Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Are Holes Material Items?

Here is a version of materialism:

1) All and only material things exist.

My question: are there decisive (philosophically dispositive) counterexamples to (1)? I hold that (1) is very reasonably rejected. But what I want to know is whether it can be 'blown clean out of the water,' i.e., refuted beyond the shadow of any intelligent person's doubt. A commenter suggests holes as counterexamples to (1) His idea, I take it, is that holes exist but are not material items. Let's think about this.  I will first argue that holes exist and then inquire whether they are material in nature.

Consider a particular hole H in a piece of Swiss cheese.  H is not nothing.  It has properties.  It has, for example, a shape: it is circular.  The circular hole has a definite radius, diameter, and circumference.  It has a definite area equal to pi times the radius squared: A=πr2  If the piece of cheese is 1/16th of an inch thick, then the hole is a disk having a definite volume.  H has a definite location relative to the edges of the piece of cheese and relative to the other holes. The hole is subject to locomotion: move the cheese and you move the hole. The hole is also subject to substantial and accidental change. Melt the cheese and the hole ceases to exist; stretch the cheese and the hole undergoes alterational or accidental change.

What's more, H has causal properties: it affects the texture and flexibility of the cheese and its resistance to the tooth.  H is perceivable by the senses: you can see it and touch it. If you can't literally see holes, how would you know that the piece of cheese is a piece of Swiss cheese? You touch a hole by putting a finger or other appendage into it and experiencing no resistance.

Now if anything has properties, then it exists.  H has properties; so H exists. What holds for H holds for any hole.

But are holes material in nature? The answer to this obviously depends on what exactly it is to be material in nature. We have seen that holes are in space: they have definite locations and are subject to change of spatial location. We have also seen that, because they are subject to both substantial and accidental change,  holes are in time. So holes are both in space and in time. But they are neither abstract objects nor spiritual substances. Holes are plausibly taken to be existing spatiotemporal particulars.

But are  holes material substances? Presumably not: substances are logically capable of independent existence; holes are not capable of independent existence. Holes are ontological parasites: they depend for their existence on the existence of the things in which they exist.  Holes are more like Aristotelian accidents than like Aristotelian substances.

The view that holes are material items cannot be definitively excluded.  According to the SEP article on our topic, this line was taken by David Lewis and his wife Stephanie:

One might also hold that holes are ordinary material beings: they are neither more nor less than superficial parts of what, on the naive view, are their material hosts (Lewis & Lewis 1970; Mollica 2022). For every hole there is a hole-lining and for every hole-lining there is a hole; on this conception, the hole is the hole-lining.

I conclude that holes are not decisive counterexamples to (1) above.


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4 responses to “Are Holes Material Items?”

  1. Joe Odegaard Avatar

    Holes in Swiss cheese are Co2 gas bubbles; after you cut the cheese, they are air pockets. So, they qualify as “things.” This discussion eventually involves the question of vacuums; but even outer space is not empty, there is a low density of hydrogen and helium out there, and that is even before the consideration of fields; the magnetic field, and the electrical field extend there as well. (there is one of each field in the entire universe as far as we know).
    Link about Swiss cheese: (it is a difficult cheese to make, I have heard, though that is not mentioned in the linked article).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_(North_America)
    Link about what is out there in “space.” The Bussard ramjet would run on it.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space
    Bussard ramjet:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet

  2. Dmitri Avatar
    Dmitri

    I think that Lewises’ solution is too simplistic. We can generalize and argue that anything which is a sort of an absence, not just a hole or a shadow, but say something like silence represent a difficulty for the materialist. Nothingness and void were important for continental philosophy because these concepts can’t be dismissed with ease by (1).

  3. Gary Huber Avatar
    Gary Huber

    This brings back childhood memories of deep philosophical reflection, occasioned by seeing “Instant Hole” on an episode of “The Coyote and Roadrunner”.

  4. Ingvar Avatar
    Ingvar

    Another universally (to the best of our theory) present field is the gravitational force.
    Ingvar

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