Are you substantial?

Philosophers have traditionally distinguished between substances and attributes. This may seem like yet another piece of obscure philosophical jargon, but is meant to capture the very intuitive distinction between objects and their properties. My pet hamster, Colonel Mustard, is a substance. Colonel Mustard's furriness is one of his attributes. The problem of accounting for the fact that different substances can share attributes has been the subject of several posts on this blog. Another worry has to do with providing a clear criterion for demarcating substances from attributes. At least since Aristotle, a very standard way of doing this involved saying that attributes necessarily depend on things outside of themselves for their existence, while substances do not. The following excerpt from Descartes' Principles of philosophy (I.51) exemplifies this well:

" By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence."

The thought here is that attributes, by their very nature, always seem to depend on other things for their existence, namely, the substances that 'have' them. Colonel Mustard's furriness couldn't possibly exist without Colonel Mustard (or, at least, without other furry things). An attribute essentially needs to inhere in a substance in order to exist. A substance, in contrast, is not dependent in this way. Of course, typical substances themselves in fact depend on other substances for their existence -- Colonel Mustard wouldn't survive very long if I stopped feeding him, or if the sun disappeared. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to conceive of Colonel Mustard as existing without the sun, or without being fed, though the laws of nature make this impossible in the actual world. In contrast, it is impossible to conceive of 'furriness' existing without something that is furry. Hence, attributes like 'furriness' necessarily depend on other things for their existence, while substances like Colonel Mustard do not.

This way of demarcating substances from attributes accommodates our intuition that objects are in some sense 'more real' than their properties. Colonel Mustard is substantial, he exists in his own right. 'Furriness', at best, is an aspect of him, not fictional, but not substantial either.

The distinction quickly runs into trouble, however, because there is apparently only one being that meets its criterion for substantiality -- God. Indeed, all substances (other than God) are created and sustained in existence by God. Crucially, every substance (again, other than God), if it exists at all, necessarily owes its existence to God. God exists necessarily, and whatever else exists necessarily depends on Him for its existence. This means that while Colonel Mustard's existence may not necessarily depend on the sun, it does necessarily depend on God's creative activity, in the same way that 'furriness' necessarily depends on furry things for its existence. God, on the other hand, being the ultimate and necessary ground of existence, is not similarly dependent (in fact, God is necessarily independent). Descartes recognized this problem, and conceded that, on the standard definition of substance, strictly speaking, God is the only substance. He nonetheless argued that everyday objects could be substances in some attenuated sense, since they are necessarily dependent on God and nothing else, whereas attributes are necessarily dependent on God and on substances (Principles I.51).

A much more radical, if more coherent, response to this puzzle is offered by Baruch Spinoza, who wholeheartedly embraces the conclusion that there is only one substance, God, and that all other alleged substances -- you, me, Colonel Mustard, Donald Trump, etc -- are really just properties or modes of God. You and I don't exist in our own right, we are, at best, aspects of the single divine substance. Steven Nadler puts it nicely in his paraphrase of Spinoza's reply to Descartes:

" In effect, he is saying to Descartes: I agree that a substance is essentially what exists in such a way that it depends on nothing else for its existence; but then, as you yourself admit, strictly speaking only God is a substance; and I, in order to be fully consistent, refuse to concede to finite things even a secondary or deficient kind of substantiality." (2006, p.56)

Hence Spinoza's monism -- there is only one thing, which possesses an infinity of modes. Hence also his pantheism -- everything other than God is an aspect of God, such that God's being 'envelops' everything. This lands us with a rather bizarre theology (it is still debated whether Spinoza's opponents were right in calling him an atheist). More importantly for our purposes, this lands us with an utterly odd picture of ourselves and the objects of the world around us, which, we are told, aren't really objects at all, but properties or 'modes'.

Of course, we can just bite the bullet and accept that we aren't substantial, but instead properties of something else -- God, or whatever else we think to be the ultimate ground of existence. But I tend to think that philosophical systems ought to try to respect the linguistic conventions of wider society. Such conventions stipulate that you, myself, and Colonel Mustard are objects, not mere attributes or properties. As I've said before, philosophers are free to make up their own linguistic conventions, but will have very little to say to those outside philosophy if their use of everyday concepts like 'object' radically differs from that of the wider public. I take it that philosophers should have something illuminating to say to those outside philosophy. Hence, the conclusion that everyday objects aren't substances at all should strike us, I think, as a sure sign that there is something wrong with the argument that inferred it. As we have seen, what brought us to the radical monistic conclusion is the traditional account of the substance-attribute distinction, whereby substances, unlike attributes, are not necessarily depending on anything outside their existence. Thus, if we are to avoid the unacceptable conclusion that you and I are nonsubstantial, it looks like we will have to give up the account. One perhaps surprising upshot of this may be that there is no clear line between substances and attributes. Certainly, different accounts of the distinction can be put forward, but philosophers have struggled to come up with a satisfying alternative (see McBride 2005 for a pessimistic survey of such attempts). But perhaps this shouldn't be surprising after all. The claim that Colonel Mustard isn't a substance or object at all, but rather a mere mode or property of God, may be absurd. But the claim that Colonel Mustard is less substantial than God, but more substantial than 'furriness', isn't obviously absurd.

This is especially true if we take properties to be tropes, i.e. particular things that exist in the objects that have them. If, say, the furriness of Colonel Mustard is a particular 'furriness-trope' that, along with other tropes, helps to constitute Colonel Mustard, then both Colonel Mustard and his furriness are particular, concrete things in the world, and it is easier to imagine how the difference in substantiality might be a matter of degree.

MacBride, F. (2005). The Particular–Universal Distinction: A Dogma of Metaphysics?. Mind, 114(455), pp.565-614. Nadler, S. (2006). Spinoza's Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Metaphysics - truth or nothing?

Metaphysics is commonly criticized on the grounds that those who practice it rely on unfounded common-sense intuitions about the world. Such criticisms are methodological, because they contend that the methods on which metaphysicians rely are untrustworthy.

Another kind of criticism holds that metaphysical inquiry just isn't worth it. Simply put, why bother with questions about the nature of causation, of properties, of free will, and so on? Life is short, and there are many more pressing worries to attend to, e.g. [insert your favorite socio-political concern]. Call this a pragmatic criticism of metaphysics, since it argues that metaphysics isn't pragmatically worthwhile.

Bas van Fraassen (2002) advances one of the most interesting versions of the pragmatic criticism that I have come across in the literature. The idea is that, prior to engaging in any theoretical discipline, we ought to consider the potential costs and benefits of doing so. Take the case of science: if we are in the business of constructing scientific theories, we risk acquiring false beliefs about the world, if such theories turn out to be false. But all wouldn't be lost -- our false theory could still be very useful, in helping us to predict future events, improve our technology and thereby contribute to human well-being. Plenty of theories now considered strictly false are nevertheless incredibly 'useful' in the foregoing sense of the term. Hence, van Fraassen tells us that we shouldn't be put off by the risk of accepting false scientific theories, because the likely gain in practical benefits is well worth such a risk.

Now take the case of metaphysics. If I accept a metaphysical theory, e.g. about the nature of free will, and this theory turns out to be true, I've acquired a true metaphysical belief -- and that's it. None of the practical benefits that come with successful scientific theories likewise follow from true metaphysical ones. Depressingly, this means that if my metaphysical theory about free will turns out to be false, I acquire nothing at all! Nothing, that is, except for the nice feeling of having explained something. Considering that the risk of getting it wrong is pretty darn high (judging by the embarrassing amount of unresolved disagreement between metaphysicians), metaphysics, van Fraassen concludes, just isn't worth all the effort. James Ladyman (2011), though generally sympathetic to van Fraassen's position, qualifies it with the claim that some metaphysical theories have indirectly contributed to scientific progress. Highly successful scientific paradigms, like Newton's physics, were inspired by metaphysical views like atomism. This leads him to posit a criterion that any worthwhile metaphysics must meet: "the fertiliser of naturalised metaphysics has no value if it does not help the tree of science bear empirical fruit". This fits nicely with his advocacy of a thoroughly naturalised metaphysics, which concerns itself only with drawing connections between the different sciences. Of course, most metaphysical endeavours would be excluded by this criterion. Theories about the nature of free will or personal identity are unlikely to inspire successful scientific theories.

But, returning to van Fraassen, is it correct that false metaphysical theories can give us nothing at all, except a possible indirect contribution to the march of science? Unsurprisingly, I do not think so. Insofar as we care about the sorts of questions that metaphysics addresses, it isn't clear to me that having false answers to such questions is worse than having no answer at all. This is especially true if we understand the aim of metaphysics to be the construction of a coherent worldview. A worldview (from the German Weltanschaaung) is a system of beliefs about what the world is 'basically like', and how we fit in it. Worldviews typically include beliefs about whether there is a God or not, how the mind relates to the body, whether the world is as it appears to us, and so on. Clearly, having a worldview is something that many (most? all?) humans beings in fact want. If that is the case, then perhaps having a false worldview is better than having no worldview at all.

The question of what it is that makes the possession of a worldview desirable is one that I hope to address in more detail in subsequent posts. For now, I will content myself with some tentative suggestions:

1. Having a worldview is admirable, because it manifests the distinctly human ability to think beyond everyday concerns. To risk being accused of anthropocentrist elitism, I think there is something uniquely noble about creatures that strive to discover who they are and what their place in the world is. A world containing such creatures, everything else equal, is greater than one containing creatures who only ever think about what they will be eating tomorrow (if they can think at all).

2. Having a worldview gives us a perspective from which to interpret our lives and the world as we experience it. This is closely related to what R.M. Hare called a blik, roughly, a way of looking at things. My interpretation of a loved one's death may be very different depending on whether I opt for a religious or materialistic worldview. Interestingly, this is what van Fraassen (ibid. p.17) seems to have in mind when he defines philosophy as "the enterprise

in which we, in every century, interpret ourselves anew". This arguably satisfies the very human need to feel 'at home' in the world.

3. Having a worldview helps us to answer the crucial questions of what constitutes a well-lived life, and why. For all the talk of the impossibility of inferring an 'ought' from an 'is', it is impossible to shake off the intuition that how we ought to live intimately depends on the sort of thing we are and the sort of world we live in. That's why all the baroque metaphysics in Plato's Republic ultimately serves to answer the question, posed at the start of the book, what is the just life? Certainly, many of us already have strongly-held beliefs about the well-lived life prior to any metaphysical theorizing. Even so, having a worldview could give us a basis or a ground for such beliefs, answering the 'why' bit in the above question.

If I am right, then it seems that metaphysical inquiry is certainly worthwhile, despite the high risk of getting it wrong, and that, pace van Fraassen, metaphysics is not 'truth or nothing'. Such inquiry would still be constrained by the need to construct a worldview. But I take it that this constraint is much less restrictive than Ladyman's criterion, which would rule out controversies that humans have always cared about.

On the dangers of believing that types aren't real

Humans can't help dividing up the world into types. After all, it would be incredibly inconvenient to be only able to talk about particular things and not the types to which they belong: why spend hours saying 'I like Fido, and Rex, and Spot ...' when I can say 'I like dogs' in a second or two? Regrouping particular things in conceptual 'boxes' allows us to make generalizations about such things, like 'dogs bark', which in turn enables us to predict future events ('the new neighbors have a dog, so we should expect to hear barking') and to draw probabilistic and explanatory inferences ('Spot keeps barking, he must be a dog', 'Rex barks because he is a dog').

This 'carving up' of the world has always been of great interest to philosophers. As we have seen, many philosophers take our categorizations to be somehow reflective of the world's real structure. The world, on this picture, is already divided up into real groups of things that resemble each other, and our categories simply correspond to such groups. Philosophers in this camp then propose explanations, like realism and trope nominalism, as to why the world is like that.

There are those, however, who dismiss the picture of a pre-divided reality. For them, types are useful ways of classifying particular things, and nothing else. The world has no preexisting 'architecture' that our concepts may or may not delineate. In fact, a completely different way of classifying things would be no more 'real' or 'accurate' than our way. A classificatory system that included the type 'shdog', where something is shdog if it is either a dog or a tree may be far less convenient than one that includes 'dog' and 'tree', but it wouldn't be any less real. On this view, types are very much like the constellations navigators used to find their way around the sea: constellations like Ursa Major are useful ways of mentally grouping individual stars, but at the end of the day, only the stars are real (Nanay 2007). Likewise, for philosophers in this second camp, types usefully regroup the individual things that come under them – their respective tokens – but only the tokens are mind-independently real. Rex, Fido and Spot are real enough, but ‘dog’ isn’t.

Philosophical positions that embrace a picture of this second sort abound: conceptualism, predicate nominalism, conceptual relativism (Putnam 1999), irrealism (Goodman 1975), singularist semirealism (Nanay 2007). For our purposes, I will call the rejection of types as mind-independently real ‘type-antirealism’. In my experience, it is popular among college students, particularly in the arts and humanities, who often talk of types as ‘social constructs’.

Undeniably, some types are mere constructs – ‘shdog’ is one of them, and I’m sure you can think of others. However, I’m going to briefly argue that dismissing all types as mere constructs may come at a high cost.

Take the type ‘dog’. The type-antirealist tells us that ‘dog’ is just one way of classifying individual things. We may as well have used the type ‘shdog’ which, once again, regroups all and only dogs and trees. ‘Dog’ is more useful than ‘shdog’, but there is no reason to consider it as any more real.

Notice that the reality of ‘dog’ has been denied on the basis that there are other types which, while less useful, are surely (we are told) no less real. But if this is an acceptable way of denying something’s mind-independent reality, then why stop at types?

Take, for instance, a token of ‘dog’, say, Spot. Spot seems about as real as anything. But ‘Spot’, like the other objects of everyday life, is just one way of mentally grouping bits of matter together. Consider instead ‘Spot*’, the composite object consisting of the dog Spot and my mobile phone. Sure, ‘Spot*’ is a much more inconvenient way of regrouping bits of matter than ‘Spot’. But why think that Spot* is any less real than Spot?

The natural reaction here is to say that Spot clearly is more real than Spot*. But it isn’t clear how we can argue for this without having to admit that, equally, ‘dog’ is clearly more real than ‘shdog’, on pain of inconsistency. For instance, we may say that Spot is real because the existence of Spot has plenty of predictive and explanatory power: Spot’s existence explains why I hear barking when I walk by the neighbour’s house, and allows me to predict that my hamster will die very quickly if he escapes to the neighbour’s garden. In contrast, the existence of Spot* doesn’t explain or predict anything that the existence of Spot and of my mobile phone don’t already explain or predict. We infer from this, using some version of Ockham’s razor, that Spot is real and Spot* isn’t. But if we infer this, we must also (again, on pain of inconsistency) infer the reality of ‘dog’ over ‘shdog’. We have already seen that ‘dog’ allows us to explain and predict quite a lot, and ‘shdog’ wouldn’t do nearly as well on that front.

At this point, the type-antirealist may bite the bullet and claim that Spot isn’t real either. All that is real, he could say, is mind-independent matter, and both types and tokens are just convenient ways of carving up matter.

Unfortunately, things may get worse for the type-antirealist. Take ‘matter’, the spatially extended stuff out of which the concrete things around us are supposed to be made. We generally think of our experiences as sometimes being of such external, mind-independent, material stuff, and other times as being illusory, as in dreams and hallucinations. This is very useful, because it allows us to predict and explain our experiences: the fact that my experience of getting my hand chopped off was only a nightmare explains why I don’t have an experience of lacking a hand the next day, and the fact that my experience of writing this article is not illusory allows me to predict a future experience of seeing the article published on my blog.

But there are other ways of interpreting experience. I could think that none of my experiences are experiences of mind-independent matter. Or I could think that those I would normally regard as illusory are not, and vice versa.

But as we have seen, the type-antirealist must hold that the explanatory and predictive usefulness of positing a thing’s reality does not warrant the belief that such thing is actually real – otherwise, he would have to admit that types like ‘dog’ are real since such types are explanatorily and predictively useful. Hence it seems that the consistent type-antirealist must also regard mind-independent matter as nothing more than a useful tool for organizing, interpreting and predicting experience.

To sum up, the type-antirealist, by disallowing the inference from explanatory and predictive usefulness to reality, ends up having to deny the reality, not only of types like ‘dog’, but also of individual things like Spot, and, finally, of the external world itself. What was intended as a relatively mild, sophisticated scepticism lands us in a scepticism of the most radical sort.

Perhaps the type-antirealist can find reasons to be sceptical about types that aren’t also reasons to be sceptical about individual things, or mind-independent matter. But I have yet to see such reasons.

So, what is the danger of believing that types aren’t real? It is that, if one is consistent, one may end up believing very little indeed.