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  • Writer's picturechris de ray

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.

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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.


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In a previous entry, we looked at platonic realism and trope nominalism. Recall, platonic realism holds that particular things of the same kind, e.g. humans participate in or instantiate the universal or form ‘humanity’, where forms/universals are immaterial entities existing in an eternal ‘world of forms’. Trope nominalism, in contrast, holds that particular things of the same kind have tropes that resemble each other. A ‘trope’ is sometimes referred to as a ‘particularized property’. We can speak of ‘humanity’ in general, but we can also speak of your humanity, and mine. Your humanity and mine may resemble each other, but they are not the same thing. Trope nominalists say that each of us has a ‘human-trope’, and this explains why we are both humans.


I argued in this entry that platonic realism can explain something that trope nominalism cannot – namely, the fact that resemblance exists at all – and that this a reason to believe that particular things do indeed participate in platonic forms. But the fact that particular things participate in platonic forms does not rule out that they also have tropes. Indeed, Michael Loux writes that one could advance a “two-step” theory, which “makes tropes constituents of familiar particulars” but in which the tropes themselves are “instantiations of universals” (2006, p.211). This is a picture in which you and I have distinct human-tropes, but each of our human-tropes participate in the platonic form of humanity.


If there are good reasons to believe, as I have argued, that there are platonic forms, and good reasons to believe that there are tropes, given that the two are not jointly inconsistent, it seems we have good reason to take seriously a hybrid “two-step” theory of this sort.


So, what reasons are there to believe in tropes? One could conjure up clever arguments for their existence, but as far as I’m concerned, it is enough that I can just see tropes. When I look at you, I see your humanity. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see my humanity.

Examples of this kind, at the very least, suggest that the idea of particularized properties fit nicely with our everyday linguistic practises. But those hostile to tropes will charge that we shouldn’t let our language dictate our metaphysics. Point taken.


What then, do I see, if not your humanity and mine? Let us consider other candidates.


1. Perhaps I see the same thing in both cases, that is, humanity itself. But this is a non-starter for those who believe ‘humanity’ to be a platonic form, since platonic forms are necessarily invisible. But of course, critics of tropes tend to be platonists, and thus will show little interest in this candidate.


2. Perhaps it is strictly incorrect to say that I see your humanity (and mine), and that saying as much is an informal shorthand for saying that I see that you are human. When I ‘see that x’, I see something which makes me know or understand that x (this is sometimes referred to as ‘epistemic seeing’, cf. Dretske 1969). But then, the critic owes us an explanation as to what this ‘something’ which makes me understand that you are human, is, which leads me to the next candidate…


3. Perhaps what I see is your appearance – your walking on two legs, your lack of fur, etc – and this leads me to know that you are a human, i.e. that you participate in the form of humanity.


This third account of what really goes on when I ‘see your humanity’ doesn’t involve tropes, unless we say that your human-trope just is your particular morphological structure. To use a simpler example, a critic of tropes might say that we don’t strictly see the yellowness of an autumn leaf, just the pigments that make the leaf yellow (Levinson 2006). But the trope nominalist, I argue, can simply answer that the yellowness of the leaf just is the collection of such pigments.


This answer presupposes that tropes are concrete constituents of particular things. Here it is common to protest that the trope nominalist has made a category mistake (e.g. Lowe 2007). Tropes are supposed to be particularized properties, and properties are not constituents or parts of objects. Rather, they are ways an object is.


Whether it is category mistake to say that particularized properties are constituents of the objects that have them is largely a conceptual matter: if our concept of a particularized property, like ‘your humanity’ rules out its being a constituent of particular thing (in this case, you), then to say that your humanity is a constituent of you is to misunderstand the relevant linguistic conventions. But while it might violate the linguistic conventions followed by some metaphysicians, I don’t see how it violates the ‘folk’ linguistic conventions of wider society. As far as I can tell, we find it quite natural to think of the particularized properties of objects as constituents of such objects -- is it really ‘absurd’ to say that the autumn leaf’s yellowness is a part of the leaf?


Granted, metaphysicians are free to use concepts as they please. But it seems to me that, if we are to communicate something of value to those outside the field, it is the linguistic conventions of wider society that our theories ought to respect. Hence, if I am right to say that the everyday concept of a particularized property (your humanity, this leaf’s yellowness) allows it to be a part of an object, we shouldn’t regard the claim that tropes are constituents of things as a category mistake.

Hence why I persist in my belief that I do see tropes. If I do in fact see tropes, then a fortiori they exist. But, as we have seen, I also think that platonic forms play a unique explanatory role. So, at the risk of being too greedy, I’m going to have both: objects have tropes, and tropes participate in platonic forms. Call this 'trope platonism'.


Levinson, J. (2006). Why There Are No Tropes. Philosophy, 81(04), 563. doi: 10.1017/s0031819106318013


Loux, Michael (2006). 8. Aristotle's Constituent Ontology. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2:207.


Lowe, E. (2007). The four-category ontology. Oxford: Clarendon.


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