Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism

This morning's mail brought a longish letter from philosophy student Ryan Peterson.  He would like some comments and I will try to oblige him as time permits, but time is short. So for now I will confine my comments to the postscript of his letter:

P.S. Just as crazy as one category trope bundle theory is to me, is the later Brentano’s attempt at a different one category ontology, ‘reism’, where “For example, ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is Greek’ are made true, respectively, by wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates, where wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)” (from Uriah Kriegel’s Thought and Thing: Brentano’s Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism). I like to rigorously understand all the different views put forth by intelligent philosophers on a topic but I do like to spend the most time understanding the more plausible seeming views first.

Leaving trope theory to one side for the moment, I am happy to agree with Peterson's assessment of Brentano. While not literally  a product of insanity, Brentano's view  I find to be incomprehensible.  (And I don't mean that to be a merely autobiographical remark.) 

I assume what to me seems to be well-nigh self-evident: some, but not all, truths need truth-makers.  (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) A truth is a true truth-bearer. The primary truth-bearers — the primary vehicles of the truth-values — are propositions.  An assertive utterance at a particular time by a particular person of the declarative sentence 'Socrates is wise' expresses the proposition Socrates is wise.  I will assume that propositions are abstract in the Quinean, not the trope-theoretic, sense of 'abstract.'  (You can hear an asserted sentence and see a written sentence; you cannot hear or see a proposition.)  A truth-bearer is not a truth-maker, except in some recherché cases I won't mention.  (And don't confuse a truth-maker with a truth condition.)

There has to be something in the world of concreta (the spatiotemporal realm of causal reality) that makes it true that Socrates exists. To avoid the word 'makes,' we can say that the sentence and the proposition it expresses need an ontological ground of their being-true. Now you either get it or you don't. There are those who don't have a clue as to what I am talking about. Such people have no philosophical aptitude, and must simply be shown the door. A contingent truth cannot just be true, nor can it be true in virtue of someone's say-s0: a contingent truth requires something  in reality external to the truth-bearer and its verbal expression that 'makes' it true, where this 'making' or grounding is neither narrowly logical nor causal.   (Its not being either the one nor the other sensu stricto is what  prejudices some against it. I kick them off my stoa as lacking philosophical aptitude.)

Now what in the world could function as the ontological ground of the contingent truth of 'Socrates exists'?  The obvious answer is: the concrete particular Socrates.  (Aristotle makes this very point somewhere in The Categories.)  A particular may be defined as an unrepeatable entity by contrast with universals (if such there be) that are by definition repeatable.

There is an obvious difference between 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is Greek,' on the one hand, and 'Socrates exists' on the other. It is the difference between predicative and existential sentences. Now we come to the nub of the issue. It seems blindingly evident to me that the two predicative sentences (and the propositions they express), if they need truth-makers at all,  need concrete states of affairs (STOAs)  as truth-makers, and that these truth-making states of affairs must be numerically distinct. I have no objection to saying that wise-Socrates makes true the first sentence and Greek-Socrates the second if 'wise-Socrates' and 'Greek-Socrates' refer to concrete states of affairs (not to be confused with Chisholmian abstract states of affairs).

But that is not what Brentano is saying.  His reism cannot allow for concrete states of affairs of the form a's being F.  For the predicate 'F' either picks out an abstract particular, a trope, or it picks out a universal. But on reism, all you've got are things, concrete particulars, which, moreover, cannot be assayed as concrete states of affairs along either Bergmannian or Armstrongian lines.  

On reism one must therefore swallow the absurdity that "wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)." So they are one and the same and yet numerically different?? A question for Peterson: Is Kriegel defending truth-maker nominalism?  I hope not. For it makes no bloody sense.  For one thing it implies that the putatively two but at the same time one concrete particular(s) are property-less and are thus 'bare,' though not in Gustav Bergmann's precise sense.  They are property-less if there are no properties, and there are no properties if there are no tropes nor any universals. A predicate is not a property.   

'Red,' 'rot,' 'rouge,' and 'rosso' are four different predicates in four different languages. If Tom the tomato is red, as we say in English, he is not red only in English or rosso only in Italian. That way lies an absurd linguistic idealism. The predicates are true of Tom because there is something in or related to Tom that makes the predicates true of him, that grounds their applicability to him.  This something in Tom is either the trope in him (assuming he is a complete bundle of tropes) or a universal that he instantiates.  Nominalism makes no sense. The reality of properties is non-negotiable. But of course they needn't be universals. Trope-nominalism makes sense.  'Ostrich' nominalism does not.  The same goes for van Inwagen's 'ostrich realism.'

Here is another argument. Socrates, while essentially Greek (Cf. Kripke's essentiality of origin), is only accidentally wise: had he lived long enough he might have gone 'Biden.'  At every time at which he exists, our man is Greek, but only at some times is he wise.  (He wasn't wise when he peeped his head out from between the legs of his mother, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.) So if he is one and the same concrete individual over time, then there has to be a distinction between him and real properties (not predicates!) that are either in him as tropes or related to him as universals.

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Bill Vallicella

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31 responses to “One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism”

  1. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    Hello Dr. Vallicella and anyone else reading. Thanks for your response. You are quite right Brentano wants to reject states-of-affairs as truth-makers.
    First off, here is a link to a pdf of Kriegel’s paper, Thought and Thing: Brentano’s Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism, for anyone to read:
    https://philarchive.org/archive/KRITAT
    I suppose the title may answer your question as to whether Kriegel is defending ‘truthmaker nominalism’.
    More specifically, Kriegel defends it in this conditional way:
    “if one is antecedently attracted by (i) a nominalist ontology and (ii) a truthmaker approach to ontological theorizing, then whereas the current literature showcases three theoretical options to choose among, Brentano’s reism represents a fourth viable option (no less prima facie plausible than the other three).” It does depend on what the other views are, but I suppose this is probably false.
    Kriegel writes “for the reist, strictly speaking there are no properties, since there are only things”. He attempts to motivate the idea of coinciding but numerically distinct entities with the example of the statue and the clay, which coincide but have different conditions of persistence. Kriegel claims that the majority of philosophers hold that the statute and the lump of clay which makes it up, are numerically distinct but coincide.
    One question I have for you: is the notion of two things ‘coinciding’ at a particular time and place but being numerically distinct incoherent? If it is, then that’s a simple way to easily shut down Brentano’s view. The other way, of course, is to just insist it is absurd to reject properties, which is also a position I’m sympathetic to.
    Once one rejects properties, one would think that the distinction between substance and accident is also rejected. But apparently Brentano does accept a substance-accident dichotomy, between some concrete thing and the other concrete things which are numerically distinct but coincide with it. The example Kriegel uses is two-legged Beyonce and long-haired Beyonce being accidents of the substance, Beyonce, because they have asymmetric dependence relation with her. There are other details, the theory even relates to Brentano’s theory of judgement, but I need not give an entire paraphrase of the view as we both find it ultimately incoherent.
    Just to further my understanding of the application of the truth-maker concept, I have one more question. Let us consider Socrates at some particular time. Let us also suppose Socrates is spherical at that time (but can take on other shapes). Do the statements, ‘Socrates is shaped’ and ‘Socrates is spherical’, have the same truth-maker?

    Reply
  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ryan,
    Thanks for the Kriegel reference. I will try to respond further tomorrow. Are you a grad student or an undergrad at U of C?

    Reply
  3. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    I am an undergrad at the U of C. I hope to go to grad school in future although it is not assured. I mostly have read about the metaphysics of properties on my own, except for some discussion of the views of Aristotle and Descartes in some fine classes with scholars who knew those thinkers well. Indeed, even some of the professors into Kant at the university emphasize Kant’s use of certain Aristotelian ideas, like hylomorphism. I was quite pleased to find professors interested in early analytic philosophy, as I find various debates in that period fruitful to reflect on (the debates about propositions, the sense-datum theory, etc).
    Regarding a philosophical theory being incoherent — it is a view of Wittgenstein’s which one of my professors agrees with that a typical philosophical failure is to produce statements which are literally nonsensical, as opposed to being false. I believe one can agree with this claim, without going as far as Wittgenstein about its prevalence. Indeed, I think Peter Geach agreed with it and I don’t think he was generally anti-metaphysical. This same professor thought this true of Descartes’s dualism, that it was incoherent, and I was less sure of this. Hobbes also thought Descartes’s statements of his conception of the mind were nonsense, but this was primarily because of his empiricist conception of intelligibility.

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  4. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    Do the statements, ‘Socrates is shaped’ and ‘Socrates is spherical’, have the same truth-maker?
    yes: “the shape of Socrates” (at the time of the utterance of the proposition exemplified by either statement.)

    Reply
  5. BV Avatar
    BV

    John,
    The answer is No. The second sentence is false, so it can’t have a T-maker. Note also that a sentence can be uttered but not a proposition.

    Reply
  6. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ryan,
    The title of Kriegel’s paper is neutral on whether he is defending or attacking T-maker nominalism.
    I’ll have to read Kriegel’s paper. But I am glad he is not saying that two numerically different things are one and the same thing. To answer your first question, it can be allowed that a lump of clay and a statue can coincide in the sense that at some times and in some possible worlds they occupy the same space.
    I’ll have to review Brentano, but if he is claiming, or if any reist or nominalist claims that there are no properties, that is plainly false. The question is not whether they are properties, for that is a datum, a given; the question is what they are: universals, tropes, sets, concepts, something else?
    More later.
    By the way, you don’t come across as an undergraduate, but as an advanced graduate student.

    Reply
  7. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    Bill,
    The answer is No. The second sentence is false, so it can’t have a T-maker. Note also that a sentence can be uttered but not a proposition.
    Ryan’s original subjunctive conditional was:
    Let us also suppose Socrates is spherical at that time (but can take on other shapes)
    Given the putative truth of that conditional, then I re-assert that the answer to his question:
    Do the statements, ‘Socrates is shaped’ and ‘Socrates is spherical’, have the same truth-maker?
    is Yes. unless you can provide a more pellucid explanation as to where I have missed the mark.

    Reply
  8. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    At the risk of belaboring the point:
    The fence around my house is blue.
    The statement (at time T) “my fence is colored” and the statement (at time T) “my fence is blue” (or, more precisely, the propositions expressed by those statements), have the same truth-maker at time T, namely:
    “the color of my fence (at time T)”.

    Reply
  9. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    Bill,
    You are right about the title. I suppose I immediately inferred Kriegel would be defending the position given my knowledge of his other sympathetic writings on Brentano.
    I quite agree it is absurd to say there are no properties. Perhaps Brentano does not say this outright and it is only Kriegel who says this, I’m not sure (I have read some Brentano but not where he articulates this position). What a philosopher should say is something like: ‘given a certain conception of properties, there are no properties’. It is very sloppy to say ‘there are no properties’ when what one means to deny is a certain conception of properties.
    Re my spherical Socrates example: I was hoping that my use of ‘suppose’ would be having us considering the hypothetical truth maker of ‘Socrates is spherical’ in the non-real world in which Socrates was spherical. Perhaps the example of Socrates was not well chosen, please substitute any other material object which could be spherical.
    If you read the Kriegel paper, I’ll certainly be interested to read about your reception of it, and if you find the view seems less absurd after reading his presentation.

    Reply
  10. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    John,
    I wondered if he thought that it was impossible for Socrates to be spherical (can a man be spherical? Maybe not). Needless to say, any spherical material object will do fine.
    I believe I agree with your view about the truth-makers. The only possible objection I can think of is that the property of having *some* shape can be retained across changes in particular shapes (I will assume you get what I mean here, although there is probably a better way of putting it). But at any particular moment, I believe there is a sense that the property of having some shape (this is equivalent, I assume, to being shaped) is only ‘conceptually distinct’ from the property of having the specific shape.
    Maybe could gloss two properties being only conceptually distinct as them having the exact same truth-maker. This gets tricky, because we could talk about some object being shaped *over a period of time* across different changes in shape. This sort of issue is the only reason the matter is not entirely clear to me.

    Reply
  11. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ryan @ 11:17: >>What a philosopher should say is something like: ‘given a certain conception of properties, there are no properties’. It is very sloppy to say ‘there are no properties’ when what one means to deny is a certain conception of properties.<< That's exactly right. Ryan @3:19: >> Let us consider Socrates at some particular time. Let us also suppose Socrates is spherical at that time (but can take on other shapes). Do the statements, ‘Socrates is shaped’ and ‘Socrates is spherical’, have the same truth-maker?<< I just now read this and I see what Doran was referencing. Only actually true truth-bearers need truth-makers. I am seated now, but I might have been standing now, where 'now' picks out the same time. *I am seated now,* since it is actually true, needs a T-maker, but the false but possibly true *I am standing now* does not need a T-maker. So it seems to me that what I said to Doran is correct: *Socrates is spherical* is false, hence neither needs, nor can have, a T-maker. After all, it is false even if possibly true. So the two Socrates sentences cannot have the same T-bearer. Agree?

    Reply
  12. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    Bill,
    The example was supposed to inquire about what the truth-maker *would be*, and answering that doesn’t seem to involve talking about the presence or absence of an actual truth-maker. Maybe this was made less clear because of the example of Socrates, a real person.
    We can truly say such statements as: if such and such object was spherical, the property of its sphericalness would be a truth-maker of the statement ‘such and such object is spherical’. If you don’t think that is cogent though, let us know.
    Maybe a David Lewis style realist about possible worlds will have those possible worlds be the real truth-makers to the properties of merely supposed entities but I don’t want to endorse that, although it’s a bit tangential to the present inquiry.

    Reply
  13. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    I’m going to reiterate my fence example, to escape the conceptual confusion of a “spherical Socrates”:
    If the fence in my backyard is blue, do the propositions:
    A) my fence is colored; and
    B) my fence is blue;
    have one or two (or more?) truth-makers?
    and, to avoid the needless complication of diachronicity, just consider true propositions about a single time in the past:
    C) my fence was colored at noon, yesterday;
    D) my fence was blue at noon, yesterday.
    if, arguendo all of A through D are putatively true, then why are they not all made true by something like:
    the color of my fence at the relevant time of their utterances?

    Reply
  14. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ryan @ 12:19.
    I have a lump of ground beef. I make it into a meat ball, giving it a spheroid shape. I then say ‘This lump of meat is spheroid.’ That contingently true sentence needs and has a T-maker. But I could have made that same lump of meat into a patty, thereby giving it a discoid shape, and then said, ‘This lump of meat is discoid.’ Let W be a merely possible world in which I do this. Does the second sentence have a T-maker in W? Yes of course: Had W been actual instead of A (the actual world, the one that happens to be actual), then ‘This lump of meat is discoid’ would have had a T-maker.
    Do the two sentences have the same T-maker in A? No, for in A, only the first sentence is true. The second is false. It is obvious, I hope, that a false sentence cannot have a T-maker. Do the two sentences have the same T-maker in W? No, by similar reasoning, mutatis mutandis.
    For any possible world W, if a T-bearer has a T-maker, then that T-maker is in W.
    Now A is one of the possible worlds, as I hope you realize.
    Does that answer the question you asked?

    Reply
  15. BV Avatar
    BV

    John @ 12:27: >>If the fence in my backyard is blue, do the propositions:
    A) my fence is colored; and
    B) my fence is blue;
    have one or two (or more?) truth-makers?<< One. The T-maker of (B) also makes (A) true. This is because it is necessarily true that anything that is blue is colored. One and the same T-maker does both T-making jobs. Blue is to colored as determinate is to determinable. >>C) my fence was colored at noon, yesterday;
    D) my fence was blue at noon, yesterday.
    if, arguendo all of A through D are putatively true, then why are they not all made true by something like:
    the color of my fence at the relevant time of their utterances?<< They are! All four sentences have the same T-maker, the concrete fact/state of affairs OF (not THAT) your fence's being blue at noon, yesterday.

    Reply
  16. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    Bill,
    Yes, this way of speaking is the most precise, if rather elaborate, way to talk about this issue. We can talk about T-bearers with T-makers in some possible world W.
    My main question was the one that John posed again in his comment. This question is if in some possible world where some material object is spherical, if the proposition that the object is spherical and the proposition that the object is shaped have the same truth-maker.
    I believe John’s example can easily be translated into this sort of framework, he uses a color example to ask about the same thing.

    Reply
  17. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    Bill,
    I understand how you would answer my question now, having read your reply to John. Indeed, these are both instances of the determinate: determinable structure.
    I do think that there is a sense ‘the property of having some shape’ had by an object persists through changes in shape — that is the main reason I thought it to be an interesting kind of an example.
    Maybe the sense that ‘the property of being shaped’ is kept over a change of shapes is explicated by analyzing ‘is shaped’ as a disjunctive property: ‘has a spherical shape or a discoid shape or a….’

    Reply
  18. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    They are! All four sentences have the same T-maker, the concrete fact/state of affairs OF (not THAT) your fence’s being blue at noon, yesterday.
    agreement! that rarest of all treasures in our endless endeavour 🙂

    Reply
  19. BV Avatar
    BV

    John,
    We agree about agreement: It’s a wonderful thing.

    Reply
  20. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    One more thought occurred to me about points made in your blog post.
    You distinguish between existence statements and property ascription statements. This is alright with me, but I wondered about how this distinction relates to the underlying judgements these sentences express. When someone judges that Socrates exists, they must have some conception of what Socrates is, so they must be ascribing some properties to him.
    Because when we judge Socrates to exist, in order to conceive of him at all, we must think of him as having some properties, it seems to me that Socrates AND at least some properties are needed to make it true that Socrates exists. Probably at the very least a kind-property such as being a man, or maybe any property essential to him.
    Yet I also note that we can judge Socrates to exist under a conception which is partially mistaken. To latch onto him at all, though, in thought, I don’t think this conception can be entirely mistaken. You don’t think Socrates is a bare particular, something which does not essentially have any properties at all. So ought you to say that a truth maker of Socrates existing is some state of affairs, since necessarily Socrates existing involves him having various properties?

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  21. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ryan,
    Consider simpler cases first. I assertively utter ‘This exists!’ upon the entry into the room of some ugly thing. The judgment expressed doesn’t seem to require that the judger have any concept of what the thing is. The demonstrative pronoun appears to function as a logically proper name.
    This is unlike ‘Socrates exists,’ in which the proper name is plausibly viewed not a logically proper but as a definite description in disguise as Russell famously argued.
    R. in effect denies that ‘S. exists’ is singular. It is instead existentially general: ‘There exists an x such that x is the unique teacher of Plato.’
    Maybe what you are getting at is that there cannot be pure assertions of existence or pure predications. I am sympathetic to that. ‘S. is wise’ is not a pure predication because the copula not only couples but also expresses existence. Thus ‘Socrates is wise,’ fully analyzed, is ‘Socrates is (exists) & Socrates is wise’ where the second ‘is’ is purely copulative.’ On the other hand ‘S. exists’ is not purely existential because nothing can exist that has no quidditative properties.
    There is whole raft of deep problems here, genuine problems, that no one has ever solved.
    I agree that one can referentially latch onto an object under a false description. ‘The man in the corner with champagne in his glass is gay’ may succeed in drawing your attention to a certain man despite the fact that he has mineral water in his glass and not champagne.’ Examples like this have been worked over in the phil of lang literature.
    >>You don’t think Socrates is a bare particular, something which does not essentially have any properties at all.<< This sentence of yours conflates two senses of 'bare particular.' G. Bergmann introduced the term but did not mean a propertyless particular; he meant a particular all of the properties of which are accidental. Finally, you raise the vexing question of whether the T-maker of 'Socrates exists' is a concrete fact or a concrete particular that is not a fact. In my existence book from 2002 I take the line that ordinary concrete particulars are facts of the form: a's being F where F is the conjunction of all the thing's quidditative properties.

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  22. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    Bill,
    I suspect your example of ‘this exists’ involves having some conception of a material object. If a person uttered when walking into a room ‘this exists’ and someone asked ‘what exists?’, a reasonable response might be ‘don’t you see it?’. This shows that there is a, perhaps inchoate, conception of the thing being a visible object (therefore existing in the spatial-temporal realm, at the very least, if not a material object).
    I have wondered about this in the context of the Cartesian cogito. Could ‘I’ in the context of the suspension of belief in all other objects be a logically proper name? In Descartes Cogito statement ‘I think, therefore I am’, I believe he is conceiving of himself as ‘this thinking thing’. But he does sometimes affirm the claim that we can simply judge ‘I am, I exist’ to be true whenever we think it, and it’s not entirely clear to me if he would have insisted on some conception being present. I suppose Frege, given his conception of existence, would have agreed with me about some conception being needed for judgements of the existence of some object. But I don’t want to tie my claim essentially to a Fregean conception of existence.
    The formulation that there are no pure assertions of existence or pure predications may be the right way to analyze it, I’ll have to think about it.
    Thank you for your clarification on bare particulars. I agree these are two different notions, something with *no properties at all, essentially* and something that has no essential properties, only accidental properties. I also just realized that strictly speaking we probably need to specify a kind of property for ‘something having no properties’ to even be intelligible. Otherwise we would run into the paradox of ‘having no properties’ being a property. This paradox may even arise for Bergmann’s bare particular, if we understand ‘having no essential properties, only accidents’ to be the essential property of a bare particular.
    Your stated view of the T-maker of ‘Socrates exists’ seems very reasonable to me, intuitively that seems superior to having a concrete particular that is not a fact be the T-maker. I have nothing further to add on that. The detailed defending of that view would require some discussion of how to identify the quidditative properties of various things, that is the only thing I might need to further grasp before affirming the view.

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  23. BV Avatar
    BV

    >>conception of the thing being a visible object<< But if I say, 'Listen to this' and then play a tune, the referent of 'this' is not something visible. But as you realize the really interesting cases are pure idexicals such as 'I' that do not require for their use any pointing or demonstration. If I say to the deli man 'I want a pound of this!' I have to point to the meat I want, but I don't have to point to my body. The status of 'I' in the context of the cogito is not easy to understand. Is it a name at all? Isn't it a pronoun, the first-person singular pronoun? Either way, trouble. More later in a separate post. As for Frege, his view is that first-level predications of existence are senseless. To borrow a Russellian example, just as it is senseless to say that Socrates is numerous, it is senseless to say that Socrates exists. Similarly for 'I.' 'I exist' is senseless for Frege. So he makes quick work of the Cogito. Frege is wrong as I have argued ad nauseam. See if you can find my A PARADIGM THEORY OF EXISTENCE in the U. of C. library.

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  24. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    I think I agree Frege is wrong, I am familiar with the views of Russell and Frege here. I thought it was interesting to note that this kind of view might agree with me about some conception being needed to affirm the existence of any specific thing. I wanted to indicate that I do *not* think this view is required to hold the view that some conception of something is required to affirm its existence, and indeed, to single it out in thought at all. I tentatively think that my view is compatible with multiple conceptions of existence (maybe this is mistaken, I don’t have a through understanding of every conception of existence — I bet our library does have your book in which case I’ll read it in the fall, if not earlier).
    By the way, I didn’t mean to argue that ‘this’ always refers to visible objects, I just meant it did in that example. Of course, various other objects will have their own categories and associated conceptions.
    Russell is interesting here because although he may not think we can judge some specific thing to exist without having a conception of it, he does allow a sort of cognitive relation to a thing independent of judgement, acquaintance.
    I shall save further comments on the issue of ‘I’ for your eventual post.

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  25. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    Anscombe’s “The First Person” is magisterial, on this very topic.

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  26. BV Avatar
    BV

    John,
    It is indeed a first-rate paper and highly relevant in this context.

    Reply
  27. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    Indeed, I have wondered the last year if Anscombe is right and how to properly understand her view.
    With a bit of argument, perhaps one could establish the dichotomy: either ‘I’ is a referring expression and its use involves us grasping the existence of something (oneself) without thinking about it under some conception, or it is a not a referring expression at all.
    There’s a paper comparing Anscombe’s thesis with Sartre which I found quite enlightening although it is a bit lengthy. I can email the paper to anyone interested.
    Reference to paper: Narboux, Jean-Philippe, 2018. “Is Self-consciousness Consciousness of One’s Self?”, in Wittgenstein and Phenomenology, Oskaari Kuusela, Mihai Ometita, Timur Uçan (Eds.), London, Routledge.

    This essay also has a fine, briefer presentation of the comparison between Sartre and Anscombe:
    https://formadevida.org/smiguensfdv17

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  28. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ryan,
    I re-read “The First Person” this morning. She’s an exasperating writer. Instead of stating clearly at the beginning what the problem is, what her theses will be, and outlining her arguments, she presents the process by which she arrived at her theses and arguments. She reports on her thinking process, as opposed to stating the results of that process. A lousy way to write. Dummett does it too. She makes the reader work too hard trying to figure out what she is driving at. But of course, she makes a number of important points. I may write a separate post about that article.
    But first I’ll upload some other materials on the self.
    Thanks for the references.
    You say you are undergraduate. Would it be correct to infer that you are 18-22 yrs old? (In general, that would be an incorrect deductive inference.)

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  29. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    I am 24 years old, still in university because I took a few years of leave and worked for some personal reasons — I have one more year of university. One year off was just wanting to avoid taking online classes during Covid, though. I did a lot of independent reading while on leave. I was still pretty lazy or I’d have learned German or French by now. Just know a bit of Latin.
    I suppose I was fairly familiar with early analytic philosophy by 19 or 20. Studying Wittgenstein in school led me to spend more time on Frege though, obviously an important figure for understanding him and thinking about modern philosophy of logic broadly. I also only really started working to understand Kant the last year or so. I do find some issues in the philosophy of judgement interesting in addition to classical metaphysical topics. It seems like a good treatment of the philosophy of judgement shall have to tackle the issue of self-consciousness generally. Earlier this year I sat in on a grad seminar talking about Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frege, relating to Wittgenstein’s treatment of Moore’s Paradox and his views on the force / content distinction.
    On Anscombe’s writing style: I suppose my ideal would be someone who both showed their thinking process and then also neatly stated their views. Perhaps this would need to be two sections.

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  30. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ryan,
    The reason I was interested in your age was that you seem extremely well-versed in these technical issues. What got you interested in early analytic philosophy in the first place?

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  31. Ryan P. Avatar
    Ryan P.

    That’s a good question. I suppose it was reading Russell’s Problems of Philosophy after picking it up at a bookstore at 16 or 18 After that I was off to the races, accelerating my study the last four years. In the last few years I’ve gotten much more historical context, Russell and Moore responding to British idealism and Bradley and all that. I also continue to learn about the invention of modern logic and the interpretation of its historical significance.
    Given modern secondary sources it is much easier than it used to be to become familiar with all this. Although yes, it would seem many of my peers are less familiar so I often only talk about a lot of the details with professors. Peter Hylton’s 1990 book Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy for instance is a nice secondary source. Lots of decent Frege stuff, from Michael Dummett’s writing onward also (I spent one summer getting really into the Frege literature, there’s a surprising amount of debate about some things in the effort of better historically contextualizing him). Or more recently a nice overview, if very logic oriented, is The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, 1879–1930: From Frege to Ramsey. On the Genealogy of Universals by Fraser Macbride covers the debates about the universal-particular distinction in early analytic philosophy, culminating with Frank Ramsey’s analysis.
    A range of secondary sources are also useful for getting a grip about the debates around a-priori knowledge in this period with respect to geometry. Modern mathematical logic as well as developments in geometry were simultaneously philosophically relevant, the geometry developments seeming to challenge Kantian dogma.
    MacBride has some nice papers on GF Stout’s defense of tropes you might enjoy if you haven’t read them.
    A very splendid text relevant to our recent conversation that juxtaposes Russell and Moore to Brentano and Ernst Mach, while also talking about Russell’s changing views is: The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn Against Metaphysics: Austrian Philosophy 1874-1918 by Mark Textor.
    In more recent analytic philosophy I need to spend more time on some of the debates about modality. I think that probably the attempts to understand essence primarily in terms of modality are wrong-headed and also not in line with the historical tradition (Descartes, for instance). Kit Fine is perhaps the most significant contemporary analytic metaphysician vigorously criticizing what he calls “the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality” in various papers.
    There is even a fairly recent work that tries to analyze the positions of early analytic philosophers, especially Russell and Frege, on the topic of modality and how it relates to logic: Necessity Lost: Modality and Logic in Early Analytic Philosophy by Sanford Shieh — this is a volume one, the second volume is yet to be published and will be about CI Lewis
    I mention these texts as all of them are helpful for orienting oneself as an autodidact covering this range of material.
    Note: there are other philosophical issues I’m interested in where the early analytics don’t especially seem to shine, I enjoy studying various older authors on ethics and moral objectivity, although I did find the logical positivist and company rejection of ethical objectivity bracing (Alastair Macintyre has some interesting writing on this).

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