needs an ontological ground of its truth. What might that be? Rejecting both tropes (Chapter 3) and D. W. Mertz's relation instances (Chapter 4) as truthmakers, Meinertsen argues that states of affairs do the job. In this example, the truthmaker is Tom's being red. On Meinertsen's use of terms, all and only states of affairs are truthmakers (84-85).
A state of affairs is a complex, and complexes are composed of distinct constituents. The composition of a state of affairs, however, is non-mereological. Mereological complexes are governed by the unrestricted composition axiom of classical mereology. (8) What the axiom states is that any plurality of items composes something: the existence of some items entails the existence of the sum of those items. The constituents of a state of affairs, however, can exist without the state of affairs existing. For example, Tom's being red entails the existence of the sum, Tom + instantiation + the universal redness. But the existence of the sum does not entail the existence of the state of affairs. A state of affairs, then, is a non-mereological complex. We will return to this important point when we come to the problem of the unity of a state of affairs.
First-order states of affairs have as their constituents particulars, properties or relations, and instantiation. The particulars are bare or thin (Chapter 5). What makes them bare is not that they lack properties, but the way they have them. The bareness of a bare particular consists in its instantiating, as opposed to including, its properties. (73) The properties that enter into states of affairs are sparse as opposed to abundant: not every predicate picks out such a property. In addition, the properties in states of affairs are universals, and thus multiply instantiable. If an immanent (transcendent) universal is one that cannot (can) exist uninstantiated, then Meinertsen's universals are immanent. Immanence so defined admits of abstractness. Meinertsen's universals, however, are concrete. (Chapter 8) The concrete is that which is “spatially and/or temporally located.” (119) Given naturalism, which Armstrong endorses and to which Meinertsen “inclines” (119), every existent is concrete and therefore located, including universals. The locatedness of universals, which is unlike that of particulars, has three implications. The first is that a universal is “wholly located in many places at the same time.” (120) The second implication is that “the region occupied by any such universal is not a mereological part of the region occupied by the whole thick particular.” (121) The third implication is that “more than one universal can have the same spatiotemporal location.” (121)
I note in passing that the banishing of so-called abstract objects demanded by uncompromising Armstrongian naturalism exacts a high price. The price is paid in the coin of the three implications just listed. The abstract-concrete distinction is replaced by a distinction between two categories of concreta, particulars and universals. This replacement requires that one accept the view that universals are ones-in-many (as opposed to ones-over-many) not merely in the sense that a universal cannot exist uninstantiated, but also in the sense that, if it exists, it is wholly present in each of its many spatiotemporal instances without prejudice to its being one and the same universal. This is a highly counter-intuitive consequence, as philosophers from Plato to R. Grossmann have appreciated, but it must be accepted by a states-of-affairs ontologist who is both a naturalist and an upholder of universals. (121)
Chapter 7 is devoted to relations, but in the interests of brevity I will not report on this chapter but advance to Chapters 9 and 10 which treat the problem of unity and Bradley's Regress respectively. This is the most exciting and original part of the book.
Meinertsen and I agree that the problem of the unity of a state of affairs is the central problem for a states of affairs ontology. The problem arises because states of affairs have “non-mereological existence conditions” (7): the existence of the constituents does not entail the existence of the state of affairs. What then accounts for there being one state of affairs having several distinct constitutents? What makes a one out of the many? A state of affairs is not just its constituents; it is these constituents unified. Something more is needed to make of the constituents a state of affairs. “I believe that it is the relating of a unique relation that is needed.” (8)
We can call this 'something more' the unifier. On Meinertsen's approach the unifier is internal to the state of affairs: “the unifier of a state of affairs is a [proper] constituent of it.” (135, emphasis in original) I added 'proper' in brackets to underscore that Meinertsen is not maintaining that states of affairs are self-unifying either in the positive sense that they unify themselves or in the privative sense that they are not unified by another. They are truth-making unities, but not as a matter of brute fact: they need a unifier to account for their unity. The unifier U is a special sort of relation, indeed it is a unique relation as I have just quoted him as saying. It relates the material constituents in the state of affairs, but it does so by being related to them. It is not just a relator of what it relates; it is a relator of what it relates by being related to what it relates. So if U relates the constituents of R(a, b), U does this by being related to each of them, including the relation R. This implies, of course, that U is not identical to R. Some say it is the business of a material relation to relate; not so on Meinertsen's view: it is the business of the formal relation U, and it alone, to relate. We also note that a consequence of U's being related to what it relates, and not merely a relator of what it relates, is that U enters as a constituent into every state of affairs. On an externalist view, by contrast, U unifies the constituents of a state of affairs S without entering into S as a constituent.
Now U is either related by another to what it relates, or it is related by itself to what it relates. If the former, then Bradley's regress is up and running, a regress both infinite and vicious. (Chapter 10) To avoid it, Meinertsen posits that “The U-relation is related to its relata by itself.” (143). This is what makes it unique: it is the only relation that has this “ability,” a word Meinertsen employs. This view, which he dubs “self-relating internalism,” has not been maintained before as far as I know. “To emphasize this unique self-relating ability of U on self-relating unternalism, I shall call it the 'U*-relation.'” (143) Because U* is a constituent of every state of affairs whose constituents it unifies, the monadic case of a's being F may be depicted as follows: U*(U*, F, a). The occurrence of the sign 'U*' both outside and inside of the parentheses indicates that the concrete universal U* is both the bringer of unity and one of the items brought into unity. It is a constituent of every state of affairs without which there would be no states of affairs.
Is U* the same as the instantiation relation? Meinertsen waxes coy: he is “inclined” to say that it is, but this would be an “extrinsic thesis.” What he means, presumably, is that a full assay of R(a,b) might list the following constituents: U*, dyadic instantiation, R, a, and b. Or it might list the foregoing items except instantiation. In the latter case, U* is instantiation. For example, “Edinburgh's being north of London is unified if and only if the U*-relation relates itself to being north of, Edinburgh and London.”(143). Either way, it would seem that U* must be a multi-grade relation, one that can be had by a variable number of items, and which therefore has different 'adicities.' For example, if U* is the instantiation relation, then U* is tetradic in U*(U*, R, a, b) but triadic in U*(U*, F, a). If U* is distinct from the instantiation relation I, then U* is pentadic in U*(U*, I, R, a, b) and tetradic in U*(U*, I, F, a). Meinertsen is aware of all this, and of the apparent problems that arise, but he thinks that they can be adequately dealt with. (157-159) The reasoning is intricate and obscure and to save space I will not comment on it.
The main point is that U* is the master concrete universal without which no state of affairs could exist. A state of affairs exists if and only its constituents are unified, and no plurality of constituents is unified in the state-of-affairs way as a matter of brute fact; ergo, unity demands a unifier as its ground. Being a universal, the unifier U* is multiply instantiable. Being concrete implies that U* cannot exist uninstantiated. It also implies that U*, if multiply instantiated, is multiply located and 'at work' in every state of affairs as that which ties its constituents into a state of affairs. As a self-relating relation, it does its work without igniting Bradley's vicious regress. (Chapter 10) To cop a line from Armstrong, “Nice work if you can get it.”
Critique: The Problem of Unity
I will focus my critical remarks on Meinertsen's fascinating and original internalist theory of the unifier U*. What struck me about his theory is its structural similarity to the externalist suggestion I made in a number of my writings. (I thank Meinertsen for his close attention to them.) The points of similarity are the following. Meinertsen and my earlier self both accept that there are middle-Armstrongian states of affairs; that their main role is to serve as truthmakers; that they are complexes composed of distinct constituents; that the composition of these complexes is non-mereological; that their material constituents are particulars and universals; that the unity of a state of affairs, and therewith its difference from the mere plurality of its constituents, needs accounting in terms of a unifier; and above all, that there is a very special, indeed a unique, entity that serves as unifier. The main difference is that Meinertsen's unifier is a constituent of states of affairs while mine is external to states of affairs. Not only is there a similarity, but the two theories, as different as they are, are open to some of the same objections. But before discussing these objections, I want to state my objections to Meinertsen's account of unity, and how my theory avoids them.
First Objection
If there is a constituent of a state of affairs that explains its unity, this constituent must have a unique feature: it must be self-relating. But 'self-relating' has two senses, and this duality of senses give rise to a dilemma. Either (1) U* is self-relating only in the privative sense that it is not related by another to what it relates, supposing it is actually related to what it relates, or (2) U* is self-relating in the positive sense that it actually relates itself to what it relates. If (1), then U* blocks Bradley's regress, but fails to ground unity. It fails to ground the difference between the state of affairs, which is one entity, and the corresponding plurality of its constituents, which is a mere manifold of entities. If (2), then U* is an active as opposed to an inert ingredient in the state of affairs. It is a unity-maker, if you will. It plays a synthesizing role. It brings together the constituents, including itself, which otherwise would be a mere plurality, into a truthmaking unity.
But analysis cannot render this synthesizing intelligible, and therein lies the rub. All ontological analysis can do is to enumerate the constituents of a state of affairs, or, more generally, the parts of a whole. Analytic understanding proceeds by resolving a given whole into its parts, and ultimately into simple parts. But there is more to a (non-mereological) whole than its parts. There is the unity in virtue of which the parts are parts of a whole. The whole is one entity; the parts are many entities. Now if we try to understand this 'more' analytically we can do so only by positing a further part, a unifying part. I say 'posit,' not 'find.' In Fa, one can reasonably be said to find a particular and a character, but not a distinct copulative entity that grounds the truthmaking unity of the constituents. And so Meinertsen posits a unity-grounding entity. But the attempt to understand synthesis analytically is doomed to failure. First of all, no proper part of a whole is its unity, and this for the simple reason that the unity is the unity of all the parts. What one could say, though, is that the unity of the parts, which is distinct from any part, and from all of them, is brought about by a special part, the unifier. But then that special part, without ceasing to be a proper part, would have to exercise a synthesizing function. This synthesizing is what eludes analytic understanding. Simply to posit that the unifier U* has the ability to synthesize is make a kind of deus ex machina move. Leaving God out of it, Meinertsen's U* is a principium ex machina. I will come back to this later in connection with Meinertsen's talk of “inference to the best explanation.” (144) My present point is that even if there is some occult constituent internal to states of affairs that grounds and thus explains their contingent unity, its existence and its operation must remain a mystery and cannot be rendered perspicuous by the analytic method of constituent ontology. Let me explain further.
Does Meinertsen's U* exist? If there are states of affairs as Meinertsen conceives them, then U* has to exist. But if U* exists, then it is (a) a distinct entity independent of us and our synthetic activities, and (b) a distinct item that we can single out in thought if not in perception. If I see that a book is on a table, then I see a book, a table, and possibly also the relation referred to by 'on.' What I don't see, however, is the referent of 'is': the being of the book's being on the table. Since I don't see the being of the book's being on the table, I do not see U*. I cannot single it out in perception. Can I single it out in thought? To do so I would have to be able to distinguish U* from S, the state of affairs the unity of whose constituents U* grounds. There is a problem here. The ordinary (material) constituents in a state of affairs S are weakly separable: each such constituent could exist apart from every other one in S and apart from S itself, but not apart from every other entity. For example, let S = Fa. If Fa is a Meinertsenian state of affairs, then a can exist without instantiating F, and F can exist without being instantiated by a, and each can exist without being constituents of S. (The separability is said to be weak because a cannot exist without properties, and F cannot exist uninstantiated.) Now the immanent universal relation U* can exist apart from a and apart from F provided it is instantiated elsewhere, but not if it is the actual unifier of a and F. As the latter, as the active ingredient in S, it is inseparable from a, from F, and from S. But then U* is quite unlike the material constituents in S, which are all inert, and it is unintelligible in what exact sense U* is a constituent of S. The analytic assay lays out the constituents of a state of affairs, but it can do this only because of the logically antecedent unity of the constituents in virtue of which there is a state of affairs to assay. To understand this unity analytically by positing a special unifying constituent would make sense only if said constituent were inert like the material constituents. But of course it cannot be inert if its is to be a unity-grounder.
Another way of appreciating the problem is by asking what the difference is between U* as an active ingredient in S, and S. Clearly, S cannot exist without U*. But it is also true that U*, as the active ingredient in S that unifies precisely a and F, cannot exist without S. This is because U* is a unifying unifier only when instantiated/located in a state of affairs with determinate material constituents. In every state of affairs S in which the in rebus immanent universal U* exists, it unifies precisely the constituents of S, and cannot do otherwise. So U* and S are mutually inseparable. It follows that U* both is and is not weakly separable from S. As a constituent of S, U* is weakly separable from S. As an active ingredient and unity-maker, however, U* is not weakly separable from S. We ought to conclude that it is unintelligible how a (proper) constituent of a state of affairs could serve as its unifier. As a constituent, U* must be inert in S; as unifier, U* must be active. But it can't be both because it cannot be both weakly separable from S and not weakly separable from S.
An analogy may help clarify my criticism. The existence of two boards and some glue does not entail the existence of two boards glued together. That is obvious. It is also obvious that there would be no need for super-glue to glue the glue to the boards should someone glue the boards together. If there were a need for super-glue, then one would need super-duper-glue to glue the super-glue to the glue and to the boards, and so on. We can express this by saying that ordinary glue glues itself to what it glues; it is not glued by another to what it glues. In this sense, ordinary glue is self-gluing. This is in analogy to Meinertsen's claim that U* is self-relating. But note that 'self-gluing' can only be taken in a privative, not a positive, sense. The same goes for 'self-relating.' By 'privative' I simply mean that the self-gluing glue is not glued by another. If the glue and the relation U* were self-gluing and self-relating in a positive sense, then they would be agents of an action. They would be active as opposed to passive or inert. But surely self-gluing glue does not do anything: it does not apply itself to the boards or bring it about that the two boards are glued together; self-gluing glue is merely such that if the two boards are glued together by a genuine agent, no further glue would be needed to glue the glue to what it glues. Likewise, self-relating U* does not do anything: it does not bring it about that U*, a, and F are 'cemented' into a state of affairs; it is merely such as to insure that if U*, a, and F are brought together to form a state of affairs, no further formal U-type relations are needed to do the job.
Meinertsen credits me with appreciating that the problem of regress-avoidance and the problem of unity are two and not one. “As Vallicella (2004, p. 163) . . . eloquently puts it: 'A regress-blocker is not eo ipso a unity-grounder, pace Russell, Alexander, Blanshard, Grossmann, et al.'” If I am right, however, Meinersten has not really taken this insight on board. My point against him is that his U* can do only the regress-blocking job but not the unifying job. The problem is that no constituent of a state of affairs can do the unifying job. A fortiori, no relational constituent can do the job. By my lights, Meinerten fails to appreciate this, and it may be that he fails to appreciate it because he illicitly slides from the privative sense to the positive sense of 'self-relating.'
Second Objection
On Meinertsen's internalist theory, the unifier U* is a constituent of every state of affairs. Now corresponding to every state of affairs there is the sum of its constituents. So, corresponding to a's being F, there is the sum a + U* + F. Clearly, the particular a in the state of affairs is numerically the same as the particular a in the sum, and the universal F in the state of affairs is numerically the same as the universal F in the sum. The state of affairs and the sum share these material constituents and do not differ in respect of them. But what about the concrete universal U*? Is it numerically the same entity in the state of affairs and in the sum? If yes, then trouble, and if no, then trouble.
States of affairs are contingent. The contingency of a state of affairs derives from the contingent unity of its constituents. So it must be possible that the same constituents exist either unified or not unified. Thus the state of affairs and the sum must have the same constituents. Now U* is a constituent. It follows that U* must be be numerically the same in both the state of affairs and the corresponding sum. Two items, x, y, are numerically the same just in case thay have all the same properties. So U* must be either inert in both state of affairs and sum, or active in both. Now if U* is inert in both, then no state of affairs is constituted. If, on the other hand, U* is active in both, then the unity of the state of affairs is necessary. (For if U* is active in both, then there is no difference between the state of affairs and the sum. ) Either way, no contingent state of affairs is constituted. Therefore, U* cannot be numerically the same in both state of affairs and corresponding sum.
If, on the other hand, U* is active in the state of affairs, but inert in the sum, we get the same problem. A state of affairs is contingent just in case its constituents can exist without forming a state of affairs. It must be possible for the same constituents to be either unified into a state of affairs or not so unified. But active U* is not the same as inert U*. It follows that the state of affairs and the sum do not have the same constituents, which implies that the state of affairs is not contingent, but necessary. We ought to conclude that the unifier of a state of affairs cannot be a constituent thereof.
Third Objection
The first objection focused on the existence conditions of states of affairs; the third focuses on the existence conditions of concrete universals, in particular, the existence conditions of U*. What I will try to show is that Meinertsen's theory is involved in an explanatory circulus vitiosus. Roughly, he attempts to explain the unity, and thus the existence, of a state of affairs by positing a special unifying constituent when that very constituent can exist only in a state of affairs. Here is my argument:
a) A state of affairs exists if and only if its constituents form a unity. b) U* is a constituent of states of affairs that explains their unity. Therefore c) U* is a constituent of states of affairs that explains their existence. (from a, b) d) U* cannot exercise its explanatory function unless it exists. Therefore e) The existence of U* explains the existence of states of affairs. But f) U* cannot exist except in a state of affairs. Therefore g) The existence of states of affairs explains the existence of U* h) Given the asymmetry of explanation, (e) and (g) are contradictory, and Meinertsen's explanation of the existence of states of affairs in terms of U* is viciously circular.
The above argument rests on the following assumptions. First, there is such a procedure as metaphysical explanation. Second, it is asymmetrical: if x explains y, then it is not the case that y explains x. Third, a circular explanation, violating as it does the asymmetry of explanation, is not an explanation, or is not a successful explanation. Fourth, the unity/existence of states of affairs, being modally contingent, needs explanation, i.e., it cannot be a factum brutum. Meinertsen is committed to all four assumptions. He is committed to the first since he accepts truthmaking. The truthmaker metaphysically (not logically and not causally) explains the truth of the truth-bearer. He is obviously committed to the second and third. He is committed to the fourth because he takes seriously the problem of unity, which is the problem of explaining the difference between a state of affairs and the mere plurality of its constituents.
An External Unifier Avoids the Above Objections
I admit that the theory of my earlier self is not much better than Meinertsen's: in the final analysis they are both unsatisfactory, although for different reasons. But my theory does avoid the above objections. Meinertsen gets into trouble by making his unifier U* a constituent of states of affairs. This exposes him to the first objection because no constituent of a state of affairs could be an active, unity-grounding ingredient. Or at least it is unintelligible how anything like that could exercise a synthesizing function. A state of affairs is a synthetic unity the synthetic character of which cannot be understood by ontological analysis. Analytical understanding here reaches one of its limits. An ontological assay is merely a list of constituents. But the unity of these constituents is not a further item on the list. Nor can adding a special constituent to explain this unity avail anything. For either this further constituent is inert or it is active. If the former, no progress as been made in accounting for unity. If the latter, then the further constituent must be ascribed a special synthesizing power that nothing else has, and that nothing that analysis could reveal could have. How could analysis reveal such an occult power?
U*'s being a constituent opens Meinertsen to the second objection because a state of affairs is contingent only if the same constituents can exist either unified or not. But this sameness is impossible if U* is both a constituent and a unifier. U*'s being a constituent also exposes him to the third objection because no constituent can exist without being a constituent of some state of affairs or other. So if the unifier is a constituent, then it cannot exist unless states of affairs exist. This however gives rise to the explanatory circle. We ought to conclude that if there is a unifier, then it cannot be internal.
My external unifier unifies but without thereby entering into the states of affairs whose unity it brings about. It thereby evades all three of the objections lately listed. Kant's transcendental unity of apperception provides a model of an external unifier. That which brings about the synthesis of representations in the unity of one consciousness, thereby constituting an object of experience, is not itself a part of the object so constituted. One obvious objection from a realist, naturalist, and empiricist point of view to an external unifier, whether developed along transcendental lines or, as in my 2002, along onto-theological lines, is that it leads us away from realism to idealism. It brings mind into the picture as the synthesizing factor. But if (irreducible) mind is brought in, then naturalism is abandoned for some sort of 'spiritualism.' Empiricism too is abandoned if one invokes an external unifier along either transcendental or onto-theological lines.
The brings me to the deus ex machina objection that has been lodged against my proposal. Roughly, I put God to work to solve the problem of the unity of states of affairs. (“God has his uses,” my teacher J. N. Findlay once said.) Curiously, Meinertsen is open to a similar objection, call it principium ex machina. He does not call upon God, but upon a sui generis entity, U*, which is unique among concrete universals due to its synthesizing power. Well, what exactly is wrong with these ex machina moves? Meinertsen and I will be told that the moves are objectionably ad hoc. Meinertsen is sensitive to the criticism:
The U*-relation is of course an 'ad hoc' entity in the sense that it is only introduced to solve a problem, viz. the problem of unity. Some authors, such as Betti (2015), would consider that a big drawback of self-relating internalism. However, one man's 'ad hoc' - solution is another man's inference to the best explanation. (143)
If any of my three objections above are sound, however, Meinertsen's inference to the best explanation is an inference to an explanatory entity that cannot exist or at least cannot be intelligibly posited.
This is the second in a series on Bo Meinertsen's 2018 book. It is part of a 'warm-up' for a review article to appear in Metaphysica. Here is the first installment.
A thick particular in the parlance of David Armstrong is an ordinary particular taken together with its non-relational properties. But an ordinary particular is distinct from each and from all of its properties: it is that which has these properties. If we consider an ordinary particular in abstraction from its properties, what we have before our minds is the particular qua particular. From here it is but a short step to the much maligned and hotly contested bare or thin particular. Meinertsen ably defends bare or thin particulars as constituents of states of affairs in Chapter 5.
A tomato will serve as an example. Call it 'Tom.' There are any number of contingent truths about Tom. Tom is red; Tom is ripe; Tom is round; etc. Meinertsen and I agree that these truths need truthmakers. As I would put it, they can't just be true. What in the world makes them true? For Meinertsen, states of affairs (STOAs) play the truthmaker role. A (first-order) state of affairs is a unified complex consisting of the instantiation of a property by a thin particular, or the instantiation of a relation by two or more thin particulars. Instantiation is an asymmetrical external relation that, in the monadic case, connects a thin particular to a property thereby forming a state of affairs. The truth that Tom is red is thus made true by the state of affairs, Tom's being red, where the subject constituent is a thin particular, thin-Tom if you will, and not thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties. And the same goes for the truth that Tom is ripe, and the truth that Tom is round. For each truth there is a truthmaking state of affairs, a thin state of affairs we can call it since it includes only one of thick-Tom's properties.
Now take the conjunction of all of Tom's intrinsic properties. The result is a conjunctive property. Call it the nature N of Tom. The instantiation of this nature by a thin particular is a state of affairs. This is because N is a bona fide property, and the instantiation of any property by a thin particular is a state of affairs. This state of affairs is a thick state of affairs, and is identical to the thick particular, Tom. So the following comment (in the earlier thread) by Meinertsen comes as a bit of a surprise:
As to (4), well, in my view, thick particulars aren’t real STOAs, merely apparent ones. It’s true that I assay a thick particular as the instantiation of N, the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties. But I also argue that conjunctive properties are truthmaking reducible (TM-reducible) - i.e. only existing at the level of truths, not at the level of truthmakers - and that the instantiation (‘instantiation’) of a TM-reducible property isn’t a real STOA.
This is puzzling because the dialectic started with a really existent thick particular, Tom together with his properties, but seems to end with the elimination of the starting point and the demotion of the thick particular to a mere appearance.
The reasoning seems to proceed as follows. The contingent truth that a is F needs a truthmaker, and so does the contingent truth that a is G. But the conjunction of the two truths -- which is 'automatically' true given the truth of the conjuncts -- does not need its own truthmaker. So these three truths need only two truthmakers. There is no need for a third truthmaker because the truth of the conjunctive proposition supervenes on the truth of its conjuncts. It's an aletheiological 'free lunch.'
Now consider the conjunction C of all the truths about a, or about Tom in our example. What makes this conjunction true are the 'thin' states of affairs corresponding to and grounding each of the truths in the conjunction. The 'thin' states of affairs do all the truthmaking work: there is no need for a separate 'thick' state of affairs to serve as truthmaker for the conjunction itself. But if there is no need for 'thick' states of affairs, then there is no need to posit thick particulars in reality. (A thick particular just is a 'thick' state of affairs.) So thick particulars are best regarded as merely apparent.
That is the argument as far as I can tell. Did I get it right, Bo?
Critique
But if there is no thick particular in reality, then what makes it the case that each of the thin particulars in each of the thin states of affairs is the same thin particular? Meinertsen speaks above of "the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties." (emphasis added) What is the antecedent of the pronoun 'its'? That would have to be Tom in our example, thick-Tom, Tom together with all its properties. So the very identity of C -- its being the conjunction it is and not some other conjunction -- presupposes the reality of thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties. For C to exist and to be true, thick-Tom must exist.
I conclude that one cannot take thick particulars to be merely apparent. Their reality is presupposed if the STOA style of ontology is to get off the ground in the first place.
Now the tomato example is what Meinertsen rightly calls a "toy example." (5). We philosophers employ such examples for convenience ignoring the fact, if it is fact, that tomatoes and other meso-particulars are not ontologically fundamental. So it may make sense to say that thick-Tom and his colleagues do not really exist. But surely the micro-entities of physics do exist and are thick particulars and thus 'thick' states of affairs. There have to be some thick particulars somewhere.
On p. 70, Meinertsen tells that at the level of truthmakers, there are no such things as molecules. Presumably he will say the same about their constituent atoms. But what about sub-atomic particles? Could he be telling us that, no matter how far down we go, we will never encounter anything fundamentally real?
I am presently writing a review article for Metaphysica about Bo R. Meinertsen's Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress (Springer 2018). Since I will probably incorporate the following critical remarks into my review, I want to give Bo a chance to respond.
Substantial and Non-Substantial Change
One way a thing can change is by coming into being or passing away. This is called substantial change. We could also call it existential change. The other way could be called alterational change. This occurs when a thing, persisting for a time, alters in respect of its intrinsic properties during that time. Consider the ripening of a tomato. This typically involves the tomato's going from green to red. This change in respect of color is an alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change. One and the same entity (substance) persists through a non-zero interval of time and instantiates different properties (accidents) at different times. As I would put it, there is no alterational change without existential unchange: numerically the same tomato is green, hard, inedible, etc. at time t and red, soft, and edible at later time t*. Bo and I are both assuming that things in time persist by enduring, not by perduring.
The Problem of Non-Substantial Change of Continuants
This is
. . . the problem of how to ground the fact that continuants 'persist through change'. For instance, a tomato's changing from red to green [sic] is a case of non-substantial change, and how do we ground the fact that the tomato that has changed exists both before and after the change? The bundles of basic trope theory essentially have the members they actually have and are therefore incompatible with such change. (Meinertsen 2018, 49)
The problem is that we want to say that one and the same tomato goes from being green to being red. We want to be able to uphold the diachronic identity of the tomato as it alters property-wise. But this is impossible on basic bundle-theoretic trope theory because trope bundles have their members essentially. This means that if bundle B has trope t as a member, then it is impossible that B exist without having t as a member. The counterintuitive upshot is that a green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes ceases to exist when it ceases to be green. This implies that our tomato when so assayed cannot undergo alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change when it goes from green to red, hard to soft, etc. It implies that every change is a substantial change. I agree with Meinertsen that this is a powerful objection to the basic bundle-of-tropes assay of ordinary particulars.
Does a State of Affairs Ontology Face the Same Problem?
Meinertsen says that it does not:
State of affairs ontology has no problem in dealing with the problem of non-substantial change. None of the properties of a particular in a state of affairs -- which as we shall see in Chap. 5 is a bare particular -- is included in it, as opposed to instantiated by it. Hence, it changes non-substantially if and only it ceases to instantiate at least one of these properties or whenever it instantiates a new property. (49)
It seems to me, though, that states of affairs (STOA) ontology faces, if not the very same problem, then a closely related one.
Critique
It is true that a bare particular does not include its properties: the bare or thin particular stands to its properties in the asymmetrical external relation of instantiation. So what Meinertsen is telling us is that it is the bare particular that remains numerically the same over time while some of its properties are replaced by others. This is what grounds the diachronic numerical identity of the continuant. The substratum of change is the bare particular 'in' the tomato, not the tomato as a whole.
But this answer is less than satisfactory. What changes over time is not a thin particular, but a thick particular. It is the green tomato with all its properties that loses one or more of them and becomes a red tomato. This is supported by the fact that we do not see or otherwise perceive the thin particular; we do, however, see and otherwise perceive thick particulars. What we have before us is a tomato that we see to be green and feel to be hard, etc., and that we then later see to be red and feel to be soft, etc.
Arguably, then, it is the thick particular that is the substratum of non-substantial change, not the thin particular. If so, then a problem arises similar to the problem that arose for the bundle-of-tropes theory. How?
Well, the green tomato is a STOA whose nature is N1, where N1 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the green tomato. The red tomato is a STOA whose nature is N2, where N2 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the red tomato. These STOAs differ numerically for they differ in one or more constituents. The first has greenness as a constituent, the second does not. A STOA is a complex, and two complexes are the same iff they have all the same constituents.
So what's the problem? The problem is that any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a STOA destroys its identity just as surely as any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes destroys its identity. On either account, there is no adequate explanation of non-substantial change. This is because there is no numerically self-same substratum of change that endures through the change in properties. The thin particular is not plausibly regarded as the substratum. I note en passant that Gustav Bergmann regarded bare particulars as momentary entities, not as persisting entities.
The problem set forth as an aporetic sextad:
There is no change in intrinsic properties of an ordinary particular over time without a numerically self-same substratum of change. (endurantist assumption)
The green tomato changes to red. (pre-theoretical datum)
The green tomato that changes to red is a thick particular. (pre-theoretical datum)
Thick particulars are STOAs. (theoretical claim)
STOAs are complexes. (true by definition)
Two complexes are the same iff they share all constituents. (theoretical claim)
These six propositions are collectively inconsistent. My question to Meinertsen: which of these propositions will you reject? Presumably, he will have to reject (3) and say that 'the green tomato' refers to an invisible thin particular, and it is this item that changes from green to red and that serves as the substratum of change.
What do I say? For now I say merely that, pace Bo, on the issue before us, STOA ontology is no better than the bundle-of-tropes theory.
Joe, who describes himself as "a high school student with a passion for philosophy of religion and metaphysics," asked me a long series of difficult questions. Here is one of them:
After reading [Edward] Feser's Five Proofs, I have had difficulties with the concept of sustaining causes. First, Feser argues that composites require a sustaining cause in order to "hold them together" or keep them conjoined. But this seems to presuppose that all composite things (be it physical composites or metaphysical composites) are contingent.
But why suppose that, necessarily, all composites are contingent? What is incoherent about this:
X is a necessary being (i.e. X cannot fail to exist). X has metaphysical parts A, B, and C. Each of A, B, and C are also necessarily instantiated in reality, and the relations between A, B, and C are all necessarily instantiated in reality.
Why ought we to rule out this epistemic possibility? This seems to be a necessary being which is composite. It would be a counter-example to the assumption that composition entails contingency (where contingency means can fail to exist).
If we take composition broadly enough, composition does not entail contingency. Consider the set, {1, 3, 5}. Assume that numbers are necessary beings. Then of course the set will also be a necessary being. Furthermore, the relations that hold between the members of this set hold necessarily. For example, necessarily, 3 < 5, and necessarily, 3 > 1. So if we think of sets as composite entities, then it is not the case that all composites are contingent.
But what Feser is concerned with are material particulars, or material substances, to use the Aristotelian-scholastic jargon, e..g., a horse, a statue, a man. And of course these cannot be taken to be sets of their metaphysical parts. If I understand Feser, what he is asking is: what makes a contingent being such as Socrates contingent? The question is not whether he is contingent, but what makes him contingent. What is the ground of his contingency? The answer is that Socrates is contingent because he is composite. Composition or rather compositeness is the ground of contingency. His contingency is explained by his compositeness, in particular, his being a composite of essence and existence. So at the root of contingency is the real distinction (distinctio realis) of essence and existence in finite substances.
The claim is not that every composite entity is contingent, but that every contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composite.
Now if a contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composed of essence and existence, then a necessary being, or rather, a necessary being that has its necessity from itself and not from another, is necessary in virtue of its being simple, i.e., absolutely non-partite. This is how Thomists feel driven to the admittedly strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine of divine simplicity.
If there is to be an ultimate explanation of the existence of contingent beings, this explanation must invoke an entity that is not itself contingent. The ultimate entity must exist of metaphysical necessity and have its necessity from itself. Thomism as I understand it plausibly maintains that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. God is necessary because in God essence and existence are one and the same.
A good discussion with links to various people including your humble correspondent. His vanity notes the following:
Bill Vallicella’s account of the two approaches and a moderate defence of Constituent Ontology. Very accessible – W.V. does a lot more for philosophy in his retirement than certain philosophers of Law who will remain nameless do in their professional capacity.
The nameless one, I take it, is the notorious Ladder Man.
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.
Do you prefer the term 'facts' to 'states of affairs'? I take it you do -- you certainly used the former most. But why, actually, did you use the latter in your Nous article?
Personally, I used 'facts' in my Ph.D. dissertation, but afterwards started using 'state of affairs', very much to be in the spirit of Armstrong, so to speak. But it is quite inconvenient and a little disagreeable-sounding. And one can -- as demonstrated by important philosophers in the area, like you -- perfectly well use 'facts' for worldly entities, as opposed to true propositions. One can also use it for both, in one and the same text, as in Arianna Betti's book, Against Facts (though that might give rise to some problems.)
So I wonder if I should return to using the term 'fact' for my book, which is derived from my dissertation. In my case, it's a terminological question only, so in principle I guess I can postpone deciding on this till later.
In the Nous article I used 'states of affairs' because I was drawing heavily from Armstrong. I now use 'fact' and 'state of affairs' interchangeably, but favor 'fact' on account of its brevity. If facts are truth-makers, however, then we cannot mean by 'fact' what Frege means by Tatsache, namely, a true proposition, where a proposition or thought (Gedanke) is the sense (Sinn) of a context-free declarative sentence (Satz). (Frege 1976, 50) Propositions are either true or false, but no fact is either true or false. A proposition is a truth-bearer, but a fact is a truth-maker. Propositions are bivalent, but there is no corresponding bivalence with respect to facts on the concretist conception. It is not as if some facts obtain and others do not: a fact cannot exist without obtaining.
By my count there are at least three correct uses of 'fact.'
Logical: A fact is a true proposition.
Epistemological: A fact is a proposition either known to be the case or believed on good evidence to be the case.
Ontological: A fact is not a proposition, but a proposition-like entity in external reality that can serve as truth-maker for declarative sentences and the propositions they express. For example, Al's being fat is a fact in the ontological sense, a complex having as primary constituents Al and the property of being fat. This fact in the ontological sense makes true the fact in the logical sense expressed by 'Al is fat.' The fact that Al is fat is made true by the fact ofAl's being fat.
I use 'fact' in the ontological sense. But what reason do we have to posit facts in this ontological sense?
There is more to the truth of a contingent sentence than the sentence that is true. 'Al is fat' is a true contingent declarative sentence. By my lights it cannot just be true: there has to be something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true, that 'grounds' its being true. This external something cannot be another sentence or someone's say-so. This external something is something 'in the world,' i.e., in reality outside mind and language. What's more, this external something cannot be Al construed as an individual. It must be a proposition-like entity, Al's being fat. This is what Armstrong calls a state of affairs and what I call a fact (and sometimes a state of affairs). It is not a proposition though it is proposition-like: it has a structure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. Clarity is served if we refer to such truth-making facts as concrete facts to distinguish them from abstract facts and a abstract states of affairs. As concrete, the fact of Al's being fat is spatially located.
This truth-maker principle goes beyond what we could call the veritas-sequitur-esse principle. The latter says merely that every true contingent sentence/proposition is about something that exists. It says that there are no truths about nonexistent items, contra Meinong. The VSE principle is satisfied by 'Al is fat' if just Al exists in reality or just Al and fatness. The TM principle takes it a step further. It requires Al, fatness, and their togetherness in the fact of Al's being fat.
This entry continues the discussion of prime matter begun here. That post is a prerequisite for this one.
Similarities between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter
S1. Bare particulars in themselves are property-less while prime matter in itself is formless. The bare particular in a thing is that which exemplifies the thing's properties. But in itself it is a pure particular and thus 'bare.' The prime matter of a thing is the thing's ultimate matter and while supporting forms is itself formless.
S2. Bare particulars, though property-less in themselves, exemplify properties; prime matter, though formless in itself, is formed.
S3. There is nothing in the nature of a bare particular to dictate which properties it will exemplify. This is because bare particulars do not have natures. Correspondingly, there is nothing in the nature of prime matter to dictate which substantial forms it will take. This is because prime matter, in itself, is without form.
S4. Bare particulars, being bare, are promiscuously combinable with any and all first-level properties. Thus any bare particular can stand in the exemplification nexus with any first-level property. Similarly, prime matter is promiscuously receptive to any and all forms, having no form in itself.
S5. Promiscuous combinability entails the contingency of the exemplification nexus. Promiscuous receptivity entails the contingency of prime matter's being informed thus and so.
S6. Bare particulars are never directly encountered in sense experience. The same holds for prime matter. What we encounter are always propertied particulars and formed matter.
S7. A bare particular combines with properties to make an ordinary, 'thick' particular. Prime matter combines with substantial form to make a primary (sublunary) substance.
S8. The dialectic that leads to bare particulars and prime matter respectively is similar, a form of analysis that is neither logical nor physical but ontological. It is based on the idea that things have ontological constituents or 'principles' which, incapable of existing on their own, yet combine to from independent existents. Hylomorphic analysis leads ultimately to prime matter, and ontological analysis in the style of Bergmann and fellow travellers leads to bare or thin particulars as ultimate substrata.
Differences Between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter
D1. There are many bare particulars each numerically different from every other one. In themselves, bare particulars are many. It is not the case that, in itself, prime matter is many. It is not, in itself, parceled out into numerically distinct bits.
D2. Bare particulars are actual; prime matter is purely potential.
D3. Bare particulars account for numerical difference. But prime matter does not account for numerical difference. (See Feser's manual, p. 199) Prime matter is common and wholly indeterminate. Designated matter (materia signata) is the principle of individuation, i.e., differentiation.
Eric Levy wants to talk about prime matter. I am 'primed' and my powder's dry: Nihil philosophicum a me alienum putamus. "I consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to me."
Change, Accidental and Substantial
There is no change without a substrate of change which, in respect of its existence and identity, does not change during the interval of the change. In a slogan: no change without unchange. No becoming other (alter-ation, Ver-aenderung) without something remaining the same. In the case of accidental change, the substrate is materia secunda, in one of its two senses, a piece of paper, say, as opposed to paper as a kind of material stuff. It is a piece of paper that becomes yellow with age, not paper as a kind of stuff. In the case of substantial change the substrate is said to be prime matter, materia prima. On the scholastic view, prime matter must exist if we are to explain substantial change. (See Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics, pp. 171 ff.) Thus to the problems with substantial change already mentioned (in an earlier portion of this text not yet 'blogged') we may add the problems that are specific to prime matter. Besides the route to prime matter via substantial change, there is the route via the very procedure of hylomorphic analysis. Traversing these routes will give us a good idea of why the positing of prime matter has seemed compelling to scholastics.
Given that thought sometimes makes contact with reality, one can ask: what must real things be like if thought is to be able to make contact with them? What must these things be like if they are to be intelligible to us? A realist answer is that these mind-independent things must be conformable to our thought, and our thought to them. There must be some sort of isomorphism between thought and thing. Since we cannot grasp anything unstructured, reality must have structure. So there have to be principles of form and organization in things. But reality is not exhausted by forms and structures; there is also that which supports form and structure. In this way matter comes into the picture. Forms are determinations. Matter, in a sense that embraces both primary and secondary matter, is the determinable as such.
Proximate matter can be encountered in experience, at least in typical cases. The proximate matter of a chair consists of its legs, seat, back. But this proximate matter itself has form. A leg, for example, has a shape and thus a form. (Form is not identical to shape, since there are forms that are not shapes; but shapes are forms.) Suppose the leg has the geometrical form of a cylinder. (Of course it will have other forms as well, the forms of smoothness and brownness, say.) The cylindrical form is the form of some matter. The matter of this cylindrical form is wood, say. But a piece of wood is a partite entity the parts of which have form and matter. For example, the complex carbohydrate cellulose is found in wood. It has a form and a proximate matter. But cellulose is made of beta-glucose molecules. Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of subatomic particles like electrons, and these of quarks, and so it goes.
Hylomorphic analysis is thus iterable. The iteration cannot be infinite: the material world cannot be hylomorphic compounds 'all the way down,' or 'all the way up' for that matter. The iteration has a lower limit in prime or primordial or ultimate matter (materia prima), just as it has an upper limit in pure form, and ultimately in the forma formarum, God, the purely actual being. Must hylomorphic analysis proceed all the way to prime matter, or can it coherently stop one step shy of it at the lowest level of materia secunda? I think that if one starts down the hylomorphic road one must drive to its bitter end in prime matter. (Cf. Feser's manual, p. 173 for what I read as an argument to this conclusion.) Ultimate matter, precisely because it is ultimate, has no form of its own. As John Haldane describes it, it is "stuff of no kind." (“A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind” in Form and Matter, ed. Oderberg, p. 50) We could say that prime matter is the wholly indeterminate determinable. As wholly indeterminate, it is wholly determinable.
(Question: if prime matter is wholly indeterminate, is it also indeterminate with respect to being either determinate or indeterminate? Presumably not. Is there a problem lurking here?)
The Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter
While it is easy to appreciate the logic that leads to the positing of prime matter, it is difficult to see that what is posited is coherently thinkable. Here is one consideration among several. Call it the Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter. It may be compressed into the following aporetic dyad:
Prime matter exists.
Prime matter does not exist.
Argument for limb (1). There is real substantial change and it cannot be reduced to accidental change. All change is reduction of potency to act, and all change requires an underlying substrate of change that remains self-same and secures the diachronic identity of that which changes. The substrate of a change is the matter of the change. What changes in a change are forms, whether accidental or substantial. Without the potency-act and matter-form distinctions we cannot accommodate the fact of change and avoid both the Heraclitean doctrine of radical flux and the Eleatic denial of change. Or so say the scholastics. In the case of accidental change, the subject or substrate is secondary matter (materia secunda). But substantial change is change too, and so it also requires a substrate which cannot be secondary matter and so must be prime matter. Given what we must assume to make sense of the plain fact of both accidental and substantial change, “prime matter must exist.” (Feser's manual, p. 172) It must exist in reality as the common basis of every substantial change.
Argument for limb (2). Prime matter is pure potency. It has to be, given the exigencies of accounting for substantial as opposed to accidental change. As pure potency, prime matter is wholly indeterminate and wholly formless. In itself, then, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually, as is obvious. But it also does not exist potentially: prime matter does not have potential Being. This is because the principle of the metaphysical priority of act over potency requires that every existing potency (e.g., the never actualized potency of a sugar cube to dissolve in water) be grounded in something actual (e.g., the sugar cube). The pure potency which is prime matter is not, however, grounded in anything actual. (Note that one cannot say that prime matter is a pure potency grounded in each primary substance. Prime matter is the ultimate stuff of each primary substance; it is not potency possessed by these substances.) Therefore, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually and it does not exist potentially. This is also evident from the first of the twenty-four Thomistic theses:
Potency and act are a complete division of being. Hence whatever is must be either pure act or a unit composed of potency and act as its primary and intrinsic principles. (Quoted by Feser, Schol. Metaph., p. 31)
If so, prime matter does not exist. For prime matter is neither pure act nor composed of potency and act. It is interesting to observe that while purely actual Being can itself be by being something actual, purely potential Being cannot itself be by being something potential (or actual). God is actual Being (Sein, esse) and an actual being (Seiendes, ens). But prime matter is neither potential nor actual. So prime matter neither is actually nor is potentially.
It thus appears that we have cogent arguments for both limbs of a contradiction. If the contradiction is real and not merely apparent, and the arguments for the dyad's limbs are cogent, then either there is no prime matter, the very concept thereof being self-contradictory, or there is prime matter but it is is unintelligible to us. One could, I suppose, be a mysterian about prime matter: it exists but we, given our cognitive limitations, cannot understand how it could exist. (Analogy with Colin McGinn's mysterianism: consciousness is a brain process, but our cognitive limitations bar us from understanding how it could be.) But I mention mysterianism only to set it aside.
But perhaps we can avoid contradiction in the time-honored way, by drawing a distinction. A likely candidate is the distinction between prime matter in itself versus prime matter together with substantial forms. So I expect the following scholastic response to my antinomy:
Prime matter exists as a real (extramental) factor only in primary substances such as Socrates and Plato. It exists only in hylomorphic compounds of prime matter and substantial form. But it does not exist when considered in abstraction from every primary substance. So considered, it is nothing at all. It is not some formless stuff that awaits formation: it is always already formed. It is always already parcelled out among individual material substances. Once this distinction is made, the distinction between prime matter in itself and prime matter together with substantial forms, one can readily see that the 'contradiction' in the above dyad is merely apparent and rests on an equivocation on 'exist(s).' The word is being used in two different senses. In (1) 'exists' means: exists together with substantial form. In (2), 'exist' means: exist in itself. Thus the aporetic dyad reduces to the logically innocuous dyad:
1*. Prime matter exists together with substantial forms.
2*. Prime matter does not exist in itself in abstraction from substantial forms.
Unfortunately, this initially plausible response gives rise to a problem of its own. If prime matter really exists only in primary substances, then prime matter in reality is not a common stuff but is parcelled out among all the primary substances: it exists only as a manifold of designated matters, the matter of Socrates, of Plato, etc. But this conflicts with the requirement that prime matter be the substratum of substantial change. Let me explain.
If a new substance S2 comes into existence from another already existing substance S1 (parthenogenesis may be an example) then prime matter is what underlies and remains the same through this change. Now this substratum of substantial change that remains the same must be something real, but it cannot be identical to S2 or to S1 or to any other substance. For if the substratum of substantial change is identical to S1, then S1 survives, in which case S2 is not a new substance generated from S1 but a mere alteration of S1. Don't forget that substantial change cannot be reduced to an accidental change in some already existing substance or substances. In substantial change a new substance comes to be from one or more already existing substances. (I will assume that creation or 'exnihilation' does not count as substantial change.)
If, on the other hand, the substratum of change is identical to S2, then S2 exists before it comes to exist. And it seems obvious that the substratum of substantial change underlying S2's coming to be from S1 cannot be some other substance. Nor can the substratum be an accident of S2 or S1. For an accident can exist only in a substance. If the substratum is an accident of S1, then S1 must exist after it has ceased to exist. If the substratum is an accident of S2, then S2 must exist before it comes to exist.
The argumentative punchline is that prime matter cannot exist only in primary substances as a co-principle tied in every case to a substantial form. If prime matter is the substratum of substantial change, then prime matter must be a really existent, purely potential, wholly indeterminate, stuff on its own.
The Problem of the Substrate
The problem just presented, call it the Problem of the Substrate or the Problem of the Continuant, may be pressed into the mold of an aporetic tetrad:
1. Prime matter is the substrate of substantial change.
2. Prime matter does not exist in reality except as divided among individual material substances.
3. The substratum of a substantial change cannot be identified with any of the substances involved in the change, or with any other substance, or with any accident of any substance. (For example, the substratum of the substantial change which is Socrates' coming into existence from gametes G1 and G2 cannot be identified with Socrates, with G1, with G2, with any other substance, or with any accident of any substance.)
4. There is substantial change and it requires a really existent substrate.
The tetrad is inconsistent issuing as it does in the contradiction: Prime matter does and does not exist only in individual material substances.
The obvious solution is to deny (2). But if we deny (2) to solve the Problem of the Substrate, then we reignite the Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter. We solved the Antinomy by making a distinction, but that distinction gave rise to the Problem of the Substrate/Continuant. We appear to be in quite a pickle. (For more on the Substrate/Continuant problem, see John D. Kronen, Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan, “The Problem of the Continuant: Aquinas and Suárez on Prime Matter and Substantial Generation,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Jun., 2000), pp. 863-885.)
The Problem of Individuation
Finally a glance at the related ontological, not epistemological, problem of individuation. This problem is actually two problems. There is the problem of individuation proper, namely, the problem of what makes an individual substance individual as opposed to universal, and there is the connected problem of differentiation, namely, the problem of what makes numerically different individual substances numerically different. It is clear that prime matter cannot be the principle of differentiation. For one thing, prime matter is common to all material substances. For another, prime matter as pure potency is indeterminate, hence not intrinsically divided into parcels. Moreover, pace Feser, prime matter cannot “bring universals down to earth” in his phrase: it cannot be the principle of individuation, narrowly construed. (Schol. Metaph., p. 199) For what makes Socrates an individual substance rather than the substantial form he shares with Plato cannot be common, indeterminate, amorphous, matter.
Prime matter is not up to the job of individuation/differentiation. It is designated matter (materia signata quantitate) that is said to function as the ontological ground or 'principle' of individuation and numerical difference. Unfortunately, appeal to designated matter involves us in an explanatory circle. Designated matter is invoked to explain why Socrates and Plato are individual substances and why they are numerically different individual substances. But designated matter cannot be that which individuates/differentiates them since it presupposes for its individuation and differentiation the logically (not temporally) antecedent existence of individual material substances. Why are Socrates and Plato different? Because their designated matters are different. Why are their designated matters different? Because they are the matters of different substances. The explanation moves in a circle of rather short diameter.
Feser considers something like this objection but dismisses it as resting on a confusion of formal with efficient causality. But there is no such confusion in the objection as I have presented it. Efficient causality does not come into it at all. No one thinks that there is an agent who in a temporal process imposes substantial form on prime matter in the way that a potter in a temporal process imposes accidental form upon a lump of clay. I can grant Feser's point that prime matter and substantial form are related as material cause to formal cause. I can also grant that prime matter and substantial form are mutually implicative co-principles neither of which can exist without the other. Granting all this, my objection remains. Prime matter in itself is undifferentiated. It it differentiated and dimensive only in combination with substantial forms. But this is equivalent to saying that prime matter is differentiated and dimensive only as the designated matter of particular individual substances. But then designated matter cannot non-circularly explain why numerically different substances are numerically different. For the numerical difference of these matters presupposes the numerical difference of the substances.
J. P. Moreland defines an "impure realist" as one who denies the Axiom of Localization (Universals, McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, p. 18):
No entity whatsoever can exist at different spatial locations at once or at interrupted time intervals.
An example of an impure realist is D. M. Armstrong. An example of a pure realist is R. Grossmann. Moreland writes,
Impure realists like D. M. Armstrong deny the axiom of localization. For them, properties are spatially contained inside the things that have them. Redness is at the very place Socrates is and redness is also at the very place Plato is. Thus, redness violates the axiom of localization. Impure realists are naturalists at heart. Why? Because they accept the fact that properties are universals; that is, as entities that can be exemplified by more than one thing at once. But they do not want to deny naturalism and believe in abstract entities that are outside space and time altogether. Thus, impure realists hold that all entities are, indeed, inside space and time. But they embrace two different kinds of spatial entities: concrete particulars (Socrates) that are in only one place at a time, and universals (properties like redness) that are at different spatial locations at the very same time. For the impure realist, the exemplification relation is a spatial container relation. Socrates exemplifies redness in that redness is spatially contained inside of or at the same place as Socrates. (18-19)
The above doesn't sound right to me either in itself or as an interpretation of Armstrong.
Is Exemplification a Container Relation?
Take a nice simple 'Iowa' example. There are two round, red spots on a piece of white paper. It is a datum, a Moorean fact, that both are of the same shape and both are of the same color. Moving from data to theory: what is the ontological ground of the sameness of shape and the sameness of color? The impure realist responds with alacrity: the spots are of the same color because one and the same universal redness and one and the same universal roundness are present in both spots. The qualitative sameness of the two spots is grounded in sameness of universals. What is the ontological ground of the numerical difference of the two spots? The bare or thin particular in each. Their numerical difference grounds the numerical difference of the two spots. The bare/thin particular does a second job: it is that which instantiates the universals 'in' each spot. For not only do we need an account of numerical difference, we also need an account of why the two spots are particulars and not (conjunctive) universals.
The upshot for both Bergmann and Armstrong is that each spot is a fact or state of affairs. How so? Let 'A' designate one spot and 'B' the other. Each spot is a thick particular, a particular together with all its monadic properties. Let 'a' and 'b' designate the thin particulars in each. A thin particular is a particular taken in abstraction from its monadic properties. Let 'F-ness' designate the conjunctive universal the conjuncts of which are roundness and redness. Then A = a-instantiating F-ness, and B = b-instantiating-F-ness. A and B are concrete facts or states of affairs. A is a's being F and B is b's being F.
From what has been said so far it should be clear that instantiation/exemplification cannot be a spatial container relation. Even if F-ness is spatially inside of the thick particulars A and B, that relation is different from the relation that connects the thin particular a to the universal F-ness and the thin particular b to the universal F-ness. The point is that instantiation cannot be any sort of container, constituency, or part-whole relation on a scheme like Armstrong's or Bergmann's in which ordinary concrete particulars are assayed as states of affairs or facts. A's being red is not A's having the universal redness as a part, spatial or not. A's being red is a's instantiating the universal redness. Instantiation, it should be clear, is not a part-whole relation. If a instantiates F-ness, then neither is a a part of F-ness nor is F-ness a part of a.
Contra Moreland, we may safely say that for Armstrong, and for any scheme like his, exemplification/instantiation is not a container relation, and therefore not a spatial container relation.
Could an Ontological Part be a Spatial Part?
Moreland makes two claims in the quoted passage. One is that exemplification is a spatial container relation. The other is that there are two different kinds of spatial entities. The claims seem logically independent. Suppose you agree with me that exemplification cannot be any sort of container relation. It seems consistent with this to maintain that universals are spatial parts of ordinary concrete particulars. But this notion is difficult to swallow as well.
A constituent ontologist like Bergmann, Armstrong, or the author of A Paradigm Theory of Existence maintains that ordinary concrete particulars have ontological parts structured ontologically. Thus thin particulars and constituent universals are among the ontological parts of ordinary particulars when the latter are assayed as states of affairs or facts. The question is: could these ontological parts be spatial parts?
Consider a thin or bare particular. Is it a spatial part of a round red spot? By my lights, this makes no sense. There is no conceivable process of physical decomposition that could lay bare (please forgive the wholly intended pun) the bare particular at the metaphysical core of a red spot or a ball bearing. Suppose one arrived at genuine physical atoms, literally indivisible bits of matter, in the physical decomposition of a ball bearing. Could one of these atoms be the bare or thin particular of the ball bearing? Of course not. For any such atom you pick will have intrinsic properties. And so any atom you pick will be a thick particular. As such, it will have at its metaphysical core a thin particular which -- it should now be obvious -- cannot be a bit of matter. Bare particulars, if there are any, lie too deep, metaphysically speaking, to be bits of matter.
Obviously, then, bare particulars cannot be material parts of ordinary particulars. Hence they cannot be spatial parts of ordinary particulars.
What about universals? Could my two red spots -- same shade of red, of course -- each have as a spatial part numerically one and the same universal, a universal 'repeated' in each spot, the universal redness? If so, then the same goes for the geometrical property, roundness: it is too is a universal spatially present in both spots. But then it follows that the two universals spatially coincide: they occupy the same space in each spot. So not only can universals be in different places at the same time; two or more of them can be in the same place at the same time.
If nothing else, this conception puts considerable stress on our notion of a spatial part. One can physically separate the spatial parts of a thing. A spherical object can be literally cut into two hemispheres. But if a ball is red all over and sticky all over, the redness and the stickiness cannot be physically separated. If physical separability in principle is a criterion of spatial parthood, then universals cannot be spatial parts of spatial concrete particulars.
Any thoughts?
Three Views
Van Inwagen: The only parts of material particulars are ordinary spatial parts. The only structure of a material particular is spatial or mereological structure. The notion of an ontological part that is not a spatial part in the ordinary mereological sense is unintelligible. And the same goes for ontological structure. See here.
Armstrong as Misread by Moreland: There are ontological parts in addition to ordinary spatial parts and they too are spatial.
Vallicella (2002): There are ontological parts but they are not spatial.
Thanks again to Professor Levy to getting me 'fired up' over this topic.
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Is the notion of a trope intelligible?
If not, then we can pack it in right here and dispense with discussion of the subsidiary difficulties. Peter van Inwagen confesses, "I do not understand much of what B-ontologists write." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge UP, 2001, p. 2) 'B' is short for 'Bergmann' where the reference is to Gustav Bergmann, the founder of the Iowa School. B-ontology is what I call constituent ontology. I will refer to it, and not just out of perversity, as C-ontology and I will contrast it with NC-ontology. Van Inwagen is a premier example of an NC-ontologist, a non-constituent ontologist.
The fundamental idea of C-ontology is that concreta have ontological parts in addition to their spatial parts if the concreta in question are material things. To invoke a nice simple 'Iowa' example, consider a couple of round red spots on a white piece of paper. Each spot has spatial parts. On C-ontology, however, each spot also has ontological parts, among them the properties of the spots. For a C-ontologist, then, the properties of a thing are parts of it. But of course they are not spatial or mereological parts of it. A spot can be cut in two, and an avocado can be disembarrassed of its seed and exocarp, but one cannot physically separate the roundness and the redness of the spot or the dark green of the exocarp from the exocarp. So if the properties of a thing are parts thereof, then these parts are 'ontological' parts, parts that figure in the ontological structure of the thing in question.
Examples of C-ontologies: a) trope bundle theory, b) universals bundle theory, c) tropes + substratum theory, d) Castaneda's Guise Theory, e) Butchvarov's object-entity theory, f) the ontological theories of Bergmann, Armstrong, and Vallicella according to which ordinary particulars are concrete facts, g) Aristotelian and Scholastic hylomorphic doctrines according to which form and matter are 'principles' (in the Scholastic not the sentential sense) ingredient in primary substances.
If van Inwagen is right, then all of the above are unintelligible. Van Inwagen claims not to understand such terms as 'trope,' 'bare particular,' 'immanent universal' and 'bundle' as these terms are used in C-ontologies. He professes not to understand how a thing could have what I am calling an ontological structure. "What I cannot see is how a chair could have any sort of structure but a spatial or mereological structure." (Ibid.) He cannot see how something like a chair could have parts other than smaller and smaller spatial parts such as legs made of wood which are composed of cellulose molecules along with other organic compounds, and so on down. If this is right, then there is no room for what I call ontological analysis as opposed to chemical analysis and physical analysis. There can be no such intelligible project as an ontological factor analysis that breaks an ordinary particular down into thin particular, immanent universals, nexus of exemplification, and the like, or into tropes and a compresence relation, etc.
In sum: trope theory stands and falls with C-ontology; the project of C-ontology is unintelligible; ergo, trope theory is unintelligible resting as it does on such unintelligible notions as trope, and bundle of tropes. Van Inwagen delivers his unkindest cut with the quip that he has never been able to understand tropes as "anything but idealized coats of paint." (Ibid.) Ouch!
Let's assume that van Inwagen is right and that the properties of concrete particulars cannot be construed as parts of them in any intelligible sense of 'part.' If so, this puts paid to every C-ontology I am familiar with. But can van Inwagen do better? Is his NC-ontology free of difficulties? I don't think so. It bristles with them no less than C-ontology does. I refer the interested reader to my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica, vol, 12, no. 2 (2015), pp. 99-125. Here is a pre-print version. I will now reproduce some of it so that you can see how a C-ontologist can go on the attack:
Van Inwagen's Ostrich Realism and Commitment to Bare Particulars
Van Inwagen rejects both extreme and moderate nominalism. So he can't possibly be an ostrich nominalist. He is, however, as he himself appreciates, an ostrich realist or ostrich platonist. (214-15)
Suppose Max is black. What explains the predicate's being true of Max? According to the ostrich nominalist, nothing does. It is just true of him. There is nothing in or about Max that serves as the ontological ground of the correctness of his satisfying the predicate. Now 'F' is true of a if and only if 'a is F' is true. So we may also ask: what is the ontological ground of the truth of 'Max is black'? The ostrich reply will be: nothing. The sentence is just true. There is no need for a truth-maker.
The ostrich realist/platonist says something very similar except that in place of predicates he puts abstract properties, and in place of sentences he puts abstract propositions. In virtue of what does Max instantiate blackness? In virtue of nothing. He just instantiates it. Nothing explains why the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'x is black' is instantiated by Max. Nothing explains it because there is nothing to explain. And nothing explains why the saturated assertible expressed by 'Max is black' is true. Thus there is nothing concrete here below that could be called a state of affairs in anything like Armstrong's sense. There is in the realm of concreta no such item as Max-instantiating-blackness, or the concrete fact of Max's being black. Here below there is just Max, and up yonder in a topos ouranos are 'his' properties (the abstract unsaturated assertibles that he, but not he alone, instantiates). But then Max is a bare particular in one sense of this phrase. In what sense, then?
Four Senses of 'Bare Particular'
1. A bare particular is an ordinary concrete particular that lacks properties. I mention this foolish view only to set it aside. No proponent of bare particulars that I am aware of ever intended the phrase in this way. And of course, van Inwagen is not committed to bare particulars in this sense. Indeed, he rejects an equivalent view. “A bare particular would be a thing of which nothing could be said truly, an obviously incoherent notion.” (179)
2. A bare particular is an ontological constituent of an ordinary concrete particular, a constituent that has no properties. To my knowledge, no proponent of bare particulars ever intended the phrase in this way. In any case, the view is untenable and may be dismissed. Van Inwagen is of course not committed to this view. He is a 'relation' ontologist, not a 'constituent' ontologist.
3. A bare particular is an ontological constituent of an ordinary concrete particular, a constituent that does have properties, namely, the properties associated with the ordinary particular in question, and has them by instantiating (exemplifying) them. This view is held by Gustav Bergmann and by David Armstrong in his middle period. Armstrong, however, speaks of thin particulars rather than bare particulars, contrasting them with thick particulars (what I am calling ordinary concrete particulars). When he does uses 'bare particular,' he uses the phrase incorrectly and idiosyncratically to refer to something like (1) or (2). For example, in Universals and Scientific Realism, Cambridge UP, 1978, vol. I, p. 213, he affirms something he calls the "Strong Principle of the Rejection of Bare Particulars":
For each particular, x, there exists at least one non-relational property, P, such that x is P.
This principle of Armstrong is plausibly read as a rejection of (1) and (2). It is plainly consistent with (3). But of course I do not claim that van Inwagen is committed to bare or thin particulars in the sense of (3). For again, van Inwagen is not a constituent ontologist.
4. A bare particular is an ordinary concrete particular that has properties by instantiating them, where instantiation is a full-fledged external asymmetrical relation (not a non-relational tie whatever that might come to) that connects concrete objects to abstract objects, where abstract objects are objects that are not in space, not in time, and are neither causally active nor causally passive. What is common to (3) and (4) is the idea that bare particulars have properties all right, but they have them in a certain way, by being externally related to them. A bare particular, then, is nothing like an Aristotelian primary substance which has, or rather is, its essence or nature. The bareness of a bare particular, then, consists in its lacking an Aristotle-type nature, not it its lacking properties. My claim is that van Inwagen is committed to bare particulars in sense (4). Let me explain.
Van Inwagen's Bare Particulars
Consider my cat Max. Van Inwagen is committed to saying that Max is a bare particular in sense (4). For while Max has properties, these properties are in no sense constituents of him, but lie (stand?) outside him in a realm apart. These properties are in no sense at him or in him or on him, not even such properties as being black or being furry, properties that are plausibly held to be sense-perceivable. After all, one can see black where he is and feel furriness where he is. None of Max's properties, on van Inwagen's construal of properties, are where he is or when he is. None of them has anything to do with the concrete being of Max himself. As I made clear earlier, the realms of the concrete and the abstract are radically disjoint for van Inwagen. They are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive realms: for all x, x is either concrete or abstract, but not both and not neither. So Max is here below in the realm of space, time, change, and causality while his properties exist in splendid isolation up yonder in the realm of abstracta. They are far, far away, not spatially and not temporally, but ontologically.
Max and his properties are of course connected by instantiation which is a relation that is both external and abstract. In what sense is the relation external? X and y are externally related just in case there is nothing intrinsic about the relata that entails their being related. Max is two feet from me at the moment. This relation of being two feet from is external in that there are no intrinsic properties of me or Max or both that entail our being two feet from each other. Our intrinsic properties would be just the same if we were three feet from each other. But Max and his brother Manny are both black. In virtue of their both being intrinsically black, they stand in the same color as relation. Hence the latter relation is not external but internal. Internal relatedness is supervenient upon the intrinsic features of the relata; external relatedness is not.
Suppose I want to bring it about that two balls have the same color. I need do only two things: paint the one ball red, say, and then paint the other ball red. But if I want to bring it about that there are two balls having the same color ten feet from each other, I have to do three things: paint the one ball red, say; paint the other ball red; place them ten feet from each other. The external relatedness does not supervene upon the intrinsic properties of the relata. Given that concrete particulars are externally related to their properties, these particulars are bare particulars in the sense defined in #4 above.
And What is Wrong with That?
Suppose you agree with me that van Inwagen's concrete particulars are bare, not in any old sense, but in the precise sense I defined, a sense that comports well with what the actual proponents of bare/thin particulars had in mind. So what? What's wrong with being committed to bare particulars? Well, the consequences seem unpalatable if not absurd.
A. One consequence is that all properties are accidental and none are essential. For if Max is bare, then there is nothing in him or at him or about him that dictates the properties he must instantiate or limits the properties he can instantiate. He can have any old set of properties so long as he has some set or other. Bare particulars are 'promiscuous' in their connection with properties. The connection between particular and property is then contingent and all properties are accidental. It is metaphysically (broadly logically) possible that Max combine with any property. He happens to be a cat, but he could have been a poached egg or a valve lifter. He could have had the shape of a cube. Or he might have been a dimensionless point. He might have been an act of thinking (temporal and causally efficacious, but not spatial).
B. A second consequence is that all properties are relational and none are intrinsic. For if Max is black in virtue of standing in an external instantiation relation to the abstract object, blackness, then his being black is a relational property and not an intrinsic one.
C. A third consequence is that none of Max's properties are sense-perceivable. Van Inwagen-properties are abstract objects and none of them are perceivable. But if I cup my hands around a ball, don't I literally feel its sphericalness or spheroidness? Or am I merely being appeared to spheroidally?
D. Finally, given what van Inwagen himself says about the radical difference between the abstract and the concrete, a difference so abysmal (my word) that it would be better if we could avoid commitment to abstracta, it is highly counter-intuitive that there should be this abymal difference between a cucumber, say, and its greenness. It is strange that the difference between God and a cucumber should “pale into insignificance” (156) compared to the difference between a cucumber and the property of being green. After all, the properties of a thing articulate its very being. How can they be so ontologically distant from the thing?
If you deny that concrete things as van Inwagen understands them are bare in the sense I have explained, then you seem to be committed to saying that there are two sorts of properties, van Inwagen properties in Plato's heaven and 'sublunary' properties at the particulars here below. But then I will ask two questions. First, what is the point of introducing such properties if they merely duplicate at the abstract intensional level the 'real' properties in the sublunary sphere? Second, what justifies calling such properties properties given that you still are going to need sublunary properties to avoid saying that van Inwagen's concreta are bare particulars?
Perceivability of Properties
Let us pursue point C above a bit further. "We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties." (179) I honestly don't know what to make of the second clause of the quoted sentence. I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light. Van Inwagen's claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue. Here I balk. If I don't see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I literally see that the cup is blue? 'That it is blue' is a thing that can be said of the cup, and said with truth. This thing that can be said is an unsaturated assertible, a property in van Inwagen's sense. Van Inwagen is telling us that it cannot be seen. 'That the cup is blue' is a thing that can be said, full stop. It is a saturated assertible, a proposition, and a true one at that. Both assertibles are abstract objects. Both are invisible, and not because of any limitation in my visual power or in human visual power in general, but because abstract objects cannot be terms of causal relations, and perception involves causation. Both types of assertible are categorially disbarred from visibility. But if both the property and the proposition are invisible, then how can van Inwagen say that "we see that certain things have certain properties"? If van Inwagen says that we don't see the proposition, then what do we see when we see that the cup is blue? A colorless cup? A cup that is blue but is blue in a way different from the way the cup is blue by instantiatiating the abstract unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is blue'? But then one has duplicated at the level of abstracta the property that one sees at the concrete cup. If there is blueness at the cup and abstract blueness in Plato's heaven, why do we need the latter? Just what is going on here?
To van Inwagen's view one could reasonably oppose the following view. I see the cup. I see blueness or blue at the cup. I don't see a colorless cup. To deny the three foregoing sentences would be to deny what is phenomenologically given. What I don't literally see, however, is that the cup is blue. (Thus I don't literally see what van Inwagen says we literally see.) For to see that the cup is blue is to see the instantiation of blueness by the cup. And I don't see that. The correlate of the 'is' in 'The cup is blue' is not an object of sensation. If you think it is, tell me how I can single it out, how I can isolate it. Where in the visual field is it? The blueness is spread out over the visible surfaces of the cup. The cup is singled out as a particular thing on the desk, next to the cat, beneath the lamp, etc. Now where is the instantiation relation? Point it out to me! You won't be able to do it. I see the cup, and I see blue/blueness where the cup is. I don't see the cup's BEING blue.
It is also hard to understand how van Inwagen, on his own assumptions, can maintain that we see that certain things have certain properties. Suppose I see that Max, a cat of my acquaintance, is black. Do I see a proposition? Not on van Inwagen's understanding of 'proposition.' His propositions are Fregean, not Russellian: they are not resident in the physical world. Do I see a proposition-like entity such as an Armstrongian state of affairs? Again, no. What do I see? Van Inwagen claims that properties are not objects of sensation; no properties are, not even perceptual properties. I should think that some properties are objects of sensation, or better, of perception: I perceive blueness at the cup by sight; I perceive smoothness and hardness and heat at the cup by touch. If so, then (some) properties are not abstract objects residing in a domain unto themselves.
Van Inwagen's view appears to have the absurd consequence that things like coffee cups are colorless. For if colors are properties (179) and properties are abstract objects, and abstract objects are colorless (as they obviously are), then colors are colorless, and whiteness is not white and blueness is not blue. Van Inwagen bites the bullet and accepts the consequence. But we can easily run the argument in reverse: Blueness is blue; colors are properties; abstract objects are colorless; ergo, perceptual properties are not abstract objects. They are either tropes or else universals wholly present in the things that have them. Van Inwagen, a 'relation ontologist' cannot of course allow this move into 'constituent ontology.'
There is a long footnote on p. 242 that may amount to a response to something like my objection. In the main text, van Inwagen speaks of "such properties as are presented to our senses as belonging to the objects we sense . . . ." How does this square with the claim on p. 179 that properties are not objects of sensation? Can a property such as blueness be presented to our senses without being an object of sensation? Apparently yes, "In a noncausal sense of 'presented.'" (243, fn 3) How does this solve the problem? It is phenomenologically evident that (a definite shade of) blue appears to my senses when I stare at my blue coffee cup. Now if this blueness is an abstract object as van Inwagen claims then it cannot be presented to my senses any more than it can be something with which I causally interact.
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.
Eric P. Levy, an emeritus professor of English at the University of British Columbia, has been much exercised of late by trope theory and other questions in ontology. He has been sharing his enthusiasm with me. He espies
. . . an apparent antinomy at the heart of trope theory. On the one hand, tropes are logically prior to objects. But on the other hand, objects (or, more precisely, the trope-bundles constituting objects) are logically prior to tropes, because without objects tropes have nowhere to be – without objects (or the trope-bundles constituting objects) tropes cannot be. Moreover, as has I hope been shown, a trope cannot be in (or constitute) any object or trope-bundle other than that in which it already is.
How might a trope theorist plausibly respond to this? Can she?
What are tropes?
It is a 'Moorean fact,' a pre-analytic datum, that things have properties. This is a pre-philosophical observation. In making it we are not yet doing philosophy. If things have properties, then there are properties. This is a related pre-philosophical observation. We begin to do philosophy when we ask: given that there are properties, what exactly are they? What is their nature? How are we to understand them? This is not the question, what properties are there, but the question, what are properties? The philosophical question, then, is not whether there are properties, but what properties are.
On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on the standard bundle version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a nonstandard theory which I will not further discuss). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ 'Has' and cognates are words of ordinary English: they do not commit us to ontological theories of what the having consists in. So don't confuse 'a has F-ness' with 'a instantiates F-ness.' Instantiation is a term of art, a terminus technicus in ontology. Or at least that is what it is in my book. More on instantiation in a moment.
Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness.
It is therefore inaccurate to speak of tropes as property instances. A trope is not a property instance on one clear understanding of the latter. First-order instantiation is a dyadic asymmetrical relation: if a instantiates F-ness, then it is not the case that F-ness instantiates a. (Higher order instantiation is not asymmetrical but nonsymmetrical. Exercise for the reader: prove it!) Suppose the instantiation relation connects the individual Socrates here below to the universal wisdom in the realm of platonica. Then a further item comes into consideration, namely, the wisdom of Socrates. This is a property instance. It is a particular, an unrepeatable, since it is the wisdom of Socrates and of no one else. This distinguishes it from the universal, wisdom, which is repeated in each wise individual. On the other side, the wisdom of Socrates is distinct from Socrates since there is more to Socrates that his being wise. There is his being snubnosed, etc. Now why do I maintain that a trope is not a property instance? Two arguments.
Tropes are simple, not complex. (See Maurin, here.) They are not further analyzable. Property instances, however, are complex, not simple. 'The F-ness of a' -- 'the wisdom of Socrates,' e.g. -- picks out a complex item that is analyzable into F-ness, a, and the referent of 'of.' Therefore, tropes are not property instances.
A second, related, argument. Tropes are in no way proposition-like. Property instances are proposition-like as can be gathered from the phrases we use to refer to them. Ergo, tropes are not property instances.
One can see from this that tropes on standard trope theory, as ably presented by Maurin in her SEP entry, are very strange items, so strange indeed that one can wonder whether they are coherently conceivable at all by minds of our discursive constitution. Here is one problem.
How could anything be both predicable and impredicable?
Properties are predicable items. So if tropes are properties, then tropes are predicable items. If the redness of my tomato, call it 'Tom,' is a trope, then this trope is predicable of Tom. Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Tom is red.' On one way of parsing this we have a subject term 'Tom' and a predicate term '___ is red.' Thus the parsing: Tom/is red. But then the trope would appear to have a proposition-like structure, the structure of what Russell calls a propositional function. Clearly, '___ is red' does not pick out a proposition, but it does pick out something proposition-like and thus something complex. But now we have trouble since tropes are supposed to be simple. Expressed as an aporetic triad or antilogism:
a. Tropes are simple. b. Tropes are predicable. c. Predicable items are complex.
The limbs of the antilogism are each of them rationally supportable, but they cannot all be true. The conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (b) and (c) entails ~(a).
We might try to get around this difficulty by parsing 'Tom is red' differently, as: Tom/is/red. On this scheme, 'Tom' and 'red' are both names. 'Tom' names a concrete particular whereas 'red' names an abstract particular. ('Abstract' is here being used in the classical, not the Quinean, sense.) As Maurin relates, D. C. Williams, who introduced the term 'trope' in its present usage back in the '50s, thinks of the designators of tropes as akin to names and demonstratives, not as definite descriptions. But then it becomes difficult to see how tropes could be predicable entities.
A tomato is not a predicable entity. One cannot predicate a tomato of anything. The same goes for the parts of a tomato; the seeds, e.g., are not predicable of anything. Now if a tomato is a bundle of tropes, then it is a whole of ontological parts, these latter being tropes. If we think of the tomato as a (full-fledged) substance, then the tropes constituting it are "junior substances." (See D. M. Armstrong, 1989, 115) But now the problem is: how can one and the same item -- a trope -- be both a substance and a property, both an object and a concept (in Fregean jargon), both impredicable and predicable? Expressed as an aporetic dyad or antinomy:
d. Tropes are predicable items. e. Tropes are not predicable items.
Maurin seems to think that the limbs of the dyad can both be true: ". . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance." If the limbs can both be true, then they are not contradictory despite appearances.
How can we defuse the apparent contradiction in the d-e dyad? Consider again Tom and the redness trope R. To say that R is predicable of Tom is to say that Tom is a trope bundle having R as an ontological (proper) part. To say that R us impredicable or a substance is to say that R is capable of independent existence.. Recall that Armstrong plausibly defines a substance as anything logically capable of independent existence.
It looks as if we have just rid ourselves of the contradiction. The sense in which tropes are predicable is not the sense in which they are impredicable. They are predicable as constituents of trope bundles; they are impredicable in themselves. Equivalently, tropes are properties when they are compresent with sufficiently many other tropes to form trope bundles (concrete particulars); but they are substances in themselves apart from trope bundles as the 'building blocks' out of which such bundles are (logically or rather ontologically) constructed.
Which came first: the whole or the parts?
But wait! This solution appears to have all the advantages of jumping from the fying pan into the fire, or from the toilet into the cesspool. (I apologize to the good professor for the mixture and crudity of my metaphors.) For now we bang up against Levy's Antinomy, or something like it, to wit:
f. Tropes as substances, as ontological building blocks, are logically prior to concrete particulars. g. Tropes as properties, as predicable items, are not logically prior to concrete particulars.
This looks like a genuine aporia. The limbs cannot both be true. And yet each is an entailment of standard trope theory. If tropes are the "alphabet of being" in a phrase from Williams, then they are are logically prior to what they spell out. But if tropes are unrepeatable properties, properties as particulars, then a trope cannot exist except as a proper ontological part of a trope bundle, the very one of which it is a part. For if a trope were not tied to the very bundle of which it is a part, it would be a universal, perhaps only an immanent universal, but a universal all the same.
Furthermore, what makes a trope abstract in the classical sense of the term is that it is abstracted from a concretum. But then the concretum comes first, ontologically speaking, and (g) is true.
Interim conclusion: Trope theory, pace Anna-Sofia [what a beautiful aptronym!] Maurin, is incoherent. But of course we have only scratched the surface.
Picture below, left-to-right: Anna-Sofia Maurin, your humble correspondent, Arianna Betti, Jan Willem Wieland. Geneva, Switzerland, December 2008. It was a cold night.
EL: I have been reading with great pleasure and enlightenment certain sections of your superb work, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated. Your skill and poise in framing and unfolding your argument, your marvelous dexterity with rebuttal of adversarial views, and your insistence that existence remain at the center of metaphysical inquiry instead of being reduced to an afterthought – or cast out of the mind altogether – reward and refresh the reader.
BV: Thanks for the kind words. The book snagged some favorable reviews from Hugh McCann, Panayot Butchvarov, and others. But the treatment it received at Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews was pretty shabby. Kluwer sent the then editor Gary Gutting a copy and he sent it to a reviewer who declined to review it. So I requested that the copy be returned either to me or Kluwer so that it could be sent elsewhere. Gutting informed me that the reviewer had sold the book. So the reviewer accepted an expensive book to review, decided not to review it, and then sold it to profit himself. A person with a modicum of moral decency would first of all not agree to have a book sent to him if he had no intention of reviewing it. But if he finds that for some reason he cannot review it, then he ought to return it. The book is the payment for the review; it is wrong to keep a book one does not review after one has agreed to review it.
EL: My question concerns your statement, in A Paradigm Theory of Existence, that tropes “float free” (221). Is this correct?
BV: It depends on what 'float free' means. Here is what I said in PTE, 221-222:
Tropes differ from Aristotelian accidents in that they do not require the support of a substratum. They 'float free.' They need individuation ab extra as little as they need support ab extra: they differ numerically from each other without the need of any constituent to make them differ. In that respect they are like bare particulars except of course that they are not bare. Each is a nature. Each is at once and indissolubly a this and a such. Tropes are the "alphabet of being" (D. C. Williams), the rock bottom existents out of which all else is built up. Ordinary, concrete particulars are bundles or clusters of these abstract particulars. Thus Socrates is a bundle of tropes, a system of actually compresent tropes, and to say that he is pale is to say that a pale trope is compresent with other tropes comprising him.
Therefore, to say that tropes 'float free' is to say that they are unlike Aristotelian accidents in at least two ways.
First, they do not require for their existence a substratum in which to inhere. An accident A of a substance S cannot exist except 'in' a substance, and indeed, 'in' S, the very substance of which it is an accident. To exist for an accident is to inhere. But to exist for a trope is not to inhere. That is what it means to say that tropes do not need support ab extra. They stand on their own, ontologically speaking. Otherwise they wouldn't constitute the "alphabet of being" in Donald C. Williams' felicitous phrase.
If an ordinary particular, my coffee cup say, is a bundle of compresent tropes, then surely there must be a sense in which the tropes are ontologically prior to the bundle, and a corresponding sense in which the bundle is ontologically posterior to the constituent tropes. This is obvious from the fact that my cup is a contingent being. In trope-theoretic terms what this means is that the tropes that compose my cup might not have been compresent. The possible nonexistence of my cup is then the possible non-compresence of its constituent tropes. The tropes composing my cup could have existed without the cup existing, but the cup could not have existed without those tropes existing. Crude analogy: the stones in my stone wall could have existed without the wall existing, but the wall -- that very wall -- could not have existed without the stones existing.
But this is not to say tropes can exist on their own apart from any bundle. It could be that they can exist only in some bundle or other but not necessarily in the bundle in which they happen to be bundled. The perhaps infelicitous 'float free' need not be read as implying that tropes can exist unbundled. By the way, here is where the crude analogy breaks down. The stones in my wall could have existed in a wholly scattered state. But presumably the tropes composing my cup could not have existed unbundled.
Second, tropes, unlike accidents, do not need something external to them for their individuation, or rather ontological differentiation. What makes two accidents two rather than one? The numerical difference of the substances in which they inhere. The metaphysical ground of the numerical difference of A1 and A2 -- both accidents -- is the numerical difference of the primary substances in which they inhere. But tropes need nothing external to them to ground their numerical difference from one another.
Example. My cats Max Black and Manny Black are asleep by the fire. Each is warm, both metabolically, and by the causal agency of the fire. Consider only the warmth in each caused by the fire. Assume that the degree of warmth is the same. If warmth is either an Aristotelian accident or a trope then it is a particular (an unrepeatable, non-instantiable) item, not a universal. On either theory, each cat has its own warmth. But what makes the two 'warmths' two? What is the ground of their numerical difference? On the accident theory, it is the numerical difference of the underlying substances, Max and Manny. On the trope theory, the two warmths are just numerically different: they are self-differentiating.
EL: I understand that tropes are self-individuating, each being a numerically distinct, particularized, and unrepeatable quality. As Maurin explains, “To a trope theorist, therefore, the fact that each particular redness (each trope) is such that it resembles every other particular redness is a consequence of the fact that each particular redness is what it is and nothing else” (2002, 57). But I don’t understand how tropes “float free.”
BV: I believe I have just given a satisfactory explanation of what 'floats free' means in this context. I would agree, however, that 'floats free' is not a particularly happy formulation.
EL: Your clarification would be keenly appreciated. When reading about trope theory, I sometimes feel that I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. Then you need some music therapy.
BV: If you want from me a defense of the coherence and tenability of trope theory, that I cannot provide. I suspect that every philosophical theory succumbs in the end to aporiai. And that goes for the theories I propose in PTE as well.
EL: On the one hand, tropes (abstract particulars) are logically prior to things (concrete particulars), because through their compresence tropes bring things into existence.
BV: Right.
EL: On the other hand, things are logically prior to tropes because, lacking existential independence, tropes are only through compresence in the thing they constitute.
BV: Not quite. Tropes are only when compresent in some bundle or other. But this is not to say that tropes composing my coffee cup could not have existed in other bundles.
EL: Indeed, Lowe argues that trope theory “fall[s] into a fatal circularity which deprives both tropes and trope-bundles of well-defined identity-conditions altogether” (1998, 206).
BV: What is the title of the book or article?
The following view is fatally circular. An ordinary particular is a system of compresent tropes. Its existence is just the compresence of those tropes. The tropes themselves exist only as the relata of the compresence relation within the very same ordinary particular.
To avoid this circularity one could say what I said above: while tropes cannot exist apart from some bundle or other, there is no necessity that the tropes composing a given bundle be confined to that very bundle. Saying this, one would grant some independence to the trope 'building blocks.' But then the problem is to make sense of this independence.
Suppose that in the actual world trope T1 is a constituent of Bundle B1, but that there is a merely possible world W in which T1 is a constituent of bundle B2. But then T1 threatens to turn into a universal, a repeatable item. For then T1 occurs in two possible worlds, the actual world and W.
What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58. It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article. First I summarize my agreements with J. P. Moreland. Then I explain and raise two objections to this theory. I post the following on account of hearing from a student of Moreland who is himself now a professor of philosophy. He has some criticisms to make. I should like to hear them in the ComBox. Another student of Moreland says he agrees with me. He may wish to chime in as well. The other day a third student of Moreland surfaced. The Moreland text I have under my logical microscope is pp. 134-139 of his 2001 Universals (McGill-Queen's University Press).
Common Ground with Moreland on Existence
We agree on the following five points (which is not to say that Moreland will agree with every detail of my explanation of these five points):
Existence is attributable to individuals. The cat that just jumped into my lap exists. This very cat, Manny, exists. Existence belongs to it and is meaningfully attributable to it. Pace Frege and Russell, 'Manny exists' is a meaningful sentence, and it is meaningful as it stands, as predicating existence of an individual. It is nothing like 'Manny is numerous.' To argue that since cats are numerous, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny is numerous is to commit the fallacy of division. Russell held that the same fallacy is committed by someone who thinks that since cats exist, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny exists. But Russell was mistaken: there is no fallacy of division; there is an equivocation on 'exists.' It has a general or second-level use and a singular or first-level use.
There are admissible first-level uses of '. . .exist(s).' It is not the case that only second-level uses are admissible. And it is only because Manny, or some other individual cat, exists that the concept cat is instantiated. The existence of an individual cannot be reduced to the being-instantiated of a property or concept. If you like, you can say that the existence of a concept is its being instantiated. We sometimes speak like that. A typical utterance of 'Beauty exists,' say, is not intended to convey that Beauty itself exists, but is intended to convey that Beauty is exemplified, that there are beautiful things. But then one is speaking of general existence, not of singular existence.
Clearly, general existence presupposes singular existence in the following sense: if a first-level concept or property is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, and this individual must exist in order to stand in the instantiation nexus to a concept or property. From here on out, by 'existence' I mean 'singular existence.' There is really no need for 'general existence' inasmuch as we can speak of instantiation or of someness, as when we say that cats exist if and only something is a cat. The fundamental error of what Peter van Inwagen calls the 'thin theory' of existence is to imagine that existence can be reduced to the purely logical notion of someness. That would be to suppose, falsely, that singular existence can be dispensed with in favor of general existence. Existence is not a merely logical topic ; existence is a metaphysical topic.
Existence cannot be an ordinary property of individuals. While existence is attributable to individuals, it is no ordinary property of them. There are several reasons for this, but I will mention only one: you cannot add to a thing's description by saying of it that it exists. Nothing is added to the description of a tomato if one adds 'exists' to its descriptors: 'red,' round,' ripe,' etc. As Kant famously observed, "Being is not a real predicate," i.e., being or existence adds nothing to the realitas or whatness of a thing. Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, Kant did not anticipate the Frege-Russell theory. He does not deny that 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate. (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75, esp. 48-50.)
Existence is not a classificatory concept or property. The reason is simple: there is no logically prior domain of items classifiable as either existent or nonexistent. Pace Meinong, everything exists. There are no nonexistent items. On Meinong's view, some items actually have properties despite having no Being at all.
Existence makes a real difference to a thing that exists. In one sense existence adds nothing to a thing. It adds nothing quidditative. In another sense it adds everything: if a thing does not exist, it is nothing at all! To be or not to be -- not just a question, but the most 'abysmal' difference conceivable. In this connection, Moreland rightly speaks of a "real difference between existence and non-existence." (137)
Existence itself exists. This is not the trivial claim that existing things exist. It is the momentous claim that that in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists. It is a logical consequence of (4) in conjunction with (3). As Moreland puts it, "[i]f existence itself does not exist, then nothing else could exist in virtue of having existence." (135)
The above five points are criteria of adequacy for a theory of existence: any adequate theory must include or entail each of these points. Most philosophers nowadays will not agree, but I think Moreland will. So he and I stand on common ground. I should think that the only fruitful disputes are those that play out over a large chunk of common ground.
But these criteria of adequacy also pose a problem: How can existence belong to individuals without being a property of them? Existence belongs to individual as it would not belong to them if it were a property of properties or concepts; but it is not a property of individuals.
Moreland's Theory
Moreland's theory gets off to a good start: "existence is not a property which belongs, but is the belonging of a property." (137) This insight nicely accommodates points (1) and (2) above: existence is attributable to individuals without being an ordinary property of them. Indeed, it is not a property at all. I infer from this that existence is not the property of having properties. It is rather the mutual belongingness of a thing and its properties. Moreland continues:
Existence is the entering into the exemplification nexus . . . . In the case of Tony the tiger, the fact [that] the property of being a tiger belongs to something and that something has this property belonging to it is what confers existence. (137)
I take this to mean that existence is the mutual belonging together of individual and property. It is 'between' a thing and its properties as that which unifies them, thereby tying them into a concrete fact or state of affairs. The existence of Tony is not one of his properties; nor is it Tony. And of course the existence of Tony is not the being-exemplified of some such haecceity property as identity-with-Tony. Rather, the existence of Tony, of that very individual, is his exemplifying of his properties. The existence of a (thick) individual in general is then the exemplification relation itself insofar as this relation actually relates (thin) individual and properties.
Moreland implies as much. In answer to the question how existence itself exists, he explains that "The belonging-to (exemplification, predication) relation is itself exemplified . . ." (137) Thus the asymmetrical exemplification relation x exemplifies P is exemplified by Tony and the property of being a tiger (in that order). Existence itself exists because existence itself is the universal exemplification relation which is itself exemplified. It exists in that it is exemplified by a and F-ness, a and G-ness, a and H-ness, b and F-ness, b and G-ness, b and H-ness, and so on. An individual existent exists in that its ontological constituents (thin particular and properties) exemplify the exemplification relation which is existence itself.
The basic idea is this. The existence of a thick particular such as Tony, that is, a particular taken together with all its monadic properties, is the unity of its ontological constituents. (This is not just any old kind of unity, of course, but a type of unity that ties items that are not facts into a fact.) This unity is brought about by the exemplification relation within the thick particular. The terms of this relation are the thin particular on the one hand and the properties on the other.
Moreland's theory accommodates all five of the desiderata listed above which in my book is a strong point in its favor.
A Bradleyan Difficulty
A sentence such as 'Al is fat' is not a list of its constituent words. The sentence is either true or false, but neither the corresponding list, nor any item on the list, is either true or false. So there is something more to a declarative sentence than its constituent words. Something very similar holds for the fact that makes the sentence true, if it is true. I mean the extralinguistic fact of Al's being fat. The primary constituents of this fact, Al and fatness, can exist without the fact existing. The fact, therefore, cannot be identified with its primary constituents, taken either singly, or collectively. A fact is more than its primary constituents. But how are we to account for this 'more'?
On Moreland's theory, as I understand it, this problem is solved by adding a secondary constituent, the exemplification relation, call it EX, whose task is to connect the primary constituents. This relation ties the primary constituents into a fact. It is what makes a fact more than its primary constituents. Unfortunately, this proposal leads to Bradley's Regress. For if Al + fatness do not add up to the fact of Al's being fat, then Al + fatness + EX won't either. If Al and fatness can exist without forming the fact of Al's being fat, then Al and fatness and EX can all exist without forming the fact in question. How can adding a constituent to the primary constituents bring about the fact-constituting unity of all constituents? EX has not only to connect a and F-ness, but also to connect itself to a and to F-ness. How can it do the latter? The answer to this, presumably, will be that EX is a relation and the business of a relation is to relate. EX, relating itself to a and to F-ness, relates them to each other. EX is an active ingredient in the fact, not an inert ingredient. It is a relating relation, and not just one more constituent that needs relating to the others by something distinct from itself. For this reason, Bradley's regress can't get started.
The problem, however, is that EX can exist without relating the relata that it happens to relate in a given case. This is because EX is a universal. If it were a relation-instance as on D. W. Mertz's theory, then it would be a particular, an unrepeatable, and could not exist apart from the very items it relates. Bradley's regress could not then arise. But if EX is a universal, then it can exist without relating any specific relata that it does relate, even though, as an immanent universal, it must relate some relata or other. This implies that a relation's relating what it relates is contingent to its being the relation it is. For example, x loves y contingently relates Al and Barbara, which implies that the relation is distinct from its relating. The same goes for EX: it is distinct from its relating. It is more than just a constituent of any fact into which it enters; it is a constituent that does something to the other constituents, and in so doing does something to itself, namely, connect itself to the other constituents. Relating relations are active ingredients in facts, not inert ingredients. Or we could say that a relating relation is ontologically participial in addition to its being ontologically substantival. And since the relating is contingent in any given case, the relating in any given case requires a ground. What could this ground be?
My claim is that it cannot be any relation, including the relation, Exemplification. More generally, no constituent of a fact can serve as ontological ground of the unity of a fact's constituents. For any such putatively unifying constituent will either need a further really unifying constituent to connect it to what it connects, in which case Bradley's regress is up and running, or the unifying constituent will have to be ascribed a 'magical' power, a power no abstract object could possess, namely, the power to unify itself with what it unifies. Such an item would be a self-grounding ground: a ground of unity that grounds its unity with that which it unifies. The synthetic unity at the heart of each contingent fact needs to be grounded in an act of synthesis that cannot be brought about by any constituent of a fact, or by the fact itself.
My first objection to Moreland's theory may be put as follows. The existence of a thick particular (which we are assaying as a concrete fact along the lines of Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong) cannot be the fact's constituents' standing in the exemplification relation. And existence itself, existence in its difference from existents, cannot be identified with the exemplification relation.
Can Existence Exist Without Being Uniquely Self-Existent?
I agree with Moreland that existence itself exists. One reason was supplied by Reinhardt Grossmann: "If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist." (Categorial Structure of the World, 405) But I have trouble with the notion that existence itself is the exemplification relation. Existence as that which is common to all that exists, and as that in virtue of which everything exists cannot be just one more thing that exists. Existence cannot be a member of an extant category that admits of multiple membership, such as the category of relations. For reasons like these such penetrating minds as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Panayot Butchvarov have denied that existence itself exists.
In my 2002 existence book I proposed a synthesis of these competing theses: Existence exists as a paradigm existent, one whose mode of existence is radically different from the mode of existence of the beings ontologically dependent on it. From this point of view, Moreland has a genuine insight, but he has not taken it far enough: he stops short at the dubious view that existence is the relation of exemplification. But if you drive all the way down the road with me you end up at Divine Simplicity, which Moreland has good reasons for rejecting.
I believe it is precisely the potentiality -- or the in principle capacity -- of logical thinking, free decisions, or higher emotions that makes killing human embryos morally problematic, seemingly unlike the killing of non-human embryos. This seems to me a promising hypothesis, to say the least. But I need help with settling several issues.
And then V. peppers me with a bunch of tough questions. I'll address just the first in this entry:
What is potentiality or in principle capacity in general? How does it differ from (metaphysical) possibility?
This is indeed the logically first question. Potentiality is widely misunderstood even by many philosophers. No wonder they do not appreciate the Potentiality Argument. Here the focus is not on the Potentiality Argument against abortion, but on the concept of potentiality it requires. My task is merely to unpack it, not evaluate it. We may begin by treading the via negativa.
1. A potentiality is not the same as a possibility. It is obviously not the same as an actualized possibility, but it is also not the same as an unactualized possibility. Potentialities are strange items and their ontological status is puzzling. Don't assume you know what they are, and don't assume that you can learn what they are from the uses of 'potential' and cognates in English.
Take the fragility of a piece of glass. Its fragility is its potentiality (passive potency, disposition, liability) to shatter in certain circumstances. Consider two panes of thin glass side by side in a window. The two panes are of the same type of glass, and neither has been specially treated. A small rock is thrown at one, call it pane A, and it shatters under the moderate impact. The other pane, call it B, receives no such impact. We know that A is fragile from the fact that it shattered. ("Potency is known through act," an Aristotelian might say.) We don't have quite the same assurance that B is fragile, but we have good reason to think that it is since it is made of the same kind of glass as A.
Suppose that B never in its existence is shattered or in any way pitted or cracked or broken. Then its fragility, its disposition-to-shatter (break, crack, etc.) is never manifested. We can express that by saying that the manifestation of the disposition remains an unactualized possibility. That is, the shattering of pane B remains, for the whole of B's existence, a merely possible state of affairs, a mere possibility.
But that is not to say that the disposition is a mere possibility, let alone that it is unreal. The disposition is as actual as the thing that has it. A disposition is distinct from its manifestation. The disposition is actual whether its manifestation is actual, as in the case of pane A, or merely possible, as in the case of pane B.
So we make a distinction between the (de re) possibility of B's shattering and B's disposition to shatter. The first is the possibility of the manifestation of the second. The first may never become actual while the second is as actual as B. What's more, the possibility of B's shattering is (in some sense needing explanation) grounded in B's disposition to shatter.
The point extends to potentialities: it is an elementary confusion to think of unrealized or unmanifested or unactualized potentialities as unactualized possibilia or mere possibilities. For example, a human embryo has the potentiality to develop, in the normal course of events, into a neonate. This potentiality is something actual in the embryo. It is not a mere or unactualized possibility of the embryo. What is a mere possibility is the realization of the potentiality. Just as we must not confuse a disposition with its manifestation, we must not confuse a potentiality with its realization.
One difference to note is that between a passive potentiality and an active potentiality. The pane's potentiality to shatter is passive whereas the embryo's potentiality to develop into a neonate is active. As for terminology, I don't see any non-verbal difference between a potentiality-to-X and a disposition-to-X. (I could be wrong.) Some people are irascible. They are disposed to become angry under slight external provocation. Is that a passive potentiality or an active potentiality? Put that question on the 'back burner.'
2. Another difference between a possibility and a potentiality is that, while every actual F is a possible F, no actual F is a potential F. Therefore, a possible F is not the same as a potential F. For example, an actual cat is a possible cat, but no actual cat is a potential cat. A towel that is actually saturated with water is possibly saturated with water; but no towel that is actually saturated with water is potentially saturated with water. If a man is actually drunk, then he is possibly drunk; but an actually drunk man is not a potentially drunk man. Potentiality excludes actuality; possibility does not. But can't a man who is actually drunk at one time be potentially drunk at another? Of course, but that is not the point.
Necessarily, if x is actually F at time t, then x is possibly F at t. But, necessarily, if x is actually F at t, then:
a. It is not the case that x is potentially F at t
and
b. X is not potentially F at t.
Furthermore, an actual truth is a possible truth, but it makes no sense to say that an actual truth is a potential truth. A truth is a true proposition; propositions are abstract objects; abstract objects are not subjects of real, as opposed to Cambridge, change. So it makes no sense to speak of potential truths.
The actual world is a possible world; but what could it mean to say that the actual world is a potential world?
If God necessarily exists, then God actually exists, in which case God possibly exists. But it makes no sense to say that God potentially exists. In terms of possible worlds: If God exists in every world, then he exists in the actual world and in some possible worlds. But 'God exists in some potential worlds' makes no sense.
It makes sense to say that it is possible that there exist an individual distinct from every actual individual. But it makes no sense to say that there is the potentiality to exist of some individual distinct from every actual individual.
3. So, to answer Vlastimil's question, potentiality is not to be confused with possibility. And it doesn't matter whether we are talking about narrowly logical possibility, broadly logical possibility, nomological possibility, institutional possibility, or any other sort of (real as opposed to epistemic/doxastic) possibility. Nevertheless, the two are connected. If it is possible that a boy grow a beard, then presumably that possibility is grounded in a potentiality inherent in the boy. The point, once again, is that this potentiality is not itself something merely potential, but something actual or existent, though not yet actualized.
I am now seated. I might now have been standing. The first is an actual state of affairs, the second is a merely possible state of affairs. How are we to understand the mere possibility of my standing now? Pace the shade of David Lewis, it would be 'crazy' to say that there is a possible world in which a counterpart of me is standing now. But it seems quite sane to say that the possibility of my standing now, when in actual fact I am seated, is grounded in the power (potentiality) I have to stand up.
A mere possibility is not nothing. So it has some sort of ontological status. A status can be secured for mere possibilities if mere possibilities are grounded in really existent powers in agents.
('Potential' Puzzle. I have the power to do X iff it is possible that I do X. But do I have the power because it is possible, or is it possible because I have the power? Presumably the latter. But my power is limited. What constrains my power it not what is antecedently possible? Throw this on the 'back burner' too, Euthyphro!)
As I understand the Aristotelian position, real possibilities involving natural items are parasitic upon causal powers and causal liabilities ingredient in these items. That, by the way, implies constituent ontology, does it not? Score another point for constituent ontology.
The Aristotelian position also implies a certain anti-empiricism, does it not? A rubber band that is never stretched never empirically manifests its elasticity; yet it possesses the dispositional property of elasticity whether or not the property is ever manifested empirically. So dispositions and potencies are in a clear sense occult (hidden) entities, and they are occult in a way the occult blood in your stool sample is not occult. For the latter, while not visible to gross inspection is yet empirically detectable in the blood lab.
4. Go back to the two panes of glass. One we know is fragile: it broke under moderate impact. How do we know that the other is fragile? I submit that the concept of potentiality underlying the Potentiality Argument is governed by the following Potentiality Universality Principle:
PUP: Necessarily, if a normal F has the potentiality to become a G, then every normal F has the potentiality to become a G.
To revert to the hackneyed example, if an acorn is a potential oak tree, then every normal acorn is a potential oak tree, and this is so as a matter of natural necessity. It cannot be the case that some normal acorns have, while others do not have, the potentiality to become oak trees. Potentialities are inherent in the things that have them. They are not a matter of ascription. We don't ascribe potentialities; things have them regardless of our mental and linguistic performances. And these very performances themselves realize potentialities. So if the potentialities of the ascribing mind were themselves ascribed, who or what would do the ascribing? I cannot ascribe potentialities to myself if the ascribing is itself the realization of my potentiality to ascribe.
Similarly with passive potentialities. To say of a sugar cube that it is water-soluble is to say that, were it placed in water, it would dissolve. Now if this is true of one normal sugar cube, it is true of all normal sugar cubes. Suppose you have 100 sugar cubes, all alike. There would be no reason to say that some of them are water-soluble and some are not. If one is, all are. If one is not, none are.
5. Note that the water-solubility of sugar cubes cannot be identified with the truth of the subjunctive conditional 'If a sugar cube were placed in water then it would dissolve.' It needs to be identified with the truth maker of that conditional, namely, the passive potency to dissolve inherent in the sugar cube.
6. Potentiality as here understood brings with it further Aristotelian baggage.
Pointing to a lump of raw ground beef, someone might say, "This is a potential hamburger." Or, pointing to a hunk of bronze, "This is a potential statue." Someone who says such things is not misusing the English language, but he is not using 'potential' in the strong specific way that potentialists -- proponents of the Potentiality Principle in the Potentiality Argument-- are using the word. What is the difference? What is the difference between the two examples just given, and "This acorn is a potential oak tree," and "This embryo is a potential person?"
The difference is explainable in terms of the difference between identity and constitution. A lump of raw meat cannot come to be a hamburger; at most it can come to constitute one. The same goes for the hunk of bronze: it cannot come to be a statue; at most it can come to constitute one. Note also that an external agent is required to shape and cook the meat and to hammer the bronze. An acorn and an embryo, on the other hand, can come to be an oak tree and a person, respectively, and indeed by their own internal agency. Potentiality in the strong sense here in play is therefore governed by the following Potentiality Identity Principle:
PIP: Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and there is a y such that y realizes, whether partially or fully, x's potentiality to be an F, then x = y.
Note that PIP does not imply that there is a y that realizes x's potential. Potentialities, after all, may go unrealized similarly as dispositions may go unmanifested. A seed's potential will go unrealized if the seed is destroyed, or if the seed is not planted, or if it is improperly planted, or if it is properly planted but left unwatered, etc. What PIP states is that if anything does realize x's potentiality to be an F, then that thing is transtemporally numerically identical to x. So if there is an oak tree that realizes acorn A's potentiality to be an oak tree, then A is identical over time to that oak tree. This implies that when the acorn becomes an oak tree, it still exists, but is an oak tree rather than an acorn. The idea is that numerically one and the same individual passes through a series of developmental stages. In the case of a human being these would include zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.
Not so with the hunk of bronze. It is not identical to the statue that is made out of it. Statue and hunk of bronze cannot be identical since they differ in their persistence conditions. The hunk of bronze can, while the statue cannot, survive being melted down and recast in some other form.
Consider the Pauline verse at 1 Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." This implies that numerically one and the same man, Paul of Tarsus, was first a child and later became an adult: it is not as if there was a numerically different entity, Paul-the-child, who passed out of existence when Paul-the-adult came into existence.
So not only is potentiality (in the strong Aristotelian sense here in play) governed by PIP, it is also governed by what I will call the Potentiality Endurantism Principle:
PEP. Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and there is a y such that y realizes, whether partially or fully, x's potentiality to be an F, then x (= y) is wholly present at every time at which x (= y) exists.
PEP rules out a temporal parts ontology according to which a spatiotemporal particular persists in virtue of having different temporal parts at different times.
Let me throw another principle into the mix, one that is implicit above and governs active potencies. I'll call it the Potentiality Agency Principle:
PAP. Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and x's potential is to any extent realized, then the realization of x's potential is driven, not by any agency external to x, but by x's own internal agency, with the proviso that the circumambient conditions are favorable.
The notion of (strong) potentiality that figures in the Potentiality Principle and the Potentiality Argument is governed by PUP, PIP, PEP, and PAP at the very least.
7. When Barack Obama was a community organizer was he 'potentially' president of the U. S.? It was surely possible that he become POTUS: logically, nomologically, and institutionally: there is nothing in the Constitution that ruled out his becoming president. And there is nothing incorrect in saying, in ordinary English, that the young Obama was 'potentially' POTUS. But does it make sense to say that, ingredient in the young Obama, there was a potentiality that was actualized when he became POTUS if we are using 'potentiality' in the Aristotelian sense?
I don't think so. It looks to be a violation of PUP above. Let 'F' stand for U. S. citizen. Does every U.S. citizen have the potential to become a presidential candidate? Obviously not: it is is simply false that every normal U. S. citizen develops in the normal course of events into a presidential candidate. A potentiality is a naturally inherent nisus -- and as natural not a matter of laws or other conventions -- which is the same in all members of the class in question. But the opportunity to become president has nothing natural about it: it is an artifact of our contingent laws and political arrangements. People like Obama do not become presidential contenders in the way acorns become oak trees.
I admire Dale Tuggy's resolve to continue this difficult discussion despite the manifold demands on his time and energy. (This Gen-X dude is no slacker! If one of us is a slacker, it's this Boomer. Or, if you prefer, I am a man of leisure, otium liberale, in the classical sense.) The core question, you will recall, is whether God is best thought of as a being among beings, or as Being itself. The best way to push forward, I think, is via very short exchanges. In Part 2, near the top, we read:
“Being itself,” I take it, is something like a universal property, an abstract and not a concrete object. (Or at least, it’s not supposed to be concrete; maybe he thinks that it is neither abstract nor concrete.) I’m not sure if Bill would accept those characterizations, but if not, I invite him to say a little more about what he means by “Being itself.” The “itself,” I assume, entails not being a self. But God – that is, the God of Christianity, or of biblical monotheism – is a god, and a god is, analytically, a self. I’m pretty sure that no self can be “Being itself” in the way that Bill means it, but again, I invite him to say more about what it is to be “Being itself.”
1. First a comment on 'itself' in 'Being itself.' I don't understand why Dale thinks that 'itself' entails not being a self or person. In expressions of the form 'X itself,' the 'itself' in typical instances functions as a device to focus attention on X in its difference from items with which it could be conflated or confused. In a Platonic dialogue Socrates might say to an interlocutor: "You gave me an instance of a just act, but I want to know what justice itself is." Justice itself is justice as distinct from just acts whether the latter are taken distributively or collectively. The same goes for knowledge itself, virtue itself, piety itself. Piety itself is not any given pious act or the collection of pious acts, but that in virtue of which pious acts are pious. It is that which 'makes' pious acts pious. 'Itself' in these constructions is a device of emphasis. It is a form of pleonasm that serves a sort of underlining function. Compare the sentence, 'Obama himself called for transparency in government.' 'Himself' adds a nuance absent without it. It serves to insure that the reader appreciates that it is Obama and not some other person who made the call for transparency; Obama, that very man, who is not known for his contributions to transparency.
Similarly with Being itself and Existence itself. When I speak of Being/Existence itself, I speak of Being/Existence in its difference from beings/existents. I am making it clear that I intend Being as other than each being and from the whole lot of beings. I am emphasizing the difference between Being and beings. I am warning against their conflation or confusion or (thoughtless) identification. I am implying, among other things, that Being does not divide without remainder into beings. Or rather, I am raising this as a question. For after investigation we may decide that Being does, in the end, divide without remainder into beings. But note that to make this assertion one has to have distinguished Being from beings. Otherwise, the assertion would be a miserable tautology along the lines of: beings are beings.
2. Now does 'Being itself' imply that Being is not a self? 'Self' has a narrow use and a wide use. In the narrow use, a self is a person. Now suppose it were said that God himself is a person. Would that imply that God is not a person? Of course not. In the wide use, a self is anything that has what Buddhists call self-nature or own-being. The Buddhist anatta doctrine amounts to the claim that nothing has self-nature, that nothing is a self in the broad sense. This could be interpreted to mean that nothing is a substance in the Aristotelian sense. (Cf. T. R. V. Murti) A mark of substance in this sense is independence: X is a substance iff x is logically capable of independent existence. Now God is either a substance or analogous to a substance. If God is a self in the broad sense, than this is consistent with God's being a person either univocally or analogically.
3. Can an abstract object be a person? No! On this point I am confident that Dale and I will rejoice in agreement. Here is a quick argument. Persons are agents. Agents do things. No abstract object does anything: abstracta are causally inert. They cannot act or be acted upon. Therefore, no person is an abstract object.
Dale operates within a certain general-metaphysical scheme common to most analytic philosophers, a scheme that he does not question and that perhaps seems obvious to him. On this scheme, every object or being is either abstract or concrete, no object is both, and no object is neither. For Dale, then, persons are concrete objects; God is a person; hence God is a concrete object.
On this understanding of 'concrete,' a concretum is anything that is either capable of being causally active or capable of being causally passive. And this, whether or not the item is a denizen of space and time. For Dale, God is not in space or time without prejudice to his being concrete. I don't know whether Dale thinks of God as impassible, and I rather doubt that he does; but one could hold that God is impassible while also holding that God is concrete given the definition above. On some conceptions, God acts but cannot be acted upon.
4. But is Being an abstract object? No! First of all, I question Dale's general-metaphysical scheme according to which everything is either abstract or concrete, nothing is neither, and nothing is both. So I don't feel any dialectical pressure to cram Being or Existence into this scheme. Being is not a being among beings; therefore, it is not an abstract being or a concrete being.
Being is that which makes beings be: outside their causes, outside the mind, outside language and its logic, outside of nothing. Being is that without which beings are nothing at all.
5. Is Being a property of beings? No. But this denial does not give aid and comfort to the Fregean view that Being or existence is a property of properties. There is a clear sense in which Being belongs to beings: one cannot kick it upstairs in the Fressellian manner. But while Being belongs to beings, it is not a property of them in any standard sense of 'property.' Suppose we agree with this definition that I got from Roderick Chisholm:
P is a property =df P is possibly such that it is instantiated.
Accordingly, every property is an instantiable item, and every instantiable item is a property. The question whether Being is a property of beings then becomes the question whether Being is instantiated by beings. In simpler terms, are beings instances of Being in the way Max and Manny are instances of felinity? I argue against this in my existence book. Being (existence) does not and cannot have instances or examples. Max is an instance of felinity, an example of cat; he is not an instance or example of Being.
Here is one consideration among several. If x, y are instances of F-ness, then x, y are not numerically distinct just in virtue of being instances of F-ness. Qua instances of F-ness, x, y are identical and interchangeable. Whatever it is that makes x, y two and not one has nothing to do with their being instances of F-ness. Max and Manny, for example, are numerically distinct, but not numerically distinct as cats, i.e., as instances of felinity. But they are numerically distinct as existents. Therefore, existents are not instances of existence. If you think otherwise, you are thinking of existence as a quidditative determination, a highest what-property. But existence pertains not to what a thing is, but to its very Being. Two cats are not numerically different as cats, but they are numerically different as existents: existence enters into their numerical diversity. For this reason, existence is not common to existents in the manner of a property or essence or quiddity or what-determination or concept.
Here is a second argument. First-level instantiation is a dyadic relation that connects an individual to a property. Now it is a necessary truth about relations that if a relation holds between or among two or more items, then all of these items exist. For example, Socrates cannot be an instance of the property of being a philosopher, as he is, unless he exists and unless the property exists. But then it should be clear that nothing exists in virtue of being an instance of a property, including the putative property of existence.
6. Is Being universal? Yes. It is common to every being, and in that sense universal. But it is not universal in the manner of a property or concept. If existence itself is God, then existence is common to existents in the manner of a common metaphysical cause, or as I prefer to say, common metaphysical ground. (I reserve 'cause' for so-called 'secondary causes.')
7. I suspect the above won't make much sense to Dale. It is very difficult to get analytically-trained philosophers to 'think outside the box.' They (the vast majority of them anyway) are boxed in by dogmas that they never question such as that "existence is what existential quantification expresses" (Quine); that there are no modes of existence; that properties are 'abstract objects,' and others.
The following review article is scheduled to appear later this year in Studia Neoscholastica. The editor grants me permission to reproduce it here should anyone have comments that might lead to its improvement.
REVIEW ARTICLE
William F. Vallicella
Peter van Inwagen, Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge University Press, 2014, viii + 261 pp.
This volume collects twelve of Peter van Inwagen's recent essays in ontology and meta-ontology, all of them previously published except one, “Alston on Ontological Commitment.” It also includes an introduction, “Inside and Outside the Ontology Room.” It goes without saying that anyone who works in ontology should study this collection of rigorous, brilliant, and creative articles. One route into the heart of van Inwagen's philosophical position is via the theory of fictional entities he develops in chapter 4, “Existence, ontological commitment, and fictional entities.”
Fictional Entities
One might reasonably take it to be a datum that a purely fictional item such as Sherlock Holmes does not exist. After all, most of us know that Holmes is a purely fictional character, and it seems analytic that what is purely fictional does not exist. Van Inwagen, however, demurs:
The lesson I mean to convey by these examples is that the nonexistence of [Sherlock] Holmes is not an ontological datum; the ontological datum is that we can use the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' to say something true. (105)
So, while many of us are inclined to say that the nonexistence of Holmes is an ontological datum in virtue of his being a purely fictional entity, one wholly made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, van Inwagen maintains that Holmes exists and that his existence is consistent with his being purely fictional. One man's datum is another man's (false) theory! To sort this out, we need to understand van Inwagen's approach to ficta.
In this entry I expand on my claim that Peter van Inwagen's theory of properties commits him to bare particulars, not in some straw-man sense of the phrase, but in a sense of the phrase that comports with what proponents of bare particulars actually have claimed. I begin by distinguishing among four possible senses of 'bare particular.'
Four Senses of 'Bare Particular'
1. A bare particular is an ordinary concrete particular that lacks properties. I mention this foolish view only to set it aside. No proponent of bare particulars that I am aware of ever intended the phrase in this way. And of course, van Inwagen is not committed to bare particulars in this sense.
2. A bare particular is an ontological constituent of an ordinary concrete particular, a constituent that has no properties. To my knowledge, no proponent of bare particulars ever intended the phrase in this way. In any case, the view is untenable and may be dismissed. Van Inwagen is of course not committed to this view. He is a 'relation' ontologist, not a 'constituent' ontologist.
3. A bare particular is an ontological constituent of an ordinary concrete particular, a constituent that does have properties, namely, the properties associated with the ordinary particular in question, and has them by instantiating (exemplifying) them. This view is held by Gustav Bergmann and by David Armstrong in his middle period. Armstrong, however, speaks of thin particulars rather than bare particulars, contrasting them with thick particulars (what I am calling ordinary concrete particulars). When he does uses 'bare particular,' he uses the phrase incorrectly and idiosyncratically to refer to something like (1) or (2). For example, in Universals and Scientific Realism, Cambridge UP, 1978, vol. I, p. 213, he affirms something he calls the "Strong Principle of the Rejection of Bare Particulars":
For each particular, x, there exists at least one non-relational property, P, such that x is P.
(I should think that the first occurrence of 'P' should be replaced by 'P-ness' despite the unfortunate sound of that.) This principle of Armstrong is plausibly read as a rejection of (1) and (2). It is plainly consistent with (3).
But of course I do not claim that van Inwagen is committed to bare or thin particulars in the sense of (3). For again, van Inwagen is not a constituent ontologist.
4. A bare particular is an ordinary concrete particular that has properties by instantiating them, where instantiation is a full-fledged external asymmetrical relation (not a non-relational tie whatever that might come to) that connects concrete objects to abstract objects, where abstract objects are objects that are not in space, not in time, and are neither causally active nor causally passive.
What is common to (3) and (4) is the idea that bare particulars have properties all right, but they have them in a certain way, by being externally related to them. A bare particular, then, is nothing like an Aristotelian primary substance which has, or rather is, its essence or nature. The bareness of a bare particular, then, consists in its lacking an Aristotle-type nature, not it its lacking properties.
My claim is that van Inwagen is committed to bare particulars in sense (4). Let me explain.
Van Inwagen's Bare Particulars
Consider my cat Max. Van Inwagen is committed to saying that Max is a bare particular. For while Max has properties, these properties are in no sense constituents of him, but lie (stand?) outside him in a realm apart. These properties are in no sense at him or in him or on him, not even such properties as being black or being furry, properties that are plausibly held to be sense-perceivable. After all, one can see black where he is and feel furriness where he is. None of Max's properties, on van Inwagen's construal of properties, are where he is or when he is. As I made clear earlier, the realms of the concrete and the abstract are radically disjoint for van Inwagen. They are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive realms: for all x, x is either concrete or abstract, but not both and not neither. So Max is here below in the realm of space, time, change, and causality while his properties exist in splendid isolation up yonder in the realm of abstracta.
Max and his properties are of course connected by instantiation which is a relation that is both external and abstract. In what sense is the relation external? X and y are externally related just in case there is nothing intrinsic about the relata that entails their being related. Max is two feet from me at the moment. This relation of being two feet from is external in that there are no intrinsic properties of me or Max or both that entail our being two feet from each other. Our intrinsic properties would be just the same if we were three feet from each other. But Max and his brother Manny are both black. In virtue of their both being intrinsically black, they stand in the same color as relation. Hence the latter relation is not external but internal. Internal relatedness is supervenient upon the intrinsic features of the relata; external relatedness is not.
Suppose I want to bring it about that two balls have the same color. I need do only two things: paint the one ball red, say, and then paint the other ball red. But if I want to bring it about that there are two balls having the same color ten feet from each other, I have to do three things: paint the one ball red, say; paint the other ball red; place them ten feet from each other. The external relatedness does not supervene upon the intrinsic properties of the relata.
Given that concrete particulars are externally related to their properties, these particular are bare particulars in the sensedefined in #4 above.
And What is Wrong with That?
Suppose you agree with me that van Inwagen's concrete particulars are bare, not in any old sense, but in the precise sense I defined, a sense that comports well with what the actual proponents of bare/thin particulars had in mind. So what? What's wrong with being committed to bare particulars? Well, the consequences seem unpalatable if not absurd.
A. One consequence is that all properties are accidental and none are essential. For if Max is bare, then there is nothing in him or at him or about him that dictates the properties he must instantiate or limits the properties he can instantiate. He can have any old set of properties so long as he has some set or other. Bare particulars are 'promiscuous' in their connection with properties. The connection between particular and property is contingent and all properties are accidental. It is metaphysically (broadly logically) possible that Max combine with any property. He happens to be a cat, but he could have been a poached egg or a valve lifter. He could have had the shape of a cube. Or he might have been a dimensionless point. He might have been an act of thinking (temporal and causally efficacious, but not spatial).
B. A second consequence is that all properties are relational and none are intrinsic. For if Max is black in virtue of standing in an external instantiation relation to the abstract object, blackness, then his being black is a relational property and not an intrinsic one.
C. A third consequence is that none of Max's properties are sense-perceivable. PvI-properties are abstract objects and none of them are perceivable. But if I cup my hands around a ball, don't I literally feel its sphericalness or spheroidness? Or am I merely being appeared to spheroidally?
This entry is a summary and critique of Peter van Inwagen's "A Theory of Properties," an article which first appeared in 2004 and now appears as Chapter 8 of his Existence: Essays in Ontology (Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 153-182.) Andrew Bailey has made it available on-line. (Thanks Andrew!) I will be quoting from the Existence volume. I will also be drawing upon material from other articles in this collection. This post is a warm-up for a review of the book by me commissioned by a European journal. The review wants completing by the end of February. Perhaps you can help me. Comments are enabled for those who know this subject.
Exposition
1. The Abstract and the Concrete.
Platonism is "the thesis that there are abstract objects." (153) Van Inwagen uses 'object' synonomously with 'thing,' 'item,' and 'entity.' (156) Everything is an object, which is to say: everything exists. Thus there are no nonexistent objects, pace Meinong. There are two categories of object, the abstract and the concrete. These categories are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Thus for any x, x is either abstract or concrete, but not both, and not neither. Van Inwagen is a bit coy when it comes to telling us what 'abstract' and concrete' mean; he prefers a roundabout way of introducing these terms. He stipulates that the terms and predicates of ordinary, scientific, and philosophical discourse can be divided into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes. The denotata of the members of these two classes of terms and predicates, if they have denotata, are concrete and abstract objects. Thus 'table,' 'God,' and 'intelligent Martian,' if they pick out anything, pick out concreta, while 'number,' 'the lion,' (as in 'The lion is of the genus Felis') and 'sentence' (as in 'The same sentence can express different propositions in different contexts'), pick out abstracta. (154) (See footnote * below)
Van Inwagen holds that platonism is to be avoided if at all possible. On platonism, there are abstract objects. This characteristic thesis does not entail, but it is consistent with, the proposition that there are also concrete objects. Van Inwagen is a platonist who accepts both abstract and concrete objects but thinks we would be better of if we could avoid commitment to abstract objects. Why? Well, apart from considerations of parsimony, the difference between members of the two categories is abysmal (my word): "the differences between God and this pen pale into insignificance when they are compared with the differences between this pen and the number 4 . . . ." (156) Such a radical difference is puzzling. So it would be preferable if the category of abstracta were empty. That the category of concreta cannot be empty is obvious: we know ourselves to be concreta. (157) Van Inwagen goes on to belabor the point that the things we can say about concrete things are practically endless, while little can be said about abstracta.
In short, reality, unlike ancient Gaul, "is divided into two parts . . . ." (158, emphasis added). The two parts of reality are radically disjoint. Everything is either abstract or concrete, nothing is both, and nothing is neither. Among the abstracta are instantiated properties. Instantiation or 'having' would seem to forge a connection between the disjoint realms. But the instantiation relation is "abstract and external." (206, 242) So it too resides in the realm of abstracta and hence (as it seems to me) does nothing to mitigate the radical dualism or span the abyss that yawns between reality's two parts. So if we could eke by without abstracta, that would be preferable. But we cannot manage without them, says van Inwagen. (158)
2. Why We Need Abstract Objects.
The short reason is that we need them because we need properties, and properties are one sort of abstract object, along with propositions and "proper relations." (240) A proper relation is a relation whose adicity is two or more; van Inwagen thinks of properties as one-place relations and propositions as zero-place relations. Every abstract object is a relation (a relation-in-intension) in the broad or improper sense, and everything else is a substance, a concrete object. (239)
But why do we need properties? We need properties because things have common features. The class of humans, for example, has something in common. This appears to be an existential claim: there is something, humanity, that the members of this class share. Platonists take the appearance at face value while nominalists maintain that the appearance is a mere appearance such that in reality there are no properties. How do we decide the issue that divides the platonists and the nominalists? Here van Inwagen is referring to what he calls "austere" nominalists, the nominalists more standardly called extreme: those who deny that there are properties at all. There are also the nominalists van Inwagen calls "luxuriant" nominalists, the ones more standardly called moderate: those who admit the existence of tropes or individual accidents or particularized properties. (203, 203 fn 5) The extreme nominalist denies that there are properties at all -- a lunatic view if I may inject my opinion -- while the moderate nominalists admit properties but deny that they are universals. Platonists are not austere nominalists because they accept properties; they are not luxuriant nominalists because they accept universals.
3. Van Inwagen's Method.
The method derives from Quine. We start with the beliefs we already have, couched in the sentences we already accept. We then see if these sentences commit us to properties. We do this by translating these sentences into "the canonical language of quantification." (160) If we need to quantify over properties for the sentences we accept as true to count as true, then we are ontologically committed to the existence of properties. If, on the other hand, we can 'paraphrase away' the apparent reference to properties in the sentences we accept that appear to refer to properties, then the ontological commitment is merely apparent.
Van Inwagen's main idea here is that our discourse commits us to quantification over properties, and thus to the existence of properties. We deduce the existence of properties from certain sentences we accept. The argument is not epistemological: it does not seek to provide evidence for the existence of properties. Nor is it transcendental, or an inference to the best explanation. (167) The operative methodological principle, if there is one, is only this: "if one does not believe that things of a certain sort exist, one shouldn't say anything that demonstrably implies that things of that sort exist." (167)
Example. We accept 'Spiders share some of the anatomical features of insects.' (159) This says nothing different from 'There are anatomical features that insects have and spiders also have.' This then is translated into canonical English. I will spare you the rigmarole. The upshot is that there are anatomical features. Hence there are properties.
The most promising way of rebutting platonism so derived is by finding a paraphrase of the original sentence that says the same thing but does not even seem to commit its acceptor to properties. (The nominalists would of course have to do this for every sentence proposed by platonists that supposedly commits its users to abstracta.) Van Inwagen, predictably, argues against the paraphrastic way out. Nominalist paraphrases are not to be had. (164-167)
4. Van Inwagen's Theory of Properties.
Given that there are properties, what are they like? What are the properties of properties? To specify them is the task of a theory of properties. What follows is my list, not his, but gleaned from what he writes. Properties are
a. abstract objects, as we have already seen. As abstract, properties are non-spatiotemporal and causally inert. (207) Better: abstract objects are categorially such as to be neither causally active nor causally passive.
b. universals, as we have already gleaned, with the exception of haecceities such as the property of being identical to Plantinga. (180) Van Inwagen has no truck with tropes. (241) See my Peter van Inwagen's Trouble with Tropes.
c. the entities that play the property role. And what role would that be? This is the role "thing that can be said of something." It is a special case of the role "thing that can be said." (175) Properties are things that can be said of or about something. Propositions are things that can be said, period, or full stop.
d. unsaturated assertibles. Things that can be said are assertibles. They are either unsaturated, in which case they are properties, or saturated, in which case they are propositions.
e. necessary beings. (207)
f. not necessarily instantiated. Many properties exist uninstantiated.
g. not all of them instantiable. Some unsaturated assertibles are necessarily uninstantiated, e.g., what is said of x if one says 'x is both round and square.'
h. such that the usual logical operations apply to them. (176) Given any two assertibles, whether saturated or unsaturated, there is 'automatically' their conjunction and their disjunction. Given any one assertible, there is 'automatically' its negation.
i. abundant, not sparse. There is a property corresponding to almost every one-place open sentence with a precise meaning. The 'almost' alludes to a variant of Russell's paradox that van Inwagen is fully aware of but that cannot be discussed here. (243) Thus, contra David Armstrong, it is not the task of what the latter calls "total [empirical] science" to determine what properties there are. Perhaps we could say that properties for van Inwagen are logical fallout from one-place predicates. (My phrase) But since properties are necessary beings, there are all the properties there might have been; hence they 'outrun' actual one-place predicates. (My way of putting it.)
j. not parts or constituents in any sense of the concrete things that have them. Indeed, it makes no sense to say that an assertible is a part of a concrete object. And although properties or unsaturated assertibles are universals, it makes no sense that such an item is 'wholly present' in concrete objects. (178) Concrete things are 'blobs' in David Armstrong's sense. They lack ontological structure. "Their only constituents are their parts, their parts in the strict and mereological sense." (243)
k. not more basic ontologically than the things whose properties they are. A concrete thing is not a bundle or cluster of properties. The very suggestion is senseless on van Inwagen's scheme. A property is an unsaturated assertible. It is very much like a Fregean (objective) concept or Begriff, even though van Inwagen does not say this in so many words. (But his talk of unsaturatedness points us back to Frege.) Clearly it would be senseless to think of a dog as a bundle of Fregean concepts. That which can be truly said of a thing like a dog, that it is furry, for example, is no part of the critter. (178-79)
I should point out that while talk of saturated and unsaturated assertibles conjures the shade of Frege, van Inwagen has no truck with Frege's concept-object dichotomy according to which no concept is an object, no object is a concept, and the concept horse is not a concept. You could say, and I mean no disrespect, that he 'peters out' with respect to this dichotomy: "I do not understand the concept-object distinction. The objects I call properties are just that: objects." (206, fn 11)
l. are not objects of sensation. (179) To put it paradoxically, and this is my formulation, not van Inwagen's, such perceptual properties as being blue and being oval in shape are not perceptible properties. One can see that a coffee cup is blue, but one cannot literally see the blueness of the coffee cup.
Critique
My readers will know that almost everything (of a substantive and controversial nature) that van Inwagen maintains, I reject and for reasons that strike me as good. Ain't philosophy grand?
1. Perceivability
I'll begin the critique with the last point. "We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties." (179) If van Inwagen can 'peter out,' so can I: I honestly don't know what to make of the second clause of the quoted sentence. I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light. Van Inwagen's claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue. Here I balk. If I don't see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I see (literally see, with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) that the cup is blue?
'That it is blue' is a thing that can be said of the cup, and said with truth. This thing that can be said is an unsaturated assertible, a property in van Inwagen's sense. Van Inwagen is telling us that it cannot be seen. 'That the cup is blue' is a thing that can be said, full stop. It is a saturated assertible, a proposition, and a true one at that. Both assertibles are abstract objects. Both are invisible, and not because of any limitation in my visual power or in human visual power in general, but because abstract objects cannot be terms of causal relations, and perception involves causation. Both types of assertible are categorially disbarred from visibility. But if both the property and the proposition are invisible, then how can van Inwagen say that "we see that certain things have certain properties"? What am I missing?
How can he say that we don't see the property but we do see the proposition? Both are abstract and invisible. How is it that we can see the second but not the first? Either we see both or we see neither. If van Inwagen says that we don't see the proposition, then what do we see when we see that the cup is blue? A colorless cup? A cup that is blue but is blue in a way different from the way the cup is blue by instantiatiating the abstract unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is blue'? But then one has duplicated at the level of abstracta the property that one sees at the concrete cup. If there is blueness at the cup and abstract blueness in Plato's heaven, why do we need the latter? Just what is going on here?
To van Inwagen's view one could reasonably oppose the following view. I see the cup (obviously!) and I see blueness at the cup (obviously!) I don't see a colorless cup. To deny the three foregoing sentences would be to deny what is phenomenologically given. What I don't literally see, however, is that the cup is blue. (Thus I don't literally see what van Inwagen says we literally see.) For to see that the cup is blue is to see the instantiation of blueness by the cup. And I don't see that. The correlate of the 'is' in 'The cup is blue' is not an object of sensation. If you think it is, tell me how I can single it out, how I can isolate it. Where in the visual field is it? The blueness is spread out over the visible surfaces of the cup. The cup is singled out as a particular thing on the desk, next to the cat, beneath the lamp, etc. Now where is the instantiation relation? Point it out to me! You won't be able to do it. I see the cup, and I see blue/blueness where the cup is. I don't see the cup's BEING blue.
It is also hard to understand how van Inwagen, on his own assumptions, can maintain that we see that certain things have certain properties. Suppose I see that Max, a cat of my acquaintance, is black. Do I see a proposition? Not on van Inwagen's understanding of 'proposition.' His propositions are Fregean, not Russellian: they are not resident in the physical world. Do I see a proposition-like entity such as an Armstrongian state of affairs? Again, no. What do I see?
Van Inwagen claims that properties are not objects of sensation; no properties are, not even perceptual properties. I should think that some properties are objects of sensation, or better, of perception: I perceive blueness at the cup by sight; I perceive smoothness and hardness and heat at the cup by touch. If so, then (some) properties are not abstract objects residing in a domain unto themselves.
Van Inwagen's view appears to have the absurd consequence that things like coffee cups are colorless. For if colors are properties (179) and properties are abstract objects, and abstract objects are colorless (as they obviously are), then colors are colorless, and whiteness is not white and blueness is not blue. Van Inwagen bites the bullet and accepts the consequence. But we can easily run the argument in reverse: Blueness is blue; colors are properties; abstract objects are colorless; ergo, perceptual properties are not abstract objects. They are either tropes or else universals wholly present in the things that have them. Van Inwagen, a 'relation ontologist' cannot of course allow this move into 'constituent ontology.'
There is a long footnote on p. 242 that may amount to a response to something like my objection. In the main text, van Inwagen speaks of "such properties as are presented to our senses as belonging to the objects we sense . . . ." How does this square with the claim on p. 179 that properties are not objects of sensation? Can a property such as blueness be presented to our senses without being an object of sensation? Apparently yes, "In a noncausal sense of 'presented.'" (243, fn 3)
How does this solve the problem? It is phenomenologically evident that (a definite shade of) blue appears to my senses when I stare at my blue coffee cup. Now if this blueness is an abstract object as van Inwagen claims then it cannot be presented to my senses any more than it can be something with which I causally interact.
2. But Is This Ontology?
Why does van Inwagen think he is doing ontology at all? It looks more like semantics or philosophical logic or philosophy of language. I say this because van Inwagen's assertibles are very much like Fregean senses. They are intensional items. (As we noted, he reduces all his assertibles to relations-in-intension.) Taking his cue from Quine, he seeks an answer to the question, What is there? He wants an inventory, by category, of what there is. He wants to know, for example, whether in addition to concrete things there are also properties, as if properties could exist in sublime disconnection from concrete things in a separate sphere alongside this sublunary sphere. That no property is an object of sensation is just logical fallout from van Inwagen's decision to install them in Plato's heaven; but then their connection to things here below in space and time become unintelligible. It does no good, in alleviation of this unintelligibility, to say that abstract blueness -- the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is blue' -- is instantiated by my blue cup. For instantiation is just another abstract object, a dyadic external relation, itself ensconced in Plato's heaven.
But not only the formulation of the question but also the method of attack come from Quine. Van Inwagen thinks he can answer what he and Quine idiosyncratically call the ontological question by examining the ontological commitments of our discourse. Starting with sentences we accept as true, he looks to see what these sentences entail as regards the types of entity there are when the sentences are properly regimented in accordance with the structures of modern predicate logic with identity.
The starting point is not things in their mind- and language-independent being, but beliefs we already have and sentences we already accept. The approach is oblique, not direct; subjective, not objective. Now to accept a sentence is to accept it as true; but a sentence accepted as true need not be true. Note also that if one sentence entails another, both can be false. So if sentences accepted as true entail the existence of properties in van Inwagen's sense, according to which properies are unsaturated assertibles, it is logically possible that there be no properties in reality. The following is not a contradiction: The sentences we accept as true entail that there are properties & There are no properties. For it may be -- it is narrowly-logically possible that -- the sentences we accept as true that entail that there are properties are all of them false. Not likely, of course, and there may be some retorsive argument against this possibility. But it cannot be ruled out by logic alone.
So there is something fishy about the whole method of 'ontological' commitment. One would have thought that ontology is concerned with the Being of beings, not with the presuppositions of sentences accepted as true by us. To put it vaguely, there is something 'transcendental' (in the Kantina sense) and 'subjective' and 'modern' about van Inwagen's Quinean method that unsuits it for for something that deserves to be called ontology.
This is connected with the point that van Inwagen's assertibles, saturated and unsaturated, are hard to distinguish from Fregean senses. They are denizens of Frege's Third Reich or Third World if you will, not his First Reich, the realm of primary reference. To illustrate: Venus is an item in the First World, while the senses of 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star' and the sense of the sentence 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' are three items all in the Third World. Senses, however, are logico-semantic items: their job is to mediate reference. Van Inwagen is arguably just hypostatizing items that are needed for us to secure reference -- whether thinking reference or linguistic reference -- to things that truly exist extramentally and extralinguistically.
Again, this is vague and sketchy. But good enough for a weblog entry! Is think my Czech scholastic friends will know what I am driving at.
3. Van Inwagen's Ostrich Realism and Commitment to Bare Particulars
Van Inwagen rejects both extreme and moderate nominalism. So he can't possibly be an ostrich nominalist. He is, however, as he himself appreciates, an ostrich realist or ostrich platonist. (214-15)
Suppose Max is black. What explains the predicate's being true of Max? According to the ostrich nominalist, nothing does. It is just true of him. There is nothing in or about Max that serves as the ontological ground of the correctness of his satisfying the predicate. Now 'F' is true of a iff 'a is F' is true. So we may also ask: what is the ontological ground of the truth of 'Max is black'? The ostrich reply will be: nothing. The sentence is just true. There is no need for a truth-maker.
The ostrich realist/platonist says something very similar except that in place of predicates he puts abstract properties, and in place of sentences he puts abstract propositions. In virtue of what does Max instantiate blackness? In virtue of nothing. He just instantiates it. Nothing explains why the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'x is black' is instantiated by Max. Nothing explains it because there is nothing to explain. And nothing explains why the saturated assertible expressed by 'Max is black' is true. Thus there is nothing concrete here below that could be called a state of affairs in anything like Armstrong's sense. There is in the realm of concreta no such item as Max-instantiating-blackness, or the concrete fact of Max's being black.
Here below there is just Max, and up yonder in a topos ouranos are 'his' properties (the abstract unsaturated assertibles that he, but not solely, instantiates). But then Max is a bare particular in one sense of this phrase, though not in Gustav Bergmann's exact sense of the phrase. (Bergmann is a constituent ontologist.) In what sense, then?
A bare particular is not a particular that has no properties in any sense of 'having properties'; a bare particular is a particular that has properties, but has them in a certain way: by being externally related to them. Thus bare particulars, unlike Aristotelean substances, have neither natures nor essences. Indeed, the best way to understand what a bare particular is is by contrast with the primary substances of Aristotle. These concrete individuals have natures by being (identically) natures: they are not externally related to natures that exist serenely and necessarily in Plato's heaven.
In this sense, van Inwagen's concrete things are bare particulars. There are no properties 'in' or 'at' Max; there are no properties where he is and when he is. What's more, on van Inwagen's scheme -- one he shares with Chisholm, Plantinga, et al. -- Max can only be externally related to his properties. This has the consequence that all of Max's properties are accidental. For if x, y are externally related, then x can exist without y and y can exist without x. So Max can exist without being feline just as he can exist without being asleep.
Could Max have been a poached egg? It is narrowly-logically possible. For if he has all of his properties externally, then he has all of his properties accidentally. Even if it is necessary that he have some set of properties or other, there is no necessity that he have any particular set. If properties are externally related to particulars, then any particular can have any set of properties so long as it has some set or other.
If you deny that concrete things are bare in the sense I have explained, then you seem to be committed to saying that there are two sorts of properties, PvI-properties in Plato's heaven and 'sublunary' properties at the particulars here below. But then I will ask two questions. First, what is the point of introducing PvI-properties if they merely duplicate at the abstract intensional level the 'real' properties in the sublunary sphere? Second, what justifies calling PvI-properties properties given that you still are going to need 'sublunary' properties to avoid saying that van Inwagen's concreta are bare particulars?
4. Existence
One can say of a thing that it might not have existed. For example, I can say this of myself. If so, it must be possible to say of a thing that it exists. For example, it must be possible for me to say of myself that I exist. As van Inwagen remarks, "it is hard to see how there could be such an assertible as 'that it might not have existed' if there were no such assertible as 'that it exists.'" (180) Existence, then, is a property, says van Inwagen, for properties are unsaturated assertibles, and 'that it exists' is an assertible.
There are many problems with the notion that existence is a first-level property on a van Inwagen-type construal of properties. Instantiation for van Inwagen is a full-fledged dyadic relation. (It is not a non-relational tie or Bergmannian nexus). He further characterizes it as abstract and external as we have seen. Now it is perfectly obvious to me that the very existence of Socrates cannot consist in his instantiation of any PvI-type property, let alone the putative property, existence. For given the externality of the instantiation relation, both Socrates and the putative property must 'already' exist for said relation to hold between them. So one moves in an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one tries to account for existence in this way.
This circularity objection which I have developed in painful detail elsewhere will, I expect, leave van Inwagen stone cold. One reason is that he sees no role for explanation in metaphysics whereas I think that metaphysics without explanation is not metaphysics at all in any serious sense. This is large topic that cannot be addressed here.
I'll mention one other problem for van Inwagen. I'll put it very briefly since this entry is already too long. Van Inwagen is a Fregean about existence; but on a Fregean view existence cannot be a first-level property. For Frege, 'x exists' where 'x' ranges over individuals is a senseless open sentence or predicate. There is no unsaturated assertible corresponding to it. I have a number of posts on van Inwagen and existence. Here is one. My latest published article on existence is "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novak and Novotny, eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, 45-75.
5. Haecceities
Among the properties, van Inwagen counts haecceities. They are of course abstract objects like all properties. But they are not universals because, while they are instantiable, they are not multiply instantiable. The property of being identical with Alvin Plantinga is an example van Inwagen gives. (180) This property, if instantiated, is instantiated by Plantinga alone in the actual world and by nothing distinct from Plantinga in any possible world. Plantingitas -- to give it a name -- somehow involves Plantinga himself, that very concrete object. For this property is supposed to capture the nonqualitative thisness of Plantinga. (Haecceitas is Latin for 'thisness.')
I submit that these haecceity properties are metaphysical monstrosities. For given that they are properties, they are necessary beings. A necessary being exists at all times in all possible worlds that have time, and in all worlds, period. Plantinga, however, does not exist in all worlds since he is a contingent being; and he doesn't exist at all times in all worlds in which he exists, subject as he is to birth and death, generation and corruption. I conclude that before Plantinga came into being there could not have been any such property as the property of being identical to Plantinga. I conclude also that in worlds in which he does not exist there is no such haecceity property. For at pre-Plantingian times and non-Plantingian worlds, there is simply nothing to give content to the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is Alvin Plantinga.' (Alvin Plantingas hung out at those times and in those worlds, but not our Alvin Plantinga.) Plantinga himself enters essentially into the very content of his haecceity property.
But this is absurd because PvI-properties are merely intensional entities. No such entity can have a concrete, flesh and blood man as a constituent. Just as a PvI-property cannot be a constituent of a concretum such as Plantinga, Plantinga cannot be a constituent in any sense of 'constituent' of a PvI-property.
But if Plantinga hadn't existed, might it nonetheless have been true that he might have existed? (180). Van Inwagen says yes and introduces haecceities. Plantingitas exists in every world; it is just that it is instantiated only in some. I say no, precisely because I take haecceities to be metaphysical monstrosities.
Conclusion
I am not out to refute van Inwagen or anyone. Philosophical theories, except for some sophomoric ones, cannot be refuted. At most I am out to neutralize van Inwagen's theory, or rather his type of theory, to explain why it is not compelling and how it is open to powerful objections, only some of which I have adduced in this entry. And of course I do not have a better theory. I incline toward constituent ontology myself, but it too is bristling with difficulties.
As I see it, the problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble.
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*At this point I should like to record a misgiving. If sentences (sentence types, not tokens) are abstract objects, and abstract objects are necessary beings as van Inwagen holds (cf., e.g., p. 242), then sentences are necessary beings. But sentences are tied to contingently existing languages and cannot exist apart from them. Thus 'I am hungry' is a sentence of English while 'Ich habe Hunger' is a sentence of German, and neither sentence can exist apart from its respective language. A natural language, however, would seem to be a contingent being: German came into existence, but it might never have come into existence. Given all this, a contradiction appears to follow: Sentences are and are not necessary beings.
Me to Josh: "Could Al be the truth-maker of 'Al is fat'? Arguably not. What is needed is a state of affairs, Al's being fat."
Josh to me: Yes, I think Al is the truth-maker of "Al is fat," but could be persuaded otherwise. I'm not sure what objections you have in mind for that position.
Here is an excerpt from a forthcoming article of mine to appear in a volume honoring the late David M. Armstrong, widely regarded as Australia's greatest philosopher:
II. The Truth-Maker Argument for Facts
The central and best among several arguments for facts is the Truth-Maker Argument. Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as 'Al is fat.' Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true. There must be something external to a true sentence that grounds its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person. 'Al is fat' is not just true; it is true because there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true, something 'in virtue of which' it is true. There is this short man, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs. There is nothing linguistic or mental about the man or his weight. Here is the sound core, at once both ancient and perennial, of correspondence theories of truth. Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured. The 'because' is not a causal 'because.' The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat. He is fat because he eats too much. The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.' Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true -- given that it is not true in virtue of its logical form or ex vi terminorum -- we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true. I don't see how this can be avoided even though I cheerfully admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear. That (some) truths refer us to the world as to that which makes them true is so obvious and commonsensical and indeed 'Australian' that one ought to hesitate to reject the idea because of the undeniable puzzles that it engenders. Motion is puzzling too but presumably not to be denied on the ground of its being puzzling.
Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker? If we need truth-makers it doesn't follow straightaway that we need facts. This is a further step in the argument. Truth-maker is an office. Who or what is a viable candidate? It can't be Al by himself, if Al is taken to be ontologically unstructured, an Armstrongian 'blob,' as opposed to a 'layer cake,' and it can't be fatness by itself.1 (Armstrong 1989a, 38, 58) If Al by himself were the truth-maker of 'Al is fat' then Al by himself would make true 'Al is not fat' and every sentence about Al whether true or false. If fatness by itself were the truth-maker, then fatness exemplified by some other person would be the truth-maker of 'Al is fat.' Nor can the truth-maker be the pair of the two. For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, by being exemplified by Sal, say, but Al does not instantiate fatness. What is needed, apparently, is a proposition-like entity, the fact of Al's being fat. We need something in the world to undergird the predicative tie. So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory. Veritas sequitur esse – the principle that truth follows being, that there are no truths about what lacks being or existence – is not enough. It is not enough that all truths are about existing items pace Meinong. It is not enough that 'Al' and 'fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. In many cases, though perhaps not in all, truth-makers cannot be 'things' – where a thing is either an individual or a property – or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort. Truth-making facts are therefore 'an addition to being,' not 'an ontological free lunch,' to employ a couple of signature Armstrongian phrases. For the early Armstrong at least, facts do not supervene upon their constituents. This yields the following scheme. There are particulars and there are universals. The Truth-Maker Argument, however, shows or at least supports the contention that there must also be facts: particulars-instantiating-universals.2 There are other arguments for facts, but they cannot be discussed here. And there are other candidates for the office of truth-maker such as tropes and Husserlian moments (Mulligan et al. 2009) but these other candidates cannot be discussed here either. Deeper than any particular argument for facts, or discussion of the nature of facts, lies the question whether realism about facts even makes sense. To this question we now turn.
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1If Al is a blob, then he lacks ontological structure; but that is not to say that he lacks spatial or temporal parts. It is obvious that he has spatial parts; it is not obvious that he has ontological 'parts.' Thin particulars, properties, and nexus count as ontological 'parts.' Layer cakes have both spatiotemporal and ontological structure.
2Are facts or states of affairs then a third category of entity in addition to particulars and universals? Armstrong fights shy of this admission: “I do not think that the recognition of states of affairs involves introducing a new entity. . . . it seems misleading to say that there are particulars, universals, and states of affairs.” (Armstrong 1978, 80) Here we begin to glimpse the internal instability of Armstrong's notion of a state of affairs. On the one hand, it is something in addition to its constituents: it does not reduce to them or supervene upon them. On the other hand, it is not a third category of entity. We shall see that this instability proves disastrous for Armstrong's ontology.
What exactly is the distinction between a universal and a particular? Universals are often said to be repeatable entities, ones-over-many or ones-in-many. Particulars, then, are unrepeatable entities. Now suppose the following: there are universals; there are particulars; particulars instantiate universals; first-order facts are instantiations of universals by particulars.
One and the same universal, F-ness, is repeated in the following facts: Fa, Fb, Fc. But isn't one and the same particular repeated in Fa, Ga, Ha? If so, particulars are as repeatable as universals, in which case repeatability cannot be the mark of the universal. How can it be that all and only universals are repeatable? I stumbled upon this problem the other day. But Frank Ramsey saw it first. See his "Universals," Mind 34, 1925, 401-17.
Instantiation as holding between particulars and universals is asymmetric: if a instantiates F-ness, then F-ness does not instantiate a. (Instantiation is not in general asymmetric, but nonsymmetric: if one universal instatiates a second, it may or may not be the case that the second instantiates the first.) The asymmetry of first-level instantiation may provide a solution to the Ramsey problem. The asymmetry implies that particulars are non-instantiable: they have properties but cannot themselves be properties. By contrast, universals are properties and have properties.
So we can say the following. The repeatability of a universal is its instantiability while the unrepeatability of a particular is its non-instantiability. So, despite appearances, a is not repeated in Fa, Ga, and Ha. For a is a particular and no particular is instantiable (repeatable).
Solve a problem, create one or more others. I solved the Ramsey problem by invoking the asymmetry of instantiation. But instantiation is a mighty perplexing 'relation' (he said with a nervous glance in the direction of Mr. Bradley). It is dyadic and asymmetric. But it is also external to its terms. If a particular has its properties by instantiating them, then its properties are 'outside' it, external to it. Note first that to say that a is F is not to say that a is identical to F-ness. The 'is' of predication is not the 'is' of identity. (For one thing, identity is symmetric, predication is not.) It would seem to follow that a is wholly distinct from F-ness. But then a is connected to F-ness by an external relation and Bradley's regress is up and running. But let's set aside Bradley's regress and the various responses to it to focus on a different problem.
If a and F-ness are external to each other, then it is difficult to see how a could have any intrinsic (nonrelational) properties. Suppose a is an apple and that the apple is red. Being red is an intrinsic property of the apple; it is not a relational property like being in my hand. But if a is F in virtue of standing in an external instantiation relation to the universal F-ness, then it would seem that F-ness cannot be an intrinsic property of a. So an antinomy rears its ugly head: a is (intrinsically) F and a is not (intrinsically) F.
Call this the Problem of the Intrinsically Unpropertied Particular. If there are particulars and universals and these are mutually irreducible categories of entity, then we have the problem of bringing their members together. Suppose it is contingently true that a is F. We cannot say that a is identical to F-ness, nor, it seems, can we say that a and F-ness are wholly distinct and connected by the asymmetric, external tie of instantiation. Is there a way between the horns of this dilemma?
David Armstrong at the end of his career suggested that instantiation is partial identity. The idea is that a and F-ness overlap, are partially identical. This bring a and F-ness together all right, but it implies that the connection is necessary. But then the contingency of the connection is lost. It also implies that instantiation is symmetrical! But then Ramsey is back in the saddle.
In this entry I will attempt to explain the difference between a bare particular and an Aristotelian primary substance. A subsequent post will consider whether this difference is theologically relevant, in particular, whether it is relevant to the theology of the Incarnation.
What is a Particular?
Particulars in the sense relevant to understanding 'bare particular' may be understood in terms of impredicability. Some things can be predicated of other things. Thus being black can be predicated of my cat, and being a property can be predicated of being black; but my cat cannot be predicated of anything. My cat is in this sense 'impredicable.' Particulars are subjects of predication but cannot themselves be predicated. Particulars, then, are ultimate subjects of predication. Thus my cat is an ultimate subject of predication unlike being black which is a subject of predication, but not an ultimate subject of predication. Particulars have properties but are not themselves properties. Properties may be characterized as predicable entities.
Three Senses of 'Bare Particular'
1. The first sense I mention only to set aside. It is a complete misunderstanding to suppose that philosophers who speak of bare or thin particulars, philosophers as otherwise different in their views as Gustav Bergmann, David Armstrong, and J. P. Moreland, mean to suggest that there are particulars that have no properties and stand in no relations. There is no such montrosity as a bare particular in this sense.
In order to explain the two legitimate senses of 'bare particular' I will first provide a general characterization that covers them both. A bare particular is a particular that lacks a nature or (real) essence. It is therefore quite unlike an Aristotelian primary substance. Every such substance has or rather is an individual nature. But while lacking a nature, a bare particular has properties. This 'having' is understood in terms of the asymmetrical external nexus of exemplification. A bare particular is thus tied to its properties by the external nexus of exemplification. To say that the nexus that ties a to F-ness is external is to say that there is nothing in the nature of a, and nothing in the nature of F-ness to require that a exemplify F-ness. After all, a, as bare, lacks a nature, and F-ness, while it has a nature, is not such that there is anything in it to necessitate its being exemplified by a. In this sense a bare particular and its properties are external to each other.
This mutual externality of property to bearer entails what I call promiscuous combinability: any bare particular can exemplify any property, and any property can be exemplified by any bare particular. (A restriction has to be placed on 'property' but we needn't worry about this in the present entry.)
David Armstrong holds that (i) there are conjunctive properties and that (ii) for each bare or thin particular there is the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of all of the particular's non-relational properties. He calls this the particular's nature. But I will avoid this broad use of 'nature.' What I mean by 'nature' is essence. Bare particulars lack essences, but not properties. Therefore, no property or conjunction of properties on a bare-particularist scheme is an essence. Note that it is given or at least not controversial that particulars have properties; it is neither given nor uncontroversial that particulars have essences.
I should also point out that talk of Aristotelian natures or essences would seem to make sense only within a constituent ontology such as Aristotle's.
From the foregoing it should be clear that to speak of a particular as bare is not to deny that it has properties but to speak of the manner in which it has properties. It is to say that it exemplifies them, where exemplification is an asymmetrical external tie. To speak of a particular as an Aristotelian substance is also to speak of the manner in which it has properties.
Consider the dog Fido. Could Fido have been a jellyfish? If Fido is a bare particular, then this is broadly logically possible. Why not, given promiscuous combinability? Any particular can 'hook up' with any property. But if Fido is an Aristotelian substance this is not broadly logically possible. For if Fido is a substance, then he is essentially canine. In 'possible worlds' jargon, Fido, if a substance, is canine in every possible world in which he exists. What's more, his accidental properties are not such as to be exemplified by Fido -- where exemplification is an external tie -- but are rather "rooted in" and "caused" by the substance which is Fido. (See J. P. Moreland who quotes Richard Connell in Moreland's Universals, McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, p. 93) The idea is that if Fido is an Aristotelian substance, then he has ingredient in his nature various potentialities which, when realized, are manifestations of that nature. The dog's accidental properties are "expressions" of his "inner nature." They flow from that nature. Thus being angry, an accident of Fido as substance, flows from his irascibility which is a capacity ingredient in his nature. If Fido is a bare particular, however, he would be externally tied to the property of being angry. And he would also be externally tied to the property of being a dog.
It follows that if particulars are bare, then all of their properties are had accidentally, and none essentially.
We now come to the two legitimate senses of 'bare particular.'
2. The second sense of 'bare particular' and the first legitimate sense is the constituent-ontological sense. We find this in Bergmann and Armstrong. Accordingly, a bare particular is not an ordinary particular such as a cat or the tail of a cat or a hair or hairball of cat, but is an ontological factor, ingredient, or constituent of an ordinary particular. Let A and B be round red spots that share all qualitative features. For Bergmann there must be something in the spots that grounds their numerical difference. They are two, not one, but nothing qualitative distinguishes them. This ground of numerical difference is the bare particular in each, a in A, and b in B. Thus the numerical difference of A and B is grounded in the numerical (bare) difference of a and b. In one passage, Bergmann states that the sole job of a bare particular is to individuate, i.e., to serve as the ontological ground of numerical difference.
Particulars, unlike universals, are unrepeatable. If F-ness is a universal, F-ness is repeated in each F. But if a is F, a is unrepeatable: it is the very particular it is and no other. One of the jobs of a Bergmannian bare particular is to serve as the ontological ground of an ordinary particular's particularity or thisness. A Bergmannian bare particular is that ontological constituent in an ordinary particular that accounts for its particularity. But note the ambiguity of 'particularity.' We are not now talking about the categorial feature common to all particulars as particulars. We are talking about the 'incommunicable' thisness of any given particular.
3. The third sense of 'bare particular' and the second legitimate sense is the nonconstituent-ontological sense. Summing up the above general characterization, we can say that
A bare particular is a particular that (i) lacks a nature (in the narrow sense lately explained); (ii) has all of its properties by exemplification where exemplification is an asymmetrical external nexus; and as a consequence (iii) has all of its properties accidentally, where P is an accidental property of x iff x exemplifies P but can exist without exemplifying P.
Note that this characterization is neutral as between constituent and nonconstituent ontology. If one is a C-ontologist, then bare particulars are constituents of ordinary particulars. If one is an NC ontologist who rejects the very notion of an ontological constituent, then bare particulars are ordinary particulars.
Conclusion
I have explained the difference between a bare particular and an Aristotelian substance. In a subsequent post I will address the question of how this deep ontological difference bears upon the possibility of a coherent formulation of the Incarnation doctrine.
For Dave Bagwill, who is trying to understand the Chalcedonian definition.
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Consider this triad, and whether it is logically consistent:
1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity. 2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily. 3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.
Each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept.But how can they all be true? In the presence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, according to which, roughly, if two things are identical, then they share all properties, the above triad appears inconsistent: The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). Can this apparent inconsistency be shown to be merely apparent?
Reduplicatives to the rescue. Say this:
4. Jesus qua 2nd Person exists necessarily while Jesus qua man does not exist necessarily.
(The stylistically elegant ‘while’ may be replaced for truth-functional purposes with the logician's ampersand.) Now one might object that reduplicative formulations are not helpful unto salvation from inconsistency since in the crucial cases they entail outright contradictions. They merely hide and postpone the difficulty. Thus, given that being a Person of the Trinity entails existing necessarily, and being a human animal entails existing contingently, (4) entails
5. Jesus exists necessarily & Jesus does not exist necessarily.
And that is a plain contradiction. But this assumes that reduplicative constructions need not be taken with full ontological seriousness as requiring reduplicative truth-makers. It assumes that what we say with reduplicatives can be said without them, and that, out in the world, there is nothing that corresponds to them, or at least that we have no compelling reason to commit ourselves to reduplicative entities, qua-entities, one might call them. That assumption now needs to be examined. Suppose we parse (4) as
6. Jesus-qua-2nd Person exists necessarily & Jesus-qua-man does not exist necessarily
where the hyphenated expressions function as nouns, qua-nouns (to give them a name) that denote qua-entities. It is easy to see that (6) avoids contradiction for the simple reason that the two qua-entities are non-identical. But what is non-identical may nonetheless be the same if we have a principled way of distinguishing between identity and sameness. (Hector-Neri Castaneda is one philosopher who distinguishes between identity and a number of sameness relations.) Essentially what I have just done is made a distinction in respects while taking respects with full ontological seriousness. This sort of move is nothing new. Consider a cognate case.
Suppose I have a red boat that I paint blue. Then we can say that there are distinct times, t1 and t2, such that b is red at t1 and blue at t2. That can be formulated as a reduplicative: b qua existing at t1 is red and b qua existing at t2 is blue. One could take that as just a funny way of talking, or one could take it as a perspicuous representation of the ontological structure of the world. Suppose the latter. Then, adding hyphens, one could take oneself to be ontologically committed to temporal parts, which are a species of qua-entity. Thus b-at-t1 is a temporal part that is distinct from b-at-t2. These temporal parts are distinct since they differ property-wise: one is red the other blue. Nevertheless, they are the same in that they are parts of the same whole, the temporally extended boat.
The conceptual move we are making here is analogous to the move we make when we say that a ball is green in its northern hemisphere and red in its southern hemisphere in order to defuse the apparent contradiction of saying that it is red and green at the same time. Here different spatial parts have different properties, whereas in the boat example, different temporal parts have different properties.
Can we apply this to the Incarnation and say that Jesus-qua-God is F (immortal, impassible, necessarily existent, etc.) while Jesus-qua-man is not F? That would avoid the contradiction while upholding such obvious truths as that divinity entails immortality while humanity entails mortality. We could then say, borrowing a term from the late Hector-Neri Castaneda (1924-1991), that Jesus-qua-God is consubstantiated with Jesus-qua-man. (Hector the atheist is now rolling around in his grave.) The two are the same, contingently the same. They are ontological parts of the same substance, and are, in that sense, consubstantiated. Jesus is God the Son where ‘is’ expresses a contingent sameness relation, rather than strict identity (which is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Necessity of Identity).
The idea is that God the Son and Jesus are, or are analogous to, ontological parts of one and the same whole. This is an admittedly bizarre idea, and probably cannot be made to work. But it is useful to canvass all theoretical possibilities.
Concerning tropes, Peter van Inwagen says, "I don't understand what people can be talking about when they talk about those alleged items." (Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge UP, 2014, p. 211.) He continues on the same page:
Consider two tennis balls that are perfect duplicates of each other. Among their other features, each is 6.7 centimeters in diameter, and the color of each is a certain rather distressing greenish yellow called "optical yellow." Apparently, some people understand what it means to say that each of the balls has its own color -- albeit the color of one is a perfect duplicate of the color of the other. I wonder whether anyone would understand me if I said that each ball had its own diameter -- albeit the diameter of one was a perfect duplicate of the diameter of the other. I doubt it. But one statement makes about as much sense to me as the other -- for just as the diameter of one of the balls is the diameter of the other (6.7 centimeters), the color of one of the balls is the color of the other (optical yellow).
Although van Inwagen couches the argument in terms of what does and does not make sense to him, the argument is of little interest if he is offering a merely autobiographical comment about the limits of his ability to understand. And it does seem that he intends more when he says that he doubts whether anyone would understand the claim that each ball has its own diameter. So I'll take the argument to be an argument for the objective meaninglessness of trope talk, not just the PvI-meaninglessness of such talk:
1. It is meaningful to state that each ball has its own color if and only if it is meaningful to state that each ball has its own diameter.
2. It is not meaningful to state that each ball has its own diameter.
Therefore
3. It is not meaningful to state that each ball has its own color.
Therefore
4. Talk of tropes is meaningless.
The argument is valid, and (1) is true. But I don't see why we should accept (2). So I say the argument is unsound.
I am not defending the truth of trope theory, only its meaningfulness. I am maintaining that trope theory is a meaningful ontological proposal and that van Inwagen is wrong to think otherwise.
It is given that the two tennis balls have the same diameter. But all that means is that the diameter of ball A and the diameter of ball B have the same measurement, 6.7 cm. This fact is consistent with there being two numerically distinct particular diameters, the diameter of A and the diameter of B.
What's more, the diameters have to be numerically distinct. If I didn't know that the two balls were of the same diameter, I could measure them to find out. Now what would I be measuring? Not each ball, but each ball's diameter. And indeed each ball's own diameter, not some common diameter. I would measure the diameter of A, and then the diameter of B. If each turns out to be 6.7 cm in length, then we could say that they have the 'same diameter' where this phrase means that A's diameter has the same length as B's diameter. But again, this is consistent with the diameters' being numerically distinct.
There are two diameters of the same length just as there are two colored expanses of the same color: two yellownesses of the same shade of yellow. So I suggest we run van Inwagen's argument in reverse. Just as it is meaningful to maintain that the yellowness of A is numerically distinct from the yellowness of B, it is meaningful to maintain that the diameter of A is numerically distinct from the diameter of B. Looking at the two balls we see two yellownesses, one here, the other there. Similarly, measuring the balls' diameter, we measure two diameters, one here, the other there.
Again, this does not show that trope theory is true, but only that it makes sense. It makes as much sense as van Inwagen's proposal according to which optical yellow is an abstract property exemplified by the two balls.
I have read your latest post on truthmakers. Among other things, you mention [David] Armstrong's view on abstract objects. As I read elsewhere (not in Armstrong own works, I have not read anything by him yet) he was realist about universals and gives a very voluminous defense of his view. Does this view entail realism about abstract objects?
I think that Quine was realist about abstract objects and at the same time naturalist and also holds that his Platonism was consequence of his naturalized ontology. Moreover, I have the impression that several preeminent analytic philosophers hold realist views on abstract objects, mostly under influences from Quine and in a smaller degree from Putnam.
Do Armstrong's views about universals entail realism about abstract objects?
No, they do not. Rejecting extreme nominalism, Armstrong maintains that there are properties. (I find it obvious that there properties, a Moorean fact, though I grant that it is not entirely obvious what is obvious.) Armstrong further maintains that properties are universals (repeatables), not particulars (unrepeatables) as they would be if properties were tropes. But his is a theory of immanent universals. This means two things. First, it means that there are no unexemplified universals. Second, it means that universals are constituents of the individuals (thick particulars) that 'have' them. In Wolterstorff's terminology, Armstrong is a constituent ontologist as opposed to a relation ontologist. His universals are ontological parts of the things that 'have' them; they are not denizens of a realm apart only related by an asymmetrical exemplification tie to the things that have them.
So for Armstrong universals are immanent in two senses: (a) they cannot exist unexemplified, and (b) they enter into the structure of ordinary (thick) particulars. It follows that his universals are not abstract objects on the Quinean understanding of abstract objects as neither spatial nor temporal nor causally active/passive. For given (b), universals are where and when the things that have them are, and induce causal powers in these things. And yet they are universals, immanent universals: ones-in-many, not ones-over-many. Some philosophers, including Armstrong, who are not much concerned with historical accuracy, call them 'Aristotelian' universals.
Does Armstrong reject all abstract objects?
Yes he does. Armstrong is a thorough-going naturalist. Reality is exhausted by space-time and the matter that fills it. Hence there is nothing outside of space-time, whether abstract (causally inert) or concrete (causally active/passive). No God, no soul capable of disembodied existence, or embodied existence for that matter, no unexemplified universals, not even exemplified nonconstituent universals, no Fregean propositions, no numbers, no mathematical sets, and of course no Meinongian nonenties.
How do Armstrong and Quine differ on sets or classes?
For Quine, sets are abstract entities outside space and time. They are an addition to being, even in those cases in which the members of a set are concreta. Thus for Quine, Socrates' singleton is an abstract object in addition to the concrete Socrates. For Armstrong, sets supervene upon their members. They are not additions to being. Given the members, the class or set adds nothing ontologically. Sets are no threat to a space-time ontology. (See D. M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 8.)
What about the null set or empty class?
For Armstrong, there is no such entity. "It would be a strange addition to space-time!" he blusters. (Sketch, p. 8, n. 1). Armstrong makes a bad mistake in that footnote. He writes, "Wade Martin has reminded me about the empty class which logicians make a member of every class." Explain the mistake in the ComBox. Explain it correctly and I'll buy you dinner at Tres Banderas.
Are both Quine and Armstrong naturalists?
Yes. The Australian is a thorough-going naturalist: there is nothing that is not a denizen of space-time. The American, for reasons I can't go into, countenances some abstract objects, sets. It is a nice question, which is more the lover of desert landscapes.
A Sketch of the Difference between Two Ontological Styles
What it is for a thing to have a property? Ostrich nominalism aside, it is a Moorean fact that things have properties, but the nature of the having is a philosophical problem. The ordinary language 'have' does not wear it correct ontological analysis on its sleeve. My cup is blue. Does the cup have the property of being blue by standing in a relation to it -- the relation of exemplification -- or by containing it as an ontological or metaphysical part or constituent? The root issue that divides constituent ontologists (C-ontologists) and those that N. Wolterstorff calls, rather infelicitously, "relation ontologists" (R-ontologists) is whether or not ordinary particulars have ontological or metaphysical parts.
C-ontologists maintain that (i) ordinary particulars have such parts in addition to their commonsense parts; (ii) that among these ontological parts are (some of) the properties of the ordinary particular; and (iii) that the particular has (some of) its properties by having them as proper parts. R-ontologists deny that ordinary particulars have ontological parts, and consequently deny that ordinary particulars have any of their properties by having them as parts. Of course, R-ontologists do not deny that (most) ordinary particulars have commonsense parts.
Drawing on some graphic images from D. M. Armstrong, we can say that for C-ontologists ordinary particulars are "layer cakes" while for R-ontologists they are "blobs." 'Blob' conveys the idea that ordinary particulars lack ontological structure in addition to such commonsense structure as spatial structure.
The distinction between these two styles of ontology or two approaches to ontology is not entirely clear, but, I think, clear enough. To take an example, is the blueness of my blue coffee cup an abstract object off in a platonic or quasi-platonic realm apart and only related to the cup I drink from by the external asymmetrical relation of exemplification? That, I take it, is van Inwagen's view. I find it hard to swallow. After all, I see (with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) the blueness at the cup, where the cup is. Phenomenologically, I see (some) properties. So some properties are literally visible. No abstract objects (as PvI and others influenced by Quine use 'abstract objects') are literally visible. Ergo, some properties are not abstract objects.
Here is a second argument. Some properties are either wholly or partially located at the places where the things that have the properties are located. No abstract objects are either wholly or partially located at the places where the things that have the properties are located. Therefore, some properties are not abstract objects. So I am inclined to say that the blueness of my cup is in some unmereological and hard-to-explain sense an ontological proper part or constituent of the cup. It is obviously not the whole of the cup since the cup has other properties. Ordinary particulars are not ontologically structureless 'blobs.'
Needless to say, these two quick little arguments do not decide the matter in favor of C-ontology. And the other arguments I could add won't decide the matter either. But taken cumulatively these arguments give one good reason to reject R-ontology.
It is also worth observing that an ontological constituent needn't be a property. Gustav Bergmann's bare particulars and Armstrong's thin particulars are ontological constituents of ordinary or 'thick' particulars but they are not properties of those particulars. The materia signata of the Thomists is a constituent of material particulars, but not a property of such particulars. So, C-ontology is not just a thesis about properties and how they are had by the things that have them.
So much for ontological background. For more on the two ontological approaches, see my article, "Constituent versus Relational Ontology," Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, vol. 10, no, 1, 2013, pp. 99-115. Now what relevance does this have for the classically theist doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS)? But first: What is DDS?
The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity
To put it as 'simply' as possible, DDS is the thesis that God is without (proper) parts. (If you want to say that God is an improper part of himself, I'll let that slide.) Being without parts, God is without composition of any sort. It is obvious that God is not a region of space, nor does he occupy a region of space. So he cannot have spatial or material parts. If God is eternal, then he cannot have temporal parts. (And if there are no temporal parts, then God cannot have them even if he is everlasting or omnitemporal.) But he also lacks ontological parts. So the divine attributes cannot be different parts of him in the way that my attributes can be different parts of me on a C-ontology. We can put this by saying that in God there is no real distinction between him and his omni-attributes. He is each attribute, which implies that each attribute is every other attribute. Indeed, there is no distinction in God between God and any of his intrinsic properties. (Each omni-attribute is an intrinsic property, but not conversely.) What's more, there can be no distinction in God between essence and existence, form and matter, act and potency. Since God is in no way composite, he is simple.
And why must God be simple? Because he is absolute, and nothing absolute can be depend for its existence or nature on anything distinct from it. An absolute is what it has. It cannot be compounded of anything that is not absolute or dependent on anything that is not absolute. Why must God be absolute? Because anything less would not be God, a worship-worthy being. These answers are quick and catechetical, but I must invoke my blogospheric privilege and move one.
Plantinga's Critique Misses the Mark
Perhaps the best-known attack on the coherence of DDS is that of A. Plantinga in his Does God Have a Nature? The attack fails because Plantinga foists on the DDS an R-ontology that is foreign to the thought of DDS defenders. If properties are abstract objects, and God is a concrete particular, then of course it would be incoherent to maintain that God and omnsicience are one and the same. For if omniscience is a property, and properties are abstract objects, and abstract objects are causally inert, then the identification of God and omniscience would either render God causally inert -- which would contradict his being concrete -- or it would render omniscience causally active -- in contradiction to its being abstract. More simply, if you think of concreta and abstracta as denizens of radically disjoint realms, as R-ontologists do, then it would be something like a Rylean category mistake to maintain that God is identical to his properties.
More simply still, if God is causally active and no property is causally active (or passive for that matter), would it not be supremely stupid to assert that there is no distinction in reality between God and his properties? Could Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Avicenna, et al. have been that stupid? I don't think so. Aquinas was as little Quinean in his understanding of abstracta as Quine was Aquinian. Philosophical theologians under the spell of Quine such as Plantinga and van Inwagen are not well situated to understand such tenets of classical theism as DDS.
It is obvious, then, that DDS is incoherent when read in the light of R-ontology. It is also uncharitable in excelsis to read Aquinas et al. in that light because so reading them makes nonsense of what they say.
Does C-ontology Help with Coherence?
One of the entailments of DDS is that God does not exemplify his nature; he just is his nature. We have seen that this makes no coherent sense on (any version of) R-ontology. But it does make coherent sense on (some versions of) C-ontology. For if God is purely actual with no admixture of potency, wholly immaterial, and free of accidents, then what is left for God to be but his nature? To understand this, one must bear in mind that the divine nature is absolutely unique. As such it is not repeatable: it is not a universal. It is therefore unrepeatable, a particular. What is to prevent it from being identical to God and from being causally active?
If you say that God is an instance of a multiply exemplifiable divine nature, they you are simply reverting to R-ontology and failing to take in the point I just made. God cannot be an instance of a kind, else he would depend on that kind to be what he is. God transcends the distinction between instance and kind. And if you persist in thinking that natures are causally inert abstract objects, then you are simply refusing to think in C-ontological terms.
If you say that I beg the question against the denier of DDS when I say that God transcends the instance-kind distinction, then you miss the point. The concern here is not whether DDS is true or whether there are non-question-begging arguments for it; the concern is whether it makes coherent sense as opposed to being quickly dismissable as guilty of a category mistake.
Another objection one might make is that the divine nature is not simple but complex, and that if God is his nature, then God is complex too. For Plantinga, the nature of a thing is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are those properties the thing exemplifies in every possible world in which it exists. On this approach, the divine nature is 'cobbled together' or constructed out of God's essential properties. But then the divine nature is logically and ontologically posterior to those properties. Clearly, no defender of DDS will think of natures in the Plantingian way. He will think of the divine nature as logically and ontologically prior to the properties, and of the properties as manifestations of that unitary nature, a nature the radical unity of which cannot be made sense of on Plantinga's approach.
There are other problematic entailments of DDS. One is that in God, nature and existence are one and the same. On an R-ontology, this makes no coherent sense. But it can be made sense on a C-ontological approach. A fit topic for a separate post.
Ken Hochstetter of the College of Southern Nevada kindly sent me some comments on my SEP Divine Simplicity entry. They are thoughtful and challenging and deserve a careful reply. My remarks are in blue. I have added some subheadings.
Suppose I said that blue is not a Peter-van-Inwagen property, but a sensible property. Suppose also that I said that we see 1) substances and we see 2) their colors, and we see 3) the fact that substances are colored (and this last point amounts to not much more, if anything at all more, than the claim that we see both substances and their colors). I take it you would agree with these points.
There are some difficult questions here. No doubt we see material meso-particulars. I see a cat, a keyboard, a lamp. But do we see substances? 'Substance' is a theoretical term, of Aristotelian provenience, not what I call a 'datanic' term. If a cat is a bundle of universals, or a bundle of tropes, or a diachronic bundle of synchronic bundles of Castanedan guises, then a cat is not a substance. It is a Moorean fact that there are cats and that we see them; it is not Moorean fact that there are substances and that we see them. But let's set this problem aside.
A black cat sleeps on my desk. I see the cat and I see black (or blackness if you will) at the cat: I see black where the cat is. Contrary to what you suggest, there is more to a cat's being black than a cat and blackness even if the blackness is seen exactly where the cat is and nowhere else. For a cat's being black involves, in addition to the cat and black, the first's BEING the second. Note that a cat's being black is a fact, but neither a cat nor blackness is a fact.
This give rise to a puzzle. I see the cat, and I see black where the cat is. But do I see the cat's BEING black? Do I literally see (with my eyes) the fact of the cat's being black? And if I don't, how do I know that the cat IS black?
But let's set this vexing cluster of problems aside as well.
But then suppose that you discover that I think that colors are per se nowhere. They are not located in space in the way that substances are. When you turn your eye to something colored, geometrically speaking, you turn your eye only to the thing that is colored, but not the color of the thing, for this has no per se spatial location and therefore has nothing to do with the geometry of space beyond being the sensible property of something that has something to do with the geometry of space. Nonetheless, we see colors and we see the things that are colored. Would you find this view problematic? If so, why? Would you think that in making color only accidentally spatial that I depart from constituent ontology? I would like to think that I do not, for I say that both being an ox and being blue are parts of what it is to be a blue ox.
The view you sketch strikes me as incoherent. You cannot coherently maintain both that blue (of some definite shade) is a sensible property and that blue is nowhere. If blue is sensible, then it is sensible at some location or other. Therefore, blue cannot be nowhere.
Note that if there is a PVI-property of blueness, it could not itself be blue. Abstract objcts don't come in colors. So what good is it? What work does it do? You are still going to need the blueness of the blue cup. PVI-blueness is ontologically otiose, a metaphysical fifth wheel if you will. The blueness at the cup, by contrast, is blue! Right? If you deny that there is any blue blueness at the cup, are you then prepared to say that the cup is devoid of sensible properties?
Will you say that the blue cup is sensibly bluein virtue of instantiating PVI-blueness? How would that work? PVI-blueness is not a Platonic exemplar. It is not itself blue. How can a particular's instantiating it explain the particular's being sensibly blue?
Could blueness be accidentally spatial? I don't see how. Either it is necessary spatial, and in consequence thereof, sense-perceivable, or it is necessarily nonspatial in the manner of an abstract object. A blue wall is accidentally blue, but blueness, I should think, is necessarily spatial. And I do think you would be departing from constituent ontology if you were to hold that blueness is accidentally spatial.
The following from a reader. I've edited it for clarity.
Here is a quick question for you: suppose someone were to grant you that there is the sensible character blue that you say that there is, a character of your coffee cup, but then still wanted to know why it is "in" or a "constituent" of a substance such as a cup. So, take this person to have read and understood your argument about nude particulars and to have said: "Indeed, whatever red is, it cannot be an abstractum, for certainly something of the sort could never enter into visual experience. Nor could "the fact that" some sensible particular stands in an instantiation relation to such an abstract object enter into visual experience, for we theorize such metaphysical facts, we do not see them. So I grant that blue is a visible property, but why should we say that blue, so characterized is "in" or is a "constituent" of a sensible particular item?"
Well, one assumption I am making is that a certain form of nominalism is untenable. Suppose someone said that what makes a blue object blue is that English speakers apply the predicate 'blue' to it. Nelson Goodman actually maintains something as crazy as this in one of his books. (Intellectual brilliance and teaching at Harvard are not prophylactic against silliness.) Why is it crazy? Because it is the metaphysically antecedent blueness of the thing in question, my trusty coffee cup, for example, that grounds the correctness of the application of 'blue' to the cup. I am tempted to say that this realism is just Moorean common sense.
In other words, 'blue' is true of the cup because the cup is blue. And not the other way around. It is false that the cup is blue because 'blue' is true of it. Obviously, this use of 'because' is not causal, as causation is understood by most contemporary philosophers. But neither is it logical. It is not logical because it does not express a relation that connects a proposition to a proposition. It expresses an asymmetrical relation of metaphysical grounding. This relation is a relation between what is at most a proposition-like entity such as a concrete fact or state of affairs and a proposition.
The truthmaker of 'This cup is blue' cannot be anything of a linguistic nature. (More generally, it cannot be anything of a representational nature.) And yet something makes our sample sentence true. There must be a truthmaker. It would be silly to say that the sentence is "just true." Given that there must be a truthmaker, it is going to involve the cup and the property, both construed as 'real,' i.e., extramental and extralinguistic. There is more a truthmaker than this, but we don't need to go into this 'more.'
My reader grants that blue is a visible property. One literally sees the blueness of the cup. This is not a Platonic visio intellectualis. It is not a seeing with the 'eyes' of the mind, but a seeing with the eyes of the head. Now if this is the case, then the property I see when I see a blue cup as blue cannot be an item off in a realm apart. It cannot be a denizen of a Platonic topos ouranos, and I am not peering into such a heavenly place when I see blue. Blueness cannot be an abstract object as many contemporary philosophers use this phrase.
Now if I see the blueness where the cup is, and when the cup is (although only at times at which the cup is in fact blue), then the pressure is on to say that blueness is some sort of 'proper part' of the cup, albeit in an extended, unmereological sense of 'part.' It can't be the whole of the cup because the cup has other empirically detectable properties such as being hot and smooth and of such-and-such weight and electrical conductivity. What other options are there?
Reflecting on the data of the problem, I come to the following conclusions: The blueness is real: it is extramental and extralinguistic. It is empirically detectable; hence it cannot be an abstract object. The blueness is detectable at the cup, not at some other place. The blueness is not identical to the cup.
We can account for the data by saying say that the blueness of the cup is an ontological constituent of the cup. Is there a better theory?
London Ed has informed me of the passing of Peter Geach. May he find the Unchanging Light that he sought through his long and productive life of truth-seeking in these shadowlands. One honors a thinker best by thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically. Here is one of my attempts. Others referenced below.
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I have been studying Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002). I cannot report that I find it particularly illuminating. I am troubled by the reading back of Fregean doctrines into Aquinas, in particular in the appendix, "Frege and Aquinas on Existence and Number." (pp. 195-204) Since Kenny borrows heavily from Peter Geach, I will explain one of my misgivings in connection with a passage from Geach's important article, "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul. Geach writes,
Frege, like Aquinas, held that there was a fundamental distinction in rebus answering to the logical distinction between subject and predicate -- the distinction between Gegenstand (object) and Begriff (concept). [. . .] And for Frege the Begriff, and it alone, admits of repetition and manyness; an object cannot be repeated -- kommt nie wiederholdt vor. (45-46)
So far, so good. Geach continues:
Understood in this way, the distinction between individual and form is absolutely sharp and rigid; what can be sensibly said of one becomes nonsense if we try to say it of the other. [. . .] Just because of this sharp distinction, we must reject the Platonic doctrine that what a predicate stands for is is some single entity over against its many instances, hen epi pollon. On the contrary: the common nature that the predicate 'man' (say) stands for can be indifferently one or many, and neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself. This point is made very clearly by Aquinas in De Ente et Essentia. Again we find Frege echoing Aquinas; Frege counts oneness or manyness (as the case may be) among the properties (Eigenschaften) of a concept, which means that it cannot at the same time be one of the marks or notes (Merkmalen) of that concept. (46)
I smell deep confusion here. But precisely because the confusion runs deep I will have a hard time explaining clearly wherein the confusion consists. I will begin by making a list of what Geach gets right.
1. Objects and individuals are unrepeatable. 2. Concepts and forms are repeatable. 3. Setting aside the special question of subsistent forms, no individual is a form, and no object is a concept. 4. Frege distinguishes between the marks of a concept and the properties of a concept. The concept man, for example, has the concept animal as one of its marks. But animal is not a property of man, and this for the simple reason that no concept is an animal. Man has the property of being instantiated. This property, however, is not a mark of man since it is not included within the latter's conceptual content: one cannot by sheer analysis of the concept man determine whether or not there are any men. So there is a sense in which "neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself." This is true if taken in the following sense: neither being instantiated singly nor being instantiated multiply is a mark of the concept man.
But how do these points, taken singly or together, support Geach's rejection of "the Platonic doctrine that what the predicate stands for is some single entity over against its many instances"? They don't!
It seems obvious to me that Geach is confusing oneness/manyness as the relational property of single/multiple instantiation with oneness/manyness as the monadic property of being one or many. It is one thing to ask whether a concept is singly or multiply instantiated. It is quite another to ask whether the concept itself is one or many. It is also important to realize that a Fregean first-level concept, when instantiated, does not enter into the structure of the individuals that instantiate it. Aquinas is a constituent ontologist, but Frege is not. This difference is deep and causes a world of trouble for those who attempt to understand Aquinas in Fregean terms. For Frege, concepts are functions, and no function enters into the structure of its argument. The propositional function x is a man is not a constituent of Socrates. What's more, the value of the function for Socrates as argument is not a state of affairs with Socrates and the function as constituents. The value of the function for Socrates as argument is True; for Stromboli as argument, False. And now you know why philosophers speak of truth-values. It's mathematical jargon via Frege the mathematician.
The Fregean concept man is one, not many. It is one concept, not many concepts. Nor is it neither one nor many. It can have one instance, or many instances, or no instance. The Thomistic form man, however, is, considered in itself, neither one nor many. It is one in the intellect but (possibly) many in things. In itself, however, it is neither. And so it is true to say that the form is not "some single entity over against its many instances." It is not a single entity because, considered in itself, it is neither single nor multiple.
But this doesn't follow from point (3) above. And therein consists Geach's mistake. One cannot validly move from the "sharp distinction" between individuals/objects and forms/concepts to the conclusion that what a predicate stands for is not a single entity. Geach makes this mistake because of the confusion exposed two paragraphs supra. The mutual exclusion of objects and concepts does not entail that concepts cannot be single entities.
There is another huge problem with reading Frege back into Aquinas, and that concerns modes of existence (esse). A form in the intellect exists in a different way than it does in things. But if Frege is right about existence, there cannot be modes of existence. For if existence is instantiation, then there cannot be modes of existence for the simple reason that there cannot be any modes of instantiation.
I'll say more about this blunder in another post. It rests in turn on a failure to appreciate the radically different styles of ontology practiced by Aquinas and Frege. In my jargon, Aquinas is a constituent ontologist while Frege is a nonconstituent ontologist. In the jargon of Gustav Bergmann, Aquinas is a compex ontologist while Frege is a function ontologist.
This post continues my ruminations on the distinctio realis. If essence and existence are really distinct in a contingent being, should we think of its existence as accidental or essential, or neither?
Max, a cat of my acquintance, exists and exists contingently: there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. His nonexistence is broadly logically possible. So one may be tempted to say that existence is to Max as accident to substance. One may be tempted to say that existence is accidental to Max. In general, the temptation is to say that existence is an accidental property of contingent beings, and that this accidentality is what makes them contingent.
But this can't be right. On a standard definition, if P is an accidental property of x, then x can exist without P. So if existence were an accidental property of Max, then, Max could exist without existing. Contradiction.
Ought we conclude that existence is an essential property of Max? If P is an essential property of x, then x cannot exist without P. So if existence were an essential property of Max, then Max cannot exist without existing. The consequent of the conditional is true, but tautologically so.
From this one can infer either that (i) Max is a necessary being (because her has existence essentially) or that (ii) existence construed as an essential property is not the genuine article. Now Max is surely not a necessary being. It is true that if he exists, then he exists, but from this one cannot validly infer that he exists. Suppose existence is a first-level property. Then it would makes sense to say that existence is an essential property of everything. After all, in every possible world in which Max exists, he exists! But all this shows is that existence construed as an essential property is not gen-u-ine, pound-the-table existence.
We ought to conclude that existence is neither accidental to a contingent thing, nor essential to it. No contingent thing is such that existence follows from its essence. And no contingent thing is such that its contingency can be understood by thinking of its existence as an accidental property of it. The contingency of Max's being sleepy can be understaood in terms of his instantiation of an accidental property; but the contingency of his very existence cannot be so understood.
If every first-level property is either accidental or essential, then existence is not a first-level-property. But, as I have argued many times, it does not follow that existence is a second-level property. The Fregean tradition went off the rails: existence cannot be a second-level property. Instantiation is a second-level property, but not existernce. And of course it cannot be a second-level property if one takes the real distinction seriously, this being a distinction between essence and existence 'in' the thing or 'at' the thing.
Where does this leave us? Max exists. Pace Russell, saying that Max exists is NOT like saying that Max is numerous. 'Exists,' unlike 'numerous,' has a legitimate first-level use. So existence belongs to Max. It belongs to him without being a property of him. One argument has already been sketched. To put it explicitly: Every first-level property is either essential or accidental; Existence is neither an essential nor an accidental first-level property; ergo, Existence is not a first-level property.
Existence belongs to Max without being a property of him. How is existence 'related' to Max if it is not a property of him?
In my existence book I maintained that existence belongs to a contingent being such as Max not as accident to substance, or as essence to primary substance, or as property to possessor, or as proper part to whole, or by identity; but as unity to items unified. In brief, the existence of a contingent thing is the contingent unity of its ontological constituents. The existence of Max is not one of his constituents but the unity of all his constituents.
This approach solves the problem of how existence can belong to a contingent being without being a property of it. But it raises vexing questions of its own, questions to be taken up in subsequent posts in this series.
One question I need to address is whether philosophy would have come up with the real distinction if it were not for the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo.
0. I wanted to explore supposita in their difference from primary substances, but John the Commenter sidetracked me into the aporetics of primary substance. But it is a sidetrack worth exploring even if it doesn't loop back to the mainline. For it provides me more grist for my aporetic mill.
1. Metaphysics is a quest for the ultimately real, the fundamentally real, the ontologically basic. Aristotle, unlike his master Plato, held that such things as this man and that horse are ontologically basic. What is ontologically basic (o-basic) is tode ti, hoc aliquid, this something, e.g., this concrete individual man, Socrates, and that concrete individual donkey. Such individuals are being, ousia, in the primary sense. And so Socrates and his donkey can be called primary beings, or primary substances. Asinity there may be, but it can't be ontologically basic.
This is clearly the drift of Aristotle's thinking despite the numerous complications and embarrassments that arise when one enters into the details.
(If you think that there is 'substance' abuse in Aristotelian and scholastic precincts, I sympathize with you. You have to realize that 'substance' is used in different senses, and that these senses are technical and thus divergent from the senses of 'substance' in ordinary language.)
2. But of course every this something is a this-such: it has features, attributes, properties. This is a datum, not a theory. Socrates is a man and is excited by the turn the dialectic has taken, and this while seated on his donkey. Man is a substance-kind, while being excited and being seated are accidents. (Let us not worry about relations, a particularly vexing topic when approached within an Aristotelian-scholastic purview.) Setting aside also the difficult question of how a secondary substance such as the substance-kind man is related to Socrates, it is safe to say that for Aristotle such properties as being excited and being seated are theoretically viewed as accidents. So conceptualized, properties are not primary beings as they would be if they were conceptualized as mind-independent universals capable of existing unexemplified. Accidents by definition are not o-basic: If A is an accident of S, then A exists only 'in' S and not in itself. A depends on S for its existence, a mode of existence we can call inherence, while S does not depend for its existence on A.
3. So much for background. Now to the problem. Which is ontologically basic: Socrates together with his accidents, or Socrates taken in abstraction from his accidents?
What I want to argue is that a dilemma arises if we assume, as John the Commenter does, that Socrates taken together with his accidents is an accidental unity or accidental compound. A simple example of an accidental compound is seated-Socrates. Now I won't go into the reasons for positing these objects; I will just go along with John in assuming that they are there to be referred to.
Seated-socrates is a hylomorphic compound having Socrates as its matter and being seated as its form. But of course the matter of the accidental compound is itself a compound of prime matter and substantial form, while the form of the accidental compound is not a substantial form but a mere accident. The accidental compound is accidental because seated-Socrates does not exist at all the same times and all the same worlds as Socrates. So we make a tripartite distinction: there is a compound of prime matter and substantial form; there is an accident; and there is the inhering of the accident in the substance, e.g., Socrates' being seated, or seated-Socrates.
As Frank A. Lewis points out, accidental compounds are "cross-categorical hybrids." Thus seated-Socrates belongs neither to the category of substance nor to any non-substance category. One of its constituents is a substance and the other is an accident, but it itself is neither, which is why it is a cross-categorical hybrid entity.
The Dilemma
The dilemma arises on the assumption that Socrates together with his accidents is an accidental compound or accidental unity, and the dilemma dissolves if this assumption is false.
a. Either (i) Socrates together with his accidents is a primary substance or (ii) Socrates taken in abstraction from his accidents is a primary substance.
b. If (i), then Socrates is an accidental compound and thus a "cross-categorical hybrid" (F. A. Lewis) belonging neither to the category of substance nor to any non-substance category. Therefore, if (i), then Socrates is not a primary substance.
c. If (ii), then Socrates is not a concretum, but an abstractum, i.e., a product of abstraction inasmuch as one considers him in abstraction from his accidents. Therefore, if (ii), then Socrates is not a primary substance. For a primary substance must be both concrete and completely determinate. (These, I take it. are equivalent properties.) Primary substances enjoy full ontological status in Aristotle's metaphysics. They alone count as ontologically basic. They are his answer to the question, What is most fundamentally real? Clearly, Socrates taken in abstraction from his accidents is incompletely determinate and thus not fully real.
Therefore
d. On either horn, Socrates is not primary substance.
I need to answer three questions. This post addresses the first.
1. What is the difference between an Aristotelian primary substance and a supposit (hypostasis, suppositum)?
2. Is there any non-theological basis for this distinction?
3. If the answer to (2) is negative, is the addition of suppposita to one's Aristotelian ontology a case of legitimate metaphysical revision or a case of an ad hoc theoretical patch job? According to Marilyn McCord Adams, "Metaphysical revision differs from ad hoc theoretical patching insofar as it attempts to make the new data systematically unsurprising in a wider theoretical context." ("Substance and Supposits," p. 40)
The First Question
By 'substance' I mean an Aristotelian primary substance, an individual or singular complete concrete entity together with its accidents. Among the characteristics of substances are the following: substances, unlike universal properties, cannot be exemplified or instantiated; substances, unlike accidents, cannot inhere in anything; substances, unlike heaps and aggregates, are per se unities. Thus Socrates and his donkey are each a substance, but the mereological sum of the two is not a substance.
Now what is a supposit? Experts in medieval philosophy -- and I am not one of them, nota bene -- sometimes write as if there is no distinction between a substance and a supposit. Thus Richard Cross: "Basically a supposit is a complete being that is neither instantiated or exemplified, nor inherent in another." ("Relations, Universals, and the Absue of Tropes," PAS 79, 2005, p. 53.) And Marilyn McCord Adams speaks of Socrates and Plato as "substance individuals" and then puts "hypostases or supposits" in apposition to the first phrase. (PAS 79, 2005, p. 15)
My first question, then is: Is there any more-than-verbal difference between a substance and a supposit, and if so, what is it?
One answer that suggests itself is that, while every substance has a supposit, some substances have alien supposits. (I take this phrase from Adams, p. 31 et passim.) A substance has an alien supposit iff it is not its own supposit. I understand Aristotle to maintain or at least be committed to the proposition that every (primary) substance is essentially its own supposit. If so, then no substance is possibly such as to have an alien supposit. If alien supposition is metaphysically or broadly logically possible, however, then we have a ground for a more-than-terminological distinction between substances and supposits. Whether the converse of this conditional holds is a further question. For it may be that there is a ground for the distinction even if alien supposition is not possible.
Incarnation, Trinity, and the separated soul's survival between death and resurrection are theological examples of alien supposition. Whether there are non-theological examples is a further, and very important question, one the answer to which has consequences for questions (2) and (3) above.
The Incarnation is an example of alien supposition as I will now try to explain.
The orthodox view is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. Although the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as we read in the NT, the Word does not merely assume a human body, nor does it acquire a universal property, humanity; the Word assumes a particularized human nature, body and soul. The eternal Word assumes or 'takes on' a man, an individual man, with an intellectual soul and and animal body. But now a problem looms, one that can be articulated in terms of the following aporetic tetrad:
a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)
c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.
The tetrad is logically inconsistent: any three limbs taken in conjunction entail the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction (a) & (c) & (d) entails the negation of (b). The solution to the tetrad is to deny (d). One does this by maintaining that, while the individualized human nature of Christ is a substance, it is not a substance that supports itself: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity.
If the Incarnation as Chalcedonian orthodoxy understands it is actual, then it is possible. If so, alien supposition is possible, which straightaway entails a distinction between substance and supposit: while every substance has or is a supposit, not every substance has or is its own supposit. The individualized human nature of Christ is a supposited substance but is not a supposit.
Let me now say a bit about the Trinity. Here too a problem looms that can be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad.
a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
e. There are exactly three divine persons, Father, Son, Holy Ghost . (Rejection of 'Quaternity')
f. The individualized nature of God is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.
Again, the tetrad is inconsistent, and again the solution is to reject (d) by saying that, while the individualized divine nature is a primary substance, it is not one that supposits itself: it has three alien supposits, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
The Son is thus the alien supposit of both God's divine nature and Christ's human nature.
My first question concerned the difference between a substance and supposit. My tentative answer is that while only substances can be supposits, there are substances that are not their own supposits nor are they supposits for anything else, an example being the individualized human nature of Christ.
Is there a non-theological basis for the distinction? if not, then the suspicion arises that the distinction is purely ad hoc, crafted to save tenets of orthodox Christian theology. But this is a question for another occasion.
Bill, what follows is what I consider the most important objection against your theory. It seems to me that in order to keep the basic meaning of "universal" and "particular" the following definitions must be assumed:
1. A universal is that which is (truly) predicable of many particular instances. BV: I agree if 'many' means two or more. I would add that a universal is a repeatable entity. But I suspect Novak will not agree with my addition. I suspect his view is that there are no universals in extramental reality. Universals are concepts. Hence I would expect him to balk at 'entity.'
2. X is an instance of a given universal U iff U is predicated of X. BV: I would say 'predicable' instead of 'predicated.' Predication is something we do in thought and with words. A universal can have an instance whether or not any predication is taking place.
3. U1 is subordinate to U2 iff all instances of U1 are instances of U2. This is expressed in language in the form "Every U1 is an U2" - for example, "Every man is an animal". BV: OK.
4. Every universal has at least some possible instances, unless it is intrinsically inconsistent. Now whiteness and color are universals. By common sense, color is superordinate to whiteness. So, every whiteness is a color. Peter's whiteness, on the other hand, is a particular. We must assume that Peter's whiteness is an instance of whiteness, and also of color - since whiteness and color are not intrinsically inconsistent and there are no more plausible candidates to [be] their instances than Peter's whiteness, Bob's blackness etc. BV: So far, so good!
But here comes the problem. If Peter's whiteness contains whiteness, then Peter's color contains color as its constituent. BV: It is true that Peter is white, and it is true that if Peter is white, then he is colored. But it doesn't follow that there is the accident Peter's coloredness. Accidents are real (extramental) items. Peter really exists and his whiteness really exists. But there is not, in addition to Peter's whiteness, the accident Peter's coloredness.
Argument 1: It is accidental that Peter is white (or pale) due perhaps to a deficiency of sunlight. But it is not accidental that Peter is colored. Peter is a concrete material particular, and necessarily, every such particular has some color or other. Therefore, being colored is not an accident of Peter. Being colored is essential to Peter.
Argument 2: The truth-maker of 'Peter is white' is Peter's being white. But Peter's being white is also the truth-maker of 'Peter is colored.' Therefore, there is no need to posit in reality, besides Peter's being white, Peter's being colored.
I therefore say that there is no such accident as Peter's being colored. Consequently, the rest of Novak's reasoing is moot.
You may perhaps say that Peter's whiteness also contains color because whiteness contains color, but certainly color does not contain whiteness in that case (else they would coincide), and therefore Peter's color does not contain whiteness.
BV: We have to be careful not to equivocate on 'contain.' In one sense of 'contain,' whiteness contains color or coloredness. We could call this conceptual inclusion: whiteness includes coloredness as a part. In a second sense of 'contain, ' if x is an ontological constituent of y, then y contains x. Thus the accidental compound [Peter + whiteness] contains the substance Peter and the accident whiteness, but does not contain them in the way whiteness contains color.
Consequently, Peter's color is not an instance of whiteness. But this contradicts the fact that Peter's color just is Peter's whiteness, because Peter's whiteness is a color (by def. 3, assuming that whiteness is subordinate to color), and there is no other color in Peter than his whiteness (let us so stipulate).
Put very simply: if Peter's whiteness is just Peter+whiteness+NE+time, then Peter's color is just Peter+color+NE+time, but then Peter's whiteness is not Peter's color. But this is wrong since whiteness is subordinate to color and so any instance of whiteness must be identical to an instance of color.
BV: Novak's argument could be put as follows:
a. If Peter's whiteness is a complex having among its constituents the universal whiteness, then Peter's coloredness is a complex having among its constituents the universal coloredness.
b. These are numerically distinct complexes.
Therefore
c. Peter's whiteness is not Peter's coloredness.
d. (c) is false.
Therefore
e. Peter's whiteness is not a complex.
By my lights, the argument is unsound because (a) is false as I already explained: there is no such complex as Peter's coloredness.
1.If substance S exists and accident A exists, it does not follow that A inheres in S. An accident cannot exist without existing in some substance or other, but if A exists it does not follow that A exists in S. If redness is an accident, it cannot exist except in some substance; but if all we know is that redness exists and that Tom exists, we cannot validly infer that Tom is red, i.e., that redness inheres in Tom.
2. So if A inheres in S, this inherence is something in addition to the existence of S and the existence of A. There is more to Tom's being red than Tom and redness. We must distinguish three items: S, A, and the tie of inherence. S and A are real (mind-independent) items. Presumably the tie of inherence is as well. Presumably we don't want to say that A inheres in S in virtue of a mental synthesis on our part.
3. My question: what is inherence? What is the nature of this tie? That the accident of a substance is tied to it, and indeed necessarily tied to it, is clear. The nature, not the existence, of the tie is what is in question.
4. Inherence is not an external relation on pain of Bradley's regress.
5. Inherence is not identity. This was argued earlier.
6. A is not a part of S. This too was argued earlier.
7. Is S a part of A? For Brentano, an accident is a whole a proper part of which is the substance itself -- but there is no other proper part in addition to the substance! Every part of the accident is either the substance or a part of the substance. This I find bizarre. Suppose a chocolate bar is both brown and sticky. What distinguishes the brownness accident from the stickiness accident if both have as sole proper part the chocolate bar? (For a very clear exposition of Brentano's theory, see R. Chisholm, "Brentano's Theory of Substance and Accident" in his Brentano and Meinong Studies.)
8. I made a similar suggestion, namely, that S is a part of A, except that I assayed accidents as akin to facts. This has its own difficulties.
9. Here is Dr. Novak's scholastic suggestion:
I take the connexion between S and A to be that of a receptive potency and its corresponding act. S contains an intrinsic relation of "informability" to all its possible accidents, and A contains an intrinsic relation of informing toward S. Together these two constitute an accidental whole of which they are not just parts but complementary intrinsic causes: S is its material cause and A its formal cause. They are unified in jointly intrinsically co-causing the one accidental composite.
This implies that we must distinguish among three items: the substance (Peter, say), his accidents (being hot, being sunburned, being angry, being seated etc.) and various accidental wholes each composed of the substance and one accident.
So it seems that Novak is committed to accidental compounds such as [Socrates + seatedness] where Socrates is the material cause of the compound and seatedness the formal cause. Moreover, the substance has the potentiality to be informed in various ways, and each accident actualizes one such potentiality.
Recall that what we are trying to understand is accidental change. And recall that I agree with Novak that we cannot achieve a satisfactory analysis in terms of just a concrete particular, universals, and an exemplification relation. If Peter changes in respect of F-ness, and F-ness is a universal, then of course there are two times t and t* such that Peter exemplifies F-ness at t but does not exemplify F-ness at t*. But this is not sufficient for real accidental change in or at Peter. For the change is not relational but intrinsic to Peter. So, whether or not we need universals, we need a category of entities to help us explain real change. As Novak appreciates, these items must be particulars, not universals.
What we have been arguing about is the exact nature of these particulars. I suggested earlier that they are property-exemplifications. Novak on the basis of the above quotation seems to be suggesting that they are accidental compounds.
Suppose Socrates goes from seated to standing to seated again. In this case of accidental change we have one substance, three accidents, and three accidental compounds for a total of seven entities. Why three accidents instead of two? Because the second seatedness is numerically different from the first. (Recall Locke's principle that nothing has two beginnings of existence.) And because the second accident is numerically distinct from the first, the first and the third accidental compound are numerically distinct.
When Socrates stands up, [Socrates + seatedness] passes out of being and [Socrates + standingness] comes into being and stays in being until Socrates sits down again. So these accidental compounds are rather ephemeral objects, unlike Socrates.
Perhaps they help us understand change. But they raise their own questions. Socrates and seated-Socrates are not identical. Presumably they are accidentally the same. Is accidental sameness the same as contingent identity? What are the logical properties of accidental sameness? Is an Ockham's Razor type objection appropriately brought against the positing of accidental compounds?
Dr. Novak is invited to tell me which of the following propositions he accepts, which he rejects, and why:
0. I have reservations about an ontology in terms of substances and accidents, but anyone who adopts such an ontology needs to provide a detailed theory of accidents. This post sketches a theory. It has roots in Aristotle, Brentano, Chisholm, Frank A. Lewis, and others who have written about accidental compounds or accidental unities.
1. Accidents are particulars, not universals, where particulars, unlike universals, are defined in terms of unrepeatability or uninstantiability.
2. The accidents of a substance are properties of that substance. Tom's redness, for example, is a property of him. That there are properties is a datanic claim; that some of them are accidents is a theoretical claim. Accidental properties are those a thing need not have to exist. I am using 'property' in a fairly noncommittal way. Roughly, a property is a predicable entity.
3. It follows from (1) and (2) that some properties are particulars.
4. A substance S and its accident A are both particulars. S is a concrete particular while A is an abstract particular. For example, Tom is a concrete particular; his redness is an abstract particular. It is abstract because there is more to Tom than his being red.
5. Accidents are identity- and existence-dependent upon the substances of which they are the accidents. An accident cannot be the accident it is, nor can it exist, except 'in' the very substance of which it is an accident. Accidents are not merely dependent on substances; they are dependent on the very substances of which they are the accidents. 'In' is not to be taken spatially but as expressing ontological dependence. If the being of substances is esse, the being of accidents is inesse. These are two different modes of being.
6. It follows from (5) that accidents are non-transferrable both over time and across possible worlds. For example, Peter's fear cannot migrate to Paul: it cannot somehow leave Peter and take up residence in Paul. Suppose Peter and Paul are both cold to the same degree. If coldness is an accident, then each has his own coldness. The coldnesses are numerically distinct. They cannot be exchanged in the way jackets can be exchanged. Suppose Peter and Paul both own exactly similar jackets. The two men can exchange jackets. What they cannot do is exchange accidents such as the accident, being jacketed. Each man has his own jacketedness.
Now for a modal point. There is no possible world in which Peter's coldness exists but Peter does not. Peter's coldness does not necessarily exist, but it is necessarily such that, if it does exist, then Peter exists. And of course the accident cannot exist except by existing 'in' Peter. So we can say that Peter's coldness is tied necessarily to Peter and to Peter alone: in every possible world in which Peter's coldness exists, Peter exists; and in no possible world does Peter's coldness inhere in anything distinct from Peter. The same goes for Peter's jacketedness. Peter's jacket, however, is not necessarily tied to Peter: it can exst without him just as he can exist without it. Both are substances; both are logically capable of independent existence.
The modal point underins the temporal point. Accidents cannot migrate over time because they are necessarily tied to the substances of which they are the accidents.
7. It follows that the superficial linguistic similarity of 'Peter's jacket' and 'Peter's weight' masks a deep ontological difference: the first expression makes reference to two substances while the second makes reference to a substance and its accident.
8 If A is an accident of S, then A is not related to S by any external relation on pain of Bradley's regress.
9 If A is an accident of S, then A is not identical to S. For if A were identical to S, then A would be an accident of itself. This cannot be since 'x is an accident of y' is irreflexive.
10. If A is an accident of S, then A cannot be an improper or proper part of S. Not an improper part for then A would be identical to S. Not a proper part of S because accidents depend on substances for their identity and existence. No proper part of a whole, however, depends for its existence and identity on the whole: it is the other way around: wholes depend for their identity and existence on their parts.
11. How then are we to understand the tie or connection between S and A? This is the connection expressed when we say, for example, that Socrates is white. It is an intimate connection but not as intimate as identity. We need a tie that is is less intimate than identity but more intimate than a relation.
We saw in #10 that an accident cannot be a part (ontological consituent) of its substance. But what is to stop us from theorizing that an accident is a whole one of the proper parts of which is the substance? This is not as crazy as it sounds.
12. Let our example be the accidental predication, 'Socrates is seated.' Start by giving this a reistic translation: 'Socrates is a seated thing.' Take the referent of 'Socrates' to be the substance, Socrates. Take the referent of 'a seated thing' to be the accidental compound Socrates + seatedness. This compound entity has two primary constituents, Socrates, and the property of being seated. It has as a secondary constituent the tie designated by '+.' Now read 'Socrates is a seated thing' as expressing, not the strict identity, but the accidental sameness of the two particulars Socrates and Socrates + seatedness. Thus the 'is' in our original sentence is construed, not as expressing instantiation, or identity, but as expressing accidental sameness. Accidental sameness ties the concrete particular Socrates to the abstract particular Socrates + seatedness.
13. The accidental compound is an extralinguistic particular having four constituents: a concrete particular, a nexus of exemplification, a universal, and a temporal index. Thus we can think of it as the thin fact of Socrates' being seated. 'Thin' because not all of Socrates' properties are included in this fact.
14. My suggestion, then, is that accidents are thin facts. To test this theory we need to see if thin facts have all the features of accidents. Well, we have seen (#1) that accidents are particulars. Thin facts are as well. This is a case of what Armstrong calls the Victory of Particularity: a particular's exemplification of a universal is a particular.
Accidents are properties and so are thin facts: both are ways a substance is. Both are predicable entities. 'Socrates is seated' predicates something of something. On the present theory it predicates an abstract particular of a concrete particular where the predicative tie is not the tie of instantiation (exemplification) but the tie of accidental sameness.
Accidents are abstract particulars, and so are thin facts. They are abstract because they do not capture the whole reality or quiddity of the substance.
Accidents depend on substances for their identity and existence. The same is true of thin facts. A fact is a whole of parts and depends for its identity and existence on its parts, including the substance.
Accidents are non-transferrable. The same holds for thin facts.
Accidents are necessarily tied to the substances of which they are accidents. The same goes for thin facts: the identity of a thin fact depends on its substance constituent.
An accident is not identical to its host substance. The same is true of thin facts. Socrates' being seated is not identical to Socrates.
An accident is not externally related to its substance. The same is obviously truth of thin facts.
Accidents are not parts of substances. The same holds for thin facts.
Finally, no accident has two beginnings of existence. If Elliot is sober, then drunk, then sober again, his first sobriety is numerically distinct from his second: the first sobriety does not come into existence again when our man sobers up. The same is true of thin facts. Elliot's beng sober at t is distinct from Elliot's being sober at t*.
15. On the above theory, an accident is a complex. It follows that an accident is not a trope, pace Dr. Novak. Tropes are very strange animals. A whiteness trope is an abstract particular that is also a property and is also ontologically simple. An example is the particular redness of Tom the tomato. I can pick out this trope using 'the redness of Tom and Tom alone' where the 'of' is a subjective genitive. But note that the 'of Tom and Tom alone' has no ontological correlate. The trope, in itself, i.e., apart from our way of referring to it, is simple, not complex. And yet it is necessarily tied to Tom. This, to my mind, makes no sense, as I explained in earlier posts. So I reject tropes, and with them the identification of accidents with tropes.
My conclusion, then, is that IF -- a big 'if' -- talk of substances and accidents is ultimately tenable and philosophically fruitful, THEN accidents must be ontologically complex entities. Anyone who endorses accidents is therefore a constituent ontologist.
Constituent ontologists would seem to have a serious problem accounting for accidental change. Suppose an avocado goes from unripe to ripe over a two day period. That counts as an accidental change: one and the same substance (the avocado) alters in respect of the accidental property of being unripe. It has become different qualitatively while remaining the same numerically.
This is a problem for constituent ontologists if C-ontologists are committed to what Michael J. Loux calls "Constituent Essentialism." ("What is Constituent Ontology?" Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag 2012, Novak et al. eds., p. 52) Undoubtedly, many of them are, if not all. Constituent Essentialism is the C-ontological analog of mereological essentialism. We can put it like this:
Constituent Essentialism: A thing has each of its ontological parts necessarily. This implies that a thing cannot gain or lose an ontological part without ceasing to be same thing.
Mereological Essentialism: A thing has each of its commonsense parts necessarily. This implies that a thing cannot gain or lose a commonsense part without ceasing to be the same thing.
To illustrate, suppose an ordinary particular (OP) such as our avocado is a bundle of compresent universals. The universals are the ontological parts of the OP as a whole. The first of the two principles entails that ordinary particulars cannot change. For accidental (alterational as opposed to existential) change is change in respect of properties under preservation of numerical diachronic identity. But preservation of identity is not possible on Constituent Essentialism. The simple bundle-of-universals theory is incompatible with the fact of change. But of course there are other types of C-ontology.
I agree with Loux that Constituent Essentialism is a "framework principle" (p. 52) of C-ontology. It cannot be abandoned without abandoning C-ontology. If an item (of whatever category) has ontological parts at all, then it is difficult to see how it could fail to have each and all of these parts essentially. And of course the fact of accidental change and what it entails, namely, persistence of the same thing over time, cannot be denied. So the 'argument from change' does seem to score against primitive versions of the bundle-of-universals theory.
I don't want to discuss whether more sophisticated C-ontological theories such as Hector Castaneda's Guise Theory escape this objection. I want to consider whether relational ontology does any better. I take relational ontology to imply that no item of any category has ontological parts. Thus R-ontology implies that no type of particular has ontological parts. A particular is just an unrepeatable. My cat Max is a particular and so are each of his material parts, and their material parts. If Max's blackness is an accident of him as substance, then this accident is a particular. The Armstrongian state of affairs of Max's being black is a particular. Mathematical sets are particulars. Particulars need not be concrete. Sets are abstract particulars in one sense of 'abstract.' Tropes are abstract particulars in another sense of 'abstract.' If an entity is not a particular, an unrepeatable, then it is a universal, a repeatable.
My question is whether we can explain real (as opposed to 'Cambridge') accidental change without positing particulars having ontological constituents. I will argue that we cannot, and that therefore R-ontology is untenable.
Lukas Novak presents an argument to the conclusion that the fact of accidental change requires the positing of particulars that have ontological constituents. Here is my take on Novak's argument:
Peter goes from being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras to being knowledgeable about it. This is an accidental change: one and the same concrete particular, Peter, has different properties at different times. Now a necessary condition of accidental change is that one and the same item have different properties at different times. But is it a sufficient condition? Suppose Peter is F at time t and not F at time t* (t* later than t). Suppose that F-ness is a universal but not a constituent of Peter and that Peter is F by exemplifying F-ness. Universals so construed are transcendent in the sense that they are not denizens of the world of space and time. They belong in a realm apart and are related, if they are related, to spatiotemporal particulars by the external relation of exemplification.
It follows on these assumptions that if Peter undergoes real accidental change that Peter goes from exemplifying the transcendent universal F-ness at t to not exemplifying it at t*. That is: he stands in the exemplification relation to F-ness at t, but ceases so to stand to t*. But there has to be more to the change than this. For, as Novak points out, the change is in Peter. It is intrinsic to him and cannot consist merely in a change in a relation to a universal in a realm apart. After all, transcendent universals do not undergo real change. Any change in such a universal is 'merely Cambridge' as we say in the trade. In other words, the change in F-ness when it 'goes' from being exemplified by Peter to not being exemplified by Peter is not a real change in the universal but a merely relational change. The real change in this situation must therefore be in or at Peter. For a real, not merely Cambridge, change has taken place.
Thus it seems to Novak and to me that, even if there are transcendent universals and ordinary concrete particulars, we need another category of entity to account for accidental change, a category that that I will call that of property-exemplifications. (We could also call them accidents. But we must not, pace Novak, call them tropes.) Thus Peter's being cold at t is a property-exemplification and so is Peter's not being cold at t*. Peter's change in respect of temperature involves Peter as the diachronically persisting substratum of the change, the universal coldness, and two property-exemplifications, Peter's being cold at t and Peter's being not cold at t*.
These property-exemplifications, however, are particulars, not universals even though each has a universal as a constituent. This is a special case of what Armstrong calls the Victory of Particularity: the result of a particular exemplifying a universal is a particular. Moreover, these items have natures or essences: it is essential to Peter's being cold that it have coldness as a constituent. (Thus Constituent Essentialism holds for these items. ) Hence property- exemplifications are particulars, but not bare particulars. They are not bare because they have natures or essences. Further, these property-exemplifications are abstract particulars in that they do not exhaust the whole concrete reality of Peter at a time. Thus Peter is not merely cold at a time, but has other properties besides.
It seems that the argument shows that there have to be these abstract particulars -- we could call them accidents instead of property-exemplifications -- if we are to account for real accidental change. But these partculars have constituents. Peter's coldness, for example, has Peter and coldness as constituents. It is a complex, not a simple. (If it were a simple, there would be nothing about it to tie it necessarily to Peter. Tropes are simples, so accidents are not tropes.) So it seems to me that what Novak has provided us with is an argument for C-ontology, for the view that the members of at least one category of entity have ontological constituents.
Loux's argument notwithstanding, a version of C-ontology seems to be required if we are to make sense of accidental change.
But how are accidents such as Peter's coldness connected or tied -- to avoid the word 'related' -- to a substance such as Peter?
First of all, an accident A of a substance S does not stand in an external relation to S -- otherwise a Bradleyan regress arises. (Exercise for the reader: prove it.)
Second, A is not identical to S. Peter's coldness is not identical to Peter. For there is more to Peter than his being cold. So what we need is a tie or connection that is less intimate than identity but more intimate than an external relation. The part-whole tie seems to fit the bill. A proper part of a whole is not identical to the whole, but it is not externally related to it either inasmuch as wholes depend for their identity and existence on their parts.
Can we say that Peter's accidents are ontological parts of Peter? No. This would put the cart before the horse. Peter's coldness is identity- and existence-dependent on Peter. Peter is ontologically prior to his accidents. No whole, however, is ontologically prior to its parts: wholes are identity and existence-dependent on their parts. So the accidents of a substance are not ontological parts of it. But they have ontological parts. Strangely enough, if A is an accident of substance S, then S is an ontological part of A. Substances are ontological parts of their accidents! Brentano came to a view like this.
More on Brentano later. For now, my thesis is just that the fact of real accidental change requires the positing of particulars that have ontological constituents and that, in consequence, R-ontology is to be rejected. Constituent ontology vindicatus est.
1. Uncontroversially, ordinary material particulars such as cats and cups have parts, material parts. Equally uncontroversial is that they have properties and stand in relations. That things have properties and stand in relations is a plain Moorean fact beyond the reach of reasonable controversy. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup. So far we are at the pre-philosophical level, the level of data. We start philosophizing when we ask what properties are and what it is for a thing to have a property. So the philosophical question is not whether there are properties -- of course there are! -- but what they are. Neither is it a philosophical question whether things have properties -- of course they do! The question concerns how this having is to be understood.
What we want to understand are the nature of properties and the nature of property-possession. Qua ontologist, I don't care what properties there are; I care what properties are. And qua ontologist, I don't care what properties are instantiated; I care what instantiation is.
2. For example, is the blueness of my cup a repeatable entity, a universal, or an unrepeatable entity, a particular (e.g.,a trope)? That is one of several questions one can ask about properties. A second is whether the cup has the property by standing in an external relation to it -- the relation of exemplification -- or by containing it as an ontological or metaphysical part or constituent. Can property-possession be understood quasi-mereologically, as analogous to a part-whole relation? Or is it more like the relation of a thing to a predicate that is true of it? The predicate 'blue' is true of my cup. But no one would get it into his head to think of the word 'blue' as a part of the cup -- in any sense of 'part.' 'Blue' is a word and no concrete material extralinguistic thing has as a word as a part. The relation between 'blue' and the cup to which it applies is external: each term of the relation can exist without the other. Indeed my cup could be blue even if there were no English language and no such word as 'blue.' But if x is an ordinary part or an ontological constituent of y, then y cannot exist without x. So one might analogize properties to predicates and maintain that properties are external to the things that have them and are related to them by exemplification.
3. At a first approximation, the issue that divides constituent ontologists (C-ontologists) and those that N. Wolterstorff rather infelicitously calls 'relational ontologists' (R-ontologists) is whether or not ordinary particulars have ontological or metaphysical parts. C-ontologists maintain that ordinary particulars have such parts in addition to their commonsense parts, and that among these ontological parts are (some of) the properties of the ordinary particular. R-ontologists deny that ordinary particulars have ontological parts, and consequently deny that ordinary particulars have any of their properties by having them as parts.
4. Let us now examine E. J. Lowe's explanation of the distinction. After reminding us that C-ontologists ascribe to ordinary particulars ontological structure in addition to ordinary mereological structure, he writes: ". . . what is crucial for an ontology to qualify as 'constituent' is that it should maintain that objects have an ontological structure involving 'constituents' which belong to ontological categories other than the category of object itself." ("Essence and Ontology" in Novak et al. eds., Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag 2012, pp. 102-103.) Lowe's characterization of the distinction goes beyond mine in that Lowe requires that the constituents of an object belong to categories other than that of object. An object for Lowe is an Aristotlelian primary (individual) substance. For me it suffices for an ontology to be 'constituent' that it allow that some entities have ontological constituents.
Lowe cites hylomorphism as an example of a constituent ontology. On both Lowe's and my understanding of 'constituent ontology,' hylomorphism is a clear example of a C-ontology. On hylomorphism individual substances are combinations of form and matter where neither the form nor the matter are substances in their own right. But is it true to say or imply, as Lowe does, that forms and matters are members of categories? This strikes me as a strange thing to say or imply. Consider just the forms of individual substances. I would not say that they are members of a category of entity alongside the other categories, but that, on hylomorphism, they are 'principles' (as the Thomists say) invoked in the analysis of individual substances. Form and matter are ontological constituents of an Aristotelian primary substance. But that is not to say that these constituents belong to categories other than that of primary (individual) substance. It is true that the form of a substance is not itself a substance. It does not follow, however, that the form of a substance belongs to an ontological category other than that of substance.
So that is my first quibble with Lowe's explanation. Here is my second. It seems that Lowe's explanation rules out one-category constituent ontologies. Keith Campbell advertises his ontology as 'one-category.' (Abstract Particulars, Basil Blackwell, 1990)) The one category is that of tropes. Everything is either a trope or a construction from tropes. Campbell's is therefore a one-category constituent ontology. Lowe's explanation, however, implies that there must be at least two categories of entity, the category object (individual substance) and one or more categories of entity whose members serve as constituents of objects.
A third problem with Lowe's explanation is that it seems to rule our Bergmann-type C-ontologies that posit bare or thin particulars. Lowe's explanation seems to suggest that the constituents of a particular cannot include any particulars. If a bare particular is a particular, then an ordinary particular has a particular as a constituent in violation of Lowe's explanation. (It is a very interesting question whether a bare particular is a particular. I am tempted to argue that 'bare' functions as an alienans adjective so that a bare particular is not a particular but rather the ontological factor of particularity in an ordinary particular. But this is a separate topic that I will get to in a separate post.)
5. I now want to discuss whether Lowe's four-category ontology succeeds in being neither a C-ontology nor an R-ontology, as he claims.
First of all the question whether it is a C-ontology. Lowe's categorial scheme is approximately as depicted in this diagram:
Lowe speaks of Kinds (substantial universals) being instantiated by Objects (substantial particulars), and of Attributes (non-substantial universals) being instantiated by Modes (non-substantial particulars). Not shown in the above Ontological Square is a diagonal relation of Exemplification running from Attributes (non-substantial universals) to Objects (substantial particulars). Consider, for example, the horse Dobbin. It is an individual substance that instantiates the natural kind horse. Dobbin also has various accidental properties, or Attributes, whiteness, for example. Dobbin exemplifies the universal whiteness. The whiteness of Dobbin, however, is unique to him. It is not a universal, but a particular, albeit a non-substantial particular. It is a Mode (trope) that instantiates the Attribute whiteness. Dobbin is characterized by this Mode, just as the Kind horse is characterized by the Attribute whiteness. On Lowe's scheme there are three distinct relations: Characterization, Instantiatiation, and Exemplification. They relate the members of four distinct fundamental ontological categories: Kinds, Objects, Attributes, and Modes.
Are modes constituents of the objects they characterize? Is Dobbin's whiteness a constituent of Dobbin? If it is, then Lowe's ontology counts as a C-ontology. Lowe plausibly argues that modes are not constituents of objects. I take the argument to be as follows. Modes are identity-dependent on the objects they characterize. Thus Dobbin's whiteness would not be what it is apart from Dobbin and could not exist apart from Dobbin. It follows that the mode in question cannot be an ontological 'building block' out of which Dobbin, together with other items, is constructed. An object is ontologically prior to its modes, which fact entails that modes cannot be constituents of objects.
So far, so good. But what about modes themselves? Do they have constituents? Or are they simple? If modes have constituents, then Lowe's is a C-ontology after all. Dobbin's whiteness could be taken to be Dobbins-exemplifying-the universal whiteness, or it could be taken to be a simple item lacking internal structure, a simple instance of whiteness. If it is a simple item, just an instance of whiteness, then it cannot have any necessary connection to Dobbin or to any object. Why then would it be necessarily identity- and existence-dependent on Dobbin? Why would it be so dependent on any object? There would be nothing about it to ground such a necessary connection. And if it were a simple, then it could very well be a constituent of an object. Lowe's argument against the constituency of the whiteness mode requires that the mode have a necessary connection to Dobbin, that it be the whiteness of Dobbin and of him alone. The mode cannot have that necessary connection unless it is a complex.
If, on the other hand, Dobbin's whiteness is a complex item, then it has as constituents, Dobbin, exemplification, and the universal whiteness, in which case Lowe's ontolology is a C-ontology. For if an ontology has even one category of entity the members of which have ontological constituents, then that ontology is a C-ontology.
My argument can also be put as follows. On Lowe's scheme, modes make up a fundamental category. As fundamental, modes are not derivative from other categories. So it cannot be that a mode is a complex formed by an object's exemplifying an attribute, e.g., Dobbin's exemplifying the non-substantial universal, whiteness. But if modes are simple, why should modes be identity-dependent on objects? It is clear that the whiteness of Dobbin cannot be an ontological part of Dobbin if the whiteness is necessarily tied to Dobbin to be what it is. For then it presupposes the logically antecedent existence of Dobbin. But the only way the whiteness can be necessarily tied to Dobbin is if it is a complex -- which is inconsistent with modes' being a fundamental and irreducible category.
Skin and seeds are proper parts of a tomato, and the tomato is an improper part of itself. But what about such properties as being red, being ripe, being a tomato? Are they parts of the tomato? The very idea will strike many as born of an elementary confusion, as a sort of Rylean category mistake. "Your tomato is concrete and so are its parts; properties are abstract; nothing concrete can have abstract parts." Or: "Look, properties are predicable entities; parts are not. Having seeds is predicable of the tomato but not seeds! You're talking nonsense!"
I concede that the notion that the properties of an ordinary particular are parts thereof, albeit in some extended unmereological sense of 'part,' is murky. Murky as it is, the motivation for the view is fairly clear, and the alternative proposed by relational ontologists is open to serious objection. First I will say something in motivation of the constituent-ontological (C-ontological view). Then I will raise objections to the relational-ontological (R-ontological) approach.
For C-Ontology
Plainly, the blueness of my coffee cup belongs to the cup; it is not off in a realm apart. The blueness (the blue, if you will) is at the cup, right here, right now. I see that the cup before me now is blue. This seeing is not a quasi-Platonic visio intellectualis but a literal seeing with the eyes. How else would I know that the cup is blue, and in need of a re-fill, if not by looking at the cup? Seeing that the cup is blue, I see blueness (blue). I see blueness here and now in the mundus sensibilis. How could I see (with the eyes) that the cup is blue without seeing (with the same eyes) blueness? If blueness is a universal, then I see a universal, an instantiated universal. If blueness is a trope, then I see a trope, a trope compresent with others. Either way I see a property. So some properties are visible. This would be impossible if properties are abstract objects as van Inwagen and the boys maintain. Whether uninstantiated or instantiated abstract properties are invisible.
Properties such as blueness and hardness, etc. are empirically detectable. Blueness is visible while hardness is tangible. That looks to be a plain datum. Their being empirically detectable rules out their being causally inert abstracta off in a quasi-Platonic realm apart. For I cannot see something without causally interacting with it. So not only is the cup concrete, its blueness is as well.
This amounts to an argument that properties are analogous to parts. They are not parts in the strict mereological sense. They are not physical parts. So let's call them metaphysical or ontological constituents. The claim, then, is that ordinary particulars such as tomatoes and cups have their properties, or at least some of them, by having them as ontological constituents. To summarize the argument:
1. Some of the properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are empirically detectable at the places the particulars occupy and at the times they occupy them.
2. No abstract object is empirically detectable. Therefore:
3. Some properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are not abtract objects. Therefore:
4. It is reasonable to conjecture that some of the properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are analogous to (proper) parts of them.
Against R-Ontology
I grant that the above is not entirely clear, and that it raises questions that are not easy to answer. But does R-ontology fare any better? I don't think so.
Suppose an R-ontologist is staring at my blue cup. Does he see something colorless? Seems he would have to if the blueness of the cup is an abstract object merely related by exemplification to the concrete cup. Abstracta are invisible. Suppose we introduce 'stripped particular' to designate the R-ontological counterpart of what C-ontologists intend with 'bare particular' and 'thin particular.' A stripped particular is an ordinary particular devoid of empirically detectable properties. If the R-ontologist thinks that my cup is a stripped particular, then he is surely wrong. Call this the Stripped Particular Objection.
But if the R-ontologist agrees with me that the blueness is empirically detectable, then he seems to be involved in an unparsimonious duplication of properties. There is the invisible abstract property in Plato's heaven or Frege's Third Reich that is expressed by the open sentence or predicate '___ is blue.' And there is the property (or property-instance) that even the R-ontologist sees when he stares at a blue coffee cup.
Isn't that one property too many? What work does the abstract property do? More precisely, what ontological work does it do? I needn't deny that it does some semantic work: it serves as the sense (Fregean Sinn) of the corresponding predicate. But we are doing ontology here, not semantics. We want to understand what the world -- extramental, extralinguistic reality -- must be like if a sentence like 'This cup is blue' is true. We want to understand the property-possession in reality that underlies true predications at the level of language. We are not concerned here with the apparatus by which we represent the world; we are concerned with the world represented.
In my existence book I called the foregoing the Duplication Objection, though perhaps I could have hit upon a better moniker. The abstract property is but an otiose duplicate of the property that does the work, the empirically detectable propery that induces causal powers in the thing that has it.
So I present the R-ontologist with a dilemma: either you are embracing stripped particulars or you are involved in a useless multiplication of entities.
Coda
It's Christmas Eve and there is more to life than ontology. So I'll punch the clock for today. But there are two important questions we need to pursue. (1) Couldn't we reject the whole dispute and be neither a C- nor an R-ontologist? (2) Should ontologists be in the business of explanation at all? (My point that abstract properties are useless for purposes of accounting for predication and property-possession presupposes that there is such a legitimate enterprise as philosophical explanation.)
I asked commenter John whether he thought that temporal parts -- assuming that there are temporal parts -- would count as ontological constituents of an ordinary particular such as an avocado. Here is what he said:
. . . I believe that I would say that the temporal parts of an avocado are ontological constituents of it. A thing's temporal parts are much more like a thing's material parts than any other putative constituent of that object, so I would say that if a thing's material parts are ontological constituents of it, then so too are a thing's temporal parts.
But I don't think I would say that this commits perdurantists to constituent ontology in any interesting sense. I have always understood the contrast between constituent and relational ontologies to be primarily a matter of how a thing relates to its properties: does a thing have properties by standing in some external relation to those properties, or instead by having those properties somehow 'immanent' in it? Perhaps this is wrong. But if it's right, then I would say that perdurantists believe that the temporal parts of a thing are among its ontological constituents, but that this does not commit them to any interesting version of constituent ontology.
John's response is a reasonable one, but it does highlight some of the difficulties in clarifying the difference between constituent ontology (C-ontology) and relational ontology (R-ontology).
One of the difficulties is to specify what exactly is meant by 'ontological constituent.' John takes the material parts of a thing to be ontological constituents of it. I don't. Material parts are ordinary mereological parts. For me, ontological constituents are quasi-mereological metaphysical parts to be contrasted with physical (material) parts. Ontological parts are those parts that contribute to an entity's ontological structure. R-ontologists deny that ordinary concrete particulars have any ontological structure. This is not to deny that they have mereological structure. So R-ontologists have no use for ontological parts (constituents). But they have plenty of use for material parts as we all do. 'Ontological' and 'metaphysical' are interchangeable adjectives in this context.
An avocado is an improper physical part of itself. Among its proper physical parts are the skin, the meat, and the pit. Of course, each of these has proper physical parts, and the parts have parts. All of these parts are parts in the strict mereological sense of 'part.' Now consider the dark green (or greenness) of the skin. It is not a physical or material or spatial part of the skin. I can't peel it off the skin or cut it up or eat it. If it is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part of the skin. And the same goes for every other property of the skin: if is is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part. These metaphysical property-parts together perhaps with some other metaphysical parts (bare or thin particulars, various sorts of nexus, Castanedan ontological operators. . .) make up what we can call the ontological structure of an ordinary particular. This quasi-mereological ontological structure is distinct from the strictly mereological structure of the object in question.
Everyone agrees that things like avocados and aardvarks and asteroids have physical parts. But not all agree that they have in addition metaphysical parts. As I see it, the issue that divides C-ontologists from R-ontologists is the question whether concrete particulars have metaphysical parts in addition to their physical parts where the thing's properties are among its metaphysical parts. C-ontologists say yes; R-ontologists, no.
This is a broader understanding of the difference between C- and R-ontology than John's above. For John the difference is between how concrete particulars have properties. For a C-ontologist, a thing has a property by having it as an ontological constituent. For an R-ontologist, a thing has a property, not by having it as a constituent, but by standing in an external relation to it. That is not wrong, but I think it is too narrow.
John seems to be suggesting that the only ontological constituents there are are properties, and that the only items that have such constituents are ordinary concrete particulars. My understanding is broader. I maintain that among ontological constituents there are or could be other items such as bare or thin particulars, various type of nexus, ontological operators, and perhaps others, in addition to properties (whether taken to be universals or taken to be tropes). I am also open to the possibility that entities other than ordinary concrete particulars could have ontological constituents.
Take God. God is presumably a concrete particular, concrete because causally active, particular because not universal; but surely God is not an ordinary concrete particular, especially if 'ordinary' implies being material. Arguably, God is not related to his attributes; if he were his aseity would be compromised. So I say he has his attributes as constituents. If he is identical to them, as on the doctrine of divine simplicity, then a fortiori he has them as constitutuents, improper constituents.
Return to the humble avocado. Our avocado is green, ripe, soft, etc. So it has properties. This simple observation gives rise to three philosophical questions:
Q1. What are properties?
Q2. What is the item that has the properties?
Q3. What is property-possession? (What is it for an item to have properties?)
I will now contrast one R-ontological answer with one C-ontological answer. What follows are very rough sketches.
One R-ontological answer is this. Properties are abstract objects in a realm apart. They are causally inert, atemporal, nonspatial, not sense-perceivable. Not only do properties not enter into causal relations, they do not induce causal powers in the things that have them. They are what is expressed by such open sentences as '____ is green' analogously as propositions are expressed by such closed sentences as 'Ava is green.' If, per impossibile, God were to annihilate all of these abstract objects, nothing would change in our humble avocado. I say per impossibile because the abstract objects in question are necessary beings. My point is that they do no work here below. They are as irrelevant to what is really going on in the avocado as the predicates 'ripe' and 'green' are.
The item that has properties is just the ordinary concrete thing, the avocado in our example, not a propertyless substratum or any other exotic item. The having is a relation or nonrelational tie that connects the concrete thing to the abstract property.
Now for a C-ontological answer. Properties are universals. Whether or not they can exist unexemplified, when they are exemplified, they enter into the ontological structure of ordinary particulars as metaphysical parts thereof. Thus the greenness of the avocado is 'in' it as a metaphysical part. Same holds for the ripeness, the softness, etc. These universals are empirically detectable and induce causal powers. The thing that has these universals is the avocado viewed as a complex, indeed, as a concrete fact. What makes it particular is a further constituent, the thin particular, which is nonrelationally tied to the universals and unifies them into one thick particular.
In an earlier entry that addressed Lukas Novak's argument against bare particulars I said the following:
The notion of a bare particular makes sense only in the context of a constituent ontology according to which ordinary particulars, 'thick particulars' in the jargon of Armstrong, have ontological constituents or metaphysical parts.
[. . .]
LN suggests that the intuitions behind the theory of bare particulars are rooted in Frege's mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive distinction between concepts and objects. "Once this distinction has been made, it is very hard to see how there might be a genuine case of logical de re necessity." (115) The sentence quoted is true, but as I said above, the notion of a bare particular makes no sense except in the context of a constituent ontology. Frege's, however, is not a constituent ontology like Bergmann's but what Bergmann calls a function ontology. (See G. Bergmann, Realism, p. 7. Wolterstorff's constituent versus relation ontology distinction is already in Bergmann as the distinct between complex and function ontologies.) So I deny that part of the motivation for the positing of bare particulars is an antecedent acceptance of Frege's concept-object distinction. I agree that if one accepts that distinction, then logical or rather metaphysical de re necessity goes by the boards. But the Fregean distinction is not part of the motivation or argumentation for bare particulars.
My claim that bare particulars are at home only in constituent ontology raised the eyebrows of commenter John and of LN, who writes:
I cannot see why the notion of a bare particular should make sense only in a constituent ontology. A bare particular is a particular which has none of its non-trivial properties de re necessarily. This notion is quite intelligible, irrespectively of the way we go on to explain the relation of "having" between the particular and the property, whether we employ a constituent or functional or some other approach (of course, saying that it is intelligible is not saying that it is consistent!). If Bill agrees that once one makes the sharp Fregean distinction between concepts and objects then there is a strong motivation against conceding any de re necessity, then he should also agree that making this distinction provides a strong motivation for claiming the bareness of all particulars.
Resolving the Dispute
I believe that this is a merely a terminological dispute concerning the use of 'bare particular.' I am a terminological conservative who favors using words and phrases strictly and with close attention to their historical provenience. To enshrine this preference as a methodological principle:
MP: To avoid confusion and merely verbal disputes, never use a word or phrase that already has an established use in a new way! Coin a new word or phrase and explain how you will be using it.
Now, to the best of my knowledge, the phrase 'bare particular' enters philosophy first in the writings of Gustav Bergmann. So we must attend to his writings if we are concerned to use this phrase correctly. Now in the terminology of Wolterstorff, Bergmann is a constituent ontologist as opposed to a relational ontologist. In Bergmann's own terms, he is a "complex" as opposed to a "function" ontologist, Frege being the chief representative for him of the latter style of ontology.
"In complex ontologies, as I shall call them, some entities are constituents of others." (Realism, p. 7) "In function ontologies, as I shall call them, some entities are, as one says, 'coordinated' to some others, without any connotation whatsoever of the one being 'in' the other, being either a constituent or a part or a component of it." (Ibid.)
Bergmann, then, is a constituent or complex ontologist and his introduction of bare particulars (BPs) is within this context. BPs are introduced to solve "the problem of individuation." A better name for this problem is 'problem of differentiation.' After all, the problem is not to specify what it is that makes an individual an individual as oppose to a member of some other category; the problem is to specify what it is that makes two individuals (or two entities of any category) two and not one.
How does the problem of individuation/differentiation arise? Well, suppose you have already decided that "some entities are constituents of others." For example, you have already decided that ordinary particulars (OPs) have, in addition to their spatial parts, special ontological parts and that among these parts are the OP's properties. Properties for Bergmann are universals. Now suppose you have two qualitatively indiscernible round red spots. They are the same in respect of every universal 'in' them and yet they are two, not one. What is the ontological ground of the numerical difference?
On Bergmann's way of thinking, one needs an entity to do the job of individuation/differentiation. Enter bare particulars. And pay close attention to how Bergmann describes them:
A bare particular is a mere individuator. Structurally, that is its only job. It does nothing else. In this respect it is like Aristotle's matter, or, perhaps more closely, like Thomas' materia signata. Only, it is a thing. (Realism, p. 24, emphasis added)
Bare particulars, then, have but one explanatory job: to ground or account for numerical difference. They are the Bergmannian answer to the question about the principium individuationis. But please note that the positing of such individuators/differentiators would make no sense at all if one held to a style of ontology according to which round red spots just differ without any need for a ground of numerical difference. For a relational ontologist, OPs have no internal ontological structure: they are ontological simples , not ontological complexes. Here is Peter and here is Paul. They just differ. They don't differ on account of some internal differentiator. Peter and Paul have properties, but these are in no sense parts of them, but entities external to them to which they are related by an exemplification relation that spans the chasm separating the concrete from the abstract. And because OPs do not have properties as parts, there is no need to posit some additional ontological factor to account for numerical difference.
I think I have made it quite clear that if we use 'bare particular' strictly and in accordance with the phrases' provenience, then it simply makes no sense to speak of bare particulars outside the context of constituent ontology.
Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, I am not the king of all philosophers and I lack both the authority and the brute power to enforce the above methodological imperative. So I can't force otber philosophers to use 'bare particular' correctly, or to put it less tendentiously: in accordance with Bergmann's usage. But I can issue the humble request that other philosophers not confuse the strict use of the phrase with their preferred usages, and that they tell us exactly how they are using the phrase.
Novak's usage is different than mine. He tell us that "A bare particular is a particular which has none of its non-trivial properties de re necessarily." On this usage my cat would count as a bare particular if one held the view that there are no non-trivial essential properties, that all non-trivial properties are accidental. But for Bergmann a cat is not a bare particular. It -- or to be precise, a cat at a time -- is a complex one of whose constituents is a bare particular. My cat Max is a Fregean object (Gegenstand) but surely no Fregean object is a Bergmannian bare particular. For objects and concepts do not form complexes in the way BPs and universals form complexes for Bergmann.
On a Fregean analysis, the propositional function denoted by '___ is a cat' has the value True for Max as argument. On a Bergmannian analysis, 'Max is a cat' picks out a fact or state of affairs. But there are no facts in Frege's ontology.
To conclude: if we use 'bare particular' strictly and in accordance with Bergmann's usage, one cannot speak of bare particulars except in constituent ontology.
Your grasp of the issue is excellent, Bill. “[T]he 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological” seems to me right; this is why it is semirealism, not realism. But it is logical semirealism: “Logical semirealism differs from both logical antirealism and logical realism much as Kant’s position on causality differed from both antirealism and realism regarding causality, and Wittgenstein’s position on other people’s sensations differed from both antirealism and realism regarding
“other minds” (page 166).
The reason facts are only “semireal” in my view is that they have a logical structure. As you say in your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated, “facts could be truth-making only if they are “proposition-like,” “structured in a proposition-like way” – only if “a fact has a structure that can mirror the structure of a proposition.” The structure of a proposition is its logical structure. In Part Two of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy I argue against realism regarding logical structure, but I also reject the simplistic antirealism regarding logical structure that says “there is only language.” Surely there are no ands, ors, or iffs in the world. It’s not just that logical objects and structures cannot be perceived or even “said.” Surely words like “and,” “or,” and “if” do not stand for anything physical, mental, or other-worldly. Yet no less surely they are not merely words.
Since facts necessarily, indeed essentially, possess a logical structure, my argument against logical realism applies also to realism regarding facts but, again, I reject the simplistic antirealism regarding facts that says “there is only language.” I wrote: “[T]here is a third way of understanding facts, which is neither realist nor antirealist. It is semirealist. In general, if a proposition is in dispute between realism and antirealism, with the realist asserting and the antirealist denying it, the semirealist would differ from both by holding that it is an improper proposition, perhaps even that there is no such proposition, and thus that both asserting and denying it are improper. There is an analogy here with sophisticated agnosticism. The theist asserts the proposition “God exists” and the atheist denies it, but the sophisticated agnostic questions, for varying reasons we need not consider here, its propriety” (pages 178-9).
I would share your discomfort if a philosopher said “There are facts and there are no facts”( I can’t find the sentence in Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). But I would understand it, just as I understand Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,” and Wittgenstein’s “some things cannot be said but show themselves.” All four are puzzling. Sometimes we have to content ourselves with truths that puzzle us, make us wonder. But philosophy begins in wonder. We could, of course, invent new terms, perhaps saying that while facts do not exist they subsist, but I doubt that this would lead to better understanding.
Butch