Author: Bill Vallicella

Two Questions About the Bundle Theory Answered

On the bundle-of-universals theory of ordinary concrete particulars, such a particular is a bundle of its properties and its properties are universals.  This theory will appeal to those who, for various ontological and epistemological reasons, resist substratum theories and think of properties as universals.  Empiricists like Bertrand Russell, for example.  Powerful objections can be brought against the theory, but the following two questions suggested by  some comments of Peter Lupu  in an earlier thread are, I think, easily answered.

Q1.  How may universals does it take to constitute a particular?  Could there be a particular composed of only one or only two universals?

Q2.  We speak of particulars exemplifying properties.  But if a particular is a bundle of its properties, what could it mean to say of a particular that it exemplifies a property?

A1.  The answer is that it takes a complete set.  I take it to be a datum that the ordinary meso-particulars of Sellars' Manifest Image — let's stick with these — are completely determinate or complete in the following sense:

D1. X is complete =df for any predicate P, either x satisfies P or  x satisfies the complement of  P.

If predicates express properties, and properties are universals, and ordinary particulars are bundles of properties, then for each such particular there must be a complete set of universals.  For example, there cannot be a red rubber ball that has as constituents exactly three universals: being red, being made of rubber, being round.  For it must also have a determinate size, a determinate spatiotemporal location, and so on.  It has to be such that it is either covered with Fido's saliva or not so distinguished.  If it is red, then it must have a color; if it is round, it must have a shape, and so on.  This brings in further universals.  Whatever is, is complete.  That is a law of metaphysics, I should think.  Or perhaps it is only a law of phenomenological ontology, a law of the denizens of the Manifest Image.  (Let's not get into quantum mechanics.) 

A2.  If a particular is a bundle of universals, then it is a whole of parts, the universals being the (proper) parts, though not quite in the sense of classical mereology.  Why do I say that? Well, suppose you have a complete set of universals, and suppose further that they are logically and nomologically compossible.  It doesn't follow that they form a bundle.  But it does follow, by Unrestricted Summation, that there is a classical mereological sum of the universals.  So the bundle is not a sum.  Something more is required, namely, the contingent bundling to make of the universals a bundle, and thus a particular.

Now on a scheme like this there is no exemplification (EX) strictly speaking.  EX is an asymmetrical relation — or relational tie:  If x exemplifies P-ness, then it is not the case that P-ness exemplifies x.  Bundling is not exemplification because bundling is symmetrical: if U1 is bundled with U2, then U2 is bundled with U1.  So what do we mean when we say of a particular construed as a bundle that is has — or 'exemplifies' or 'instantiates' using these terms loosely — a property?  We mean that it has the property as a 'part.'   Not as a spatial or temporal part, but as an ontological part.  Thus:

D2. Bundle B has the property P-ness =df P=ness is an ontological 'part' of B.

Does this scheme bring problems in its train?  Of course!  They are for me to know and for you to figure out.

 

The Beat Generation, the Tea Party and the Meaning of ‘Beat’

Many thanks to that indefatigable argonaut of the cybersphere, Dave Lull, for bringing Lee Siegel's The Beat Generation and the Tea Party to my attention.  An auspicious find in this fine October, Kerouac month hereabouts.  If I wanted to be unkind I would say that the article proves that anything can be compared to anything.  But he does make some good points.  Excerpt:

Still, American dissent turns on a tradition of troublemaking, suspicion of elites and feelings of powerlessness, no matter where on the political spectrum dissent takes place. Surely just about every Tea Partier agrees with Ginsberg on the enervating effect of the liberal media: “Are you going to let our emotional life,” he once wrote, “be run by Time magazine?”

More seriously, the origin of the word “beat” has a connection to the Tea Partiers’ sense that they are being marginalized as the country is taken away from them. According to Ginsberg, to be “beat” most basically signified “exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out . . . rejected by society.” Barack Obama meant much the same thing when, during the presidential primaries, he notoriously said that “in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government.” That he went on to characterize such people as “bitter” souls who “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” only strengthened the anxiety among proto-Tea Partiers that they were about to be “rejected by society.”

Here some serious qualifications are in order.  Although 'beat' does have the connotation of 'beaten down' and 'exhausted,' this meaning is strictly secondary when compared to the term's fundamental meaning which is in the semantic vicinity of 'beatific,' 'beatitude,' The Eight Beatitudes, and the Beatific Vision (visio beata) in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  Kerouac cannot be understood apart from his Catholic upbringing.  If we take Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) and Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) of On the Road as the main exemplars of beatness, there is nothing of the cool, jaded beatnik about them (the latter term an invention of the liberal media modeled on 'sputnik.')  They are not cool, but hot, 'mad,' joyously affirmative.  Every Kerouac aficionado thrills to the passage near the beginning of On the Road where Sal confesses: ". . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved . . . ." (p. 9)

The very name 'Sal Paradise' is a tip-off.  Salvatore, Salvator: savior.  Paradise: the prelapsarian state, the state before the lapsus or Fall, or else heaven.  Is there any book of his where our bourbon-besotted boy does not talk of heaven? It's all about salvation, happiness, heaven.  In part this is why he distances himself from Buddhism whose solution to suffering is merely negative: 

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

And then there is the later OTR passage in which the 'beat' is explained:

. . . his [Dean's] bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins saying, "Yes, yes, yes, " as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now . . . . He was BEAT — the root, the soul of Beatific. (OTR, 161)

See also this Kerouac  interview for confirmation.  This was two years before his death.

Siegel's piece, then, is quite a stretch, but very interesting nonetheless.  But it is annoying when he quotes Ginsberg but provides no reference.  

Kerouac October Quotation #8 The Detritus of Literary Production

Satori in Paris (Grove Press, 1966), p. 35:

The whole library groaned with the accumulated debris of centures of recorded folly, as tho you had to record folly in the Old or the New World anyhow, like my closet with its incredible debris of cluttered old letters by the thousands, books, dust, magazines, childhood boxscores, the likes of which when I woke up the other night from a pure sleep, made me groan to think this is what I was doing with my waking hours: burdening myself with junk neither I nor anybody else should really want or will ever remember in Heaven.

Hits a nerve.  I also note the incongruity of a book ostensibly about satori mentioning heaven.  My longstanding sentimental attachment to the old dharma lush makes me overlook his silly misuse of 'satori' to refer to his inebriated Parisian experiences.

Happiness

"You can't make the unhappy happy."  I just heard Dennis Prager say this during his Happiness Hour.  An important truth.  There are people who are bent on being miserable, no matter what their circumstances or endowments.  As a general rule, they are best avoided if you want to be happy yourself.

Companion post:  People Are What They Are.

Supererogation and Suberogation

It would be neat if all actions could be sorted into three jointly exhaustive classes: the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. These deontic modes would then be analogous to the alethic modes of possibility, impossibility, and necessity. Intuitively, the permissible is the morally possible, that which we may do; the impermissible is the morally impossible, that which we may not do; and the obligatory is the morally necessary, that which we must do.

Pursuing the analogy, we note that the following two alethic modal principles each has a deontic analog, where 'p' ranges over propositions and 'A' over actions:

Joseph Sobran

Joseph Sobran is dead at the age of 64.  Beginning as a paleocon, he ended up an anarchist, and apparently something of an anti-Semite.    His 1985 Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow, however, contains a wealth of important ideas worth ruminating on.  A couple of excerpts, not necessarily the best:

"The poor" are to liberalism roughly what "the proletariat" is to Communism–a formalistic device for legitimating the assumption of power. What matters, for practical liberals, is not that (for example) the black illegitimacy rate has nearly tripled since the dawn of the Great Society; it is that a huge new class of beneficiaries has been engendered–beneficiaries who vote, and who feel entitled to money that must be taken from others. It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised. But such a proposal would now be called inhuman, which helps account for the gargantuan increase in the size and scope of federal spending. Corrupt politicians make headlines; but no honest politician dares to refer to the problem of corrupt voters, who use the state as an instrument of gain.

[. . .]

The enemy, for socialism, is any permanent authority, whether it is a long-standing church or a holy scripture, whose tendency is to put a brake on political power. In fact power and authority are often confused nowadays: the thoroughly politicized man who seeks power can only experience and interpret authority as a rival form of power, because it impedes his ambition for a thoroughly politicized society. But authority is more nearly the opposite of power. It offers a standard of truth or morality that is indifferent and therefore often opposed to current desires and forces, standing in judgment over them. If God has revealed Himself to man, the progressive agenda may find itself seriously inconvenienced.

For this reason, religion is a source of deep anxiety to the liberal. He harps on its historical sins: Crusades, Inquisitions, witch burnings, wars. He never notices that the crimes of atheist regimes, in less than a century, have dwarfed those of all organized religions in recorded history. He sees Christianity's sporadic persecutions as being of its essence; he regards Communism's unbroken persecution as incidental to its potential for good. He warns of the "danger" posed by American fundamentalists (one of the most gentle and law-abiding segments of the population) and is unchastened by the results of "peace" in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Kerouac October Quotation #6: Slim Gaillard, the Man Who Knew Time

This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day. 

From On the Road:

 … one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …" He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Light up a cigarodi, mix yourself a wine spodiodi and then dig Slim Gaillard's Cement Mixer mentioned above.  While you're at it, check out the cat on bass in this clip.  Go, man, go!  (Never did get around to reading John Clellon Holmes' Go.)

 

Sinatra on Rock and Roll

Frank Sinatra died on 14 May 1998. Here we read:

 . . . as Sinatra began to recover from Gardner, he became more outspoken. In 1957, he denounced rock 'n' roll as "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. … It manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth."

That is about as fair as my judgment, back in the '60s, of the music of Sinatra and his fellow Rat Pack crooners: "lounge lizard music." Enamored as I was of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Sinatra's music struck me as so much booze-drenched escapist rubbish, devoid of reality content. Empty glamor and glitz, at home in the plastic fantastic fool's paradise called Las Vegas.

But escapism is what Sinatra and his generational cohort needed, as mine needed a music of engagement. Different generations with different needs and sensibilities. In the meantime, I've come to appreciate his artistry.

Angel Eyes.  Only the Lonely. 

Metaphysics at Cindy’s: The Ontological Stucture of Contingent Conreta

Over Sunday breakfast at Cindy's, a hardscrabble Mesa, Arizona eatery not unwelcoming to metaphysicians and motorcyclists alike, Peter  Lupu fired a double-barreled objection at my solution to Deck's Paradox.  The target, however, was not hit.  My solution requires that (a) concrete particulars can be coherently 'assayed' (to use a favorite word of Gustav Bergmann), or given an ontological analysis in terms of constituents some or all of which are universals, and (b) modally contingent concrete particulars can be coherently assayed as composed of necessary beings.

Peter denies both of (a) and (b), without good reason as it seems to me.  Let's begin with some definitions pithily presented.

Definitions

Abstract =df causally inert.

Concrete =df not abstract.

Universal =df repeatable (multiply exemplifiable).

Particular =df unrepeatable.

Modally contingent=df existent in some but not all broadly-logically possible worlds.

Modally necessary =df not modally contingent and not modally impossible.

Ad (a).  One form of the question is:  Could a concrete particular be coherently construed as a bundle universals?  Peter thinks not: "But the unification of two universals U and V is another universal W, not a particular." (From a two page handout he brought to breakfast.  How many people that you know bring handouts to breakfast?!)  Now bundle-of-universals theories of particulars face various standard objections, but as far as I know no one in the literature has made Peter's objection.  Presumably for good reason: it is a bad objection that confuses conjunction with the bundling relation.

We understand conjunction as a propositional connective.  Given the propositions a is red and b is round we understand that the conjunction a is red & b is round is true iff both conjuncts are true.  It is clear that a conjunction of propositions is itself a proposition.  By a slight extension we can speak meaningfully of a conjunction of propositional functions, and from there we can move to talk of conjunctions of properties.  Assuming that properties are universals, we can speak of conjunctions of universals.  It is clear that a conjunction of universals is itself a universal.  Thus the conjunction of Redness and Roundness is itself a universal, a multiply exemplifiable entity.  I will use 'Konjunction'  to single out conjunction of universals.

Now it should be obvious that a bundle of universals is not a conjunction of universals.  Let K be the Konjunction operator: it operates upon  universals to form universals.  Let B be the bundling operator: it operates upon universals to form particulars.  Bundling is not Konjunction.  So far, then, Peter seems to have failed to make an elementary distinction.

Now suppose Peter objects that nothing could operate upon universals to form a particular.  Universals in, universals out.  Then I say that he is just wrong: the set-theoretical braces — { } — denote an operator that operates upon items of any category to form sets of those items.  Now it should be obvious that a set of universals is not itself a universal, but a particular.  A Konjunction of universals is a universal, but a set of universals is not a universal, but a particular.  The Konjunction of Redness and Roundness is exemplifiable; but no set is exemplifiable.

Am I saying that a bundle of universals is a set of universals?  No.  I am saying that it is false to assume that any operation upon universals will result in a universal.  What I have said so far suffices to refute Peter's first objection, which was that the unification of two universals yields a third universal. You can see that to be false by noting that the unification into a set of two or more universals does not yield a universal but a particular.

Ad (b).  Our second question is whether a contingent particular could have as ontological constituents necessary beings.  Peter thinks not.  He thinks that anything composed of necessary beings will itself be a necessary being.  And so, given that universals are necessary beings, and that concrete particulars are composed of universals, no concrete particular can be modally contingent.

This objection fares no better than the first.  Suppose Redness and Roundness are compresent.  (You will recall that Russell took the bundling relation to be the compresence relation.  See An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 1940, Chapter 6.)  Each of these universals, we are assuming, is a necessary being.  But it doesn't follow that their compresence is necessary; it could easily be contingent.  Here and now I see a complete complex of compresence two of whose constituent universals are Redness and Roundness.  But surely there is no necessity that these two universals co-occur or be com-present.  After all, Redness is often encountered compresent with shapes that are logically incompatible with Roundness.  Compresence, then, is a contingent relation.  It follows that complexes of compresence are contingent.  Necessarily, Rednessexists.  Necessarily, Roundness exists.  But it does not follow that, necessarily, Redness and Roundness are compresent: surely there are possible worlds in which they are not.

Peter's argument for his conclusion commits the fallacy of composition:

1. Every universal necessarily exists.

2. Every concrete particular is composed of universals. Therefore,

3. Every concrete particular is composed of things that necessarily exist. Therefore,

4. Every concrete particular necessarily exists.

The move from (3) to(4) is the fallacy of composition.  One cannot assume that if the parts of a whole have a certain property, then the whole has those properties.

 

Literary Kicks

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place. 

In his response to me, Asher points out something I wouldn't dream of denying, namely, that Siddartha Gautama recommended a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence.  That's true, but pertains only to the means whereby desire as such is to be conquered.  The fact remains that for Buddhism desire as such is the problem, as opposed to misdirected desire, desire for unworthy of objects.