Metaphysics I: Dr. J.P. Moreland

1
Metaphysics I
Dr. J.P. Moreland
Talbot School of Theology, 1994
I. Introduction to Metaphysics
A. Christianity and Metaphysics 1. Christianity involves a commitment to an unseen world. The vast majority of the real world is unseen--and is more significant than the seen. All great philosophers believed this. Any culture which loses a commitment to the unseen world will ultimately degenerate. 2. Apart from Scripture, the most important things you can think about are metaphysics and epistemology. Most of the great thinkers of history were metaphysicians: Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Leibnitz, etc. B. Metaphysics is difficult to define: 1. William Hasker: a. The study of what things are real and unreal, of what is ultimately real; also the study of the basic constituents of the universe. b. The metaphysician looks for ontological dependency--one thing depends on another for its existence (e.g. roundness depends upon the existence of a ball). 2. Rom Harre, Introductory Survey of the Philosophy of Science. a. The study of the most general concepts used in ordinary language and science. Metaphysics studies concepts, not the things the concepts are about. This is what Science does. It studies reality--the physical world. b. Metaphysicians study our language--the way we talk about reality. This view is neo-Kantian. It is the study of the concepts of the real, not the real itself. 3. W.R. Carter (See handout) a. Metaphysics is the study of existence and things that exist. b. Concepts are what confer reality on something. To Carter existence means to fall under a concept of a category. 1) Fido falls under or instantiates the concept of dogness. The existence of Fido depends on the concept. 2) This idea of instantiating is incorrect. a) Does the concept of a dog make a dog real? This makes the real dependent upon conceptualization. b) Fido as a dog is independent and prior to my concept of dogness. The concept is of the object; it doesn't confer existence on the object . It's outside the object. The relationship of a dog and Fido is the relationship of intentionality, it is about-ness or of-ness. c) For Carter, to say "The ball is red" is to say that the concept of red is instantiated by the ball. He is grossly confused here. The ball does not have any concepts in it! The ball can instantiate nothing, because balls don't have minds. My mind might instantiate the ball "as red," but the ball cannot. 4. The realist view is that our mental states are of the real world. a. My concept of a dog is a mental entity in my mind. But the concept isn't what makes Fido a dog. Fido has dogness in him which makes him a dog. b. There's a modern tendency to say that what philosophers are studying is how things fit into our conceptual schemes, not objective reality itself. If this is true, are concepts are somewhat arbitrary.
"Metaphysics" 1994 Gregory Koukl & Melinda Penner Stand to Reason, 1-800-2-REASON
2 c. But concepts are not dependent upon finite minds. The concept of a triangle existed long before I was here. It's mind independent. Augustine argued that was an argument for God because there must be a way for immutable concepts to exist. C. Typical Metaphysical Questions 1. Is being a property of things, or is it some kind of thing itself? Or is there some third alternative? 2. What is existence? Is being basically one [absolute idealists, pantheists] or are there many beings? [pluralists]. Is being fixed and changeless or is it constantly changing? [Process philosophers]. 3. What is the relationship between being and becoming? Is being prior to becoming? Which is more basic if either? 4. Does everything have the same kind of being? Do unicorns, fictional objects, and desks have the same kind of being? Is there a lesser form of being? Do fictional objects exist? 5. What are the fundamental categories into which all existing things may be divided? D. Three Broad Approaches to Metaphysics 1. The "Interesting Problems" Approach a. Find an interesting metaphysical problem and kick it around. (This is the way many people do morality.) b. This is a faulty view because it assumes that metaphysical questions can be analyzed and answered without first learning how to use the tools and understanding a general background of the field. It's not precise enough. 2. The "Schools of Thought" Approach (E.g. Thomism, pantheism, process theology) a. What does metaphysics "look like" from inside a particular school? b. This concentrates too much attention on answers to metaphysical questions and not enough on clarifying and systematizing the very questions themselves. 3. The "First Principles" Approach a. Certain metaphysical topics are fundamental. There is a proper ordering to our intellectual investigations: certain issues are prior to and pervasive throughout the range of all our other questions. b. For example, the nature of existence and the nature of identity are metaphysically prior to other topics. Anything else you study will presume answers to these two questions. These issues must be addressed first. c. This will be our approach in this class. E. Aspects of Analytic/General Ontology 1. Analyze the nature of existence: What does it mean to "be" or not "be"? a. Is existence a property of part of a thing's essence, or is it some third alternative? What is the difference between existing and not existing? Is there a difference between coming to be and being? b. Armstrong, for example (a clear-thinking atheist): 1) To exist is to be able to cause things to happen in the physical universe. If you want to know if something exists ask, "Is it capable of causing something in the universe?" 2) Numbers don't exist for Armstrong because they can't exercise efficient causality. 3) But does causality itself cause causality? This is a problem. If "to be" means to cause something, it leads to infinite regress--there is no first cause. c. Moreland: Physical reality is only one kind of reality. 1) It's a mode of reality, and not reality itself.
3 2) If physical reality is only a type of reality, it will follow that there is nothing that exists that is only physical; it also fits into another category which is not physical. 2. Clarify the general principles of being (two subdivisions); sometimes referred to as the study of being qua being, asking what can we say about something simply by the fact that it exists): a. An analysis of the transcendentals: Are there any features of being that are coextensive with the real? 1) The Medievals thought transcendentals were true of all existence whatsoever, true of all categories. They are universal and co-terminous with each category of existence. a) For e.g., unity and identity transcend all categories of being. b) If so, there are two things true of everything that exists: one, it exists and two, it will possess the transcendentals. 2) This is the most fundamental branch of metaphysics. b. What does it mean to say that something "is"? We get at this question by looking at language and how we use terms for being. 1) The "is" of existence. a) "Socrates is." b) Socrates exists; he's real. 2) The "is" of essential predication. a) "Socrates is human." b) Socrates has humanness as his essence. 3) The "is" of accidental predication. a) "Socrates is white." b) Socrates has the accidental property of whiteness. 4) The "is" of constitution or the part-whole "is." a) "Socrates is skin and bones." b) Among Socrates' parts are skin and bones. 5) The "is" of identity. a) "Socrates is the teacher of Plato." b) Socrates is identical to the teacher of Plato. 3. Determine the ultimate metaphysical categories of reality a. A category is the broadest, most ultimate set of classifications. They are: 1) Individually necessary 2) Jointly sufficient 3) Mutually exclusive 4) Into which everything whatsoever can be classified b. Examples: individual, substance, property, relation, facts, numbers, set c. A category is the most fundamental set into which every existent can be placed. Every thing which exists resides in one, and only one category, although the features of a thing can be in other categories. e. Modern philosophy has two different approaches to categories: 1) Realist approach: a) Aristotle is a classic example of a categorial realist. b) To be a realist is to say that these categories are features of the mindindependent world as that world is in itself, prior to anyone's reflection upon it. 1. There are really substances, and dog is an example of a substance. there really are properties. Red exists even when no one looks at it. 2. Categories are discovered, not invented. 2) Anti-realist approach:'alist.
4 b) For Kant categories are the necessary preconditions for intelligible thought. c) There is a world in itself (the noumenal world), but we can't get at that world. d) Categories are forms of the mind that impose themselves on my perceptions and distort the way the world as it is in itself. e) For Kant, substances are mind-dependent. There would not be substances without knowers. The human mind must find "homes" or categories for sensory experiences to fit into. 1. What prevents us, then, from each having our own little isolated worlds with our individual categories? Who do the categories belong to? 2. Kant's answer: They belong to the transcendental unity of sensory experience (the transcendental self), all those features necessary for the ideal human knower to have experiences. The ideal knower has all of these categories in it. 3. The ideal knower does its knowing in and through human beings. We all have these features in common. 4. Kant's theory doesn't say anything about the real world; in fact, Kant didn't believe that the transcendental self actually existed. f) Today anti-realists say that categories are merely broad concepts in our linguistic community. Different communities have different categories. Therefore, some things exist in one community and not in another. 1. There is no way to know what is really "out there." 2. Everything becomes relative in this deconstruction. 3. Philosophy becomes a second order discipline. a. It doesn't study reality itself, but perceptions of reality. b. Categories are not taken as descriptions of things that are mindindependent, but are merely descriptions of our relativist schemes. There are no objective categories, only interpreters. 4. Philosophy becomes the study of language. a. This view is called the Linguistic School of Philosophy. b. Thus Wilfred Sellars might say, "What makes the apple red is that the word red is true of it." He may begin a study of the soul, but before long, he will switch disciplines and study our talk, how we use the word "soul" in English, and abandon metaphysics. c. Why you can't say metaphysics is just the study of language and concepts: 1) It is revisionistic, a change of subjects. I am interested in studying reality, not my talking of reality. 2) Language cannot be what metaphysics is, because language is part of the problem which generates metaphysics. g) As metaphysicians, we are concerned about studying reality, not how we talk about it. Beware of this subtle reduction of philosophy to linguistics. As Quine said, Are we talking about redness or the word 'red'? h) The problem is, metaphysics cannot be the study of language, because the use of language is already a metaphysical question itself, (the problem of the one and the many). The word red is just as troublesome as the color red, both can appear in more than one place at the same time, i.e. they are both universals. Language does not come in types and tokens, it comes in concepts. So, linguistic philosophy fails because language itself is a metaphysical problem. f. Aristotle had only "substance" and "property", the category "relations" was added to metaphysics in the late medieval period. Plato had thought relations (i.e. "taller
5 than") were properties. If A was taller than B it was because A had something that B did not have: height. He did not see height as a relation between A and g. Einstein and Newton debated over the category in which to place space. Einstein argued it was a relation, and Newton argued it was a substance. F. Speculative Cosmology/Special Metaphysics 1. The study of interesting sub-groups within the different categories--Are their minds? What are space and time? What categories do they belong in? 2. The second order philosophical study of other disciplines: "self" in psychology, "beauty" in art, and "substance" in science. G. How to approach the metaphysical task. There are many schools of thought. Here is one reasonable approach: 1. First, start with common sense particularism. Start with things that seem reasonable to you. a. Particularism is the idea that we start our knowing enterprise not with criteria of how we know but with knowing particular things b. I know some things without knowing how I know them. c. As Christians we start with certain beliefs before we start metaphysical reflection. 2. Second, start asking questions about this knowledge. There are two kinds of metaphysical problems which are really two sides of the same coin: a. How could there be "x's" given that certain other things are the case? 1) How could there be living creatures given that the physical universe is all that there is? 2) How could there be moral responsibility if matter is the only reality? b. How could "x" fail to exist given that certain things are the case? (e.g., How could numbers fail to exist given that 2+2=4?) 3. Analyze the problem. a. What are the relevant facts and considerations to solving this problem? b. What are the alternatives available to me? H. Epistemology & Metaphysics 1. Our epistemic systems influence our approach to metaphysics. 2. There's a tendency to reduce metaphysics to epistemology. a. Locke and Hume said that you start your philosophy by developing a theory of knowledge; then you use your epistemology to answer metaphysical questions. A lot is rejected outright this way. b. Today the claim is that the methods of science are the only way of knowing anything. 1) This leads to a rejection of traditional philosophy. 2) Traditional philosophical questions cannot be resolved by an appeal to science, so they're pseudo-questions. c. Therefore, a prior commitment to a certain epistemology (scientism) rules out certain philosophical questions. 3. David Papineau handout, p. 3-4: a. David Papineau says that "the task of philosophy is to bring coherence and order to the total set of assumptions we use to explain the natural world." Philosophy is meant to shore up the assumptions of science. b. Papineau's epistemology assumes that science tests the real world and that philosophy studies assumptions which aren't real. 4. Epistemology and metaphysics challenge each other in this way: a. The epistemologist says to the metaphysician, "You better justify your metaphysical conclusions with good arguments; you must justify your claims."
6 b. The metaphysician says to the epistemologist, "Whatever epistemology you adopt, you must at least leave room for genuine acts of knowing. We all know things, after all." I. The "Battle of the Gods" and metaphysics 1. [Read Grossman p.7 : "The Battle of the Gods" from Plato's Sophist.] 2. The "world" vs. the "universe" a. Grossman defines the universe as the total space-time reality including all the material objects in it. b. The world is much broader than the universe. The world is everything whatever that exists. It includes the universe, but also the invisible non-spatio-temporal realm of abstract objects. c. A very interesting question is: Are space and time part of the universe? Or are things in space and time? 3. The "Battle of the Gods" is over whether the world, in addition to the universe, exists. a. This is battle between the Ideational (two tiered) and the Sensate (one tiered) world views. b. If Universals are real, abstract objects that do not exist in space and time, then the world exists. So the focus is on the existence of universals. 4. For one to be within their epistemic rights to claim to know something, the something need not "show up" in space and time. Further, for things to show up in space and time it does not follow that the thing itself must be spatio-temporal. a. Consider the fact that God "showed up" in space and time "in" the burning bush. We all would recognize that God is "in" space and time in a far different way than merely being located spatially. b. How is the yellow "in" a piece of yellow paper? Where does yellow go when the paper is burned? Answer: the same place that God "is". 5. You must become aware that the unseen world shows up and leaves all the time, and if redness can do it, so can God. God is not a property or a universal, for properties and universals cannot just show up anywhere, (redness cannot show up in the dark), but God can.
II. What is the Nature of Existence?

A. Three main lessons gleaned from a study of the history of this question: 1. There is a difference between existing (a horse) and not existing (a unicorn). What is the difference? Can we make sense out of that difference. 2. Existence is not a normal, garden variety property (predicate). a. It's not the same thing to say "The lamp exists" as it is to say "The lamp is green." b. Existence and being green are very different types of properties. 3. Existence is not part of the "what-ness," or essence of a thing. a. This was the great insight of Thomas Aquinas. b. A thing's what-ness (essence) is different from its that-ness (existence). c. A necessary being may be a possible exception to this. It could be that part of a necessary being's essence is its existence. B. Preliminary considerations 1. Is being (existence) a single genus? (Discussed in Aune reading) a. Is there one notion of existence that applies to everything that has it? Or are there many different notions or types of existence itself? b. Aune said that being is not a genus--there are different kinds of existence.
7 1) A rock versus a pile of rocks. The rock has a different kind of existence than the pile. a) The rock has independent existence. b) The pile has dependent existence. c) An aggregate is dependent upon its parts, but the parts exist on their own. 2) Aune says that to account for that there must be different kinds of existence. a) If that's the case then there are equivocal notions of existence; there will be as many types of existence as things that exist. b) There would be no theory of existence. You end up with the problem of "grades of being" view. There are more fundamental types of existence than others. c. It's better to say, "There are different kinds of things that have existence," rather than say "There are different kinds of existence that things have." 1) There is a univocal theory of existence. Existence is a single genus. 2) Not everything that exists is the same kind of entity. 3) There are dependent realities (heaps) and independent realities (single objects). 2. Are there modes of being? Do nonexistent things have being? (Grossman, p. 92) a. Some people have claimed that there are different modes of existence, grades of being in which some things are more real than others. 1) This view allows reality status for imaginary objects; when we think of Pegasus we are not thinking of nothing. 2) Fictional objects have being, but they're not real. b. Why do philosophers believe this? 1) We have to find modes of existence for objects of consciousness. a) If we can think of something (Pegasus), then we're not thinking of nothing. b) Therefore it must be real in the sense that it's different from nothing. c) They don't exist, but they have being as the objects of our reflection. 2) This allows us to give properties to imaginary things. 3) Another reason for this view is the reality/appearance distinction (A.E. Taylor). a) A spinning coin appears as a line, then as a series of ever-changing ellipses, then as a circle. But the object isn't an ellipse; it's round. b) We must find out the difference between what's real and what's an appearance. c) Therefore the appearance is not quite as real as the actual shape of the coin. c. Plato said that there were different degrees of reality. 1) Forms are more real than matter. 2) If this is true then the fundamental laws of logic don't apply to existence. You can't say that a thing either exists or doesn't exist (the law of excluded middle). d. There is a simpler way to explain these problems. 1) Everything that exists, exists in the same way. But its existence may depend on other things. a) There are different senses of existence. b) Also some things are more independent or less dependent than other things. 2) Appearances are a mode of consciousness; they're in the mind. a) The appearance is just as real as the circle of the coin. It's not nothing because it has a property of being elliptical.
8 b) The entities are located in different places, though. The elliptical appearance is a mode of my consciousness; it's in my mind. 1. The appearance is just as real as the property of the object, but is not a property of the object, but of the mind. The round appearance is a property of the coin. 2. If there were no viewers, there would be no elliptical appearances. 3. Appearances are mind dependent. 4. To say something exists in the mind is not to say it doesn't exist. 3) The pile of stones is dependent and more transitory than the rocks themselves, which are independent and more stable. a) Dependence or independence isn't a property of a thing. b) It's a difference in the way a thing has properties and is related to other things. 4) Concepts and tables have different modes of existence, but not different degrees of reality. C. Five features of a theory of existence: 1. A theory of existence has to account for what does and does not exist. E.g., a definition that says that "to exist is to exist within 5000 miles of Earth" doesn't work because it doesn't account for Venus. 2. It needs to account for what could have but does not exist. a. Does it explain the reality of things in alternative, possible worlds that could have been real but aren't? b. The existence of possible things (unicorns) cannot violate what it means to exist. c. An impossible world is a world whose description includes a logical contradiction, for even God could not create these worlds. God could not create a world with square circles, or where free creatures have their decisions coerced. 3. It has to allow for existence itself to exist. a. How can something have existence if existence itself doesn't exist? b. A thing's existence is just as real as its nature. c. A theory of existence must be self-referentially consistent. E.g., we can't say that to exist something has to exist in space because space doesn't exist in space. 4. Existence cannot violate the fundamental laws of thought: the law of identity, excluded middle, and the law of non-contradiction. a. A theory of existence has to allow that something has to be identical to itself, something either does or doesn't exist, and something cannot exist and not exist at the same time. b. From these, it will follow that there are no degrees of existing, or grades of existence, because existence itself follows the law of excluded middle, something either is or is not. Existence is an all or nothing sort of thing. 5. It must allow for acts of knowing to exist, otherwise it will be self refuting. Why? The theory itself is something we know or is based on what we know. 6. Existence should be understood as a single genus unless there is evidence to the contrary. a. The burden of proof is on the denier of this thesis. b. "Genus" refers to a class of things with a common characteristic. c. Existence must be univocal, for existence must be the same for all things which have existence, including existence itself. Therefore it follows that material objects are not solely material, they have the immaterial property of existence. D. What is Existence? [X exists if and only if. . .] 1. Strict empiricists: x is sense perceptible (Hume) 2. Plato: x participates in the form Existence.
9 a. He was playing with the idea that existence is a property. b. This is wrong, but many people have returned to this theory (but it's close). 3. Aristotle: x is either a substance or "present" in substance. a. A substance or a feature of a substance. b. He missed relations--not characteristics of substances but things that stand among substances. 4. Aquinas: x has that-ness. a. Aquinas made a distinction between the essence of a thing and the fact that it exists. b. To contemplate a thing's nature doesn't mean that it exists. c. Something comes to exist when the essence is combined with existence. d. This doesn't really solve the problem, but rather a rewording of the problem. He's merely said, "Existence is that-ness." 5. W.R. Carter: Something instantiates the concept x falls under. 6. Scientific Naturalism: x is spatially located, or x is physical, or x is part of something that is capable of exercising causal powers on other physical particulars. a. This theory makes impossible the existence of things that do seem possible, like numbers. b. Naturalism must say that it's impossible for numbers to exist. c. Naturalism requires one to pay a high ontological price. 7. Whitehead/Process philosophers: x is an event or bundle of events. 8. Atomism: x is capable of independent existence. a. No dependent things exist, i.e. the heap of stones. b. Fundamental particles are the only things that exist. c. For atomists, the atom is the ultimate separable part. The only kind of entities that exist are those which can be broken down into parts, and these parts are able to exist independent of the whole. To be is to be capable of separate, independent existence, there are no such things as inseparable parts. Hume said that because the shape and the whiteness of a cube cannot be separated, then they must therefore not be real, they are merely two different ways of talking about the cube. d. The existence/non-existence distinction equals the separable/inseparable distinction. You cannot take my soul, annihilate me and save my sensations. My sensations depend upon me existing to have them, they are inseparable from me, they are part of me, but they are not me. My thoughts and experiences are inseparable parts; they cannot be separated from the whole they are in. But atomists then go on to say, that since emotions, volitions, and cognitions cannot be separated from me then they do not exist. Even God could not separate your thoughts from your existence, you must first exist in order to have thoughts in you. The very fact that I can isolate my thoughts from my emotions argues that they are separate and not the same thing. Thus the atomist is wrong. 9. Quine: x has membership in the class of entities taken as real by the theory you take to be the best one. a. Anti-realism is a movement that attempts to make "existence" and "truth" relative to cognizers. (Hillary Putnam: "truth" is that which is rational to assert). b. This error takes "truth," which is metaphysical, and makes it epistemological, "with no asserter there would be no truth." This makes the existence of the world dependent upon experiencers. 10. Grossman: There is some entity e such that x is identical to e. E. Moreland's Theory of Existence: The Having of a Relation 1. Is existence a property [Anselm's ontological argument]?
10 a. Existence seems to be the kind of thing something has or does not have. But if you're not careful you can liken this to the same way other properties are had or not had and existence is different. b. Kant's critique (see Grossman p. 98): 1) Suppose existence is a property and you conceive of an apple and you list all of the properties of the apple. 2) Once you discover that the apple really exists on the table, since it has the added property of existence, it isn't the same thing as the concept of the apple. 3) But existence doesn't add to our conception of a thing, but it changes the way we conceive of it. a) Existence does not seem to add a new characteristic to something. There isn't a new feature in this thing, you've just discovered that the concept has reality. When you discover that something you've conceived of exists, you think of it differently. b) A thing's existence must be presupposed before it has any properties at all, so existence can't be a property. c) In fact, each of the properties themselves already exist before they are had by something. So existence of a thing must be something broader than a property. A thing having properties presupposes its existence. 2. GE Moore's claim [Conception of Reality} "lions exist asserts two things: a. There is a property of being a lion. This describes the "what-ness" or essence of a thing. b. There is a "belonging to" relation. The second thing is the existence of the lion, the "that-ness." 3. Existence is the having of a property or the being had by a property. a. Existence is not a property that belongs; existence is the belonging of some property. If something is real, it enters into the having relation with properties. b. To say that something exists is to say that some property has had something happen to it: it has been exemplified or to be instantiated; it belongs. c. Existence is not an ordinary property, it is a mode of properties, a modification of properties. d. So everything that exist must have at least one property. Descartes said that nothing is just that--nothingness. No properties. e. This is why conceiving of something and discovering that it exists doesn't add anything to our concept. The set of properties hasn't changed. It's just been discovered that this set of properties exists in the world. It is exemplified. f. The belonging or having relation is called exemplification, inherence or predication. g. Example of the color red: 1) The having of a property is not a physical relation of which the physical sciences know anything about, it is an immaterial entity. The virtue of having a property is what makes something real. 2) If something has properties it must exist. Red is real because is has the property of being a color. The number two exists because it has the property of being even. 3) For nominalists that reject that redness exists, they must make a reductive paraphrase of the statement "Red is a color," and say "Red things are colored things. a) But this makes no reference to redness, only to red things. b) This also doesn't work because red things are extended things, and we would not want to say that red is an extension. h. Nothing, then, is only physical. 1) More fundamental to a thing's physicality is the fact that it exists.
11 2) An object's physicalness consists of all of the things we can say about it chemically and physically; but the fact that we can say it has properties says that it has existence which is not physical [this sounds like you're calling existence a property again]. 4. We now have a test for existence: a. Does the thing that claims to exist have any characteristics attributed to it? b. Are there any predicates true of a thing? c. If something truly exists, then there can be something truly predicated of it. d. Unicorns don't exist, because there is nothing truly predicated of them. 1) Unicorns do not have horns upon their heads. 2) The concept of a unicorn, is the concept "of something" which doesn't exist, and the thing of which the concept of a unicorn is, is a thing which has a horn on top of its head. The concept of a unicorn does exist because there are predicates which are truly ascribed to it. 5. We also have a test for identity: If all the properties are the same, the things are identical. 6. How do we know that redness is not physical? a. It's possible to conceive of red without having a red object. b. In possible worlds in which there are no red particular things it still seems to be true that red is still a color. c. Red is a color" seems to be, then, a necessary truth. There are no worlds in which red can be a shape. d. We have to ask then, "What is it that grounds or makes the statement true that there can red in a possible world that has no red objects?" 1) It cannot be a fact about red particular things. It's a fact about red. 2) Therefore red cannot be the same as the particular that has the property of red. F. "Coming Into Being and Passing Away," Chisolm,On Metaphysics (p. 49-51) 1. Some things seem innocent epistemically, we should believe them until there is reason to abandon them: I exist , I have a body and it is the same body I had in the past, I have acted in the past and I could have chosen otherwise. 2. When I say I exist I mean I am an entity per se, a thing in myself. Chisolm believes that 3. Persons are the kind of thing that come into being and that could, theoretically, perish. 4. The concept of coming into being and passing away are not merely physiological, scientific notions. They're metaphysical. a. A person ceasing to be is not the same thing as a person's body dying. b. When a body dies it doesn't cease to be; it merely ceases to function--it is altered. c. It could be that ceasing to be and ceasing to function happen at the same time, but they're not the same thing. 5. Alteration is not the same thing as coming into being and perishing. (p. 51-52) a. Ceasing to be is instantanteous; alteration is a process. b. Process philosophers don't believe in alteration because they don't believe in any enduring entities. 1) There are series of momentary, instantaneous events. 2) This view attributes temporal parts to an object because of a prior commiment to physicalism. Today's object is different from yesterday's because it has a different temporal part. c. Anything that is altered has to exist all throughout the process to be considered altered, therefore it can't cease to be. Change presupposes sameness--something that endures through change.
12 1) If there is no change, there is replacement or succession--momentary temporal entities that come into existence and cease to be. 2) But Chisolm says that an alteration is a change in a thing's properties. This presumes the enduring of an entity throughout the alteration process. d. If something comes into existence at time T, then by our definition, then there is at least one property which can be ascribed to it, (it has a property). 1) We can then propose that at time T minus 1 there would be no properties ascribed to it because it no longer exists, it doesn't have any properties. 2) "Coming to be" is the having at least one property. "Passing away" is the having of no properties. Even a quantum ghost is not nothing because even it has certain properties. 3) Nothingness has no properties whatsoever, as Descartes said, "Nothing is just that." 6. Elanguesence (p. 55) a. Elanguesence means gradually diminishing in reality. b. Kant thought that things could gradually diminish in their existence. 1) Existence is like walking through a door; perishing is like walking through a door. 2) This requires a modes of being view in which there is a hlaf-way house between really existing and only partially existing. 3) To J.P., to exist is to have properties, and you either have them or you don't have them. Properties don't present themselves n degrees of that property. c. Chisolm says that elanguesence is the gradually losing of properties, like a note losing its sound. 1) Some properties are all or nothing properties, like the property of being even. 2) Other properties are degreed properties--you can have them in different degrees, like sound. a) Sound does not lose its existence gradually; its loses the particular properties of intensity it has. b) Nothing gradually comes into existence or perishes. These examples are all cases of alteration. 7. Chisolm's definition of coming into being. (p. 56) a. Coming into being means that there is a property which is such that x has it, and there is no property which is such that x had it. b. It now exists, but didn't exist before. 8. Persons don't gradually come into being or perish. a. If being human is a process, then it's an alteration. b. But in all alterations there is an enduring subject. 1) In order for properties to be lost or gained the entity itself must remain throughout. 2) You're not an embryo, because it doesn't endure; it's a description of a certain combination of properties identifying a stage of development. 3) The human being isn't the constant, because that's a physical assessment, and the physical changes. 4) If the body doesn't endure through time and the person doesn't endure through time (but is just a level of development) then what do we mean when we say the thing changes? What is "the thing" in mind? You have a body and a person, and you must have something else more fundamental to being human. What is more fundamental to being human than personhood. c. Therefore the human being/person must be constant in its essence though it goes through a stage of alteration by losing or gaining properties. 1) I exist prior to the process.
13 2) I exist after the process. 3) If I claim that I gradually become a person, then I must have existed before the process started and I exist after the process ends. What is the "I" the continues to exist throughout? a) The statement "I'm always going through change, so there is not specific thing called 'I'" is a nonsense statement. b) Are you the same self as the baby you once were? If so then your "self" cannot be your mere physical body because your body is not the same. d. Personhood/humanness relation is a genus/species relation. 1) While you can be a person without being human, you cannot be human without being a person. 2) The species is a mode of the genus, it is a way for the genus to exist.
III. The Nature of Identity and Identity Statements

A. There are four different philosophical questions related to the issue of identity: 1. When x and y are contemporaneous, what is it for x to be identical to y? a. This is the most fundamental question about what identity is in itself. b. What is identity in itself? What is it about a thing that makes it identical to itself at any moment? 2. When x and y are non-contemporaneous, what is it for x to be identical to y, and how is this possible? a. This is the question of the existence of substances or continuants. b. Do I endure through time? Am I the same entity that lived a year ago? 1) Sameness through change is studied in the branch of philosophy called the metaphysics of substance. 2) The notion of sameness through change already presupposes a more fundamental notion of what identity is. You cannot make sense out of identity through change if you don't already know what identity is to begin with. 3. What kind of evidence or criteria enable us to know that a given x and y are identical? a. This is an epistemological question, not metaphysical. b. This is not what identity is, but how are we to know about cases of identity? 4. What are the different kinds of identity statements? a. How are we to understand sentences that contain two or more expressions referring to the same thing? b. This is the analysis of sentences and their use, not the analysis of identity itself. B. What is the nature of identity? 1. Joseph Butler (17th c.) allegedly said, "Everything is what it is and not something else." Everything is identical to itself and different from something else. 2. Leibnitzs Law of the Indiscernability of Identicals a. Leibnitz (18th c.) stated two laws of identity (one true, and one false). b. Leibnitz' Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals: 1) [(X)(Y)(X = Y)] [(P)(PXPY)] This is known as the Law of Identity. 2) Translated: For any entity X and for any entity Y, if X is identical to Y, then for any property P, P is true of X if and only if P is also true of Y. a) If two things are identical, then the two things must have the same properties. b) Things share all of their properties with themselves, every thing is identical to itself.
14 c) The "if and only if" relation (material equivalence) is not the same as the identity relationship, though it's a necessary part of identity. d) Triangularity and trilaterality are material equivalents, but not identicals. c. Example: If Jim Macan is identical to the President of Biola, then we're talking about only one entity here. Then any property will be true of Jim Macan if and only if the property is true of the President of Biola. 1) Identity is a sufficient condition to establish the sameness of properties (though sameness of properties is not sufficient to establish identity). 2) If Jim is the President of Biola, they share the same properties. d. When someone talks about identity, they're talking about this law. 3. From the above, a second proposition about identity can be inferred, and it can be stated in two different ways. a. The first way: 1) (Y)(X = Y) (X = Y) 2) Translated: "For any entity X and for any entity Y, if X is identical to Y, then necessarily X is identical to Y." 3) Something's identity to itself is not an accidental feature of that thing but a necessary feature of that thing. b. The second way: 1) (Y)(X = Y) ~~ (X = Y) 2) Translated: "For any entity X and for any entity Y, if X is identical to Y, then it is not the case that it is possible that it is not the case that X is identical to Y." 3) This says that it is not even possible that X be different from Y. c. Simply, these say that there could be no possible worlds in which I would not be identical to myself. 1) If I exist, it is a necessary feature of me that I am identical with myself, it is not even possible that I am not identical with myself. 2) If my necessary properties were changed, I would not be myself. 4. Leibnitz' law gives us a way of falsifying or verifying identity statements. If one thing is true of x is not true of y then they aren't identical. a. If color is a wavelength of light, then everything that's true of a color is also true of the wavelength. b. But wavelengths lack the quality of redness (you can see redness in your mind with no light). c. Therefore they're not identical. 5. When you're trying to refute an identity claim you don't have to prove that there is in fact a difference, just the possibility to make your case for dualism. Just give a possible counter-example. a. Descartes 1) His argument for the soul was that disembodied existence was possible. 2) Therefore, I can't be identical to my body because disembodied existence is impossible without my body. 3) If Descartes is right, he has proved that you aren't the same thing as your body. b. Type/Type Identity Thesis 1) Any type of "mental" state is identical to a physical state. 2) Pain is identical to certain type of physical state in the brain that can be measured by physiologists. 3) But then Martians--with a different physical body--would not be able to be in physical pain. 4) If you then say that they had "Martian pain," then the question is "What allows you to call them both pain?" And the only answer is that they both have
15 the same felt quality; they hurt, proving the case for the existence of the pain apart from the physical state. 6. The issue underlying this discussion of identity is whether or not physicalism is true. C. Identity is a non-physical relation. 1. Relations a. Something which takes place between two or more things like "to the left of," it requires at least two things. However, a property (being red) requires only one thing. b. I do not have a property of identity. I stand with myself in the relation of identity, just like standing in the relation of "to the left of" the podium . 2. Identity is not a physical relationship. a. It is immaterial, non-physical, non-spatial relation. b. It is not quantifiable in the language of physics and chemistry because identity is not physical, it is metaphysical. c. Rarely will materialists ever discuss these issues at this level, they have a different view of metaphysics all together. To them, metaphysics is an attempt to clarify the language of science. 3. How do we know identity exists? Because it has certain properties true of it. 4. Identity is reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive. a. Identity is reflexive. 1) If some relation (R) is reflexive, then for all X, X stands in R to itself. 2) A reflexive relation is one that relates entities to themselves. 3) Being the same size as is reflexive (because a thing is the same size as itself) but large than isn't reflexive. b. Identity is symmetrical. 1) If R is symmetrical, then A stands in a relationship with B if and only if B stands in that same relationship to A. 2) Given any X and Y, if X is identical to Y then Y is identical to X c. Identity is transitive. 1) If X stands in relationship R to Y, and Y stands in relationship R to Z, then X stands in relationship to Z. 2) Simultaneity is transitive. If X is simultaneous with Y, and Y is simultaneous with Z, then X is simultaneous with Z. 3) "Larger than" is transitive, but "father of" is not. 5. There nothing that is solely physical. a. There are physical facts about physical objects, those features described by chemistry and physics. b. But identity is also a fact about a physical object. c. So there are two things that are true about every physical object that aren't physical: 1) It exists, which is not a physical fact. Chemistry and physics presupposes the having of properties. 2) It is identical to itself, which is also a non-physical fact. D. The identity of events 1. The importance of this issue. a. The discussion of physicalism has focused on the identity of physical events and mental events because scientists study events. The debate is over what does it mean for an event to be identical to another event. b. In the question of the existence of the soul the debate is focusing on events and not the nature of brain and soul themselves. c. This allows some to reduce the soul to physical events.
16 2. The Property Exemplification Account of events a. Leading advocate: Jaegwon Kim, Brown University ("an inconsistent naturalist") b. Definition of an event is the coming, having or leaving of a property by or among substances at or through time. c. (E1=E2)->[(S1=S 2) and (P1=P 2) and (T1=T2)] 1) If E1 is identical to E2, then S1 is identical to S2, and P1 is identical to P2, and T1 is identical to T2. 2) If the event of Aunt Sally is identical to the event of stew cooking at 103 Woodburn Drive, then the time will have to be the same, the substance that gets hotter has to be the same substance and the property that results has got to the same. 3) When there are different properties that change at the same time in a given substance, these are different events. 4) For someone to claim that a pain is the same as a certain brain state, the time is the same, but it is arguable that the substance and property are the same thing. a) Property dualists would say that the brain possesses the event, but it simultaneously has a pain and a brain event. The properties are different, though there's one substance that possesses them. b) The substance dualists would argue that the properties are different and there are two different substances possessing the properties, though the time is the same. The object that has the pain is the soul, though the brain is having C-fibers firing. 3. The Causal Contribution Criteria for Identity: a. E1 is identical to E2 if and only if E1 and E2 have the same causes and the same effects in the natural world. b. The event of me having a pain and the event of me having a brain state is the same input and the same output. Based on this criteria those two events are identical. c. This confuses isomorphism (materially equivalence) with identity. 1) Having a brain state is the same as having a pain because they are materially equivalent. 2) But material equivalence is a weaker relation than identity. 3) There's something true of the pain event that isn't true of the brain event. 4) Even if they're always coordinated, it doesn't prove they're identical. They can't be identical because there's a property true of one that isn't true of the other. a) The mind state has the property of feeling painful; it hurts. b) The brain state doesn't have that property. E. Leibnitz's law of the Identity of Indiscernibles 1. (P)(Px<->Py)->(x=y) a. For all properties P, if you have P of x, if and only if you have P of y, then x is identical to y. b. If you can't discern a difference between the properties of two objects, then they're really the same object. 2. Why would someone believe this? a. This is held by people who hold to a bundle theory of substance: 1) An object is nothing but its properties. 2) The sum of thing's properties exhausts what it means to be that thing. b. Empiricism: all that we can know of an object is an acquaintance with its properties. An apple is red, round, smooth, sweet, juicy, etc. 3. Can't location distinguish them? No.
17 a. Location can't be one of a thing's essential properties, because if it was moved to a new location then it wouldn't be the same object anymore. b. Spatial location doesn't make objects different because spatial location presupposes that the objects are different, therefore it can't be what constitutes their difference. c. Different locations is enough to show that two things are in fact different things, but location doesn't tell us precisely what it is that makes things different from each other. 4. There must be something else that's part of the object that is not a property which makes it different from all other objects, it's identity (a reflexive relationship). 5. A description of a thing can't be exhausted by its properties because two different objects can share all of their properties in common and yet be distinct. F. Identity statements 1. Identity statements are sentences we use to express identity: a. Physicalists think they can avoid arguments for the soul by changing the conversation from the soul to identity statements. b. Instead of analyzing identity itself, they analyze the sentences we use to express identity. c. What is going on here is a war about what is real. 2. Gottlob Frege (19th c. German philosopher of mathematics): a. Consider the following two statements [Hesperus and Phosphorus are the ancient names of the Morning Star and the Evening Star which later were discovered to be the same planet: Venus.]: 1) (s) Hesperus is Hesperus. 2) (l) Hesperus is Phosphorus. b. Sentence (s) and sentence (l) appear to be different. How are we to make sense out of the fact that they're different? c. The Traditional (or Objectual) Account of identity statements said: 1) An identity statement means that the thing referred to by the first term has a certain feature, namely it is identical to itself. Sentence (s) means that the object referred to by the first word has the property of being identical to itself. 2) Sentence (l) means that the object referred to by the first term is identical to itself. 3) So according to this view both of these sentences are asserting the same thing, they are synonymous, but that appears to be false. a) Sentence (s) is trivially true, but sentence (l) seems to give new information, and it also looks like sentence (l) could have turned out to be false. b) Therefore these two sentences can't mean the very same thing. 4) The traditional view couldn't account for these differences. d. Frege solved this by changing what we mean by identity statements. 1) Frega offered the Meta-linguistic Account (lit. "about language") 2) Sentences (s) and (l) both assert a certain relationship that holds between the two referring expressions. 3) Namely they are co-referring, or they name the same object. e. This was significantly different from the traditional account. 1) Remember first that we're not analyzing identity here but English sentences that express identity. 2) According to the traditional view the most important subject of discussion in an identity statement is the object referred to in the external world. a) The subject is the planet Venus. b) That object out there called the planet Venus is identical to itself.
18 c) It's an extra-linguistic entity, namely Venus. 3) For Frege, when you make an identity statement you're talking about words. This set the trend in a bad direction. a) The subject of the discussion in an identity statement is a word b) I've chosen to use the words Hesperus and Phosphorus to name the same object, Venus. c) The danger is that identity claims become claims about words, not things in the real world. 1. A painful state is merely a brain state. 2. Churchland says that sentences about pain are not about pain per se but about how we use the word pain. How did we come up with the word? By observing the behavior of people who have certain experiences like being stuck with pins. It's a description of other people's behaviors. 3. If you stick with the subject, i.e. states that hurt, it would be much more difficult to explain away pain. 4. Philosophy then becomes a study of how we use words, not a study about real things in the world. f. De re and de dicto 1) De re means "concerning the thing itself." a) In an identity statement where both of the terms in the sentences "Hesperus is Phosphorus" refer to rigid designators, the terms are to be understood by a de re sense (i.e., "concerning the thing itself"). b) What makes de re statements true is something that's true about the world: the first and second objects named are the same. These are true because they fit the world the way it really is. 2) De dicto means "concerning the proposition" (dictum). G. Three different kinds of identity statements 1. Name/Referential Identity Statements--kinds of statements that use words that are called rigid designators (Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity) a. A rigid designator is a term which designates--or picks out--the same object throughout all possible worlds in which it exists. It functions merely to tag or refer to the object of reference in every possible circumstance or world in which it could exist, even if given a different name in that world. b. It works even with counter-factuals: 1) "If x were to have been f, then z." (Facts possible in other possible worlds.) 2) "If you were to have stayed home today instead of coming to class, then you would have watched Oprah Winfrey." That's a possibility, but not a fact. 3) I can refer to you in counter-factual situations (contrary to fact situations) and still be talking about you. You can do this because of rigid designators. c. Examples: 1) If Richard Nixon is used as a rigid designator, then what we mean is "that man out there in the world." It refers to him even in a world where he is named something else." 2) Rigid designators refer to a thing's essence, not to what it does accidentally. Richard Nixon would still be himself in any possible world. 3) If "Ben Franklin" is a rigid designator, the name refers to the same individual man even in a world where he was named Thomas Jefferson or where he did not invent bifocals. d. Definite descriptions 1) These are non-rigid designators in that they do not track the same referent in counter-factual situations.
19 2) Terms like "the inventor of bifocals" (called a definite description) refer to whatever it is that satisfies or is described by the term. Thus, in our world "the inventor of bifocals" refers to Ben Franklin, but if Jefferson and not Franklin had invented bifocals, the term would refer in that possible world to Jefferson. 3) Thus, non-rigid designators do not refer to the same object in worlds where that object doesn't satisfy the description. Therefore, they do not stay with the same object but refer to whatever object it is that satisfies that description in that world. 4) In "blue is the color of the sky", "blue" is rigid and designates the same color in all worlds, including those with pink skies. "The color of the sky" refers to whatever color the sky is in that world (blue in our world, pink in a world where God made the sky pink). But blue would still be blue regardless of the world. e. Rigid designators depend on the notion that things themselves have essences. f. There are two kinds of rigid designators: 1) Proper nouns, e.g. Hesperus, Richard Nixon. These name individual objects. 2) Natural kind terms, e.g., H2O, a lion. These refer to a type of thing, a class, a repeatable thing. g. Application 1) Suppose someone claims that pain is a brain state? 2) You can disprove that by showing that there is a possible world where there is pain without a certain brain state. 3) If the word "pain" rigidly designates a certain feeling, then it's not possible to have a world in which pain is not a certain feeling. 4) But it is possible, it seems, for there to be a world in which there is pain without brain states, i.e., disembodied pain, unless pain is not used as a rigid designator. 2. Meaning identity statements a. Meaning statements occur when the two referring expressions are synonyms. 1) "A bachelor is an unmarried male" is an example. 2) "The teacher of Plato...." b. Meaning statements are true not by virtue of the way the world is, but by virtue of the way we use language. These can be found in the dictionary. c. To refute one of these, just show that one term doesn't mean the other term. d. These include operational definitions of things: IQ is a certain score on an IQ test (as opposed to the thing the score represents). 1) B.F. Skinner: "Pain means 'if I am stuck by a pin the I will grimace and shout 'ouch'." 2) The meaning of the term "pain" is equal to a set of pain behaviors. 3) This is a meaning identity statement because it holds that these two things are synonyms. 4) But this isn't what people mean when they use the word pain. Pain isn't the behavior itself, but what causes the behavior. If you could show that the concept of pain is present without the behavior then meaning statements are disproven. e. This is the most important development in 20th c. philosophy. It has changed the debate of the soul. 1) Nobody is a behaviorist anymore. 2) This view turned out to be false and the concept of contingent identity statements was embraced instead. 3. Contingent identity statements (this is a deeply flawed physicalist response) a. These occur when two descriptions of something happen to be fulfilled by the same thing but could have been fulfilled by different things, when two terms mean different things, but still pick out the same object. E.g., "The evening star is the morning star" or "Ben Franklin is the inventor of bifocals."
20 b. The statements could turn out to be false if the world turns out to be different, but that doesn't mean that Venus is not identical to itself or Ben Franklin isn't identical to himself. c. Suppose Aunt Sally's favorite color is blue. Then "The color of the sky is Aunt Sally's favorite color" expresses an identity. 1) But this identity statement, though true, is contingent. God could have made the sky green and Aunt Sally could still favor blue, or the sky could be blue but Aunt Sally could have preferred pink. In either case, "The color of the sky is Aunt Sally's favorite color" would be false. 2) These kinds of identity statements can be understood as saying this: "Whatever turned out to be the color of the sky is identical to whatever turned out to be Aunt Sally's favorite color." d. Identity statements can be contingent (true in some worlds and false in others), but the fact that a thing is identical to itself is necessary. 4. There are four grades (types) of necessity. a. Strict logical necessity is a de dicto necessity and refers to the fact that some entire propositions are true necessarily (in all possible world) either in virtue of the form of the proposition (Pv~P) or the meanings of its terms (as in meaning identity statements). b. Metaphysical or Kripkean necessity is a de re necessity and refers to the way a property is possessed by a thing (water is necessarily H2O or has H2O as its essence). c. Physical necessity expresses the fact that, given the (contingent) physical laws of nature, objects fall to the ground, but there are possible worlds with different laws of nature where this is not the case. d. Epistemological necessity expresses the fact that it is impossible to be wrong about some judgment. This is contrased to "epistemological possibility," which means that for all we know we could be mistaken in some judgment. H. Francisco Suarez on the various kinds of distinctions 1. We need to have a rich enough set of distinctions, or mental categories, in our understanding to keep us from making fundamental errors. 2. The identity/difference is not the same thing as the cause/effect, the co-extensionality or the separable/inseparable distinction. None of these latter things prove identity. a. Cause/effect: If a causes b, then a isn't identical to b. b. Coextensionality (material equivalence): 1) One is true if and only if the other is true. This doesn't prove they are identical. 2) A thing can be triangular if and only if it's trilateral. But that doesn't prove that triangularity is identical to trilaterality. c. Separable/inseparable: If two things are separable they are different; if they're inseparable they're the same thing. 1) Two things can be inseparable but not identical. Some things in this world exist and they are dependent entities, they cannot be separated from other things all by themselves and put on a shelf and exist. But this doesn't mean that they are not real. 2) Here is the significance of this. When we come to properties like redness, we are going to argue that redness can be in more than one thing at the same time, it is a universal. But when redness is in something like a shirt, something happens to it, it is modified. We are going to argue that there is a modal distinction between redness and redness's being had by this shirt. So that when we talk about the redness of a shirt, and ask if the redness can be had by another shirt, the question is ambiguous. We could mean the redness as a particular,
21 (there is a sense in which the redness of this shirt can't be had by another shirt), or redness as a universal (in the sense that the redness can be in another shirt if it is the same color red). Redness is a property that can be in many shirts at one time, but this particular mode of redness can only be had now by this particular shirt. 3. Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) was great medieval philosopher. In his work entitled On Various Kinds of Distinctions Suarez discussed certain distinctions that shed light on identity and identity statements. a. First: the real distinction (for non-identical things) 1) Two entities differ by means of a real distinction if they can be separated and still exist. 2) Independence of existence is the key here. 3) The test for real distinction: Can the things in question be separated from each other? For example, the different legs of a chair bear a real distinction to each other; they can be separated. b. Second: the distinction of reason (for identical things) 1) If "two" things differ by means of a distinction of reason, then "they" are identical. 2) For Suarez, there are two kinds of distinctions of reason. a) The distinction of reasoning reason. 1. This arises solely because we use the same word twice, as in sentences like "Peter is Peter." 2. The only thing that is distinct are the two uses of the same word, or two occasions of my thought about the same object. 3. Here, there is no distinction that exists in the world, in reality, but only in the intellect. The appearance of distinction is merely the process of thought or language that gives rise to a distinction in which the same, identical thing is named (or thought of) twice. b) The distinction of reasoned reason. 1. These are contingent identity statements. 2. An example would be "The red object is the sweet object" said of a red, sweet apple or "The Evening Star is the Morning Star" where each description refers to the planet Venus (these are definite distinctions). 3. When the distinction of reasoned reason is present: a) The "objects" referred to are identical (the apple or Venus)... b) But the concepts or terms used to refer to the object (the red vs. the sweet object, The Evening vs. The Morning Star) do not exhaust the object in question and they express different non-identical aspects of the same, identical object. 1. The name "Evening Star" captures an a star's relationship with other things (the other objects in the evening sky) that is not a necessary one. 2. Venus's identity to itself is necessary, but its relations with other heavenly bodies are contingent. c) The object grasped by both terms is identical, but the thing used to grasp it is not identical, i.e. the manner of grasping differs, capturing different aspects of the self-same object. 4. This distinction is what makes contingent identity statements possible. 5. These kinds of statements can be epistemologically contingent, but metaphysically necessary.
22 a. If the Evening Star is Venus and the Morning Star is Venus, it is necessary that the Evening Star is identical to the Morning Star, because it is necessary that Venus is identical to itself. b. But it may be epistemologically uncertain that both stars actually refer to the same planet. In this case, only my knowledge is contingent, not the identity itself. 6. This is similar to the different names for God which are inadequate in themselves to fully describe Him. c) The question then is, where does the distinction come from if I am talking about the same thing? 1. In the first case, the distinction is in the fact that I am really saying the same thing twice. 2. In the second case, the distinction is in capturing different aspects of the same object. 3. Both of these are mental distinctions, they do not exist in the physical world, they are distinctions I make in my mind. 3) Hume's cube a) Hume said that the color and the shape of a cube are not separable, that they are not "really distinct from one another; thus if they are not really distinct from one another then they must be different by a distinction of reason only. This means, the shape of the cube is identical to it's color. b) This reflected Hume's commitment to atomism, or an atomic theory of being. c) However, Hume is wrong because the shape of the cube has something true of it that is not true of the color of the cube, namely the shape has the property of being a geometrical structure, and not the property of being a color. The whiteness and the shape are different, even though they can't be separated from one another. d) Things which are inseparable are not necessarily identical, they can be different and distinct. c. Third: the modal distinction (really distinct things that have a dependency relationship). 1) If A is modally distinct from B, then A could exist without B, but not visa versa. a) B is a mode of A. b) B is an inseparable aspect of A. c) B is dependent upon A. 2) No mode is part of the essence of the thing modified, although it may be necessary. If A is modally distinct from B such that B is a mode of A, then A and B are not identical and A could exist without B, but not vice versa.. 3) For example, consider the property of redness. a) When redness is exemplified by or had by an apple, then at least these three entities are involved: the property of redness, the apple, and thehaving-of-redness-by-the-apple. b) This latter entity is an instance of redness. Redness is modified by its being exemplified by the apple. c) Redness could exist without its being possessed by this apple, but theexemplification-of-redness-by-the-apple, i.e. this specific instance of redness in this specific apple, could not exist without redness. d) This instance of redness is not identical to redness, but is modally distinct from redness. 4) The point: A and B can be inseparable from each other, but not identical. 5) Francis Suarez, On Various Kinds of Distinctions, p. 29
23 a) "Thus light, for example, depends on the sun; and this dependence is something other than light or the sun. We can conceive that light and the sun would remain; without light depending on the sun, if God were to refuse to concur with the sun for the production or conservation of light, and would keep both in being by His own power alone. But we cannot conceive the dependence of light on the sun to be an entity wholly distinct from the light itself, for two reasons. First, this dependence is, so to speak, the channel through which the cause flows into its effect or terminus, and so the dependence cannot be something entirely distinct from the effect." b) The light's dependency on the sun is a separate entity than the light or the sun, because the light and the sun could exist by themselves. c) But this doesn't mean that it can be separated and exist on its own. 1. This is the view of atomism: "to be" is to be capable of independent existence. 2. If it isn't independent, it isn't real. If the mind depends upon the brain for its existence, that means that the mind doesn't exist. The spirit is a mode of the soul. a) The soul could exist without the spirit, but the spirit couldn't exist without the soul. b) Therefore, the spirit is not a separate, independent entity from the soul, but a sub-category, a modal distinction, a kind of capacity. Note: There is a modal distinction between a thing and the heap of its parts. a) The whole is dependent on its parts and inseparable from its parts. b) But it is not identical to its parts. Application to the Trinity a) The Father, Son and Spirit are not separable entities. There are three "whos" and one "what." The "what" is the nature of God, His attributes. Three "whos" share the same "what." In the incarnation you have one "who" and two "whats." b) How do the Father and Son and Spirit relate to each other? They don't stand in an identity relation. They aren't identical to each of the others. How does the Son relate to the divine nature? The Son isn't identical to the divinity; He has divinity. c) There is modal distinction between the divine nature and the members of the Trinity in such a way that each of the three persons aren't identical to the divine nature, but dependent upon it. d) This isn't the same as the heresy of modalism in which you have one substance and one person (one "what" and the "whos" are merely modal distinctions). Application: Pain can be a modal distinction of my soul. a) Pain can't be separated from my soul and exist, but my soul can be separated from my pain and still exist. b) It seems there is no real distinction between my soul and my pain because my pain cannot be separated from me. c) Nor is there a distinction of reason between me and my pain state, because they're not identical (if so, then when my pain ceased to exist, I would cease to exist).
6)
7) 8)
9)
I. Reductionism (or the "Nothing Buttery" problem) 1. Reductionism is an attempt to reduce something to be something else. This is related to identity claims. a. The modern tendency is toward reductionism.
24 b. E.g., Freud reduced religious belief to nothing but a defense mechanism, a desire to cope with fear of death, and the need for a father figure. color is reduced to a wavelength. 2. Three forms of reductionism: a. Linguistic reduction (focuses on analyzing sentences and replacing them with new sentences) 1) This occurs when a sentence that uses one vocabulary is replaced with a sentence that uses another vocabulary that you claim is equivalent to the first to get rid of something in the first sentence that you don't like. a) Sentence A: The average family has 2.5 children. b) Sentence A': Add the children and divide that number by the number of families and you get 2.5. c) A is the reduced sentence. A' is the reducing sentence. Sentence A uses a term that is absent in A' (average family). 2) Importance: there's war going on for what's real. a) True sentences have ontological implications. If you take a sentence to be true, then that has implications for what is real. It commits you to the existence of what is the subject of the sentence, at least. b) Suppose you look to a sentence and you want to believe that the sentence is true, but you don't want to commit to the existence of what it asserts. You give the sentence a reductive paraphrase. A' no longer commits you the existence of a real thing called an "average family." 3) An example: a) Sentence B: Smith is in pain. b) Sentence B': Smith has a tendency to grimace when stuck with a pin. c) Sentence B' allows you to use the term "pain" without being committed to the idea that pain is real; instead it's just a behavior. d) Instead of committing to a non-physical world inhabited by things like colors and numbers, you reduce these terms with what is claimed is really meant by these terms. 1. You paraphrase sentences to terms that are metaphysically preferred. E.g., "Red is a color" = "Red things are colored things." 2. This avoids a commitment to the property red in favor of a commitment to red things (like fire engines and apples). 4) Refutation: Prove that the two are not equivalent. a) Give a case where one is true and the other is false. b) Turn the sentences around. E.g., "Red things are shaped things," isn't the same as, "Red is a shape." b. Strong ontological reduction 1) This occurs when some entity x is identified with, or reduced to, some entity y. In this case, x is nothing but y. 2) E.g., heat is the vibration of molecules. Red is a wavelength. Pain is brain state alpha. 3) In this case it's not the sentence that you're focused on, it's the entity in the real world. And you're making the claim that this entity is actually identical to something else. a) We're not asking what the sentence "I have a pain" means (identity statements) b) Rather, we're asking what pain is. c. Weak ontological reduction 1) Entity x is reduced to entity y in that x is caused by or explained by y. Y is a sufficient condition for x, though both are genuinely distinct entities.
25 2) The relationship between x and y is called the emergent relation or supervenient relation. 3) E.g., wetness can be explained by a certain molecular structure of water. a) Wetness and water don't stand to one another in an identity relation, they aren't the same entity. b) Wetness supervenes upon water, or emerges upon water. 4) When that takes place there are two things true: a) x and y are not identical; they're not the same thing. b) x depends on y. d. You need to discern between strong and weak reductionism. 1) Strong ontological reduction: wetness does not exist over and above the molecular structure, but is the same thing as it. 2) Weak ontological reduction: The wetness is not identical to the structure (it's a different entity), but it depends on the structure. 3) Supervenient materialists: The mental supervenes on the physical like wetness supervenes on water or like software supervenes on the hardware. a) They don't like dualism, but they don't think that the mental is identical to the physical and can't be reduced to merely physical terms. b) Weak reductionism is the same strategy (for the most part) used by property dualists in the mind-body problem. 1. Mental states emerge upon the top of brain states. 2. They're genuinely different things, but the mental is dependent on the physical. 4) Some physicalists think that once you've established the weak ontological reduction, then you've actually accomplished the strong reduction. If one is dependent upon the other in an emergent way, then the one is identical to the other. This is very confused. a) It's often thought by people making these claims that by demonstrating a supervenient relation they've made a strong reduction argument. b) Some scientists who make strong reductionistic claims give only weak reductionistic evidence. e. The two positions can be called strict physicalism and weak supervenient physicalism. 1) Churchland points out that the weak physicalist's view is inconsistent with the theory of evolution. There is neither need nor room for supervenient mental properties to exist. 2) Physicalist definition of a scientific law of nature: it is a scientific law if it relates only to physical entities. a) But a supervenient view relates a physical object with a non-physical object (the supervenient entity, e.g., wetness). b) Therefore the law governing it can't be a scientific law because it entails something non-physical. c) Strict physicalists, therefore, must deny these supervenient relations by making strong reductions because there is no naturalistic explanation for them. 3) Once you abandon strong ontological reduction you come perilously close to violating naturalism, because you're embracing entities in the natural world that are not, in principle, explainable scientifically. 4) It begins to look like these mental things pop into existence ex nihilio.
IV. Properties
26 A. The battle for the existence of the "world" 1. Plato's battle between the Gods and the Giants is a battle between the ontologists and naturalists about the existence of the world. (See Grossman, p. vii) The history of ontology is the battle over the existence of the world. 2. The "universe" consists of all the spatio-temporal entities. a. Naturalists are those who believe that the space-time physical universe open to scientific investigation is all there is. b. Some things may be in space and time but not be physical (i.e., a thought I'm now having). 3. The "world" includes all abstract objects (and may include the universe they way some use the term). 1) These are non-spatio-temporal entities. They is real but not located in space or time. 2) Ontologists believe in the world in addition to the universe. They think that abstract objects are real. 3) Naturalists deny the existence of the world and believe only in the universe. B. The challenge of naturalism 1. The naturalist faces three tasks (Grossman, p. 24): a. He must make a plausible case for the contention that there are no mental things. b. He must argue that properties are concrete rather than abstract. c. He must try to show that there are no other kinds of abstract things (sets, relations, etc.). 2. Regarding the existence of propositions (handout: "Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge," The Reform of Logic): a. Naturalists will not accept the existence of propositions. b. If propositions are real, then they have the following main features: 1) The proposition is not located in space or in time, as are, for example, sentences or speech acts, or events involving sentences. This is in part what is others mean by saying that propositions do not have actual or real existence, but only ideal being. [A proposition is not the same thing as the sentence.] 2) The proposition is not identical with a sentence, but the meaning or sense of an (indicative) sentence is a proposition. Propositions may, thus, be 'expressed' by sentences, though it is not essential to them that they be so expressed. a) Propositions have to do with meanings not language. b) You can think without using language. Thought is not essentially linguistic, but rather an activity that involves meanings or propositions. c) The same proposition can be grasped by the minds of many people at once. c. Propositions are real and are in the world, not the universe. 1) Propositions don't exist in space and time. 2) But they, like properties, can be exemplified in things that are in space and time, but it's not a spatial "in," so they do not enter space and time when they are "in" things. 3) Naturalists must keep properties in space and time, because if they let these things fly off into the world then their naturalism is dead. 3. Moreland believes naturalism is false, in part because: a. The universe had to have a beginning and there needs to be an explanation for design. b. Mind/body dualism, libertarian freedom of the will, and personal identity through change are not consistent with naturalism, and these things seem to be true. c. Abstract objects exist (numbers, colors, propositions, etc.).
27 4. The nominalist/realist debate about whether properties exist is a specific example of the broader debate between naturalists and anti-naturalists on the world view level. a. If you're going to be a naturalist, you'll need to get rid of all abstract objects. b. You'll need to get rid of properties, mind, and libertarian freedom. c. You'll have to find some way of explaining them without making reference to abstract entities. d. Armstrong, as a naturalist, must find a way to keep all properties inside of space. 1) Though properties might be universals, he holds, there must be particular instantiations for them to exist. 2) Where would these things be if they existed but weren't exemplified? It's hard to see how they can be material. This implies the existence of an immaterial world. 3) But now he's faced with a different problem: these properties instantiated must have individually existed for all time (no big bang) or they had to come into existence out of nothing. C. Do properties exist?--Three major schools of thought regarding the ontological status of qualities. 1. The problem: Suppose that we have two discs before us, one called Socrates and the other called Plato. Socrates and Plato are concrete particulars. Both discs have the exact same properties. a. We have three entities: the concrete particular Socrates, the property of redness and inherence, which is the relation between Socrates and redness (the one in the many). b. How do we account for Socrates being red? c. How are we to make sense out of the fact that two objects share the same properties? 2. Realists say that properties (qualities, attributes, characteristics, e.g., being round) exist and are universals (multiply-exemplifiable entities that can be "in" many particulars at the same time). a. Socrates has the property of being red. Plato has the property of being red. And the redness of Socrates is identical to the redness of Plato. b. Further, somehow redness is the kind of thing that can be in more than one thing at the same time (i.e., it's a universal). c. The relationship between Socrates and redness is called the exemplification relation, the predication relation or inherence (these are not quite synonyms, but are often used interchangeably). A realist would say Socrates exemplifies (or predicates) the property of redness, or redness inheres in Socrates. d. Pure realists hold that properties are outside of space and time and two schools of thought exist about how properties (redness) relate to their particular instances (apples). 1) Model/copy pure realists hold that a copy of redness is in the apple, not redness itself (like an image in the mirror). Thus, properties are not in their instances in any sense, but rather a copy of a property is in its instance (Augustine held that these properties existed in God's mind and were copied to the particulars). a) The third man argument refutes this view, based on two assumptions in the model/copy view. 1. The self-predication assumption: f-ness is itself f (redness is itself red) 2. The non-identity assumption: f-things are f in virtue of some other entity f-ness possessed by all f things (red things are red in virtue of some other entity--redness--possessed by all other red things).
28 b) Since every set of red things has red as a member of that set (selfpredication assumption), then what is it that gives unity to the class as a whole? Redness (non-identity assumption), which then requires inclusion because of self-predication, leading to a viscious regress. c) Standard response: deny the non-identity assumption. It applies only to particulars and not to properties and particulars. Redness itself doesn't have to be red in virtue of some other entity; it can be red in virtue of itself. 2) Simple pure realists (Morland, Grossman) hold that properties actually are "in" their instances in that they enter the very being of those instances; redness itself is actually part of the being of the apple's surface, but that the "in" is not a spatial container sense of "in" (as water is "in" a glass) but, rather, is just the primitive, unanalyzable relation of predication (where neither the property nor the predication relation are spatial, though the apple itself is spatial). a) "There is redness in the apple and the apple is on the table." b) This means that the other side is much closer to us than we think. Entities enter this world from spaceless-timelessness all the time. c) For the ancient, the non-material was easier to figure out than the material. It was quite clear to them that properties exited, but they weren't sure about the particulars. Their problem was figuring out what was left of the apple when the properties were taken away. e. Impure realists hold that properties are spatially in their instances (vs. nonspatially for pure realists) and thus believe that properties can be wholly present at many different spatial locations at once. 1) The Axiom of Localization (Grossman): no entity can be in more than one place in space at the same time. a) This is consistent with pure realism because properties aren't in space. b) The nominalist and the extreme nominalist also both accept it because there aren't any properties and the only things that exist are particulars. 1. The particulars can only exist in one place at a time. 2. Nominalists believe that the only things that exist are concrete particulars and the abstract particulars that exist in only one place at a time. 2) Armstrong, an impure realist, is the only one who denies the axiom. a) He believes properties can be in more than one place at the same time. b) But properties don't exist outside of space and time. They exist "in" spatially. c) Therefore he has to believe that properties can be in more than one place at time. Armstrong accepts in the axiom of localization as it relates to material objects, but not to properties. d) He's an impure naturalist (pure naturalists believe that everything is in space, but that everything is only in one place in space). 3. Nominalists believe properties exist and are themselves abstract particulars or tropes; they are individual things. a. To nominalists, properties exist, but they are themselves particulars, not universals. Each apple has its own "little redness" in it. b. There are both concrete particulars (Socrates) and abstract particulars (sometimes called tropes). 1) Socrates is a concrete particular, a non-abstract individual entity. 2) An abstract particular, or trope, is an individualized, particular quality that is exhausted in its own embodiment. It can only be at one place at a time. 3) Socrates has his own particular redness, and Plato has his own particular redness. c. Keith Campbell is the leading nominalist; he wrote Abstract Particulars.
29 Nominalists are also called particularists, not to be confused with particularism as an epistemic doctrine that one can know things without criteria for how one knows them]) believe that properties exist and are themselves particulars ( 4. Extreme nominalists say properties don't exist at all. (Extreme nominalists is a term J.P. coined to distinguish this view from nominalism; other writers will use nominalism as a synonym for extreme nominalism.) a. Extreme nominalists (Grossman's term "nominalist") deny the existence of properties altogether, and only believe in fire engines and apples. 1) Some would say the word r-e-d is true of Socrates, but Socrates has no property of red. 2) But nothing grounds the word as true of Socrates. It's just a primitive linguistic association. b. There has been a strong connection between physicalism and nominalism throughout the history of philosophy. Extreme nominalism has been motivated by materialism. c. Examples of extreme nominalists are Willard Quine at Harvard and Wilford Sellers from the University of Pittsburgh. 5. Different forms of Extreme Nominalism (from handout) a. Predicate Extreme Nominalism 1) Some entity (a fire engine) has the property of red if and only if a falls under the predicate 'F' (or 'F' is true of the fire engine or a satisfies the function 'x is F'). 2) The fire engine has no true property of red. It's just an arbitrary convention of language. The word "red" is true of the fire engine, and that's all. b. Concept Extreme Nominalism 1) This is just like the predicate version except it substitutes "concept," taken as an irreducible mental entity, for "predicate" in the definition. 2) A fire engine has the property of being red if and only if the concept of being red is true of the fire engine. This view would embrace the existence of irreducible mental entities called concepts. c. Mereological or Exploded Object Extreme Nominalism (Mereology comes from Greek meros for "part." Mereology is the study of parts and whole. Mereological essentialism is the view that parts are essential to the identity of a whole.) 1) This view holds that a has the property F, if and only if, a is a part of the aggregate of F-things. 2) A fire engine has the property of being red if and only if that fire engine is part of the exploded object of red things. a) It's like "red" exploded into individual red things which have a piece of the original red stuff. b) Armstrong calls it the "blob theory." Plato considers this view. This is Grossman's "piece of pizza" analogy. c) This leaves unanswered the question, what makes each of the pieces of red things red? It doesn't solve anything. d. Class Extreme Nominalism 1) This is the view that a has the property F just in case a is a member of the class of F-things. 2) The fire engine is red if it's a member of the class of red things. This is just a primitive feature of the world. There is no grounding for the unity of a class. e. Resemblance Extreme Nominalism 1) This view requires that a appropriately resemble a paradigm case of an Fthing.
30 2) A paradigm case is an ideal example. A is red if it exactly resembles the set of all red things. 3) This is a way of doing away with properties and replacing them with predicates. a) Hume says white is just a word we use of white things. The shape and color of a sugar cube differ by a distinction of reason only. b) There is no real distinction or modal distinction. The shape and the color of the cube are identical to each other, just different ways of looking at the same thing. They are the same entity. c) Hume asks what white is. White turns out to be objects that we use the word white to refer to. d) But now the word "white" turns out to be a universal. This doesn't solve anything because there is one word "white" but many examples of it, the same one and many problem with the color white. Hume replaces one universal, the property of color, with the word white, which is a universal, too. Are these points of view fastening on to real things in the world? If not, there's an arbitrariness to how we attend to these "white" things. 6. Nominalism hasn't been widely held in the history of philosophy. a. The leading exponent of it is Keith Campbell at the University of Maryland. b. When nominalists say that Socrates and Plato are both red, they mean that they both have their own little piece of red (red 1 and red 2). They don't share the same property of red. c. Concrete particulars exist and abstract individuals (individual qualities) exist. d. Red 1 (the specific color of the specific particular Socrates) is a "simple" entity. 1) It has no diversity of constituents (parts or properties) in it. 2) A simple thing is not composed of more basic components that are different from one another (non-identical). There's no diversity in a being that's a simple entity. e. The problem here is that every red thing has its own individual quality of red. 1) It has color, formed volume (roundness, in this case), location, and is individuated (it is particular). 2) Campbell has to say that these differ from each other by a distinction of reason only. 3) But what makes red 1 different than red 2? a) Something in each instance of red has something that makes it red and something that individuates it. 1. Red 1 has a bare particular that distinguishes it from red 2. 2. Redness is exemplified by a bare particular to make red 1, and redness is also exemplified by a different bare particular that makes up red 2. b) Therefore we treat these as complex entities, wholes with constituents: properties (color), an individuator, and a relation of predication. c) But this commits us to something Campbell wants to avoid. 1. They share the same constituents, which is a universal. This leads to realism. 2. Campbell has to treat them as simple entities in order to avoid further constituents which includes a property (a universal) shared by both. 3. 3. Campell has to say that the color of red 1 differs from its shape or spatial location by a distinction of reason only. d) But these things are the same in some way, yet they're different in some way to. 1. The "individuator" makes them different: Plato and Socrates are different concrete particulars.
31 2. But there is a property of redness that is in Socrates and in Plato which accounts for their sameness. 3. Two individuators exemplify the same property. The redness of Socrates is identical to the redness in Plato. They are the very same entity. Redness is the kind of entity that can be in more than one thing at the same time, i.e. a universal. 4. If red 1 and red 2 resemble each other by virtue of their color, and if their color is identical to their individuality, then Socrates and Plato will resemble each other by virtue of their individuality. But they don't resemble each other by virtue of their individuality. They're different by virtue of their individuality. So there's something wrong here. Equals can be substituted for their equals without loss of truth value. And if the shade and the individuation of these two are different by a distinction of reason only, then the very entity that they differ by means of, is the very same identical entity that they are the same regarding. 7. There is an intramural debate about the "in" relation, the predication relation. a. One way of reading Plato is the model/copy view. 1) Socrates and Plato each have their own copy of redness, they don't really have redness. 2) This falls prey to the third man argument. b. Another view is to say that redness is spatially contained either inside Plato or at the very same location as Plato. 1) Redness would also be at the same location as Socrates. 2) Armstrong, who holds this second view, rejects the axiom of localization which says that no entity can be in more than one place in space at the same time. a. He believes that properties can be in more than one place at the same time. The whole pizza is over here and over there at the same time. b. He wants to maintain properties as naturalized entities located inside space and time. But this is not "natural" in any usual sense of the word. 3) Some people feel they have to be nominalists because of the tendency to locate properties in space where the objects are that have the properties, and then to exhaust the property in one embodiment. c. Realists say that redness is not "in" the apple in a spatial relation, but is "in" the apple by the relation of predication. It can't be reduced to anything else; it's a fundamental feature of reality. d. The nominalist believes that since the ball is in the room and the ball exemplifies the color red that the color is located in the room. The realist (ontologist) doesn't accept the third fact. The balls are spatially located, but the having of the color isn't spatial; it's a relation. If one color is darker than another, this "darker than" relation is not in space. D. Handout on properties 1. Do Properties Exist? No Extreme Nominalist Yes Pure Realists (Grossman) Impure realists/Naturalists (D.M. Armstrong) Pure Naturalists/Nominalists (Keith Campbell) Are properties abstract (outside space/time)? No
32 Pure Naturalists (Nominalism) Impure Realists Yes Pure Realists Acceptance of Axiom of Localization No Impure Realists Yes Nominalists Extreme Nominalists Pure Realists can 2. Are properties universals? No Extreme Nominalist Nominalist (Particularistic) Yes Pure Realists Impure Realist 3. Are properties "in" their instances? No Extreme Nominalist Model/Copy Realists (Plato) Yes Nominalist Impure Realist Pure Realist Is this 'in' spatial? No Pure Realist Yes Nominalist Impure Realist Axiom of Localization Yes Nominalist No Impure Realist Question Do properties exist? Are properties universals? (multiply exemplifiable?) Yes Nominalists All forms of Realism All forms of Realism No Extreme Nominalists Extreme Nominalists (they do not exist?) Nominalist (the do exist but are abstract particulars) Are properties abstract entities? (not in space and time) Impure Realists Model/Copy Realists Extreme Nominalists Nominalists Impure Realists
33 Are properties 'in' the concrete particulars that have them? Pure Realists (the 'in' is not a spatial properties) Nominalists (accept the axiom of localization and the 'in' is a normal part/whole themselves) Extreme Nominalists (there are no relations) Model/Copy Realists (copies of properties are in their particulars, not properties spatial relation)
Impure Realists (reject the axiom of localization and the 'in' is an abnormal spatial relation) E. An interesting class of propositions 1. There is an interesting class of propositions that appear to be significant. These propositions are described in Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Kripke's Naming and Necessity give further clarification. 2. Apriori and aposteriori propositions a. Apriori and aposteriori distinctions are epistemic distinctions. They have to do with how something is known. b. An apriori proposition is known to be true independently of sense experience. 1) "Red is a color" can't be expressed without experiences of red. These experiences of red provide the chance to get the concept of red in my mind and form the proposition. 2) But I do not appeal to sense experience to justify red's existence. An apriori proposition is not justified by any appeal to a sense experience. Sense experience may be temporally prior to the proposition, but it isn't the justification for the appeal. The experience becomes the occasion for forming the thought, but it is not the court of appeals for forming the thought. "Red is a color" is not justified by appealing to sense experience. 3) The intellect appears to have the ability to gaze at the property itself and learn something about it that doesn't require sense experience any longer. E.g., 7+5=12. 4) If a statement is a priori true for me, then it also is a priori true for any rational cognizer that has the same faculties I do. c. An aposteriori proposition is one whose epistemic justification involves an appeal to a sense experience. This provides verification for an epistemic claim. The proposition is justified on the basis of sense experience. 3. Analytic and synthetic propositions a. Analytic and synthetic propositions are linguistic distinctions. b. Analytic statements are statements such that the predicate does not add anything that isn't already contained in the subject. c. Analytic propositions are not true because of the way the world is, they are true because of the way that we use words, true de dicto. All unicorns are one-horned horses is true although unicorns do not exist, i.e. it is true by definition. 1) E.g., "All bachelors are unmarried males." a) The predicate and subject here are synonyms. b) The predicate is simply another way of saying the subject. 2) E.g., All things that are F and G are F. a) This is a part/whole relationship. b) The predicate is already contained in the subject. \
34 d. Synthetic statements have a predicate that adds something to the subject that isn't contained in the subject itself. 1) E.g., "All ravens are black." a) Being black is not part of the meaning of the word "raven;" ravens could have been green. b) Being black adds information to the subject. 2) Synthetic propositions are true by virtue of the way the world is because of the things in themselves, true de re (a de re necessity is the way on object has a property). 4. Contingent and necessary propositions a. Contingent and necessary are metaphysical categories. b. A contingent proposition is one that is true, but doesn't have to be true. 1) A contingent truth is accidental. 2) It's easy to conceive of possible worlds where the proposition is false. It's easy to conceive of a world with white ravens. c. Necessary truths are true throughout possible worlds. 1) It is not possible or conceivable that they can be false. 2) They are true in virtue of the propositions themselves, that is, the propositions are necessarily true de dicto (a de dicto necessity is the way a proposition is true). 5. According to Hume (a nominalist and a strict empiricist in his view of knowledge) there were only two kinds of propositions: a. Analytic-apriori propositions 1) Analytic-apriori propositions are true linguistically only, because of convention. They tell us nothing true about the world. 2) Analytic-apriori propositions are necessary truths; they are true throughout all possible worlds. E.g., All bachelors are married men is a necessary truth in any world where we use English. b. Synthetic-aposteriori propositions 1) These are statements of matters of fact (according to Hume); they're made true because of something in the real world. E.g., All ravens are black. 2) This is synthetic because it's true by virtue of the way the world is and the predicate adds information to the subject. 3) It's aposteriori because of an inductive generalization of ravens; we've looked at a number of ravens and concluded that they are black . 4) Synthetic-aposteriori propositions are contingent. truths. c. Metaphysical implications of Hume's thought: 1) There are no abstract objects. 2) No are no necessary beings that exist in all possible worlds, only contingent beings. 3) There no necessary truths, only contingent truths. a) For Hume, the world was full of contingency. b) The only necessity Hume allows is the artificial necessity of linguistic usage, the relationship of words and their meanings. d. Epistemological implications of Hume's thought: 1) There are no truths of reason. 2) The intellect cannot give us truths about reality; only the senses can give us truths about reality. a) Your senses are what inform you directly about the external world. b) There is no rational faculty that gives you insight about the real world. 3) Rationalism, therefore, is false, according to Hume.
35 a) A rationalist in this context is someone who believes in truths of reason (See Chisolm, A Theory of Knowledge [2nd or 3rd edition], chapter on "The Truths of Reason"). b) A truth of reason, a rational fact, is a truth that the rational faculty is able to perceive or grasp correctly. It is one that the intellect can grasp, not the senses. c) If truths of reason exist, then your mind has a rational faculty that is able to perceive things that aren't sense perceptible. There's an intellectual way of seeing that is a way of grasping non-physical objects. d) Rationalists in the history of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle (?), Aquinas, Leibnitz, Descartes, Chisolm, Plantinga. 6. What is at stake in this debate? a. Whether there are abstract objects b. Whether there are necessary truths about reality c. Whether there is a faculty in the self that is capable of knowing things directly without using the senses. d. It's hard to be a rationalist and an evolutionist. 1) According to evolution every part of your body is there because of the following: feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproducing. 2) It's not clear that abstract thought on abstract objects or rational perception are things that the brain can do because it has been shaped by the struggle for survival. 7. Synthetic-Apriori Propositions a. Kant said that there is a third class--synthetic-apriori propositions--and these are truths of reason. 1) Modes Ponens is necessary: if P then Q, and P, therefore Q. 2) It is necessary that red is a color or that 7+5=12. b. They are apriori propositions because they can be justified without any appeal to the senses. 1) Even though I may need sense experience before I can understand some propositions, once I understand the meaning of a proposition there is something about my intellect that allows me to grasp it without appealing to sense experiences any longer. 2) The mind is able to learn something about redness that doesn't require further appeal to sense experiences, but rather by simple intellectual gaze. c. They are also synthetic because the predicate adds something to the meaning of the subject. These are made true by virtue of the way the world is. d. And they are necessary truths; there is no possible world in which these can be false. e. What makes them true are the abstract objects that they describe. f. The laws of logic are relations among propositions. 1) They are about internal relations about abstract objects and naturalists can't believe in internal relations. 2) The laws of logic have nothing to do with linguistics. Apriori--------------------Necessary---------------------Analytic Epistemic Notions Metaphysical Notions Linguistic Notions
Aposteriori-----------------------Contingent-------------------Synthetic
36 Synthetic-Apriori = truths of reason Necessary F. Properties have properties. 1. Moreland's definition of existence is that something exists if it has properties or if it is a property that is had by something. a. Existence is the entering into the exemplification relation. b. It's possible to take a property ascribed to a thing and try to reduce it away. But the test for existence is not whether it is located in space, or whether it can be an efficient cause or is sense perceptible. 2. Lower order properties are the kinds of properties that are only possessed by particulars, they are not possessed by other properties. 3. Higher order properties are possessed by lower order properties. 4. "Red is a color" expresses a genus/species relation between the property of being a color (higher) and the property of being red (lower). a. A genus ("color") is also called a determinable or a higher order universal. b. A species ("red") is called a determinate or a first order universal. 5. This is a necessary truth because the entities it describes are necessary beings (redness and color are necessary beings throughout all possible worlds), and the relation that obtains between them is timeless and immutable, but spatial relations can vary. 6. "Red resembles orange more than it resembles blue" expresses the relation among the same order entities under a determinable (color). a. These are quality orders, natural groupings of properties or determinables under a second order determinate that is true of all of them. b. A quality order (e.g., all of the colors) consists of all the determinates under the same determinable (color). c. The entities in a quality order have relationships with each other. 1) It is necessarily true that red resembles orange more than it resembles blue. 2) It's hard to conceive of a possible world where that would be false. 3) When determinates are possessed by a particular, they exclude each other. a) When something is blue all over it can't be red all over. b) They enter into exclusionary relations with each other (Chisolm). 7. There are abstract objects that stand in relationships to other abstract objects and these relationships are necessary. a. But physical objects don't stand in any necessary relationship to other physical objects. The laws of nature are not necessary. They are contingent. b. But the relations of abstract objects are necessary because there are no worlds where the relations among abstract objects are contingent. 8. How do we "see" things that aren't in space? a. Grossman's solution (p. 34) is to use Plato and Augustine's understanding of perception. 1) Perception is not to have an object directly in front of your consciousness (Moreland's view of perception) but to judge that a concept has been satisfied. 2) Where does the concept come from? a) Plato said from a previous life. b) Augustine said from the mind of God, through the Logos. 9. Synthetic-apriori propositions require non-sensory perception, affirming the reality of the world. 10. The way to refute these propositions is by reducing them to either analytic-apriori propositions or synthetic-aposteriori propositions. a. John Stuart Mill said that the laws of mathematics are synthetic-aposteriori ; they are inductive summaries, contingent truths.
37 1) My experience of 5+7=12 leads me to believe that the next grouping of 5 and 7 will produce 12. 2) However, it may turn out to me some other number next time. It isn't a necessary truth. b. The most popular view today is to say that these truths are just linguistic conventions (analytic-apriori propositions). 1) The difficulty with this view is that means these truths could be changed by just changing the words we use. 2) But it doesn't seem to be the case that you could change the language convention and make 7 + 5 = 15. 3) In fact, they don't seem to be dependent upon language users at all. They seem to be true even if no one could frame the proposition in language. 11. It appears that we have synthetic-apriori propositions that seem to be true, and these turn out to be universals. a. Both attempts to refute them (calling them either analytic-apriori or syntheticaposteriori) require that these be contingent. But these attempts fail because contingency cannot be demonstrated. b. If you believe in synthetic-apriori truths you've automatically committed yourself to a metaphysic that goes beyond the laws of nature and science. c. Plantinga says they were created by God in that they are necessarily dependent on Him (Plantinga's Does God Have a Nature?). 1) They are dependent, but not contingent . 2) God necessarily believes in them. d. Realism often goes in hand with rationalism. e. But if you're a naturalist then you're going to have a hard time determining what the laws of logic are. G. Three major arguments for the existence of properties understood as universals 1. The debate about universals is being waged in the philosophy of mathematics. a. This is a serious mistake, according to Moreland. 1) The existence of properties is far more pervasive [fundamental?] in a person's world view than debates about numbers. 2) Even if nominalists are able to neutralize mathematical language, they still have to deal with other properties (like apples appear to be sweet). 3) So the discussion is much broader than numbers and its best to just focus on the existence of properties. b. Mathematics is the language of science, and science presupposes that mathematical statements are true. 1) If you believe that mathematical statements are true, it commits you to the existence of abstract objects. This is contrary to naturalism. 2) The attempt is to either save the truth of mathematics without having to be committed to the existence of numbers, or to say that numbers are useful fictions that we use to predict sensory experiences. 2. First major argument: the argument from predication a. The realist knows that there are statements like "a is F" which are true. E.g., Socrates is red. Socrates is round. The apple is sweet. b. The realist can explain this statement's truth by saying that it expresses the fact that "a has F-ness"--a particular stands in the relation of predication to a property. c. The realist also notices that "b is F." That means that "b has F-ness" also. d. So the phenomenon of predication suggests that something exists to that grounds the unity of the class of F-things. 1) A realist can explain why all red things are in this class and not blue or purple things.
38 2) All red things literally have something in common that unites the class and accounts for their membership in the class. e. This is very common-sensical and straight-forward account for predication and the unity of the class of things that seem to have the same entity predicated of them. 3. The extreme nominalist will want to reduce properties to words or classes of particulars. a. A predicate extreme nominalist strategy is to say that when "a is F" we really mean that "the word F is true of a." 1) The sentence doesn't express a relation between a and the property of F. 2) Instead it expresses the way a word is used. b. A class nominalist simply asserts that it's a brute fact that "a is a member of the class of F-things" (concrete particulars). This is an attempt to appeal to the realness of things without an appeal to properties. 4. There are three difficulties with these nominalist explanations. a. This doesn't offer any grounding for why the words are ascribed to the objects that they describe. 1) There is no content or definition of F-ness as it applies to the concrete particular. 2) It's just an ultimate, primitive fact that the word F is true of a. But there's no way of saying what F is. b. The extreme nominalist doesn't have a doctrine of inseparable entities. 1) "To be" is to be capable of independent existence (atomism). a) Socrates exists as a particular on its own. b) So do the pieces of Socrates if you break up the disc because they can exist in isolation from the other pieces. 2) But properties don't "exist" for the extreme nominalist except by a distinction of reason. a) They can't exist apart from the other pieces of Socrates. b) So the properties are identical to Socrates. c) Ultimately, Socrates is a bare, property-less entity. c. You don't solve the problem of the one and many by appealing to words. Words have the same difficulties of the "one and many" that colors have. 1) Hume said the word white is used for all white objects. He says the word white gives unity to the class of white objects. 2) Now he has to answer, what unifies the class of the words white? 3) Words do exist and the individual word ascribed to a color is an example of the "one and many" also. a) In the series "Red Red White" how many words are there? b) There are two types [universals--red and white] and three tokens [particulars].) d. Application to Biblical inerrancy: 1) The concept of "original writings" is ambiguous. In one sense we do have the originals. 2) The text is a type--a universal. The autographic codex is the token--a particular. 3) Copies (other tokens) are made of the original token. The type or text is what bears the meaning so we don't need the original token. 4) We don't have the original tokens, but if lower criticism shows that our copies are accurate to the originals, we do have the autographic text (the autographic types--not the tokens). 5) Don't confuse this with the epistemological question: How do we know our copies are faithful to the original token?
39 a) We have greater certainty of accuracy with many types than if we had the original token because that would be basing our claim of inerrancy on one physical object which could be quickly altered 1. If that happened then the "standard" would be forever lost 2. This is our defense against those who said the church removed references to reincarnation. b) See Kripke's discussion of the example of the standard meter in Paris. 5. More problems with class extreme nominalism a. The statement "a is F" means that "a has an F, and F is a member of the class of Fs." b. Note that these are not F-things now. "Socrates is red" means "Socrates has a red which is a member of the class of reds." We form a class of reds: red1, red2, red3, etc. Red1 has redness. These are abstract particulars. c. The difficulty is the same: What unifies the reds in a class if it's not the property of red being true of them? d. The realist explains the unity of the class of red things: 1) Each "little red" is a complex entity that includes three constituents: the property of redness, predication (the having of the property), and an individuator. 2) What makes Plato's red and Socrates' red the same redness is that they both have the same property of redness. 3) The unity of the class of reds is grounded in the universal property that is shared by each one of them. 4) Their diversity--the reason there are many of them--is a result of their being assigned to a particular or individuator. e. Nominalists can't do this. 1) For the nominalist, red1 is simple (it doesn't have a multitude of constituents). a) A thing can be complex because it has many properties even though it has no parts. 1. The difference between a part and a property is if you annihilate something you destroy all of its parts, they cease to exist. 2. But none of its properties would pop out of existence. b) Something can be complex in more than one way. 1. It can be complex because it is made up of different parts. 2. It can also be complex because it has many properties in its being and those properties are not necessarily parts. 2) A constituent is an entity that enters into the being of another entity (either a part or a property). My foot is a constituent of me and so is my color, but one is a part and the other a property. 3) The nominalist has to treat little reds as simples; the color and particular of an instance of red differ by a distinction of reason only. f. Summary of the nominalist problem: 1) Extreme nominalists will appeal to words and class membership. 2) The nominalists will appeal to the class of abstract particulars or tropes. 3) Nominalists, though, have two debilitating problems: a) They have no explanation for the unity of the class of tropes. b) They have to treat tropes as simples. 1. Both the redness and the particularity of a trope are identical to each other; they differ by a distinction of reason only. 2. The color of the trope and its individuality can't be assigned to different constituents; it has to treat particulars and tropes as identicals. 6. Second major argument: the argument from exact similarity or resemblance
40 a. The argument: 1) When two entities resemble each other exactly, that fact is grounded in the fact that both resembling entities have a property in common and that property constitutes their respective resemblance. 2) A and b have the very same property in each of them, and it is by virtue of that property that they resemble each other. 3) For the realist, exact resembling entities are explained by the fact that both have the same exact property in each of them. 4) The realist doesn't take the exact similarity to be primitive, but does take the identity of property to be primitive. b. The extreme nominalist and nominalist response: 1) They have to take exact similarity as a primitive relationship (it can't be grounded anything further.) a) The fact that all red things resemble each other is a primitive relation that they all sustain. b) The nominalist is confused. 1. He thinks that similarity between objects is primitive and basic. 2. He doesn't acknowledge that similarity is grounded in identity. 2) The difference between the nominalist and extreme nominalist is the entities in the class. a) For the extreme nominalist the class will be made up of red things (red thing1, red thing2, red thing3, etc.). b) For the nominalist the class will be made up of particular instances of reds (red1, red2, red3, etc.). 3) the problem of infinite regress of similarities. a) For the nominalist or extreme nominalist, there is object 1, object 2 and object 3. 1. 1 and 2 stand in the exact similarity relation of ES12 (exact similarity 1,2). 2. 2 and 3 stand in the exact similarity relation of ES23. 3. And 1 and 3 stand in the exact similarity relation of ES13. b) But each of these exact similarity relations resemble each other. Now we have a second order of exact similarity relations. The first order relations stand in relation to one another also, which will lead to an actual infinite number of similarity relations. c) Bertrand Russell said that to avoid the regress and not commit to an actual infinite number, you must admit that there is a universal called exact similarity, and that universal is a relation. d) But if you're forced to admit universals in the category of relations, why not in the category of properties. 7. Third major argument: the argument from abstract reference a. These are synthetic-apriori propositions (e.g., red is a color) in which the subject term seems to refer to an abstract object. b. The realist claims that redness has the property of being a color (as opposed to the property of being a taste or being even). c. The extreme nominalist says that the phenomenon of abstract reference--where the subject term appears to be describing an abstract object--is really talking about concrete particulars: "Red things are colored things." 1) It's not talking about the color but about the things. 2) But there is a difference between red things and redness (Husserl). a) Red things have a diverse multiplicity of objects. b) Redness seems to be a single, unitary entity.
41 c) Since once has a diversity the other doesn't share, redness and red things can't be equivalent. d. Another refutation: 1) On the nominalist view, the statements "red is a color" and red things are colored things" are equivalent. 2) Using the same procedure, generate a counter-example that leads to an absurdity. a) Red things are extended things = red is extension. b) Red things are L located (take all the red things in the universe that are all located in space, L is the combined location of all red things.) = red is L location. c) But these statements don't seem to be intelligible, so the statements can't be equivalent and this sort of reduction doesn't work. e. The nominalist counters by saying that "red is a color" means "reds are colors." 1) The realist says that we're talking about the property red. 2) The nominalist says that we're talking about the entire class of red abstract particulars (tropes). a) But reds are also L located and are particulars. These become "Red is locatedness" and "Red is particularity." b) If the nature of a trope and its individuality differ only in a distinction of reason, then red turns out to be particularity, which it doesn't seem to be. H. Subcategories of Properties (Properties come in different kinds) 1. Two definitions to the word "abstract" a. The standard way of using the word 'abstract" is metaphysical. 1) It means "existing outside of space and time." 2) An abstract entity is non-spatial and non-temporal. b. There is an epistemological usage of abstract. 1) Knowing it in the abstract means getting a thing before your mind by disregarding everything else in its vicinity. 2) An act of abstraction is an act of noticing only one thing (e.g., the redness of an apple) and disregarding everything else in your view. c. Tropes, according to Campbell, are abstract in the way that we focus on them and attend to them. 2. Non-degreed properties a. These are all or nothing properties. They can't be qualified by the terms "more or less than," like the property of being even. b. An important kind of non-degreed property is "natural kind" or "essence of primary substances" (e.g., living organism, chemical elements). 1) If evolution is true then it's hard to claim that human beings have natures (that we're substances). 2) Natures don't seem to come from anywhere. 3) If evolution is true, then where "humans" begin and where they end is not clear. There's just a gradual gradiation of properties. Where one kind begins and another ends in its evolutionary development is arbitrary. 3. Degreed properties a. A degreed property is one that can be qualified by the phrase "more or less than." It can be possessed by a greater or lesser degree. E.g, the property of being heavy. b. There are two subclasses of degreed properties: 1) Numerically degreed properties can be possessed in a greater or lesser degree in a mathematically quantified way (e.g., extension, mass). 2) Qualitative intensity properties grow in their qualitative intensity (e.g., pain, brightness, love).
42 c. There's another way of dividing degreed properties: 1) Degreed properties with intrinsic maxima a) It can increase up to a certain point, but not beyond; it can become "saturated" (e.g., the property of being salty). b) If God's properties have no intrinsic maxima, His qualities could improve and increase. Then there could be no maximally perfect Being. 2) Degreed properties without intrinsic maxima It can increase without limit; no ceiling. E.g., being heavy 3) Personhood a) Traditionally the property of being a person was understood as a nondegreed property. 1. Something either is or is not a person. As a human matures, they don't become more of a person or more of the kind they are. 2. More capacities are realized with maturity, but the kind--personhooddoesn't increase in degree. Maturity is not the process of becoming more of a person, but becoming a better person. b) The new view of personhood shifts personhood to the degree category. 1. The realization of capacities defines the degree of personhood. 2. That means that rights develop gradually if rights are tied to developing personhood. a. One way to avoid that is to say that personhood is a degreed property with an intrinsic maximum. Personhood increases to a point and then no further. b. So a person would reach the point where they had full rights, but up until that point rights would increase. c. Without an intrinsic maximum there would never be a basis for equal rights because one's innate personhood could always increase to a greater degree. c) The problem is that the property of being a person doesn't seem to be the kind of thing with an intrinsic maximum because it's not a degreed property.
V. Relations
A. What is a relation? 1. Definition: A relation is any discernible aspect of two or more entities taken together, aspects which cannot be understood without reference to the two or more entities. 2. The property of being red can be exemplified by one object alone. Relations like "larger than," "in between" and mathematical ordering require more than one thing before they can be exemplified. 3. Relations exist because they have properties that are true of them. 4. The problem for naturalists: a. Everything that exists is located in the space/time physical world. b. But relations do not appear to be in the space/time physical world.
43
B. Arguments naturalists use to deny the existence of relations 1. Relations are not sense perceptible (empiricist arguments). a. Reality is exhausted by sense impressions. b. I can see the two apples, one to the left of the other. I can have a sense perception of the whole structure formed by the apples in a spatial relation (the mereological whole), but I can't have a sense perception of the spatial relation itself. 1) There are three particulars, apples, a, b and c. 2) There is also the spatial relation between them. 3) Then there is also the mereological whole, which is the total structure that is formed by the constituents. 4) What you see is a spread out structure. You can have a sense experience of the points and the mereological whole, but not the space relation itself. 2. Relations don't seem to be inside space and time. a. Grossman says that properties are not located at the same place as the objects that have them, but it's understandable that someone would point to the ball and say, "That's where the property is." b. But this appearance vanishes when we consider relations. 1) The relation isn't located with the object or at a point between the objects. 2) It's hard to make sense out of where space relations exist in space and time. 3) Spatial relations are not themselves inside space. 4) Other relations don't seem to be in space either. For example, the relation of the tone C and the tone D. Is the relation between them? What about the larger than relation? Logical relations? Spatial relations have been a difficulty for those who want to say that everything exists inside space and time. 3. Relations can be reduced to properties (Plato). a. Reduction strategies in general. 1) When replacing one view for another the first is abandoned and the second is adopted. a) E.g., the phlogiston view of chemistry was abandoned b) E.g., Churchland as eliminative materialist regarding mind/body problem. 2) When you reduce something you discover that the thing in view turned out to be something else (e.g., "the mind turns out to be only the brain"--identity thesis). 3) This strategy holds that relations exist, but they just turn out to be properties (reduction). Then the properties are treated like particulars located where the things are that have them. b. If you want to explain away relations then you have to express this in terms of properties. 1) "Six inches > three inches" expresses the larger than property. 2) To get rid of the relation, explain it as a property. 3) "Six inches > three inches" = "six inches is F and three inches is G." 4) Properties have therefore replaced relations. c. There are two serious problems with this approach. 1) Bertrand Russell identified one problem with this strategy. a) The reduction is an incomplete translation because it doesn't capture everything that the first statement expresses. b) It should read "a is F and b is G and F>G." Now there's a relation between the properties.
44 2) Secondly, consider the fact that Simmias is taller than Socrates who is taller than Plato who is taller than Aristotle. a) If "taller than" as a relation can be replaced with the property of "tall", then this state of affairs is completely expressed by the following sentences: 1. Simmias is tall and Socrates is short. 2. Socrates is tall and Plato is short. 3. Plato is tall and Aristotle is short. b) But this generates a contradiction: Socrates is both tall and small. c) There is a possibility to restate the reduction and avoid the falsehood: 1. Assign each tall and short a separate number (Simmias has tall1 relative to Socrates, and tall2 relative to Plato, etc.) 2. Simmias would have 3 "talls," Socrates would have two, Plato would have one and Aristotle none. 3. In this case the contradiction is avoided. d) But this generates a further problem: 1. Why does the fact that Simmias has three different properties of being tall and Socrates has two properties of being tall make Simmias taller than Socrates? 2. The answer is that three is greater than two. 3. But this solution seeks to avoid the "taller than" relation by relying on the greater than relation, which solves nothing. d. Relations have got to exist because we can't eliminate them and still be able to say what we know is true about the world. 4. Relations are spatially located where the mereological whole is (Grossman, p. 27) a. Naturalists can try to locate the relation where the mereological whole consisting of a, b and c is. b. The whole is located in space and the relation is located where the spatial structure is. 1) The structured set of parts is diffused throughout space. 2) The structure is the mereological whole of a, b and c and the structure. 3) The relation "in between" exists at the very same place as the structured parts that exemplify the relation. c. This is similar to the naturalist's claim that properties are located where the object is that exemplifies them, with an important difference. 1) It's easy to locate the thing that is supposed to exemplify the property (a ball), so the temptation is to locate the property where the thing is. 2) But it's not at all clear that any particular thing exemplifies the relation of being "in between," even the mereological whole. 3) The difficulty is finding out where the location of that relation is. The relation holds between the points, which is different than properties. d. Response: 1) But while the mereological structure is spread out and has spatial dimensions, the relation of "being between" is not spread out and it has no dimensions. 2) The relation of being "in between" is what constitutes the essence of this whole of three points. 3) The relation, instead, of being "in between" is the thing that gives the structure its spread. It's ontologically prior to the structure. a) It's easy to locate the points. b) It's easy to locate the whole structured set of points. c) But it becomes very difficult to locate the spatial relations that constitute and form the points in the structure.
45 5. Relations constitute the nature of space and time (Armstrong). a. Relations are not located anywhere, but they are also not outside of space and time. They are part of what constitutes the nature of space and time. b. But this just rephrases the problem. It to assert the realist view. 1) Spatio-temporal relations place things in space and time, but those relations aren't themselves located in space and time. 2) Space isn't inside space. The only things that are inside space are things which are spatial. Space is a spaceless entity, making it an abstract object. 6. Bradley's Regress Argument a. F.H. Bradley (18th c) was an absolute idealist (the only thing that exists is the whole and there are no parts; nothing is really distinct from anything else). b. Bradley claimed that if you believe in relations you generate a vicious infinite regress. 1) If you claim that a and b stand in relation to one another, you've got to postulate a relation R to explain it. 2) But this relation R, which is a third entity, must also stand in relation to the other elements, adding a fourth entity R'. But this relation needs a relation, leading to an infinite regress. c. However, relations are unique in that they do not need to be related to their relata (plural for the things standing in that relation). 1) Relations are what account for the structure and order of the universe. 2) If there were no relations there would be no structure to anything. 3) Relations are like glue. a) Part of the nature of glue is to stick two things together without needing something else to stick the glue to each of the things. b) A relation is just the kind of thing that requires more than one thing to be exemplified, and they do not need something else for them to be related to things. These two criteria are what make relations a unique category of existence. C. Features of Relations 1. Relations can be asymmetrical a) R is an asymmetrical relation if and only if a stands in R to b and it is not the case that b stands in that R to b. b) If a is larger than be, it is not the case that be is larger than a; it is asymmetrical. 2. Relations can be symmetrical a) R is symmetrical relation if and only if a stands in R to b and b stands in R to a. b) If a is a spouse of b, then b is the spouse of a; it is symmetrical. 3. Relations can be reflexive a) R is reflexive if and only if a stands in R to itself. b) A thing is identical to itself. c) There are some relations that I stand in to myself. 4. Relations can be transitive R is transitive if and only if a stands in R to b and b stands in that R to c then a stands in that R to c. [(aRb)&(bRc)]-->(aRc) D. Converse Relations 1. If a stands in R to b, then there exists some relation R' such that b stands in R' to a. If a is related to b, then b is related to a [aRb-->backwards E R'bR'a].
46 2. All relations have converse relations. a) However, in the Medieval period, theologians like Aquinas and Anselm held that relations don't have converse relations. b) They thought that God was related to the world but that the world didn't stand in relation to God. c) They held this because they didn't want the world to be able to change God. This means E. Internal Relations 1. If the relation R of aRb is internal to a, then for all x, if it's not the case that xRb, then x is not identical to a. 2. Internal relationships enter into the being of the thing that has them. a. An internal relation between two things is something essential to the thing so related. It's part of its very essence. b. If something loses an internal relation it ceases to exist. My relation to humanness is an internal relation. Red and blue have an internal "darker than" relation. c. The laws of logic are internal relations between propositions. 3. External relations are not part of the beings of the things they relate. a. A thing can change its external relations (e.g., spatial relations) and still exist. b. Their being is prior to their external relation; the external relation is outside of the entity which exemplifies it. c. An application re: vitalism: 1) A mechanistic view of life holds that the parts of a living organism stand in external relations to one another. The parts are prior to the whole. 2) However, if living organisms are substances with natures, then the parts of the organism presuppose the living whole before they can be what they are. a) Aristotle said that a hand severed from a human body is no longer a human hand. It was once a hand but no longer has an organizing living principle in it. b) The essence of a hand is a functional entity that is related to other parts of a body integrated into a whole. d. An application re: pantheism: 1) Pantheism is the doctrine that there are only internal relations, no external relations. 2) The only thing that exists is the pantheistic whole, not the fleeting momentary entities within it. F. Intentionality 1. Intentionality is the ofness or aboutness of the mind. It is the mind's directedness to it's objects. a. Whenever we have a thought, this thought is always "of" something beyond it. b. A thought of Pegasus is a thought about something. 2. Is intentionality a relation? a. If you make intentionality into a relation, then you will have a representative dualist view of perception like Locke. 1) Locke held that when we become visually aware of objects, what is happening is that we have become aware of our own internal sense images. 2) Thus awareness or intentionality becomes the relation "aware of" between the relata "person" and the relata "sense image in the mind." b. This leads to the egocentric predicament (solipsism): how one can believe in a world that is outside of my sense experiences?
47 1) It's not possible to distinguish an hallucination of a pink elephant from the real thing. 2) If intentionality is merely your relation with your sense perceptions, then you can never get "out there" to the objects themselves to know what is true. a) There's no epistemological distinction between a hallucination and a genuine experience. b) This ultimately leads to skepticism. c. For relationships to be exemplified both of the relata have to exist. 1) If intentionality is a two-place relation, then there must be two relata: the thought, and the object of the thought. 2) How can this second relata be a non-existent entity? 3) Grossman says this is an "abnormal relation," but this is problematic. a) When I contemplate something that doesn't exist I literally stand in relation to the non-existent. b) If the relation is converse, then this relates nothingness to me, which seems absurd. 3. Intentionality is a property of the mind (perceptual realists). a. When you have a thought, the mind has a property in it and it is that thought. b. It is a feature of our thoughts that they have vectors--they point--and these vectors point whether there is anything to be pointed at or not. c. The contents of my mind are not related to anything, but they are about things, and their aboutness is a feature intrinsic to the thought itself. 1) One can have thoughts about things that are not real, and this is like a vector that doesn't hit anything. 2) Sending out these darts does not mean that these darts don't exist, they just don't hit anything. 3) Thus, we would rather say that my thought about Pegasus is a thought about nothing. The content of my thought is not a content of nothingness, there is just nothing that corresponds to it. I can have a thought about my concept of Pegasus, and this is a form of thinking about my own thinking. 4) From the fact that I am thinking of something it does not follow that there is something I am thinking about. I can think of a one horned horse, even though there are no unicorns.
48
G. The Category of Property Graph

PROPERTIES DEGREED Anything > or <. QUANTITATIVE Numbers NON-DEGREED Is or isn't INTENTIONAL Ofness or Aboutness CONCEPTS
QUALITATIVE God's Attributes
PROPOSITIONS Contents of a thought. A group of concepts in certain relations
RELATIONS INTERNAL EXTERNAL INTENTIONALITY? No, it is a property.
RELATIONS S/T LAWS OF LOGIC Relata are propositions
VI. Substance
A. Aristotle on substance 1. Aristotle was the philosopher of substance (Plato was the philosopher of properties and universals. a. Aristotle did more than anybody (except maybe Aquinas) to unpack the notion of a substance and make it clear. b. His first teaching on this issue is found in the Categories. 2. Aristotle's distinction between a property and substance. a. Start with the sentence, "Socrates is a white human." b. Socrates is the subject who has certain properties (whiteness and humanness). 1) Accidental predication a) These are properties "present in" Socrates, but not "predicable of" Socrates. This is what Socrates has, e.g., whiteness. b) The "present in" relation is accidental. 1. It isn't essential to the thing. 2. It can change and the thing will still be what it is. 3. The "present in" relation is not a part-whole relation. 2) Essential predication a) These are properties "predicable of" Socrates, but not "present in" Socrates. This is what Socrates is, e.g., humanness. b) The "predicable of" relation is essential. 1. Humanness relates to Socrates in a way different than his whiteness does. 2. If Socrates lost his humanness he would no longer exist. 3. Socrates' humanness (his nature or essence) is sometimes called a "secondary substance" by Aristotle. c) Socrates' essential properties stay with him throughout his existence. It's the answer to the deepest question, what sort of thing is Socrates? d) This is the "is" of essential predication.
49 3) Socrates is basic and everything else is "in" him in some sense. a) Socrates is the primary substance. b) There are some things that are neither predicated of or present in, and that's Socrates. B. Distinctive features of a substance (The term "substance" is used here in the classic sense of Aristotle and Aquinas.) 1. Substances have deep unity. a. A substance is a unity of parts, properties and dispositions. b. The clearest example would be a living organism, e.g., a dog is a unity. 1) A dog is a unity of properties. a) He has several properties: color, weight, shape, etc. b) He exhibits adherence. 1. He has several properties that are grouped together. 2. His color goes everywhere his shape goes. 2) He is also a unity of parts. a) The parts of Fido form some sort of integrated whole that isn't captured by spatial proximity. b) A ring attached through his ear would be spatially closer to Fido's nose than his tail would be to his nose, yet the tail and the nose sustain a more intimate relationship of unity than the ring and the nose do. c) What's the difference between a property and a part? 1. Parts are spatial. 2. Properties can be shared, but parts are particular. 3. Fido's parts can be annihilated, but his properties cannot be. 3) Fido is also a unity of capacities (i.e., his dispositions, potentialities, tendencies, causal powers, etc.). c. Substances (e.g., living organisms) are not just heaps. 1) There are heaps that have homogeneous parts, like a pile of sugar. There is unity accounted for by spatial proximity, possibly. 2) Heterogeneous heaps have parts that are different. 3) But a substance's parts are more deeply united than heaps. Something gives a human's parts a unity that heaps don't have. d. The notion of substance helps us to account for the precise nature of this deep unity that exhibits itself in parts, properties and dispositions. 2. Substances "own" properties. a. Substances seem to be the owner of things; they house them or contain them in a non-spatial way. They are basic. 1) Parts seem to have owner; parts adhere together. 2) Properties are predicable of something; they inhere in the subject. b. A substance is the kind of thing that houses or contains parts and properties, but not in a spatial way. c. Properties are had by substances. But substances are not had by something else. d. When Fido moves around, why do the color, weight and shape of Fido go along? 1) They belong to the substance and the subject goes somewhere; Fido takes his properties with him. 2) It is not his shape that is brown; it is Fido who is brown. 3. Substances are continuants. a. Substances remain the same through change. 1) They endure through time. 2) Substances do not have temporal parts. 3) Instead, a substance or continuant moves through time wholly.
50 b. If you deny the existence of continuants, you will eventually believe in an "event ontology." 1) Living organisms turn out to be space-time worms, a mere series of events that do not endure. 2) Events and processes have temporal parts, but substances do not. 3) Persons then become the sum of their temporal parts. c. Identity through change. 1) Change has sameness as a necessary condition. a) In order for an entity to go through change, it must exist at both ends of the process. b) If you deny this, you no longer have change (because nothing endures to be changed), but only sequence of events and person-stage ontology. c) But what ties these events together as identifying one "thing" over time? 2) Spatial parts a) The number two doesn't have spatial parts, but a book does. b) In order for something to have spatial parts it has to be extended throughout space. c) Part of the book is in one part of space and part of it is in another part of space. 3) Temporal parts a) Entities with temporal parts are extended through time (as opposed to space). b) The whole is just the sum of its temporal parts, e.g., a baseball game. 1. A part of the game is present in the first inning, not the whole thing, and part of the game is present in the ninth inning. 2. The whole game doesn't exist until the temporal series is complete. c) If persons are the sum of their temporal parts, then each event is essential to the identity of a person. 1. If you were born at a different moment, you would be a different person entirely. 2. God could not have caused you to be born at a different moment. 3. Persons, then (like the ball game) would not exist until the entire series of events were completed; persons don't exist until after they're dead. a. Then you could never kill a person. b. In fact, they'd become a person when you kill them. c. Murder is not killing a person but creating one. 4. Substances manifest law-like change. a. When a thing matures (e.g., when an acorn becomes an oak tree), it undergoes a series of specific changes. 1) These changes follow a sequence that is "law-like" in nature. a) It is not random. b) There is a normal development for an oak. 2) It seems to be necessitated by the thing itself. 3) Whatever accounts for the sameness isn't visible to the senses. There is something underlying it that is the grounding for its law-like changes. b. A thing's nature limits the changes it can undergo. 1) "Nature" in this sense means self-limited motion (change). 2) An infant substance has built within it a set of laws that will govern how it will mature and what kind of changes it can undergo as it develops. 3) It's development is orchestrated by its nature, a certain set of internal laws. 4) These changes are predictable based on the nature of the entity itself. 5. Substances form natural kinds or classes
51 a. Substances seem to fall in natural groups or classes of natural kinds. b. This grouping is grounded in the fact that all the members have the same nature in common (dogs, cats, etc.). c. We are all members of the same class in virtue of a shared nature. 6. Substances have final causality or teleology a. The change in a substance is a movement towards a particular end. b. Things change in order to realize their nature fully. 7. Sum: A substance is what accounts for these supposed metaphysical facts. It is an individual entity with a nature, a unity of parts, properties and capacities, that remain the same through change, and that can change in law-like ways in order to realize its proper nature, its end. C. Why has this idea fallen on hard times? 1. Empiricist epistemology a. You cannot have a sense experience of the entity that underlies (substance + "sub-stands," that which stands under) and gives me unity. b. You can observe its properties, but not the underlying entity. c. You opt instead, like Berkeley, Hume, and Locke, for a bundle theory of substance: organisms are properties bundled together. 2. The debate between vitalism and mechanism in biology a. Modern science tends to be mechanistic by treating living organisms as heaps or structured stuff. b. Science tries to explain everything about living organisms in terms of their parts and the interaction between them. Vitalism, the idea that something underlies a thing's unity, was abandoned because it was deeply misunderstood. 3. The theory of evolution. a. If naturalistic evolution is true then organisms cannot be substances. 1) Evolution teaches that we developed slowly by chemical and physical processes, not by an underlying blueprint. 2) There is no place for fixed natures; only parts put together in chemical/physical structures. 3) A thing's nature is not a physical object. b. Freedom of the will is at stake, because only substances can act as self-movers. This has critical ethical implications. D. Three views of substance 1. The classical (Aristotelian/Thomist) view a. Summary definition: A substance is an individuated nature, and as such, it is a whole that unifies its parts, properties and capacities, possesses accidental properties, remains the same through change, and matures in law-like ways towards the realization of its appropriate end, its maturity. b. There are three different characterizations of the classical Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of a substance: 1) The substance is the concrete, living organism itself, the total package. "I" am the sum of all my properties. 2) A thing's essence or nature is a substance. a) In our case, humanness would be the substance, the abstract nature. b) This would be the "secondary substance" of the Medievals. 3) The most accurate view: a substance is an individuated nature that stands under a thing's properties and parts. a) If I claim that I'm a substance, then I'm not referring to my body-soul package.
52 b) It is better to say that I am a soul, and my soul has a body. c) A substance is sometimes called a "this-such." 1. "This" refers to the particularity. 2. "Such" refers to the nature, e.g., humanness. 3. A human is a "this-such," a human particular which underlies its accidental properties and infuses its body. Humanness is combined with a bare particular. 4. The soul is what underlies the properties. a. The soul is ontologically prior to the body, and the body is the outworking of a structured set of capacities that are already in the soul. b. The soul is the essence that informs every part of the body. 1) The way scientists talk about the DNA structure sounds like the Aristotelian view of substance. 2) How can the "same" DNA be in every soul of your body? c. The soul can exist without a body, but it is not natural for it to do so. It has a natural capacity ("exigency"--Aquinas) to be in a body. d) An individual human being consists of humanness, a bare particular and the exemplification relation. 1. The substance is the composite whole. 2. This composite whole is the possessor of accidental properties. 3. All the capacities in a thing's nature are related through internal relations. 2. Locke's "bare particular" view a. According to Locke, a substance is just a bare particular, an individual substratum. 1) Strip all of the properties of an apple, you are left with a property-less, bare substratum which is the substance. 2) The bare particular is simple, not composite. 3) The bare particular is the possessor of all properties. a) Whatever properties happen to be attached to this bare particular are all accidental. b) This is the view of substance you'll have to hold in order to believe in reincarnation. The self is a "bare I." b. What's the difference between a Lockian substratum and an Aristotelian substratum? 1) For Locke, the bare particular does two things. a) It individuates. 1. The properties, if they're all universals, are just a bunch of abstract objects. 2. The substratum is an individuator. 3. This is also what the Aristotelian substratum does. b) Secondly ( and this is a problem), the substratum is the sole possessor of all a thing's properties. 1. A bare center--a simple entity--possesses all the properties. 2. For the classic view, I am not identical to a bare particular, I am identical to my substance, an individuated nature exemplified by a substratum. c) All the properties relate to the substratum through external relations. 2) Locke denies real essences. Everything is fundamentally the same. 3. The bundle theory a. The Bundle Theory was held by David Hume, and George Berkeley held it for material substances (not mental substances).
53 b. A substance is a bunch of properties bundled together. c. There are problems here for identity through time and change. 4. Summary of the three views: a. Classical view (Aristotle, Aquinas)--A substance is a composite of a nature, individuated by particularity, and that composite "sub-stands" (stands under, underlies), all of a thing's accidental properties. b. Locke--A substance is a simple, property-less substratum. c. Bundle theory--A substance is just a set of properties bundled together. E. Implications of the classical view 1. A substance contains a complicated hierarchy of capacities. a. First order capacities consist of things I'm capable of doing now (e.g., speak English).. b. Second order capacities or the potentials to have a first order capacity (e.g., learn Russian). c. This teaches us two things: 1) You can have capacities to have capacities, or capabilities. 2) I have a number of capacities that aren't actualized now. d. A substance's ultimate set of capacities --that which it possesses solely in virtue of being a member of its natural kind--is its nature. 2. As an organism grows and develops its higher order capacities realize themselves through chains of lower order capacities. For example, in order to realize the lower order capacity of language or thought, it may need to develop it's higher order capacity to have a central nervous system and a brain. 3. A defect is often a block in a lower order capacity. a. Evil is a privation of something that should be there. b. Evil is often a defect in a lower order capacity that prevents the realization of a higher order capacity that a thing has by virtue of its nature. 1) A newborn may lack some lower order capacities. 2) But it doesn't follow that it doesn't have higher order capacities that couldn't be realized if some defects in lower order capacities were cleared up. 3) To say that a newborn isn't a person since it doesn't have a capacity for rationality is to fail to recognize this hierarchy of capacities. c. The recognition that the soul is complex and has a hierarchy of capacities allows theologians to map the soul and study the relations between different capacities. 1) The philosopher gives the framework and turns it over to the experts in other fields to fill in the details. 2) The idea of a substance is incredibly useful in understanding the soul. 3) Certain capacities of the soul depend on other capacities in the soul either through a hierarchy or through interaction on the same level. a) The mind is a unity of capacities in the soul, a grouping of cognitive faculties. b) If so, then the function of one item in the unity (feelings) may be influenced by another (thinking). F. Heaps and the Complementarity View 1. Modern science, and evolutionary theory in particular, treats substances like property-things. 2. A heap--a whole that is a loose association of parts a. The parts of a heap are loosely associated, e.g., a pile of salt or a pile of garbage in a junkyard. b. Often what gives them unity is a spatial-temporal configuration; they're parts of a particular heap because they're close together spatially for a time.
54 c. That pretty much exhausts their relationship. 3. The Complementarity View a. The Complementarity View integrates theology and science by accepting evolution as true, but that God guided the process. b. This view is widely accepted among liberal Christian thinkers, like McKay and Peacock. c. This view sees the world as hierarchy of systems that stand in part-whole relationships. 1) At the bottom would be sub-atomic particles. Entities at this level can come together in a complicated structure to form systems. 2) From that a new level emerges made up of atoms. Atoms form systems and produce molecules. 3) Molecules form cells which form systems that give rise to whole, biological organisms. 4) When biological systems reach a certain level of complexity that gives rise to psychological properties. 5) When forms of psychological properties form networks you get and then theological properties. d. The important thing is that the fundamental level is the bottom level. 1) Everything else is emergent from it or supervenient upon it. 2) The top level exists only because something on the bottom level produces it. 3) Causality runs from bottom to top. e. Is this is a kind of reductionism? 1) Strong ontological reductionists reduce higher layers down to lower ones. a) Upper level properties are identical and not distinct in any way to lower ones. b) Mental properties are identical to physical properties; there is no psychological level. c) The psychological exists, but it's nothing more than the physical. Only the physical and chemical levels are real. All other levels are reducible to the physical. 2) The complimentarian view believes the higher level realities aren't reducible to lower levels of reality. But the relationship between the lower and higher levels is causal or explanatory. a) The physical (lower level) causes and explains the mental (higher level). 1. The neurophysiological causes the psychological. 2. To understand what happens at the higher level you must understand what's going on at the lower level. 3. This is called "bottom up causation," and "bottom up explanation." 4. You cannot have top-down causation or explanation. b) Everything is carried along on the physical functioning according to laws. 1. The top levels are genuinely real (contrary to the strong reductionist), but they supervene--emerge upon--on the lower levels which are more fundamental and cause the top things to happen. 2. This automatically leads to determinism, because it treats human beings as property-things. 3) There are two different ways of viewing living organisms: a) They are purely physical mechanisms, machines. 1. The emerging properties of the whole are dependent on the structure of the parts. a. There are no emergent levels that are genuinely distinct. b. The "psychological level" is identical to physical things.
55 2. One difficulty with this view is to keep things from becoming heaps. b) They are substances. 1. The parts are dependent on the whole. 2. The dependency relationship goes the other way, top-down rather than bottom-up. 3. Evolutionary theory reduces things to heaps or property things; there is no room for substances. a. In evolutionary theory, changes in the whole depend on changes in the parts. b. Creationism assumes that a class of organism share something in common, a divine archetype, a nature or essence. c. Natures don't exist for Darwin, and are replaced by historical relationships. Common ancestry (historical relationship) replaces common nature. d. Evolutionary theory has no account for archetypes or natures. It smacks of a divine blueprint. e. It's hard to generate any deep kind of unity. 1) A fundamental problem of naturalism is that it doesn't have enough resources to account for the kind of unity that living things seem to possess. 2) They are either heaps or property-things. 4) Teleology and design are at stake in the debate over property-things and substances. a) The paradigm case of a property-thing is an artifact. b) Evolutionists see organisms as artifacts without a designer. c) Can functions be accounted for by mechanical causation? d) The issue is what kind of unity do living organisms possess--the type of unity appropriate to a property-thing or the type of unity appropriate to a substance? G. Substances vs. property things--handout PROPERTY-THING (or Aggregate) Requires two categories to classify it (e.g. a table is structured wood, a car is heaped metal). Described by the stuff it's made of and what unifies it. Derives its unity from an external principle in mind of designer artificially imposed from the outside on a set of parts to form the object (artifact) Parts are metaphysically prior to the whole. The existence and nature of the whole depends upon the parts that are artificially and externally associated with the whole. Parts related to each other by external relations. Parts are same inside or outside of whole and, thus, are indifferent to those wholes. A part is what it is independent of SUBSTANCE Requires one category to classify it (Fido is a dog, Jim is a human). Has a unified definition. Derives its unity from its own internal essence or nature which serves as a principle of unity from within the substance. This is a deeper unity. Whole is prior to its parts. The parts are what they are in virtue of their functions in the whole that makes and collects them. Prior means ontologically prior. Parts are related to each other by internal relations. Parts lose identity when severed from the whole and, thus, are dependent on the whole to be what they are. Parts of
56 the whole. It maintains its identity. Parts are essentially stuff things. body is actually an integrated network that nature. PROPERTY-THING (or Aggregate) Wholes have no new properties not in parts, except new utility for human purpose and new shape, dimension, and spatial order. A watch doesn't have any emergent properties. Parts are given new functions according to a new interpretation. No absolute sameness and strict identity through change (e.g., through loss of old parts and gain of new ones). a substance are functional entities based on the substance's internal nature. The human is ensouled, grounded in a SUBSTANCE Wholes have new kinds of properties not in parts, grounded in the essence of the substance taken as a whole unit.
Maintains absolute sameness and strict identity through change (e.g., through loss of old parts and gain of new ones).
H. A Property Thing (ordered aggregate)--handout 1. Gets its "species" (nature) by the forms intelligence imposes on natural materials. These materials are determined by a structure added to them to form the property thing. The structure is a reflection of a blue-print in the mind of a designer and not due to any internal nature. 2. An ordered/structured aggregate (e.g., shaped wood is a table) and its classification goes into two categories: the category of relation and the category of stuff or material. 3. It derives its character as a unit from a property antecedently imposed upon existing stuff that can take or leave the property. The parts of a property thing are the same inside or outside of the property thing. The parts are metaphysically prior to the whole. The principle of unity of a property thing is not really in it but is, rather, external to it in the mind of the designer of the property thing and externally imposed upon them in such a way that they are taken up into an ordered arrangement without changing within themselves. What orders the parts are external forces which are artificial and aren't expressions of the parts or any internal nature. 4. Coming-to-be/perishing is simply the modification of the relationships uniting permanently existing parts (e.g., atoms). When a whole ceases the parts are just rearranged. 5. The parts are heterogeneous and a property thing is a unit is a secondary, loose sense in that the parts are prior to the whole and are related to one another by a relation external to all the parts. 6. The structure of a property thing does not bring about a new kind of energy or active power (actually, property things are not active agents, but only undergo state-state causation) that does not already belong to the parts (e.g., winding a watch). A property thing is a medium which allows a natural agency to act on a passive recipient whose character is determined by the properties already present in it. 7. The structure is extrinsically imposed on pre-existing parts and this presupposes the properties of the materials ordered by that external arrangement, and no new qualities arise.
VII. Substance Dualism vs. Property or Event Dualism

A. Background to the discussion 1. According to physicalism, a human being is simply a chemical, physical object. 2. Dualists have argued that there is something else besides the brain and central nervous system.
57 a. The immaterial stuff of man, that which cannot be explained in the language of chemistry and physics b. Sometimes called a mind, soul or spirit. c. Two different kinds of dualists 1) Property (or event) dualist: you are a brain and central nervous system that has irreducible mental properties. 2) Substance dualist: you are an immaterial substance that has a body. Not only do you have mental properties, but you are a mental substance that possesses your conscious life. 3. Personalists are a group in the middle. a. Personalists hold that the metaphysical category of person was a third category that was neither physical nor mental. b. You're a person, which is a fundamental, primitive notion. c. Personalism is so close to substance dualism that it can be lumped with dualism for our purposes. d. It's not really a live part of the modern debate. Few people hold to it. The leading personalist philosopher was P.F. Strasser. USC and Boston University were the leading centers of personalism. B. The kinds of entities that dualists would claim are mental: 1. Sensations--two subclasses a. A perceptual sensation is a mental event mediated by one of the five senses. 1) E.g., an awareness of sight, sound, taste, smell and texture. 2) A sensation is a real event that exists. It is the result of input and the experience of different mental events. 3) These are states of consciousness. They are the possession of mental properties at a certain time. b. Non-perceptual sensations are not mediated by one of the five senses. 1) E.g., pains, itches and emotions 2) These are conscious awarenesses of my own internal states. 2. Thoughts and propositional attitudes a. A thought is the possession of a mental content. b. When I'm thinking I possess a proposition. 1) Either my brain possesses it (property dualist) 2) Or my soul possesses (substance dualists) c. Language is the expression of propositions. 1) You do not have to think in language. Thinking is a mental activity that includes propositions, not language. 2) Propositions are more basic than language. a) They are abstract objects that form the content of sentences. b) But they aren't identical to sentences. 3) Language is an arbitrary convention of sense perceptible signs that convey propositions or meanings. d. Propositions are not sense perceptible. When you're aware of your thoughts you are aware of the mental content of your mind. e. A propositional attitude has been given two different definitions by philosophers: 1) A propositional attitude is an attitude toward a proposition. a) E.g., hoping it will rain tomorrow, fearing that 2+2=4: "F-ing the P." b) The attitude is toward the proposition. c) For Descartes and Locke, I am trapped behind my mental states and I take them as the direct object of my mental acts. I look at a sense image in my mind caused by a table, but not directly at the table. d) This is called "the idea theory of consciousness" or "indirect realism."
58 1. The thing I fear or wish is a proposition. 2. You get trapped behind propositions. 3. A sense image is a little substance in my consciousness. e) Chisolm's "adverbial theory of consciousness" 1. When I see a red object, I am being appeared to red-ly (the adverb). 2. A sense image is a mode of my consciousness. It is a property that modifies my consciousness; it is not a substance. 2) A propositional attitude is an attitude toward a state of affairs by means of a proposition. a) The attitude is directly toward the state of affairs in the world, not toward the proposition. 1. It is because I have the proposition in my mind that my attitude is directed to the state of affairs, that my thought is about what it is about. 2. Thoughts are different than beliefs because beliefs remain when you are not thinking about them; thoughts do not. b) A sense image on this view is a mode consciousness, a property that modifies my consciousness. 1. The table is directly appearing to me. 2. I am exemplifying an "appeared to red-ly" state of consciousness. 3. Volitions, purposings, willings, intendings a. These are spontaneous exercisings of causal power. b. There existence relies on a certain view of freedom. c. They are Swinburne's "purposings." C. Property dualism 1. You are just a series of mental events through time, and a bundle of mental events at a particular time possessed by your brain or nervous system. 2. There is no enduring I that owns the experiences. I am simply the series of events through time plus my brain. 3. The substance dualist would agree that there are series of mental states, but I am the mental substance that possesses those properties. 4. A property dualist is either a hard determinist or a compatibalist. We ask the question, "Can mental states like wishing cause an action?" a. If you answer yes, then you're a compatibalist regarding action; mental events can cause physical events. b. If you answer no, then you are an epiphenomenalist. 1) The idea that mental states are real, they are caused by physical events, but they don't cause anything. 2) This is sometimes called supervenient physicalism; pain, for example, supervenes on the physical. D. Is the body a separate substance from the soul? 1. A Cartesian would say yes. a. Mind and body are totally separate substances--material and mental--complete in themselves without reference to the other. b. They would each have their own nature. 1) The essential nature of the mind is thought and of the body is extension. 2) 2) The only relationship between them is cause and effect. c. The problem with this view is that the body is not really human. 1) The body is just a physical object, an extended machine. 2) The person is the mind that is externally related to the machine. The mind is primarily a thinking thing.
59 3) A comatose person who has no mental function but a function body would no longer be a person because the soul is the mind and that is the person. a) If thought is no longer possible then the person is no longer there. b) The body is just a bio-chemical machine. 2. A Thomist and Aristotelian would say no. a. The soul is a substance that has a body. b. The body is not a separate substance. 1) The body is a physical structure with a human nature diffusing it. 2) By structure we mean that it is physical parts that are put together into a whole that has a human nature informing those parts. a) For Descartes the difference is two radically different substances that have no reference to each other. Their only relationship is cause and effect, not deep unity. b) For Aquinas the relationship of soul and body is much deeper because it is the relationship of essence and physical structure informed by that essence. 1. The soul is what gives the body its nature and unity. 2. If a comatose patient has a body that is still functioning as an organic whole, the soul is still present because the soul is the seat of organic functioning. The soul is what gives the body its nature and accounts for its unity. 3. This also helps us understand how the body is a part of spiritual disciplines (fasting, for example), because of the deep unity. c. Substance dualism doesn't mean that there are two radically different substances that make up a person. 1) The body is physical stuff, but not technically a substance. 2) I am an immaterial substantial soul that has a physical body. I am a soul that has a body. 3) The soul is in the body: the soul is the essence of the body that diffuses and is fully present throughout all its parts. 4) The body is in the soul: the body is the realization, the outworking, of a structure, a set of dispositions, that is contained within the capacities of the soul. 5) A better name for this position is a Thomistic dualist. d. The central question is of unity when it comes to a living organism. What kind of unity does it have and what accounts for that unity?
VIII. Options in the Mind/Body Problem

A. Handout on the Mind/Body Problem Physicalism Non-Reductive Materialists 1. Eliminative Materialism These three "Reductive Materialists"--Mental states are all reduced (to three different material things). 2. Behaviorism 3. Identity thesis Personalism Dualism 1. Substance Dualism Issue: Is the body a separate substance from the soul? a. Cartesian b. Aristotelian/Thomism 2. Property/Event Dualism Issue: Can mental states cause actions?
60 4. Functionalism a. Compatibalism b. Epiphenomenalism
B. Four major versions of strict physicalism 1. Introduction a. Supervenient physicalism is a confused category. 1) It really turns out to be a form of property dualism 2) It is not included in this list. If it were included under physicalism, the list would include five versions, not four. b. This discussion is related to different kinds of identity statements in which the mental is identified with something else through theory replacement or theory reduction. 2. Eliminative materialism: a. This is a replacement theory in philosophy of mind. 1) It eliminates the mental in favor of the physical. 2) A new theory replaces--rather than modifies or clarifies--the old theory. b. For example, Paul Churchland is an eliminative materialist with regards to propositional attitudes. 1) Thoughts, desires and beliefs don't exist. a) They are like the concepts of demons or phlogisten of old; they don't refer to anything. b) That's why this view is "eliminative." Mental states are eliminated and are replaced with another option: physical states. 2) These are merely terms in "folk psychology." a) Folk psychology is a common sense theory that is used to explain other people's behaviors. 1. It can be used in an instrumentalist way ("useful fictions"), but not in a realist way; it doesn't really refer to anything. 2. Is just a way of speaking about behaviors that turn out to be entirely physical in nature. b) Neurophysiology has replaced folk psychology. 3) Note that this is a third person theory. Pains, for example, are externally accessible physical states, not private mental states. 3. Reductive pysicalism a. Mental states do exist, but they are reduced to something physical. b. "Mental states" turn out to be something other than what common sense makes them out to be. 1) They are physical, not mental. 2) Heat still exists, but it is identical to the physical vibration of molecules, instead of a felt quality of warmth. c. So the assertion that they're real is a slight of hand. They are actually identical to something physical. 4. Behaviorism: a. First, mental states are identical to overt bodily behavior or the tendency to overt bodily behavior. 1) Pain is identical to the tendency to say ouch when stuck with a pin. 2) Pain is the overt, observable bodily behavior. b. Second, the identity is a meaning identity. 1) The meaning of mental terms entails physiclly observable behavior. 2) Mental terms can be exhaustively defined by operational definitions. a) An operational definition is a definition in terms of operations or procedures that you can go through. b) E.g., intelligence means scoring a certain level on a test. It's measurable.
61 c. Nobody is a philosophical behiavorist anymore because the problems with the view are obvious. 1) We can apply the law of identity to show that mental states and behavior are not identical. 2) The behavioral definition is neither necessary nor sufficient for having a mental state. a) It's not necessary: a person can be in pain without grimacing. b) It's not sufficient: a person can grimace without being in pain. 3) Mental states cause behavior; they are not themselves the behavior. a) Empirical equivalence doesn't constitute identity. b) There is no problem with correlating the two, or showing that behaviors evidence certain mental states; they're just not the same thing (not identical). 4) Behaviorism also leaves out the felt quality of the mental state like pain. 5) How do you define the behaviors that are supposed to apply to mental states? a) There is a potentially infinite number of behaviors that can be included to define the mental state. b) If the mental state of desiring to go on vacation in the Bahamas is the tendency to browse through travel brochures, then it can also include the tendency to save money, go shopping for clothes, stop your mail, etc. c) On the basis of what do you decide which behaviors fit the definition of the mental state and which ones don't? e) The only way is by a covert or overt appeal to the mental state itself. d. Behaviorism was part of ridding psychology of mental talk. 5. The Identity Thesis replaced behaviorism. a. This is also called the hardware view. b. There are two different forms of identity theory, type-type identity theory and type-token identity theory. 1) First, type-type identity theory (the earliest form) has largely been abandoned. a) Behaviorism said that mental states mean bodily movements. Type-type denies that they mean the same thing, but they do refer to the same thing. 1. It's not an identity of the meaning of the terms but an identity of reference. 2. According to this view a type of mental state called pain turns out to be (is identical with) a type of brain state, i.e. C-fibers firing in a certain way. 3. You can only have a pain state if and only if you have a particular physical state. b) This is a contingent identity claim 1. Two descriptions of something happen to be fulfilled by the same thing but could have been fulfilled by different things. The two terms mean different things, but still pick out the same object (e.g., "The evening star is the morning star" or "Ben Franklin is the inventor of bifocals."). 2. This was a contingent statement because it could have been turned out to be the soul, but it was scientifically discovered that a pain type state turned out to the a brain state. c) The problem of multiple realization: The same mental state (type) can be realized by many hardware states. 1. It seems possible that Martians, if they exist, could experience pain. 2. This is sufficient to refute a type-type claim. Why? a) Identity is transitive (if A is identical to B and B is identical to C then A is identical to C).
62 b) If pain is identical to human hardware and Martians have pain, then Martians have human hardware. c) But pain can't be identical to human hardware and identical to different Martian hardware. 3. But maybe there is Martian pain and human pain? a) Why call both of these hardware states pain? What unifies the category? b) The only thing to unify the category is the felt quality of pain. c) This means that many hardware types can realize the same mental type, refuting the type-type thesis. 2) Second, there is type-token identity theory. a) This view agrees that there is no identity between a type of brain state and a type of mental state (it gives up on a general identity statement). b) Instead every specific individual pain type is identical to some specific token brain state. c) Problem: 1. Once again, what type unifies the class of tokens? 2. This is a bald-faced assertion and can't be proved. 3) Each form of the identity theory leaves out the phenomenological texture of mental states. a) This is the way something appears directly to your consciosness. b) Pains present themselves to us phenomenologically and have a subjective feel to them; no brains states have that. 1. The phenomenological texture of mental states is not part of the physical features of the world. 2. Consciousness isn't part of the langue of chemistry or physics. c. A side observation: 1) Our thoughts stand to one another in epistemic relations. One thought is the basis for another thought; it entails the other thoughts. a) Thoughts are the kinds of entities that can stand in epistemic support or inferential relation to one another. b) Certain thoughts are epistemically prior to other thoughts, e.g., the thought that there is a red object in front of you is prior to your conclusion that a red book is in front of you. 2) How can a thought stand in epistemic support relation to a physical object? a) Brain states can stand in causal relations to each other but not in epistemic relations to each other. b) Physicalism requires we reduce epistemological and logical relations to cause and effect relations. 6. Functionalism: a. Functionalism is an attempt to answer the multiple realization problem and at the same time avoid behaviorism. 1) The functionalist has to make it possible for a mental state to be realized by many different brain states. 2) This can't be accomplished if the mental state is identical to hardware, so functionalists make mental states identical to software. b. A functional state is characerized by causal inputs to the organism, causal outputs from the organism and a movement to a new mental state. 1) For example, a pain state is whatever state occurs in you that is caused by being stuck by pin, that in turn causes you to grimace and say "Ouch!" 2) But the mental state has to be defined in a functional way, too. There can be no feelings. c. Difference between the behaviorist and the functionalist
63 1) For the behaviorist the mental state is the behavior. 2) For the functionalist, the mental state is what is causing the behavior and what is caused by the pin-stick. a) It turns out to be a state of the brain that plays a causal role in the organism. b) It isn't the behavior, but whatever plays the causal role in the input/output, like the state in a computer (the software) when you input 2+2 and it outputs 4. c) This is obviously deterministic. 3) For the identity theorist, the essence of a mental state is the hardware (very specific). 4) For the functionalist, the essence of a mental state is whatever state that is in there that functions in a certain way, that is caused by a physical stimulus and causes a physical response (very general). a) This state can be realized with many different kinds of hardware. Pain doesn't have to be a particular brain state. b) The thing that makes them both pains is not a similar hardware state, but a functional role it plays in input and output. c) This solves the problem of multiple realization. d) This would be a contingent identity. d. Problems with functionalism 1) It implies determinism. It's incompatible with libertarian free agency. 2) What is a function? a) Can you have functions without designers? b) Or it implies a substance with a nature. 3) The problem of inverted qualia a) A quale is a specific, experienced quality (like a shade of red). b) The functionalist says that if two things are in the same functional state, then the mental states are identical. c) The inverted qualia problem is a case where two organisms manifest the same functional state, but different mental states. If this is the case, they can't be identical. 1. Robot example a. Two robots have the same inputs. They both sort three objects from the others and identify them as red. Both have had the same inputs and give the same outputs. b. According to functionalism they would both be in the same mental state. c. But it's possible that one sorted according to an experience of seeing red, but the other was color blind and sorted according to an experience of blue, but called it red. d. If this is possible then there's a difference between mental states and functional abilities. 2. John Serle's "Chinese Room" a. Thoughts involve having meanings in your mind, semantic concepts. b. For the functionalist thought is just spitting out an answers to linguistic problems. c. The Chinese room functions as though it understands Chinese but is just manipulating characters according to rules; it doesn't understand the meanings. d. Therefore the functions and the meanings must be different. C. Summary
64 1. Every one of these, except eliminativism, tries to make mental states identical to something else. 2. But this always leaves out some essential quality, such as first person accounts. a. When I'm aware of my thoughts I'm not aware of my brain. b. I might not even have a brian. c. Consciousness is just different than matter. 3. Physicalists have confused functional dependence with identity. 4. Certain versions of freedom aren't possible with physicalism. 5. Identity through change isn't possible with physicalism.
IX. Freedom and Determinism

A. Two questions in the debate over "freedom": 1. Is there such a thing as freedom? 2. If so, what is it exactly? B. Three different arguments for freedom (especially libertarian freedom). 1. Certain concepts only make sense if determinism is false. a. Moral ought and moral duty b. Moral and intellectual responsibility c. Moral and intellectual praise and blame. 2. There is a distinction between the active and passive voices in grammar, and a distinction between bodily action and mere bodily movement. a. There is a distinction between my arm going up (bodily ) and my raising my arm (action). b. These distinctions, if real, have libertarian freedom as a necessary condition. 3. In acts of introspection I can be aware of two things that lend support to libertarian freedom: a. I am not aware of anything causing me to act. b. I am aware that when I act I am acting freely. 1) I'm aware of being the ultimate originator of your own actions. 2) I'm aware of being a first, unmoved, mover. C. Three Kinds of Freedom 1. Freedom of permission (political) a. This is not metaphysical, but is solely social and/or political, having to do with social and legal rights. b. One has certain freedoms allowed him by law in his society. 2. Freedom of personal integrity (developmental) a. The ability of a mature person to act well as a unified self. b. It is the cultivation of abilities (i.e. the freedom to play the violin). c. The notion of freedom has changed in the contemporary debate. 1) Freedom has classically meant the power to do what I ought to do. 2) Freedom now means the ability to do what I want (individual rights). 3. Freedom of moral and rational responsibility (moral) a. This is called "freedom of the will," or simply "freedom." b. This is the kind of freedom that's usually debated, the type of freedom that's a necessary condition for responsible action. D. Different Views About the Freedom of Responsibility (Freedom of the Will) 1. Definition of determinism:
65 a. For every event that happens there are conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could have happened. b. Every event that happens is the inevitable outcome of a chain of events leading up to and sufficient for that event. 2. Three broad positions on free will a. Hard Determinists 1) Freedom and determinism are incompatible with each other. 2) There is no such thing as freedom. b. Libertarians 1) Freedom and determinism are incompatible with each other. 2) There is freedom. 3) Libertarian free will is not compatible with naturalism. a) John Bishop, quoted in Natural Agency: "The problem of natural agency is an ontological problem. It is a problem about whether the existence of actions can be admitted within a natural scientific ontology. Naturalism does not employ the concept of a causal relation where the first member is in the category of person, agent or substance. All causal relations have first members in the category of events." b) If you're a naturalist, the only thing that causes anything is an event. c. Soft Determinists/Compatibalists 1) The most popular view today among philosophers. 2) Freedom and determinism are compatible with each other. 3) This, of course, implies that there are two different views of what "freedom" means, one employed by the libertarian, and one employed by the compatibalist. 4) This is different than the antinomy view which says that the determinism and libertarian views are both true. This could not be the case if libertarian freedom is in view here. E. Compatibalism Clarified 1. The idea behind compatibalism is this: a. If determinism is true then every event is caused by prior events. b. If freedom is to be compatible with that, then freedom must be consistent with free actions being determined by prior events. 2. Hard vs. Soft Compatibalism a. Hard compatibalism 1) Free will is inconceivable without determinism. 2) If there is no cause for the action, then the action seems completely random, a spontaneous, uncaused event that is done for no reason at all (indeterminism). 3) How can anyone be responsible for a random event? b. Soft compatibalism holds that determinism is not required for freedom. Libertarianism is not incoherent (as the hard compatibalist holds); it's just false. 3. Classical vs. Contemporary or Hierarchical Compatibalists a. Locke and Hume were classical compatibalists. b. Definition: Freedom means that one is free if and only if he can act according to one's own desires in the absence of external constraint. 1) The essence of freedom is the freedom of bodily movement. 2) You can do what you want to do. c. This view isn't held much today because it is neither necessary nor sufficient criterion for freedom. 1) It's not sufficient because a person with a strange fear may run from the color red. Though not constrained in the classical sense, they are still enslaved by their compulsion.
66 2) It's not necessary. Consider this case. Jones is deliberating whether or not to kill Smith. The scientists wants to ensure that Jones kills Smith, so they implant an electroid in Jones's brain and will hit a button causing Jones's arm to go up and shoot Smith if Jones does not freely choose to do so. Jones decides to kill Smith on his own. It wasn't possible for Jones to have acted other than what he did, ultimately, yet it seems he exercised free will. 4. Contemporary or Hierarchical Compatibalism a. This view focuses in on free will, not free action. b. You have free will if your action is caused in the right way by your own beliefs, desires and preferences, which are themselves determined. c. Harry Frankfurt and Gary Watson hold this view. F. Libertarianism 1. Libertarianism says that free action is not compatible with determinism. a. When I act freely I act as a substance who is a first, unmoved mover. b. I spontaneously exercise my causal powers and act for reasons. 2. Suppose that some person P freely does some action E. a. P is a substance that had the power to bring about E. b. P exerted its powers as a first mover (an actor who is not caused to act) to bring about E. c. P had the ability to refrain from exerting its power to bring about E. d. P did E for the sake of reason R. 3. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reed were classical libertarians. Currently Roderick Chisolm, and Peter Van Inwagen are libertarians. G. Five areas of comparison between libertarians and compatibalists 1. The ability condition a. To do something freely you would have to 1) Have the ability to have done otherwise or... 2) Have willed to have done otherwise or... 3) Have refrained from willing to do the thing you did. 4) Compatibalists and libertarians agree on this. b. Libertarians called this dual ability--a two way ability. At the moment of choice there was more than one option that is within one's power to do. c. For the compatibalist, however, this is called a hypothetical ability, a conditional notion of can. 1) I could have done otherwise if I had wished or wanted to do otherwise. 2) But your wants and wishes are determined. 3) This turns out to be a one-way ability. d. One problem with the compatibalist view is called akrasia, weakness of the will. 1) On the compatibalist view you always act on your strongest preference. 2) So with compatibalism you never have weakness of will, allegedly; you never do what you don't want to do, ultimately. 3) A compatibalist response: you may have a number of preferences, and when there is competition, one always turns out to be weaker because it's chosen against for the stronger one. 4) But then you start sounding like and ethical egoist, that everything you do always turns out to be self interest. e. For the libertarian the ability to act is called a categorical ability: 1) If Smith freely does A, he could have refrained from doing A or he could have done B, without any state in me being different. 2) It is not conditioned on something else in me, like a wish or desire.
67 f. The libertarian view, though, is vulnerable to the charge of indeterminism and randomness in action. 1) If choice is without cause then it seems random. There is no way to account for how human personality is stable and human actions can be predictable. 2) It is only with some sort of determination that human behavior can be predictable. In fact, we find it psychologically impossible to do certain things (to trust someone, for example). g. Libertarians respond two ways. 1) First, in cases where I act freely but predictably, it's predictable because my motives, desires and beliefs strongly influence my choice but don't determine it. My choices are influenced, but not necessitated. a) The argument turns on a notion of influence that is strong enough that accounts for a regularity of behavior, but short of determination. b) The compatibalist responds that influence is actually causal; the idea of something "moving" the soul to act implies determinism. 2) The second choice is that our actions are determined by our character, but we are still responsible and praise worthy for it. How can that be? a) We must distinguish between first and second order capacities. b) Some time in the past I had the capacity to develop that capacity, but refrained from developing that capacity. c) While I had a second order freedom that is enough to justify accountability, but no did not develop the first order capacity. 1. My determined choices can be traced back to libertarian choices to develop capacities. 2. E.g., "You should have practiced honesty; then you wouldn't have become a compulsive liar." d) Freedom, then, is active or passive. 1. Freedom is exercised not only in doing something, but in refraining from doing something. 2. Responsibility can accrue from second order choosing or refraining from choosing, which I cannot exercise right now. 2. The Control Condition a. A necessary condition for being free is that I be in control of my actions. 1) All sides agree on this. 2) They differ over what it means to be in control of your actions. b. For the compatibalist, causation is event-event causation. 1) The compatibalist conceives of a chain of causal events where later events are determined by earlier events in the chain sufficient for it. 2) Suppose we have black dominos 1 through 80, and red dominos 81' through 99' and green dominos 81'' through 99''. And then we have domino 100. a) You hit domino 1 which hits 2, and so on. b) The dominos are arranged so that 80 hits 81' instead of 81'', and finally hits domino 100. We would say that causal chain of events runs leading from domino 1 to domino 100, runs through 81' through 99', but not through the others. 3) According to the compatibalist notion of control, an action is free only if the action is under my control. That means that the causal chain of events leading up to my action must run through my beliefs and desires. a) An action is free only if it runs through Jones's beliefs and desires, even though his beliefs and desires are themselves determined ultimately by something outside of his control.
68 b) If a scientist plants an electrode in Jones's brain and hits a button to cause him to shoot Smith, then it is not a free action for the compatibalist even though it's determined because it's determined by the wrong things. c) Responsibility only requires that my actions are caused by my beliefs, desires and character. They are under my control, i.e. not caused by something else. 4) The compatablist view is called a Causal Theory of Action. a) A causal theory of action says an act is free if and only if it is under the agent's own control, and it is under the agent's own control if and only if the act was "appropriately caused by" the right mental states existing in the agent prior to the act (e.g., not induced by a mad scientist). b) "Appropriately caused by" is required because of the problem of "causal deviance." 1. Having acts merely as a result of my beliefs and mental attitudes is not sufficient for the act to really be free and under my control. One's own mental state isn't sufficient to call a choice free. 2. A soldier plans to give a sign of imminent attack by knocking his coffee over. He has a certain mental state to knock his coffee over, and a belief that he can thus warn his compatriots looking at him through the window. But he becomes nervous thinking about this, and he knocks his coffee over by accident. The belief state caused the action to take place, but not in the appropriate way, so it wasn't a free will act. 3. This turns out to be a significant problem hard to explain and still avoid new counter-examples. c. The libertarian says that the compatablist view of control is pseudo-control, a slight of hand. 1) It's like saying a guided missile is under control of its course if its wiring is correct. But that's not freedom. 2) Libertarian free will requires an unmoved mover for a first cause. a) Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, Chapter 13, has a very interesting discussion on the difference between first and intermediate movers. b) According to Aquinas, domino 100 falls because of the falling of domino 1 through 80 and 81' through 99' are just instrumental movers. The real cause was the person who knocked over domino 1. 3) For the libertarian, the kind of control necessary for free action is an action that is undergone by an unmoved mover. I'm under control if I am a first mover and am not caused by something else to act. 4) The compatablist arbitrarily stops the causal chain inside the person and ignores the causes that occur before the person was born and in the environment. a) It is arbitrary because what is being described is a chain of instrumental movers. b) It's like cutting off the chain before domino 81' and ignoring dominos 180. 5) The compatibalist says that the notion of an unmoved mover is: a) Incoherent and unintelligible b) Merely a brute given c) Appears to be random and therefore not free 3. The Rationality Condition a. This requires that a responsible action must have a personal reason for why it's done. b. Libertarians typically divide free acts into two groups:
69 1) Actions that are done for no reason (called the freedom of spontaneity) a) There is a debate whether there are any acts for no reason. b) Perhaps animals act for no reason. Perhaps out attention to details in our vision field are done for no reason. 2) Actions that are done for a reason (the freedom of liberty) a) Some libertarians say that the only kind of free acts are those done for a reason. b) Others say that there are both kinds, but only responsible for those done for a reason. c. The compatibalist and libertarians agree that responsible actions are those that are done in light of certain beliefs, desires, preferences, etc. But they differ over the role of a reason in an action (efficient and final causes); they have very different views on the nature of purposefulness. 1) An efficient cause is that "by means of which" an effect is produced (strict cause and effect). 2) A final cause is that "for the sake of which" an effect is produced (purpose). 3) For the compatablist reasons are efficient causes; for the libertarian they are final causes. a) Suppose that Smith raises his hand to vote. Suppose his reason is due to having a certain belief and desire (a belief-desire set). 1. The desire may be the desire to vote. 2. The belief may be that by raising the hand one can satisfy the desire. b) What is the reason that Smith voted? The answer is: his belief-desire set. 1. For the compatibalist, it is the belief-desire state that causes the hand to go up. a. What causes the hand to go up is not Smith, if he is a substance. Smith, as a substantial ego, did not cause anything. b. What causes my hand to go up is an event inside of me, an event of having a certain belief-desire state. A believing and desiring state caused an arm raising state to occur within me. c. This view that I am a series of events is consistent with compatibalism. 1) Being a substance is not a part of causality. 2) But this makes it hard to distinguish between the active and passive voices. 2. For the libertarian it is a final cause. I raised my hand in order to vote ("for the sake of which"), for a reason. 3. The word "cause" is ambiguous because it can mean efficient causality or final causality. a. For the compatablist, it can be much like a missile following its target. b. For the libertarian, teleology cannot be reduced to efficient causality. To say I acted for a reason is for a reason. The reason explains ("for the sake of which"), but doesn't cite the efficient cause. 4. Causation a. The compatibalist believes in event-event (or state-state) causation. 1) Consider a brick breaking a glass. This refers to two substances standing in a breaking relation. 2) An event of kind K (the moving of the brick and the touching of the glass), in circumstances of kind C (the glass being in a solid and not a liquid state) occurring to an entity of kind E (the glass object), caused the event of kind Q (the breaking of the glass).
70 3) The causes and the effects are events. a) The state-state causation gets rid of the substances as causes. b) Substances do not enter into causal connections in any literal sense. 1. "The problem of natural agency is an ontological problem. It is a problem about whether there can be actions within a natural, scientific ontology. Naturalism does not essentially employ the concept of a causal relation whose first member is the category of person, agent or...continuent or substance." (John Bishop, in Natural Agency) 2. Naturalists are committed to event-event causation. The first connection is an event, not an agent. b. The libertarian has two different views of causation. 1) Agent causation a) Agents cause their own actions. b) I am a substance with spontaneous causal powers. 2) A non-causal theory of agency a) Nothing causes my actions, but they are done for reasons. b) Human actions are uncaused events, but not unexplainable; they are done for reasons. c) A reason is an explanation, but not a cause. 5. The Person as Agent a. It is consistent with (but is not necessary for) the compatibalist view that I am not a substance. 1) There is no enduring self through time. 2) It is consistent that I am a stream of events. b. A necessary condition for libertarian theory is that I am a substance. I am a substantial agent with causal powers to act. H. General thoughts on freedom 1. Naturalism can't have libertarian freedom is because it doesn't have an ontology rich enough to support it. a. Naturalists don't treat humans as substances, but as property things. b. Causation is reduced to event-event causation. 2. Determinism is sufficient but not necessary to generate the problem of free will. a. If you believe in determinism then you'll have difficulty allowing for freedom. b. This is the problem compatibalism was designed to address. 3. But determinism isn't necessary to generate the problem of freedom. a. One can deny determinism and still have difficulty allowing for freedom. b. Quantum physics is irrelevant to this problem because the problem of freedom can be stated as the problem of the existence of substantial agency. c. Indeterminism on the quantum level may be evidence against determinism but still creates problems for freedom because completely indeterminate events are random and not consistent with free action. 4. The real problem is whether there are substances that can act qua substances. a. Is there final (teleological causality)? b. Can substances engage in a spontaneous exercise of causal power? c. The naturalist doesn't have room for that kind of thing in his world view. 5. The free will problem is primarily a problem about the nature of agency and the agent, not primarily a question of determinism or indeterminism.
X. Personal Identity
71 A. Introductory thoughts 1. Bishop Butler, John Locke, David Hume and Thomas Reid are the major philosophers on the question of personal identity. 2. There are two schools of thought on the issue of personal identity. a. The Absolutist View of Identity b. Empiricist Views of Identity B. The Absolutist View of Identity (Bishop Butler and Thomas Reid) 1. Persons are different than physical objects; personal identity is unique. a. Persons are different from physical objects; they are not merely natural objects in the material world. b. Usually the absolutist holds that physical objects don't sustain absolute identity through change, but persons do. c. Therefore, identity for persons should not be determined by starting with identity questions for objects which are then applied to persons. d. Butler distinguished between strict-absolutist and loose, popular-fictitious identity. 1) Strict identity is where the thing literally remains the same through change (e.g., persons). 2) Loose identity is where the thing is called the same by conventional, even though parts have been added, altered or removed (e.g., tables or nations). 2. Personal identity is absolute, unanalyzable and primitive. a. It can't be reduced to anything else, contrary to the other opposing empiricist view. b. To be "absolute" means that if P1 at T1 is the same person as P2 at T2 then P1 and P2 stand in the identity relation to each other. They are strictly and literally the same person. 3. Identity is not conventional and it doesn't admit to degrees. a. It's not a matter of arbitrary convention. b. It doesn't make sense to say that this person is 80% identical to the other one. 4. The absolutist view entails commitment to tensed predicates, which are the ascription of a property to a thing that includes past, present or future tense. a. Tensed-ness must be taken into account in order to hold that two individuals stand in the identity relation. b. What does it mean to say that the person who was in the fifth grade is the same person who sits in this class today? According to strict identity, whatever is true of the fifth grader should be true of the adult sitting here today. But clearly there are differences. c. The solution is to tense the properties. I have the property of being 5'8" and that boy was to have the property to be 5'8". 1) The tense is a way of expressing my full endurance through time. 2) Whatever property the child had, we both had that property; and whatever property the adult has, the child was to have it. 5. Persons do not have temporal parts. a. Parts of persons are not extended in time. b. A person is wholly present at each moment of his life. c. A person moves through time, and is not a static set of moments. Persons are temporally simple. C. Empiricist Views of Identity 1. Empiricist views start by making identity judgments of strictly material objects, called "fictitious identity." a. "The Good Ship Theseus"
72 1) Suppose that each time the Theseus goes on a voyage and returns to port an old plank is replaced with new one. Over time a pile of old planks accumulates on the shore. Eventually the old planks are assembled according to the exact same design as the Theseus. 2) Which is the original ship Theseus? Most claim that it is the reassembled one. b. The usual view is that physical objects cannot gain and lose parts and still be the same physical object. 1) This is sometimes called mereological essentialism, which is the view that the parts of something are essential to it as a whole. 2) If we have different parts, we have a different whole. 3) Physical objects are not strictly speaking the same physical objects from one moment to the next. a) The podium is constantly losing and gaining parts on an atomic level. b) When we say that this is the same podium, we are not speaking in a strict philosophical way but are referring to a space-time worm, a series of stages along a time line from the beginning to the end of the podium's existence. c) Podium stages are spatio-temporal slices of the whole podium. The whole podium is the entire line. d) The podium we look at any given moment is only one temporally extended part, a slice of the whole podium which is the object extended through time. 4) Physical objects have temporal parts to them, they are extended through time. 2. Persons are just natural objects. Their identity is fictitious, a unity of spatio-temporal parts. Persons are processes or series of events; they do not really sustain absolute personal identity through change. a. This is sometimes called an ancestral chain model of personal identity. b. A person turns out to be a chain where the earlier persons on the chain are the ancestors of the persons later on the chain. The baby is the same person as the adult in that the baby was in the same chain of events as the adult. c. These person stages stand to each other in a certain relationship which makes them "part of the same person." 1) Each person part slice stands in relation R to a later time slice. 2) The question is, "What is relation R?" d. A person, then, is the sum of the whole history of stages, much like a baseball game which is not a game until it's complete. 1) No sense can be given to the statement I am going through a stage because there is no I which undergoes both events. 2) Nor are you a person right now, at this moment you are only one person-slice in a long series of person-slices. 3. What is the relation that unites the events, the person stages? a. The Psychological Continuity/Memory View 1) It is the same person if it is the same memory (John Locke). a) What constitutes the later stage as being the same person as a previous stage is that the later stage has the same memories as the previous stage. b) You share the same memories as the child that preceded you. c) But how many past memories must one have to be the same person? 2) Sometimes this is supplemented by memories plus other psychological features, such as personality traits. This is called the psychological empiricist theory. 3) Some views hold to the same character traits plus the condition that no other competitor exists. a) This position is typically held by property dualists.
73 b) Nozick holds to this "no closest continuer view," offered to rule out the possibility of God creating another person with the same psychological states, in which the two would both be me. c) But how can my identity be dependent upon the existence or nonexistence of another entity?. 4) Same person is not strict and literal. b. Body View (David Hume) 1) It is the same person if it is the "same body." Sameness of body is necessary and sufficient for sameness or persons. 2) This requires an analysis of what it means to have the same body. a) "Same body" could mean that as you trace the person stages through time there are no radical discontinuities in the body. Each stage is spatiotemporally contiguous to the previous one. b) It could mean that one body stage resembles the next body stage. c) Some claim that one body stage has got to cause the next body stage. c. Brain Criteria 1) Some have opted for the sameness of brain. a) Chisholm holds there is a physical part of the brain which does not undergo change, and this grounds personal identity. b) This unchanging part could possibly cause the next body state, or it could account for some kind of a spatio-temporal continuity from one moment to the next (there could be no skips, jumps). 2) This can be classified as sameness of body, because the brain is part of the body. 3) This view is attractive because having the same brain seems to be a necessary condition for having the same psychological features. 4. Summary of the empiricist view: a. Persons are a chain of events. b. Identity is not strict and literal. c. It can admit to degrees. d. Identity judgments can be arbitrary. D. A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, by John Perry 1. Night 1: objections to the classical substance-dualist view a. Miller offers the classical substance-dualist view. 1. Personal identity as sameness of soul. 2. Personal identity is absolute. b. There are two objections to this view. 1) The first set of objections are epistemological in nature. a) If the view is true it leads to the epistemic impossibility of making personal identity judgments from the third person perspective. 1. One would never be able to know when another is the same person at different moments in time. 2. But I can obviously do that, so the soul view must be false. 3. The only thing we're acquainted with is the body or personality traits, not the soul. b) The dualist would allow for body or memory to count for an epistemological criterion (same body, same soul), through would be careful to point out it isn't what constitutes personal identity. c) But how is such a correlation established (same body, same soul)? The argument by analogy. 1. The problem as stated is the problem of other minds. Dualism is supposed to result in skepticism regarding the existence of other minds.
74 2. The analogy argument says that in my case I find it to be true that sameness of soul is correlated with sameness of body. I know this by introspective, first person awareness. 3. Assuming others are analogous to me, I establish a correlation: what's true for me is true for others like me. e) The counter argument is that this is a generalization based on only one case--a weak analogy. 1. This is an undo use of the skeptical argument. If the skeptic can suggest the mere possibility that I may be mistaken, it doesn't follow that I am mistaken. 2. I may still be justified in believing the analogy. 2) The second problem is for all you know, your soul may be just a stream of mental events. a) The paradigm case is a river. 1. Note the use of a fairly loose physical object as an analogy for personal identity. 2. When it comes to a river we notice surface features of a river that maintain through time. But strictly speaking it isn't the same river today as the river that was here a week ago. 3. Just by observing surface similarities in a river doesn't mean it's the same river. 4. By parallel, observing similar surface features in persons doesn't mean it's the same person. b) One response is to say that's just what a soul is, a kind of thing able to maintain identity through change. 1. I am primitively aware of myself being identical through change. 2. I am aware not just of my mental states; I am aware of me and that I continue to exist through time (though Hume and some others say you can never be aware of yourself). c. After the first night, the absolute view is set aside. 2. Night 2: a discussion of Locke's memory view a. Reference to the body isn't necessary to make personal identity judgments. 1) When I wake up in the morning, before I open my eyes, I am aware that I am the "same person." I am part of the same stream of mental events. 2) Locke says that a prince could wake up in the cobbler's body and the cobbler could wake up in the prince's body. therefore personal identity is not physical. a) Why would we say the cobbler's body is really the prince? b) Because it has the prince's memories (Moreland would say that it is because it has the prince's soul). 3) The questions is what is relation R? This is the psychological view and the relation is sameness of memories. b. The problem is that memory or psychological characteristics seem neither necessary nor sufficient for identity. 1) It's not necessary: a) It seems a person is the same person even if he had someone else's memories. b) It is possible that a person could have permanent amnesia yet still be the same person. c) So sameness of memories isn't necessary. 2) It's not sufficient: a) Two people could have the very same memories and not be the same person.
75 b) Suppose that you die and cease to exist, and in the afterlife God created two new people with your same memories. Which would be identical to you? c) According to the memory view, both would be because they both have the same memories as you. But one thing can't be identical to two things. c. There is also a difference between a real memory and an apparent memory. 1) Suppose another person woke up with all of your memories implanted there by a mad scientist or God. 2) They would only be apparent memories, not real memories. 3) The memory view doesn't distinguish well between real and apparent memories. a) The way the memory view has to distinguish between the real and apparent memories is to say that the real memories are the ones that are caused in the right way by the earlier mental states. 1. Real memories are ones carried along by the same brain. 2. Apparent memories were infused from another brain. b) Personal identity turns out to be same memory plus same brain, which serves as the appropriate casual relation. c) This is a common solution for a naturalist on the questions of identity, free will, etc. They patch up their view by adding that it has to happen in the right way. d. Changing the example shows that this won't work. 1) Split the same brain in half. Implant each half in two other bodies so that they both have the same memories. 2) Now we have two people with the same memories caused in the right way by the same causal path. But how can one person be identical with two persons? 3) Robert Nosic at Harvard responds with the "No Closest Continuer View." a) This view says that you have to stipulate that no other entity has come into existence that has the same memories as the first entity. 1. We have P1 before the operation, and P2 and P3 after the operation, who have the same memories as P1. Is P2 the same person as P1? 2. Nosic says the answer depends on whether or not there is some other entity P3 that has the same memories as P1. b) But now identity depends upon whether or not there is a third entity that has the same memories. 1. How can personal identity be the function of the existence of some other entity? 2. Before I make identity judgment of myself, I would have to check around for rival candidates. c) This response confuses epistemology and ontology. It brings up the problem of how we know, but doesn't solve the metaphysical problem. e. The memory view replaces true identity with "gen identity" (pronounced "jen"). 1) Gen identity is a term Quine used to distinguish this view of identity from the absolute view of identity. 2) Gen means "two stages in the same stream as." This isn't real identity. f. A scientist extracts the memories from Julia's brain, stores them in a computer and puts those memories into a number of brain clones from Julia's brain. 1) They all have the same memories produced by the correct path. Which is the real Julia? 2) The memory criterion doesn't work, suggesting sameness of body and the best criterion for personal identity. 3. Night 3: argument for identity based on same body
76 a. Julia has an accident which destroys her body but not her brain. Julia's brain is transplanted in Mary Francis's healthy body. b. Who survived, Julia or Mary Francis? c. According to the memory criterion view, the person who wakes up is Julia because she has the same memories as the pre-operation Julia, and those memories are produced by the correct path, Julia's brain. d. According to the body view Mary Francis survived with Julia's memories because it is Mary Francis's body. They would say that we have Mary Francis's body with Julia's memories. 1) In what way can we say this is Mary Francis's body? 2) We can trace a continuous path of bodily stages. Mary Francis's body maintains gen identity. 4. Madell will argue that there has never been an adequate statement of identity other than sameness of self, which is irreducibly first person, not physical or material. a. Persons are not natural objects. There is something about persons such that they cannot be treated as natural objects. b. The question of unity through change is just a different aspect of identity at a moment in time. 1) At any given moment, I have many more than one mental state going on inside of me. Am I a heap of ownerless drops of experience? 2) If I'm going to be a unified self at a moment in time, then I have to be more than my body and mental states because they are many and I am one. c. A key question of whether I am a natural object or an emergent property thing turns on libertarian agency and the unity of the self through change. E. Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self 1. Madell chapter 1: Empiricism vs. Absolutism a. Overview of chapter 1) Madell states two views of personal identity, the absolutist view and the empiricist views, then he clarifies two sub-groups of the empiricist view. 2) He identifies alleged weaknesses in the absolutist view. 3) He then answers the alleged weaknesses and gives his support for the absolutist view. b. The Empiricist View 1) Strict identity is a fiction. a) The paradigm case offered is the identity of nations or the identity of physical objects. b) The assumption of the empiricist view is that persons are mere natural entities that have fictitious identity through change and which can be captured exhaustively by a third person description. 2) Identity is explainable in only the third person. a) This is the same way one would describe the world scientifically. 1. To describe the objects in space-time you give a definite description by listing the features true of the object from the outside in. 2. You locate it in space time and describe it from the outside, listing the predicates pertaining to that object. b) According to this view, the same method exhaustively describes persons. 1. According to the body view of identity, a third person description uses solely physical language to list the physical predicates true of it. 2. According to the memory view, you pick out an object in space-time and describe it in terms of memory and personality traits.
77 3. There is no irreducible first person self that transcends the third person description. 3) This amounts to a bundle theory of substance. a) A substance is a bundle of properties and events in time. b) You are a sum of the events on the chain that are connected by some relation R. Identity is not real, but different stages standing in R. c) What is the relation R that connects all the stages of the ancestral chain and makes them true of the same person? 1. According to the body advocate view, R would be the same body. a. Each stage includes the very same body. b. By body is meant that each stage of the body resembles the previous stage, allowing for smooth, continuous change, but no abrupt changes; or it traces a continuous spatio path. c. Earlier body stages cause later body stages. 2. According to the memory view, R (personal identity) consists in continuity of consciousness (not continuity of the thing that has consciousness). a. Consciousness is a stream of mental events. b. So relation R is continuation of the same memories, and sometimes same personality traits is added. 4) These views make identity conventional and partial, admitting of degrees. a) It is merely a matter of convention, i.e., the way we happen to speak about a thing. b) You could be partially identical to yourself if you had a partially similar body or some of the same memories. 1. Physical things can be partially identical, that's clear. a. If we joined two halves of different podiums, then we could say that each half is 50% "identical" to the original. b. This is not strict identity, though, just a loss, popular understanding of identity. 2. But personal identity doesn't seem to admit to degrees. a. Fission: if P1's body and brain were split in two, and P2 and P3 were formed with half of P1's brain with all of P1's memories. Which is identical to P1? According to the empiricist view, they have equal claim and identity is arbitrary. According to the body view, each would be half identical to P1. But then you could partially experience both torture and reward simultaneously. b. If you lost 80% of your memories, then you would be only 20% identical to who you were. If you get amnesia, then you would have no identity. 3. Fission cases prove substance dualism (Chisolm): that we are not our bodies, nor are we our mental states, instead we are the things that have our bodies and our mental states. a. In the case of the fission of physical objects we can locate all of the parts of the object with certainty to answer the question "Where is it?" b. However, this is not the case with persons. In the fission case we are able to locate all of the physical components of P1 with the same certainty as we are able to locate the components of the podium. Yet, it is still unclear where P1 is. 5) By contrast, absolute identity is strictly Leibnitzian.
78 a) Identity questions are either true or false for the absolutist. We may not know which is identical epistemologically, but identity is absolute metaphysically. b) This presupposes that personal identity is different than the identity of other kinds of things. 1. If everything that can be observed is transient, and what can be observed are your mental states or body which can be degreed, then if personal identity is absolute it must consist of something that cannot be observable. 2. Moreland believes that this conclusion is flawed somewhat because Madell doesn't allow for the fact that I can be immediately aware of myself. a. For Hume, experience is exhausted by sense perception. b. Moreland sides with a much deeper tradition in philosophy that believes I can experience something other than sense perceptions. 1) Not all experiences are sense perceptions. 2) There are all kinds of rational intuitions that can be experienced without a sense perception, like synthetic-apriori propositions and my awareness of myself. 3) In cases of amnesia or Alzheimer's, there may be an epistemological problem in ascertaining awareness of self, but this doesn't address the metaphysical question. c. Weaknesses of the Absolutist position and responses. (Bishop Butler and Joseph Reid were advocates of the absolutist view.) 1) Absolutists only point to the difference between personal identity and other kinds of things, they don't argue for it (question begging); the claim that identity can't be explained is weak. Introspection is suspect. a) However, if you hold to a first person account of epistemology (Chisolm), then you are warranted to trust introspective, phenomenological experience. You don't need an argument. b) I simply know that I am different than my mental events and experiences. c) Since this is self-evident, then the burden of proof is on the other view because the first person experience is so clear. 1. Dualism does not need an argument. 2. The soul is what you're aware when you engage in an act of introspection, and you're not aware of a physical object. For all you know you might not even have a body. 2) If your memories and character totally changed, we would say that you're a different person. a) If there were such a radical discontinuity, we would be inclined to say that you're literally a different person, according to the memory view. b) The memory view is committed to this conclusion, which suggests circularity. c) The absolutist allows that it seems metaphysically possible that one could have such a discontinuity and still be the same person, even in the midst of the epistemological confusion. 3) Madell attempts to defend the relativist view by rebutting the circularity argument. a) According to the memory view, what makes P2 at T2 the same as P1 at T1 is that P2 has the same memory as P2. b) Butler and Reid argued that this is circular because it presupposes that sameness of memory means sameness of person.
79 c) Madell argues that sameness of memory presupposes not sameness of person (which would be circular) but sameness of brain that carries the memories. 4) The fear of the future has been argued against the relativist view because I won't be the same person who goes to the dentist in two weeks. a) Suppose the person who goes to the dentist has the same body as you do, but none of the same projects. Would you be afraid of going to the dentist? No, because it's not you. b) The response is that fear of the future only requires the continuity of my projects. 1. By projects is meant continuity of personality traits, desires and concerns. (This is James Rachel's biographical life.) 2. It is legitimate to fear the dentist in two weeks because the person who goes will have the same traumatic experience from childhood and reluctance to waste time sitting in the waiting room. 5) It has been argued that rights, moral responsibility and punishment requires continuing personal identity. a) The response is that all that's required for punishment to make sense is a continuation of these projects. As long as the person being punished has the same memories and attitude, then it is justified. b) Evidence for this interpretation is that prisoners are paroled if they have changed their attitudes and behavior. 1. This is a bad argument. 2. We don't set prisoners free because we believe that they are different persons; it is because we view incarceration as rehabilitation not retribution. d. The problems with the empiricist case 1) It may be easy to say that the identity of objects is conventional, but it's harder to do that with persons because of our valid intuitions to the contrary. 2) If identity through change is conventional, then so is unity at a point in time. a) Whatever reason you might give for the idea that my sameness in time is arbitrary (convention), the very same argument can be given for the fact that I am a unified person right now. 1. At any given time I am a heap or bundle of many different things. I am aware of a number of mental states at one time. 2. Unless I have a substantial self, then I turn out to be a collection of little drops of experience, and it could be argued that I have as many selves as experiences. b) How do I know that I'm not ten thinkers thinking in unison? Chisolm answers that the way I know I'm not ten selves is the same way I know I am one self. I am immediately aware of that fact. 3) My future pain is not mine by convention. a) Madell points out that this just isn't what we are experiencing when we experience fear. b) Is it really true that we fear future pain only as a matter of convention? e. What is important here will be what you can imagine about what is possible and impossible. 1) Personal identity is primarily a matter of whether there are valid counterexamples to your view based on what seems most conceivable to you. a) Could you be the literally same person, yet with different body and different memories? b) If this is possible then the empiricist view must be false.
80 c) Disembodied existence with different memories seems possible, therefore the body and memory are not necessary. 2) Empiricists have objected that conceivability as a test can be mistaken. 3) The proper response to this is the same response to skepticism in general. a) It doesn't follow that since it was mistaken in the past that I'm mistaken right now. b) In what particular ways might I be mistaken now given the facts at hand? e. Background presuppositions 1) What drives empiricist? (Madell p.4) a) The concept that things must be observable by the five senses. b) Thus, they argue, because we can observe where pains go, where mental states go, and where our bodies go, personal identity must be grounded in one of these. c) For the empiricist, then, the essence of personal identity lies in what is observable. 2) What drives the absolutist? a) The notion that personal identity lies in what is unobservable, because the soul is not empirically observable. b) Thus, if absolute identity is true, it cannot be based upon normal sensory observations (empiricism). If empiricism rules out a priori all nonobservable entities, then the empiricist will never find an unobservable soul. 3) We would take the view of Husserl and phenomenology, that we must pay close attention to our experiences of our experiences. a) We must be empirical about empiricism and allow our experiences to inform us about our experiences. b) If we do so, Husserl maintains, we will discover the I. c) Further, we become aware of much more in the world than what empiricism tells us is there. 1. There is much about the world we'll never be able to know if we continue to operate within the confines of crude empiricism. 2. It is a very lean ontology and metaphysics. 2. Madell chapter 2: The problem of subjectivity for naturalists a. Madell makes a mistake in terminology here, because there are really two problems that have been conflated and confused which need to be distinguished 1) Problem one: the phenomenological characteristics of subjectivity itself. a) Computers (and other physical objects) can be subject to exhaustive physical descriptions. b) However, subjective states of consciousness have their own intrinsic qualities and properties not describable by physical science. 1. Living organisms have an "inside" to them that physical objects don't have. 2. The phenomenological texture of pain or the experience of red can't be described in scientific terms. c) Nagel wrote "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" He says that even if we had an exhaustive physical description of a bat, there would still be one thing that we wouldn't know--what it's like to be a bat. 2) Problem two: the irreducibility of the first person perspective to the third person perspective. a) This is different from the first problem. 1. A property dualist could account for the phenomenological qualities of mental states, i.e., consciousness is a series of mental states with mental properties. 2. But a substantial self is being left out. a. "I" am more than just my body and my mental states.
81 b. "I" have a body and I have mental states. b) A substance dualist would say that I am an irreducible substance. b. Madell talks about the term "I" as a logically proper name. 1) Madell argues for a substantial self by doing philosophy of language. a) Madell is not reducing philosophy to language b) He is doing metaphysical analysis by picking up some clues from the way we use language. 2) A distinction needs to be made here between a rigid designator and a nonrigid designator (Kripke). a) A rigid designator is a term which designates--or picks out--the same object throughout all possible worlds in which it exists. It functions merely to tag or refer to the object of reference in every possible circumstance or world in which it could exist, even if given a different name in that world. 1. Rigid designators refer to a thing's essence, not to what it does accidentally. 2. If "Ben Franklin" is a rigid designator, the name refers to the same individual man even in a world where he was named Thomas Jefferson or where he did not invent bifocals. 3. In "blue is the color of the sky", "blue" is rigid and designates the same color in all worlds, including those with pink skies. "The color of the sky" refers to whatever color the sky is in that world (blue in our world, pink in a world where God made the sky pink). But blue would still be blue regardless of the world. b) There are two kinds of rigid designators: 1. Natural kind terms, e.g., H2O, a lion. These refer to a type of thing, a class, a repeatable thing. 2. A logically proper name, i.e., proper nouns, e.g. Hesperus, Richard Nixon. These name individual objects. c) Rigid designators have serious metaphysical ramifications; they depend on the notion that things themselves have essences. 1. "I" is a logically proper name. 2. Logically proper names designate real entities in the world that exist throughout all possible worlds in which they exist. 3. "I" tracks me in every possible world, even if I'm disembodied or don't have the same features. It has to pick up something real. d) A kind of non-rigid designator is a definite description. 1. The "F of A," e.g., "the color of the sky" 2. Definite descriptions express a property or relation of some kind, and refer to whatever satisfies that property. "The teacher of this class." 3) Madell argues that "I" can't be treated as a definite description but must be logically proper. a) Definite descriptions merely describe properties and not essences (like a rigid designator would). b) We would become a bundle of mental or physical properties and not a substantial self. c) The war over sentences with "I" in them is this: Does "I" really pick out a first-person, substantial, Cartesian or Thomistic entity that can't be exhaustively captured by a bundle of physical properties (physicalist) or mental properties (property dualist)? c. Madell's argument in sum: 1) Persons are substantial, immaterial selves, and aren't bundles of physical properties (physicalists) or a chains of mental events (Locke).
82 2) This is obvious when we look at our linguistic use of the word "I"; it refers to me in any possible world. I can survive change and still be my own self. d. Since Madell's argument is basically linguistic, it relies on indexicals: here, now, then, this, that, there, I. 1) For naturalists, indexicals are troublesome and must be gotten rid of. 2) All indexicals seem to express an irreducible reference to the first person: a) "Here" is where I am. b) "That" is what I'm pointing to. c) "Now" is when I am. 3) If indexicals are valid, then third-person descriptions cannot be exhaustive. 4) "I" becomes a logically proper name, presupposing a self. e. Madell points out that I know who I am by immediate first person reference without appealing to a spatial-temporal description as we would for merely physical objects (i.e. "I" is irreducible). 1) I could describe my body in a third person perspective that would have my body satisfy a list of physical descriptions. 2) But there is another way of recognizing my body--I am directly, phenomenologically aware of my body. 3) In fact, I couldn't describe my body in third person language unless I knew through direct awareness, in advance which body was possessed by me. f. Madell wants to claim Cartesian ego, but Moreland would say we are a Thomist self. 1) The Cartesian view: I stand to my body in a merely causal relation. It becomes difficult to distinguish between how I stand to my body and my car because I cause things to happen to my car, too. 2) The Thomist view: there is a deeper grounding through the owner relation, not just the causer relation. a) I own and possess and diffuse throughout my body. b) This is called the "lived body"; I live through it. 3) The Cartesian view can lead to a Gnostic view of the self. a) This is what led to the church's abandonment, for a time, of the physical spiritual disciplines, like fasting. b) But there is a deeper body/soul relationship that justifies physical disciplines for spiritual growth. g. Strategies naturalists will use to reduce "I" to something else. 1) "I" is a non-referential term. In a sentence like "I am here," "I" doesn't refer to anything. a) First substrategy: "I" sentences are "performative utterances" (Wittgentstein). 1. It does something for us, but it doesn't refer to anything in reality. 2. The statement "I am here" is a mere emotive announcement, like "Hear ye, hear ye." 3. This is an attempt to get rid of the metaphysical implications of sentences, but it doesn't work. a. Performative utterances don't have truth value. They are neither true nor false. b. But the statement, "I am here," is either true or false, so it is not a performative utterance; it appears to refer to something. b) Second substrategy: There are thinkings without thinkers. 1. There are I-thoughts without I's that have the thoughts. a. We are a series of I-thoughts. b. It is an expression of the property "I-am-here."
83 c. Anscombe says that we have been misled by grammar into thinking we are substantial selves. The self is a creation of the way you talk. 2. This is putting the cart before the horse. a. I am aware of my substantial self before I use language. b. How could I know if a term is misleadingly picking me out unless I have a prior experience of my substantial self (see e., 3) above). c. Anscombe asks how I know I'm not ten Cartesian selves thinking in unison? d. Chisolm says the way I know I'm not ten different thinkers thinking is the same way I know \ I'm at least one unified self--I am immediately, directly aware of it. 3. We respond the same way we do to any skeptic's claim. a. We are prima facie justified in believing that which we are immediately aware of unless the skeptic can provide enough evidence to overturn it. b. There are two kinds of "mights," a logical might and an epistemic might (logical possibility vs. epistemic probability). 1) A logical "might" means that it is logically possible that you're wrong: "It's logically possible that I'm mistaken." 2) An epistemic "might" means that there are sufficient reasons for thinking I'm wrong to overturn my evidence: "The weight of the evidence is that I'm mistaken." c. The skeptic bears the burden of proof here. A greater proof is needed than the logical possibility. 5. Diversity always presupposes unity. a. Even if we take the unity and redistribute into diversity, we now have many unities. b. Getting rid of the substantial self won't solve their problem. 2) "I" is a term without a fixed referent like the word "here." This assimilates the term "I" to "here." a) On this view the term "here" does refer; it refers to a region of space. b) But the region of space it refers to is context-dependent and arbitrary. c) If "I" works the same way, then "I" picks out a space-time slice of person-stage of arbitrary size. d) This makes my fear of future pain an arbitrary use of the term "I". Is it really a matter of convention what's going to happen to me in the future? 3) If the term "I" expresses a logically proper name that is irreducibly first person, then I am a first-person substantial ego that can't be captured exhaustively by any third person description. a) A physicalist description of the universe can describe all entities by the third person, but there would still be no way of knowing which "I" I am or which selves belonged with which body. b) A third person description can't be what my knowledge of myself amounts to because it presupposes that I already know who I am before I know that any particular physical description describes me. 4) Why are people driven to this? a) If there are Cartesian egos in the universe, you've got to ask where they come from. b) You also have the possibility of life after death c) It allows for libertarian free will and responsibility for your actions.
84 (Madell, pp. 13-22, has a summary of the eight arguments for the absolutist view of personal identity) 3. Madell, chapter 3: The Bodily Criterion View of Personal Identity a. Personal identity consists of a series of experiences being related to the same body. 1) Sameness of person at two different times is the same body which traces the same spatial-temporal path as an earlier body stage. 2) Personal identity is reduced to spatial-temporal continuity. b. The arguments that are advanced for the body view have a trait characteristic of them. 1) They turn out to be third-person descriptions, i.e., you are called upon to make a judgment whether another person is the same person as he was before. 2) They contain epistemically ambiguous statements. a) The different criteria of same body and same memory seem to be conflicting with each other. b) Memory criteria seems to contain genuine problems that are resolved when referring to the continuity of the body. c. Both the body and memory views of identity suffer from a Cartesian thought experiment. 1) You have no difficulty conceiving of yourself existing in a disembodied state with loss of memory. 2) Note we don't use the term imagining, because we can't image or picture it; we con concieve of it. We reserve the "imagining" term for a thought with pictures. 3) If we can conceive of this, the bodily view has to be false. The only rejoinder for the bodily view would be to object and say that it isn't the case that we can conceive disembodied. 4) This is a powerful first-person thought experiment expresses the fact that I am identical to a substantial soul that has a body and memories. There is a prima facie plausibility that derives from this first-person thought experiment. d. To argue for the bodily view, the following problem is offered. 1) There are two men, Charles and Robert, who both have all of the memories of Guy Fawkes. 2) Since both men can't be the real Guy Fawkes, the memory view is flawed. 3) The solution is to see which one has a body which is spatially-temporally continuous with Guy Fawkes. Charles has Guy Fawkes body, and Robert doesn't. a) The only way to distinguish between real memories and apparent memories is to appeal to the body view. b) Robert to have the same memories, but Robert's are only apparent memories. 4) Note that this is a third-person case. a) We are asked to determine one's identity using a third-person methodology based on bodily continuity. b) Notice how the memory criterion and the bodily criterion are at odds, and the bodily view solves the problem. 5) Problems with this assessment: a) It is possible that you could have a different person in the same body, e.g., the prince could wake up in the cobblers body (Locke). We could have the same body with totally different memories and psychological traits. 1. Substance Dualist (Absolutist): The Prince is in the cobblers body because the Princes soul is in the cobblers body.
85 a. This acknowledges that it is possible for God to create a person with my body, and my memories without it being me. 1) The person goes where the soul goes, not where the body or memory goes. 2) What consitutes the difference between the two is not the memories or the body but the substantial self that possesses both. b. Note, this can't be used for a third-person judgment. But all this means is that the reality of the external world transcends our epistemic capabilities. 1) The epistemology of personal identity should start with firstperson, not third. I realize that generally speaking, I keep my same body and my same memories. Then I can generalize to others. 2) The body and memory criteria are good for third-person judgments; though the memory view has preference over the body view. 3) Body and memory aren't identical to personal identity, but are used as a useful epistemic tool. 2. Empiricist Body View: The Prince is not in the cobblers body; the cobblers body is the cobbler, but the cobblers body has undergone some kind of psychological shift or psychotic split. 3. Empiricist Memory View: The Prince is in the cobblers body because the cobblers body now has the Princes memory. b) The possibility of demon possession (two persons in one body) shows that the bodily criterion view is false. c) When dealing with person identity, you've got to deal with what's possible and impossible. e. There is another argument for the body view: without the bodily criterion, there is no principle of individuation--no third-person, epistemological test for identity. 1) How can one tell that this individual is the same as one who was here earlier? a) Without the body there is no way of telling whether a person is the same as another individual. b) If Charles and Robert were disembodied there would be no way of knowing which was Guy Fawkes. The body view allows for the principle of individuation--one body/one person is needed or we could be ten thinkers at the same time or ten thinkers in a row. c) Because of the possiblity of demon possession, the principle of one body/one person isn't necessarily true. It is generally true, but not necessarily true. 2) This principle of individuation can be metaphysical or epistemological, and many philossopers are vague at this point. a) Metaphysical: given two things with all there properties in common, what is it that makes this one this one and that one that one? b) Epistemological: how can one tell that this individual is the same as the one that was here earlier? 3) There is something deeper in this principle, though. a) How do we make a judgment that someone else is the same person? All the Cartesian dualist has is the principle of individuation. b) But the absolutist has more available in the first-person case than the mere awareness that I am causally connected to a body. 1. The absolutist has a background view that explains how the body is dependent on the soul.
86 2. It is a primitive ownership view. The body is owned by me and an instrument for experiencing the world. 3. I am aware of ownership of my body so that I can generate a theory of substance based on a first-person experience that I can then generalize to third-person cases. f. Madell's arguments against the body view: 1) Madell argues that body view is circular and self-defeating. a) How does Charles know that he is Guy Fawkes? According to the body view he has to single out a set of bodily experiences. b) But experiences have the property of being owned. How does he know which of all the experiences in the world are his? c) Charles knows that he is Guy Fawkes because he sees a set of experiences that are connected with Guy Fawkes' body. d) But this presupposes which experiences and which body is his, which body he owns. e) This assumes a certain body, making it circular. f) It also depends on prior knowledge of personal identity (which body is his) and therefore cannot constitute personal identity, making it selfdefeating ["infanticide" suicide--GK]. 2) Madell points out that it's part of our own experience that we attend to things as wholes (songs, a line of reasoning, etc.). a) If we pay attention, we are aware of not just a series of notes; we are aware of a song. Husserl says that if I pay attention, I am aware of having had the experience of notes 1-4, of presently hearing note 5, and of about to have the experience of note 6 (note the tenses). b) We are aware in sequences of experiences that we are an enduring self and uniting them as a experience. My endurance through time is not a theoretical postulation, but is part of the data itself. c) What is it that gives unity to the experience of the song? My experience of it as a unified self through time. 3) Madell's desk illustration [?] a) Suppose that at a given instance I am having experiences E1-E5 and E6E10. E1-E5 are experiences mediated directly through my body. E6-E10 are experiences mediated to you directly through the desk (you were aware of the softness of the carpet, for example). How is the bodily view going to explain this? b) The bodily criterion view has got to say that of all ten experiences, the person is only going to have five of them. Then you've got a problem with unity of consciousness. g. Two problems with physicalism (Madell, p. 71) 1) The first-person point of view problem of subjectivity a) There is an irreducibility of the first-person. Physicalism requires a third-person description of bodies, but no such description will allow me to determine which body is mine. b) One has to have an independent way of knowing which body is his before he can even attempt to employ the physicalist bodily view. 2) There is no room for subjectivity in physicalism. a) There is a phenomenological, subjective aspect to experience that can't be captured in physicalist language (like Nagel's bat). b. In fact, physicalists must get rid of indexicals like "there" and "now" because they require the first-person, subjective perspective. h. J.L. Mackey responds: we shouldn't abandon the body view.
87 1) We should define it so that identity is identical to a part of the body which is whatever causally supports consciousness, which is the brain and nervous system. 2) Consciousness is key. a) Are you an unconscious physical object that causes and supports consciousness? b) Or are you what is conscious and has mental states predicated of you? 3) Madell says that personal identity is constituted of the property of being the same self, which is immaterial. a) I am the property of being the same self. He says that you could have been born at a different time, just as red could have been exemplified at a different time. b) But are you the kind of thing that is exemplified? Madell says we are. You exist for the purpose of exemplifying. The property of being a self is circular. c) Moreland believes that being a self is a relation. 1. I am aware of being an individual with a set of properties and capacities. 2. I am aware of having those capacities coming to actuality and having been potentialities. Those capacities exist in me. 3. I am not aware of being a bare, propertyless monad. I am an individuated nature. F. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity 1. Introductory thoughts a. This is the most important book written in philosophy in 100 years 1) It represents a revolution in philosophy, though shouldn't have because it explains what the Medievals believed. 2) Kripke looks at what our intuitive use of certain words (names) tells us about the nature of a thing. b. Kripke is concerned with reference and meaning, which is linguistic. 1) What are the implications of one's view of reference and meaning for metaphysical questions like mind/body identity and essentialism (whether things have essences and therefore can remain the same through change)? 2) The temptation is always to reduce metaphysical questions to epistemological ones by focusing improperly on language. 3) However, metaphysics precedes philosophy of language, not the other way around. a) First you study the world and find a way of expressing what you've discovered to be true. b) You don't study language and then use that to determine what is true about the world. c. His deeper concern is to get to the question of property dualism and the identity thesis. 1) The mind/body identity theses make no sense to Kripke. 2) He wants to trace the identity of things in counterfactual situations. What machinery is possible to make sense of identity throughout other possible worlds? 3) Analyzes different views in the philosophy of language and analyze their impact on different metaphysical issues. 2. Meanings and reference a. It's customary to hold that terms sustain two different functions: they have meaning and they accomplish reference.
88 1) The meaning of a term is sometimes called... a) The sense of a term b) A term's connotation c) A term's intension [sic] 2) The reference of a term is sometimes called... a) A term's denotation b) A term's extension (the set of all of the objects that a term refers to). b. Moreland doesn't believe that terms do either of these things. 1) Meanings reside in the minds of persons. To say that a text has a meaning is to say that there was a particular meaning in the mind of the writer. 2) Terms are arbitrary sense perceptible signs that are publicly accessible to us, used by the writer to communicate his meaning. c. Kripke says that we fix the meaning of a term by the act of intending. 3. Some metaphysical categories a. A priori and aposteriori are epistemological terms. 1) Something is a priori if it can (not must) be known independently of experience. Coming to know the a priori is an internal experience which is not sense perception. An internal view of knowledge says that nothing is known apart from the basis of a first person experience. 2) Aposteriori means known dependent on experience (sense experience). b. Necessary and contingent are metaphysical distinctions. 1) If something is necessary, a statement asserting it is true in all possible worlds. 2) If something is contingent, it is true in some worlds and false in others. c. The analytic/synthetic distinction is linguistic and has to do with meanings. 1) A statement that is analytically true is true in all possible worlds by virtue of the meanings of the terms in the sentence (all bachelors are unmarried). The predicate is a synonym of the subject or stands in a part/whole relationship to the subject. 2) A synthetic statement is one in which the predicate adds content to the subject. 3) If a statement is analytic, then it is a priori because it's known apart from experience. And it must be necessary because it's a priori.. If it is shown not to be analytic and not a priori, then it is contingent. 4. Essentialism and modality a. Modality refers to necessity or contingency, possibility or impossibility. b. Modality de re means "concerning the thing itself," as it is itself. c. Modality de dicto refers to the modality of a proposition, the way that a proposition is true. d. Kripke focuses on whether there is such a thing as modality de re. 1) The modality of necessity de re meant that certain things themselves necessarily had certain properties (the number 2 has the necessary property of being even). a) This asserts essentialism, the fact that a things have essences. b) Nixon then stands to the property "humanness" by way of de re necessity. c) This sticks you with an entire inflating metaphysical package hostile to physicalism (things out there have properties and essences). 2) To get rid of these implications for physicalism, you can reduce de re necessity to de dicto necessity. a) The propositions are necessarily true about the way we think or use terms, but not necessarily true about the world itself. b) But this changes the discussion to epistemology, not metaphysics.
89 3) Kripke is trying to free the necessary/contingent distinction from linguistic and epistemological issues. a) Necessity and contingency have nothing to do with epistemology or linguistics. Kripke is talking about the thing itself. 1. Essentialism has to do with the idea of necessity. 2. This is the way a thing possesses a property. The property you possess is a necessary part of you. 3. Kripke argues for de re necessity, real essences. 4. But there is a tendency among modern philosophers to reduce de re necessity to de dicto necessity, and then to say de dicto necessity is relative to the sentence that you use. b) Nine possesses a property of being odd is a de re necessity, it's true in all possible worlds. c) Quine says nine necessarily being an odd number depends upon the description (dictum) you use, like "nine is the number of planets". 1. Clearly the number of planets could have been even. 2. Notice necessity is no longer a feature of how a thing is in the world (de re)--how something owns a property--but now become features of propositions (de dicto). a. A proposition will be necessary depending on how it's described. b. Analytic statements are necessary because of the way we use language (e.g., "all bachelors are unmarried"), true by definition. 1) Things become linguistically relative. 2) The idea is that a thing is necessary only if it's a priori, and it's a priori only if it's analytic. c. Things become linguistically relative. d. Kripke says something wrong here. 5. Metaphysical possibility vs. epistemological possibility a. Something may be metaphysically impossible but epistemologically possible. b. Could this very wooden table have been made out of ice? c. Metaphysically, no. It's metaphysically impossible, because it is essentially wooden. d. Epistemologically, yes. Could what appears to me to be a wooden table actually be ice but it appears to me to look like wood? 1) Yes, that's epistemically possible, but in this case we never were talking about a wooden table. 2) I could be having an appearance of wood and be mistaken. We could mistake fool's gold for real gold. 3) There's a distinction between the surface qualities of a thing and the underlying nature of the thing, it's essence. 6. How is it that the term is fixed to an object? How is it that Fido refers to this dog instead of that cat? a. A designator is a term that refers to something (some terms don't accomplish reference, like "ouch!"). b. There is a taxonomy of these. 1) There are definite descriptions a) A definite description is of the form "the f of a". b) E.g., "the teacher of this class," or "the author of Waverly." 2) There are "names." a) Individual names (logically proper names, like Harry) b) Natural kind terms, like lion, gold, or human. c. Kripke wants to focus on the relationship between names and definite descriptions.
90 1) The issue has metaphysical implications. 2) There are metaphysical things at stake here that will ultimately find their way into discussions on dualism and physicalism, etc. 7. Tag Theory (John Stuart Mill) a. John Stuart Mill says that names have denotation (reference), but not connotation (meaning). b. A name doesn't have a meaning; it simply accomplishes reference to an object by tagging. 1) Let's suppose that Dartmouth refers to that town there. It just tags that town. 2) Could Dartmouth have been built in another place? 3) If names are simply tags, then it couldn't have because tags don't work in counter-factuals. "That town right there" couldn't be 100 miles away. c. For Mill, a definite description has a meaning, but names do not have meanings. 8. Cluster Concept of Reference (Russell/Frege), (p. 71) a. Russell and Frege developed a different view that was contrary to Mill's view of these matters, which made essentialism false and ended up reducing substances to the bundle theory. b. There are problems in the tag view of a name. 1) If names function the way Mill says they function, no one could ever determine the referent of a name. a) I have never been acquainted with Napoleon. b) If Napoleon means "that Frenchman there," then I can't point to Napoleon. 2) In the tag view, the terms in "Hesperous is Phosphorus" (the Evening and Morning star) mean "that thing there." This statement turns out to mean "that thing there is identical to itself." a) This is not informative--there is no empirical discovery in saying that x is identical to itself b) This isn't a contingent statement--it couldn't turn out to be false. It's a necessary truth. But "Hesperous is Phosphorus" is a contingent truth (they thought there were two different heavenly bodies.) 3) Singular existence statements and negative existence statements are difficult because the tag view requires acquaintance with the object. a) "Aristotle exists" is a singular existence statement and seems to be informative. On the tag view, Aristotle exists means "that thing there exists," which is obvious. b) "Pegasus doesn't exist" means, on the tag view, "that thing there doesn't exist," which is absurd. c. Because of these problems Frege and Russell developed a theory of names that reduced names to definite descriptions. 1) Proper names are disguised definite descriptions. a) The modern version of this is called the "cluster concept of reference." b) This means that names stand for a set of properties and relations. E.g., the name Aristotle means "the author of The Categories, the pupil of Plato, the teacher of Alexander the Great, etc." c) How is that a name refers to something? 1. Names are treated as definite descriptions of a cluster of properties that are thought to be satisfied by some entity. The name serves as proxy for that cluster. Names are sets of properties. 2. Definite descriptions refer to things in a two step process. a. First, a definite description specifies a set of properties. b. Second, it refers to whatever object it is that satisfies this list of properties.
91 3. Proper names are assimilated into definite descriptions. a. This is called de dicto reference ("concerning the proposition, or dictum" ). b. It is whatever it is out there that satisfies the relevant description. 4. If something satisfies enough of the properties identified in the cluster, then the cluster "refers" to that thing. d. This seems to solve some of the problems. 1) It isn't necessary to be acquainted with Napoleon, but simply just get a list of descriptions. 2) "Pegasus doesn't exist" means that a set of properties fail to satisfy the description. 3) "Hesperous is Phosphorus" stands for definite descriptions. a) Hesperous really means the Evening Star and Phosphorus means the Morning Star. b) These are further reduced to a cluster of properties that are both satisfied, it turns out, by the same objects, but could have been satisfied by different ones. Therefore it is contingently true. e. However, it creates new problems. 1) In this view, identity turns out to be a matter of degree. Your personal identity is that you're the closest contender to satisfy the description and there is no closer contender. 2) If there are no entities that satisfies the description, the description doesn't refer and the entity doesn't exist (rather than existing, but being mistakenly described). a) If this is true, then it's hard to argue that science makes progress through change. b) To have progress one must assume that later theories are referring to the same earlier entities that were mistakenly described. 3) In the cluster view a name is necessary because it's an analytic a priori. f) Kripke wants to show that the Russel/Frege cluster concept of reference is wrong by making some further metaphysical distinctions. 4) Twin earth hypotheses point out problems. a) On a Twin Earth the stuff people drink, ski on and freezes at 32o, but it is not made up of H2O; it's made up of xyz. b) Do they have water on Twin Earth? 1. According to the cluster theory, they do, because this substance satisfies the same description even though it is different stuff. 2. But then water isn't the same thing in counterfactual situations, which seems to be counter-intuitive. f. Kripke wants to come up with a term that metaphysically follows its objects in other possible worlds. 1) Counter-factual situations seem to be possible for certain entities, so Kripke wants to use rigid designator to refer to the very same entity in every possible world in which that entity exists. 2) A rigid designator turns out to be a name of a certain kind. 3) This has implications for substances with essences, and for absolute personal identity through change in counterfactual situations, and essentialism. A possible world (something that is possible, but not actual--"what could have been") is a way of expressing counterfactual possibilities, but not actualities. 4) Example of "one meter"
92 a) If by "one meter" we mean a definite description of a particular stick, then if someone changed sticks for a longer one, then "one meter" would be whatever length that stick was changed to be. b) If by "one meter" we mean a rigid designator of a particular length, then the new stick would not be one meter long. c) This is the difference of identifying the thing itself rigidly and necessarily (one meter) or identifying it contingently with a rigid description ("whatever is the length of that stick, even if the length of that stick changes). 5) Definite descriptions, on Kripke's view, don't give meanings of the things that are then satisfied by objects (analytic statements). Rather, names primarily fix the referent, identifying a metaphysical de re necessity of certain properties associated with that name. 9. Baptismal view (or Causal Chain View) of reference (p. 96-97) a. This is Kripke's view of how a thing get its name, how it refers. b. A name is "baptized" by ostension, by pointing. 1) A given name refers to that thing out there. 2) It is based on authorial intent. c. The name is then passed from link to link, from person to person, where each is intending to refer to the same thing. d. This view seems to make sense out of the intuitive way we use names. 10. How does this view work in other possible worlds, in counterfactual situations? a. Do things have essences? Kripke uses the sentence "Nixon might not have been president" to look at this question. 1) On the cluster view, the phrase "Nixon might not have been president" is necessarily false because Nixon stands for a set of descriptions, which includes being president. 2) When you're dealing with counter-factual situations, Nixon can't refer rigidly to the same entity. 3) Definite descriptions are tied to their world; they can't work in other possible worlds. They don't follow their objects to another worlds; they stay in their world and find a new object. b. David Lewis says that the alternative entity that satisfied 8 out of 10 of your qualities, isn't strictly speaking identical to you, but is your closest counterpart. 1) You don't have a nature that survives alternative situations. 2) Identity is a matter of degree. [Study Kripke, p. 97-105 & 107-133] 10. Kripke's argument vis a vis the nature of pain and the mind/body dualism a. Kripke wants to get at the mind/body problem by focusing on the nature of identity and identity statements. 1) To do that he must talk about definite descriptions and rigid designators and how they refer to things in the world. 2) He begins by looking at identity statements that are contingently true and asks "Where is the contingency?". a) The first obvious problem is that a thing's identity to itself isn't contingent, it's necessary. A thing is necessarily identical to itself. b) Kripke wants to find the source of the contingency of identity statements, since identity itself as a relation in the world is necessary. c) The contingency is that definite descriptions used for naming are accidental. 1. E.g., the inventor of bifocals "is" the first Postmaster General. 2. The contingency is this: whatever satisfies the first description and satisfies the second description is accidental and could have been different.
93 a. The first contingency is between the first description ("the inventor of bifocals") and the thing that satisfies it (Ben Franklin). b. The second source of contingency is the object that satisfied the first description (Ben Franklin) turns out to be the same object that satisfies the second description ("the first Postmaster General"). 3. Does that mean that Franklin's identity with himself is contingent? No. Identity isn't contingent. Identity itself is necessary. d) Identity statements are contingent because they use definite descriptions. 1. Some other kind of term must be used to capture the notion of the necessary nature of a thing's identity to itself. 2. This is where rigid designators come in. e) The only way to make definite descriptions necessary is to make them analytic a prioris. 1. But this creates a problem for counterfactuals. It makes it impossible to follow identity in counter-factual situations. 2. To secure the necessity of identity statements you must sacrifice the possibility of absolute identity in counterfactual situations. b. He then proceeds to examine the strategy of the physicalist. 1) Contingency and necessity a) If you want to show that something is contingent, you show that it is aposteriori and synthetic. b) If you want to show that something is necessary, you show that it is apriori and analytic. 2) Identity statements between mind and body were taken to be analytic a priori statements. 3) These gave the meaning of the mental name (e.g., "pain") that turned out to be a set of definite descriptions. a) Pain is identical to a set of body movements that can be described. b) This is a meaning identity statement. 1. According to Skinner, this statement expresses the meaning of the name pain. 2. So pain turns out to be a name that refers to a set of behaviors-bodily movements. 4) The behaviorist was defeated because it's clear that pain doesn't mean the same thing as a list of descriptions. a) You could have a Martian who demonstrated the bodily "pain" movements and therefore be in "pain" without feeling pain. b) Or you could have someone who never expressed the physical reaction, yet experienced the quality of pain, who wouldn't be in pain. 5) So physicalists changed their strategy. a) Physicalists based their case on contingent identity statements, e.g., "Pain is c-fiber A firing." 1. Contingent identity statements are definite descriptions. 2. Pain stands for whatever happens in me after I'm stuck with a pin. Cfiber firing turns out to be whatever is in my brain at that time. b) It just turns out to be that what satisfies these two descriptions is a state of the brain. c) Even though you don't have sameness of meaning, you do have sameness of referent. This is contingently true. e. How do we make identity statements necessary, like identity is? 1) If the identity statement has rigid designators flanking the identity sign, then the identity statement is necessary.
94 2) Rigid designators have a de re modality, referring to a thing as it essentially is. a) It is necessary that a thing is identical to itself. b) When you say Hesperus is Phosphorus, the terms are being used in a de re sense. 1. Hesperus means that entity right there, Venus. 2. Phosphorus means that entity right there, Venus. 3. Venus is identical with Venus necessarily. 3) Statements with rigid designators are necessary, but do have an element of contingency. a) The statements are only epistemically contingent. b) It's possible for your assessment to be mistaken about the morning star and evening star. We could misidentify it. 4) There has to be a distinction between what something is and the way it appears to me for epistemological error. d. Kripke then applies his thesis to mental properties. (p. 134) 1) Type-type identity a) Every time you have a certain type of state that is a mental type of state (joy, pain) it is identical to a certain hardware state of the brain. b) Kripke says that this is implausible because you could have a Martian in pain, but not have the same hardware state. 2) Kripke says that heat is a vibration of molecules. This is a rigid designator. a) So in a world where molecules don't vibrate appropriately, there would be no heat, even though one might feel warmth. b) Kripke distinguishes what heat is from how heat appears to me. 3) Is it possible, epistemologically, to mistake a pain? a) Could pain really turn out to be c-fibers firing and I'm epistemologically mistaken about the essential nature of pain? b) No, because there is no difference between the way a pain appears and what it is, because a pain's appearance--its felt quality--is just what it is. 4) In order for contingent identity statements to work there has to be a distinction between what a thing is and the way it appears to me. But that is not possible with our internal experiences. 5) Incidentally, Moreland disagrees with this view of heat. a) First, if you say that heat is molecular motion, then you have to do something with the warmth. 1. Warmth is attributed to consciousness. a. This is difficult to do if you're not a dualist. b. If you're a physicalist, you have nowhere to put wayward secondary properties. 2. Moreland's view is that warmth is a property caused by and always correlated with molecular motion, but heat isn't identical with molecular motion. a. These two views are empirically equivalent and science is incapable of settling this dispute. b. It appears self-evident that a quality is not a quantity. b) Second, Kripke's view reduces to a causal model of intentionality. 1. A direct realist would say, "I am aware of a hot object." a. The object of my sensory act is an external object that I direct my intentionality to. b. I stand in relation to that object in the intentional of-ness and the object can't be broken down to something more primitive.
95 c. The object is the way it appears to me to be. What I'm feeling is the hot coffee, not my nerve endings. 2. Kripke reduces intentionality to a causal relation and not a realist view. a. "That object is causing a hot sensation in you." b. This sensation is no longer of anything, in a strict sense. It fleets through my consciousness. c. Why is it "of" the coffee? Because the coffee caused it. 6) Token-token identity a) The focus here is on individual pain states instead of pain in general. It's a turn from universals to particulars. b) The claim is that every particular pain in the history of the world is identical to a particular brain state. c) In response Kripke says that there is something true of a particular pain that is not true of a particular brain state, so they can't be identical. 1. One version of token-token theory holds that what makes a thing a pain is that it plays some causal role in the organism. 2. B is a pain because B is the state that plays a certain causal role in the organism. It is the state that is caused by certain inputs and causes certain outputs. 7) This is Kripke's argument for the dualist view of pain. a) If we take pain to be a certain felt quality, then every individual pain has as its necessary essence a certain feel about it. b) But on the physicalist's view, pain can be described solely in the language of physiology, making no reference to it's necessary felt quality. c) Most people define pain by its internal features and not having anything to do with external causality. d) The token-token theory makes pain external (a certain contingent, causal role) rather than internal, denying one of its necessary qualities. 8) The response to Kripke: a) Kripke has argued that the quality of a pain is necessary, but the specific brain state only contingently plays a causal role. So, pain can't be identical to a specific brain state. b) The proper conclusion to draw from the contingency of B to the causal role is not that A is not B, but that A is contingently connected to pain. Therefore, it's possible to have a specific pain and it feel pain. c) In other words, the contingency lies in the felt quality, not in the brain state. I.e., you can have a pain that's not painful. d) What is it that gives unity to the class of pains? 1. For token-token, it's because every pain plays the correct causal role and has the right input and output. 2. For Kripke, it's the felt quality. This argument is based on the intuition that a necessary element of pain is its felt quality, the very thing the physicalist denies. The argument can be accused of being circular, but the accusation only holds by denying that pain is something one feels, a high price to pay.
Bibliographies
I. Bibliography on the Problem of Universals:
96 Universal, Qualities and Quality-Instances: A Defense of Realism, (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1985). "Was Husserl a Nominalist?," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 49, (June, 1989): 661-73. "Keith Campbell and the Trope view of Predication," Australiasian Journal of Philosophy, 67, (December, 1989): 379-93. "Nominalism and Abstract Reference," American Philosophical Quarterly, 27, (October, 1990): 325-34. "How to be a Nominalist in Realist Clothing," Grazer Philosophiche Studien, 39, (1991): 75-101. "Review of The Existence of the World by Reinhardt Grossmann," in Mind, 102, (July, 1993): 504-507. II. Bibliography on Substance C.D. Broad, "The 'Nature' of a Continuant," in Readings in Philosophical analysis, ed. by Herbert Feigl, Wilfrid Sellars (N.Y.: Dover, ?), pp. 472-81. Richard J. Connell, Substance and Modern Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). C.J. Ducasse, Nature, Mind, and Death (La Salle, IL: Open court, 1951), pp. 161-73. W.E. Johnson, Logic Part III: The Logical Foundations of Science (N. Y.: Dover, 1964), chapter 7. Michael J. Loux, Substance and Attribute (Holland: D. Reidel, 1978). David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, University of Notre Dame Press III. Bibliography for Agency Theory Randolf Clarke, "Toward a Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will," Nous 27 (1993): 1910-203. Roderick Chisolm, "Human Freedom and the Self," in Free Will, ed. by Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 24-35. . "The Agent as Cause," in Myles Brand and Douglas, eds., Action theory (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976). . Person and Object (La Salle: Open court, 1976), pp. 53-88. "Self Profile," in Roderick Chisolmm, ed. by Radu J. Bogen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 3-77. Alan Donagan, Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 157-88. Stewart C. Goetz, "A Noncausal Theory of Agency," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 49 (1988): 303-16. Timothy O'Conner, "Indeterminism and Free Agency: Three Recent Views," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 499-525. William Rowe, "Two Concepts of Freedom," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association Supplement to vol. 61 (September 1987): 43-64. . "Respnsibility, Agenbt-Causation, and Freedom: An Eighteenth-Century View," Ethics 101 (Jan 1991): 237-57. . Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 85102. Richard Taylor, Action and Purpose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 99152.
97 . Determinism and the Theory of Agency," in Determinims and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, ed. by Sydney Hook (NY: Collier Books, 1979). . Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983), pp. 33-50. "Agent and Patient: Is There a Distinction?" Erkenntnis 18 (1982): pp. 223-32.

Metaphysics I: Dr. J.P. Moreland

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Исходное описание:

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Metaphysics I: Dr. J.P. Moreland

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

1

II. What is the Nature of Existence?

III. The Nature of Identity and Identity Statements

G. The Category of Property Graph

QUALITATIVE God's Attributes

PROPOSITIONS Contents of a thought. A group of concepts in certain relations

RELATIONS INTERNAL EXTERNAL INTENTIONALITY? No, it is a property.

RELATIONS S/T LAWS OF LOGIC Relata are propositions

VII. Substance Dualism vs. Property or Event Dualism

VIII. Options in the Mind/Body Problem

60 4. Functionalism a. Compatibalism b. Epiphenomenalism

IX. Freedom and Determinism

Вам также может понравиться