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August 10 - August 17, 2021
this is a book about metaphysics, and in metaphysics we are concerned with the nature of things in very general terms.
The notion of a particular is very important to us. I want to know that the pen on the table is my particular one rather than someone else’s, or that the woman in the room really is my wife rather than her identical twin sister. To understand the importance of these issues, we need to probe them more deeply.
Particular
Brownness, hardness, four-leggedness, and so on, are the qualities or properties of the table. One might then be tempted to say that I do not know the table itself but only its properties. Does that then mean that the table is an underlying something about which I know nothing? Its properties seem wrapped around it and impossible to strip away.
Properties?
we really cannot avoid mentioning properties as soon as we mention the particulars to which they attach.
We can say that something has changed qualitatively even though it has remained numerically the same. So the table can be different in its qualities–it was brown and now it is white–but it remains one and the same thing.
Being one and the same, despite such changes in qualities, is what we mean by numerical sameness
The table is something that underlies the properties and holds them all together in one place. It is something I cannot see or touch, because all I experience is a thing’s properties, but I know it is there through my rational thinking. When I move the table across the room, for instance, all of its properties move with it. They are clustered together in a semi-permanent way. It is not as if the brownness and hardness of the table can move but the four-leggedness can get left behind. I say that the properties are clustered only semi-permanently, though. As we have seen, some properties can be
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Properties
The pins represent the properties of an object and the cushion represents the particular itself. Some call this a substratum view of particulars, where the pin cushion is the substratum that underlies all the properties on view.
As well as removing its colour, we also have to take away its shape, as that is just another property like the rest, and so is its four-leggedness, smelliness, and furriness. Take all those away and we could well wonder what this underlying substratum really is.
Substratum
It would have to be invisible. It would have no length, breadth, or height, and no colour or solidity. There would be a bareness to it that may really make us start to wonder whether we have anything at
Nothingness
It was suggested that the particular had to be something other than its properties. But once we started to abstract away the properties of the cat from the cat itself, we realized that it would leave hardly anything. Our substratum-cat seems to be nothing at all. It has no weight, no colour, no extension in space, and so on. And this starts to look like a non-thing.
When in our minds we stripped away those properties, in a process of abstraction, the fear was that we were left with nothing at all. So shouldn’t we then just countenance the possibility that there is nothing more to a particular than that bundle of properties? If there really is no remainder once all the properties have been removed, then we know that our particular cannot be more than them. The bundle view is that particulars can be accounted for in terms only of properties. How plausible is this view?
Bundle of properties?
If a thing were just a collection of properties, it couldn’t survive any change. If one property were lost and another gained, we would have a different collection: for I am assuming that what makes a collection the same thing at different times is that it is composed of the same component things. Consequently, two collections are different if the things collected within them are different.
Bundle
A cat changes its shape frequently. Sometimes it is lying out flat, other times it is rolled up in a ball, and then it might be running around, changing its shape continuously. How can the cat be just a collection of properties when they change all the time?
Hmm
The unknowable formless substratum seemed to give us nothing extra: if the bundle theory is correct, then the substratum is dispensable.
Unlike the case of the pen, the fact that circularity appears in one place or time does not stop it appearing at other places and times.
What is circle
This is different from the case of the pen. It being wholly owned by one person stops it being owned by another, whereas one thing being circular does not stop other things being circular.
One view is that there are two basic kinds of entity: particulars and their properties. Tables, chairs, and sheep are examples of particulars and they seem present only at one location at a time. Circularity is an example of a property: a feature or quality of a particular.
Hmm getting interesting
The fact that a property appears in one place, in its entirety, puts no limit on it appearing elsewhere at other places and times. Because of this feature, some like to call properties universals–they can be at any place or time–though really this term is best used for one particular theory of what a property is. Other examples of properties are redness, squareness, being hairy, soluble, explosive, tall, and so on.
Properties universal
Suppose they were then to crush all the circular things, or whatever the example is, until they were destroyed or at least no longer circular. Would they thereby have destroyed circularity? Arguably not. At best, they have destroyed all the instances of it.
Hmm
Plato didn’t think you could destroy circularity. He thought that the instances of it with which we are acquainted are all imperfect copies of the true circularity. Every circular thing existing in the physical world will be defective in its circularity, to at least some degree, no matter how small.
But all the circles we see in the world around us will have some slight deviation from this perfect or ideal circle. Now here is the fanciful part. Plato thought that the perfect circle existed in a heavenly, transcendent world: above and beyond the physical world of everyday objects that we inhabit. This heavenly realm would contain all the true versions of all the properties and relations too.
hmmm hence form
Suppose we wanted to say something like this: the worldly circles resemble the perfect Form of a circle. Resemblance is a relation. But a relation, it will be recalled, is also something that a Platonist thinks belongs in their heavenly realm. There would be a Form of resemblance, therefore.
Form of every adjectives
We would then have to answer the same question again: how does the Form of resemblance relate to the actual resemblance (between the worldly circle and the Form of a circle)? If we give the same answer–that it resembles it–we will have made no further progress.
infinite regress
infinite regress. There will be a never-ending series of resemblances, and this would indicate that the original answer is no good: we never should try to say that the instances relate to the Form.
philosophy at its finest lol
The view that everything is a particular is sometimes called nominalism, which means name-ism. The idea is that circularity is just a name–just a word–that we use to describe groups of particular objects.
There are varieties of this theory, but one is that the name is applied to groups of particulars that resemble each other. Hence, there are particulars–a ball, a coin, a screw-top lid, a wheel, and so on–and circularity is just a name for the way in which these things resemble each other.
Circularity itself is no thing. It has no existence or reality. Every single...
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But nominalism has its own problems. It can be asked in what way the group of objects resemble each other. Suppose the group of things offered as examples–the coin, wheel, and jar lid, and so on–as well as all being circular were also all brown in colour. In that case, there seems to be more than one way or respect in which they resemble. Circularity cannot just be a resemblance between the things, therefore, for it seems it must be one individual resemblance in a certain respect.
nominalism
It seems we have to appeal not just to the particular things but also to ways or respects in which they resemble; and a way or respect sounds like a property by another name. Our attempt to do away with properties and have only particulars looks to have run aground very quickly, therefore.
nominalism. ways or respects = properties
The technical term for these particularized qualities is tropes. But the same kind of difficulty arises for them. In virtue of what are all these tropes red tropes, for instance? What gives them their red nature? One may just say that it is a primitive fact about them that permits no further explanation. But that then starts to look like a realism about properties after all. Or one might say that they are all red because they resemble each other. But we have already seen the difficulties resemblance gets us into. Are there resemblance tropes? And do they resemble each other?
tropes
Is there an alternative to Platonism and nominalism? We have seen the difficulties of both and might wonder whether there is a third way.
platonism - form. nominalism - a name but not a thing. different from actual objects
In the centre, Plato and Aristotle debate. Plato is seen pointing up to the heavens. All that really matters is up there. But Aristotle has a different view. He gestures down to earth. No, he is insisting, it is all down here.
oh that's what that means!
perhaps the properties could be real and exist down here, in the regular world of which we feel part. Such was Aristotle’s view, which we can call an immanent realism, because properties are here with us. Circularity would be a real feature of the world but exist only in its instances: in circular things. One would have to accept that some such circles were imperfect. Perhaps that means that only imperfect circularity is a real property. Why not accept that? The mathematician’s circle is really nothing more than a stipulated definition of something, which doesn’t mean that it thereby exists.
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immanent realism
Would it be a contradiction to suppose that the world contained infinite complexity, with ever-smaller parts? There seems no conclusive argument why infinite complexity couldn’t be the case.
Hmm
We can consider the pile as a whole, and in this case it seems to be nothing more than the aggregation of one hundred individual stones. Even in this case, however, we can note that there are some properties of the whole that are not properties of the parts.
philosophers sometimes distinguish substances–the integrated wholes–from mere aggregates.
There are, however, other cases in which this idea has been challenged. Some qualities are thought of as so special that they emerge at a certain higher level of reality and nothing like them is to be found at the level of the parts.
Life. Consciousness
A reductionist is someone who insists that the parts can ultimately explain all the workings of the whole. A reductionist might admit that we do not know all the details yet of how the brain is able to produce consciousness, but they have faith that eventually, when science has discovered all the facts, we will be able to do so.
Reductionism
In opposition to that view, emergentism is the claim that wholes are more than sums of parts. There are various ways in which such an idea can be stated, and different emergentists might not be supporting exactly the same thing.
Emergentism
What the emergentist would really be claiming is that there are genuinely novel phenomena to be found in wholes that are not in their parts, nor their sums, nor in their arrangement. And just as there is a difficulty in knowing whether reductionism is true, and in knowing whether anything is really simple, so there is a difficulty in knowing such emergentism to be true.
Interesting
it seems like the organism as a whole uses its DNA to provide it with what it needs at the level of a whole. If that is true, it would not be that the microscopic physical facts about the giraffe are determining the macroscopic observable properties of the whole: but the other way around. It is whole organisms that live or die, feed or starve, and sometimes reproduce; not their genes or molecules. It seems confused to say that one’s genes went for a walk: it is the person who walks. Similarly, it is persons who see things.
Interesting
These considerations are not conclusive, but they may show that there is at least some attraction in the view we call holism. This idea is that wholes in some sense have a priority over the parts. The notion of priority can be explained in various ways.
Interesting. Holist.
This idea that change needs a subject is often attributed to Aristotle; indeed, much of metaphysics comes from him. It seems that we can say the same sort of thing about all small-scale changes, though when we get to larger-scale processes, it may be unclear what the subject of change was. What was the subject of change in the Second World War? The world, perhaps? And some changes involve multiple subjects. Suppose that energy passes from one object to another, perhaps when two snooker balls collide. Is the transfer of energy just one change, involving a relocation of energy, or do we actually
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subject of change
Remember being told that energy could neither be created nor destroyed? It makes you wonder where it came from in the first place. But we need not ponder that for too long because all we need in order to say that a change has occurred is a coming into or going out of existence in the relatively weak sense of parts having made a new whole or having being disassembled from a whole. I know that a change has occurred when my car is taken apart even if those parts, or some parts of the parts, remain in existence.
maybe that's why we live in a circular planet where things come and go and repeat like seasons.
A human body has spatial parts. It has a top half and a bottom half. There is an arm, a heart, a toe, and much more besides. These could all be thought of as being spatial parts of the body: parts in space. But then why not also allow that there are temporal parts too: parts in time? There is the part of that body that existed in 2010 and another that existed in 1970. There is a part that existed for just one minute at 12.05 today. Certainly, if there is a close analogy between space and time, it suggests there should be temporal parts.
parts in space. parts in time?
The Aristotelian view is known as endurantism because wholly present particulars endure through changes. But how can the view explain the bearing of incompatible properties? The answer, of course, is that those incompatible properties are borne at different times. The tomato was green last week while it is red this week. This reply comes at a cost, however. It means that properties are not held pure and simple by particulars. They would always have to be held relative to something else, namely a particular time, and this complicates our account of what it is to have a property.
Endurantism. Describe properties in relation with time
In contrast, those who believe in temporal parts, who are known as perdurantists, can say that the temporal part has the property pure and simple, with no need for any further relational element to be involved.
Perdurantist. Without time becase temporal
If the view is an attempt to explain change, then it means that each of those temporal parts must themselves be changeless. Were a temporal part to be capable of undergoing any change itself, then the problem that originally motivated the view would resurface. So it is clear that there must be a different temporal part for every slight change.
Frame like
The thought behind this line of reasoning is that when we have two events, A and B, the question of whether A caused B is about A and B alone and any connection there is or isn’t between them. What is happening at other times and places seems like it ought to be irrelevant. Such a view is known as singularism.
Singularism
