Elliot C. asked me about tropes. What follows is a re-post from 30 March 2016, slightly emended, which stands up well under current scrutiny. Perhaps Elliot will find the time to tell me whether he finds it clear and convincing and whether it answers his questions.
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A reader has been much exercised of late by trope theory and other questions in ontology. He has been sharing his enthusiasm with me. He espies
. . . an apparent antinomy at the heart of trope theory. On the one hand, tropes are logically prior to objects. But on the other hand, objects (or, more precisely, the trope-bundles constituting objects) are logically prior to tropes, because without objects tropes have nowhere to be – without objects (or the trope-bundles constituting objects) tropes cannot be. Moreover, as has I hope been shown, a trope cannot be in (or constitute) any object or trope-bundle other than that in which it already is.
How might a trope theorist plausibly respond to this? Can she? [My use of the feminine third-person singular pronoun does not signal my nonexistent political correctness, but is an anticipatory reference to Anna-Sofia Maurin whom I will discuss below. 'Anna-Sofia'! What a beautiful name, so aptronymic. Nomen est omen.)
What are tropes?
It is a 'Moorean fact,' a pre-analytic datum, that things have properties. This is a pre-philosophical observation. In making it we are not yet doing philosophy. If things have properties, then there are properties. This is a related pre-philosophical observation. We begin to do philosophy when we ask: given that there are properties, what exactly are they? What is their nature? How are we to understand them? This is not the question, what properties are there, but the question, what are properties? The philosophical question, then, is not whether there are properties, nor is it the question what properties there are, but the question what properties are.
On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on the standard bundle version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a nonstandard theory championed by C. B. Martin which I will not further discuss). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ 'Has' and cognates are words of ordinary English: they do not commit us to ontological theories of what the having consists in. So don't confuse 'a has F-ness' with 'a instantiates F-ness.' Instantiation is a term of art, a terminus technicus in ontology. Or at least that is what it is in my book. More on instantiation in a moment.
Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness.
It is therefore inaccurate to speak of tropes as property instances. A trope is not a property instance on one clear understanding of the latter. First-order instantiation is a dyadic asymmetrical relation: if a instantiates F-ness, then it is not the case that F-ness instantiates a. (Higher order instantiation is not asymmetrical but nonsymmetrical. Exercise for the reader: prove it!) Suppose the instantiation relation connects the individual Socrates here below to the universal wisdom in the realm of platonica. Then a further item comes into consideration, namely, the wisdom of Socrates. This is a property instance. It is a particular, an unrepeatable, since it is the wisdom of Socrates and of no one else. This distinguishes it from the universal, wisdom, which is repeated in each wise individual. On the other side, the wisdom of Socrates is distinct from Socrates since there is more to Socrates that his being wise. There is his being snub-nosed, etc. Now why do I maintain that a trope is not a property instance? Two arguments.
Tropes are simple, not complex. (See Maurin, here.) They are not further analyzable. Property instances, however, are complex, not simple. 'The F-ness of a' – 'the wisdom of Socrates,' e.g. — picks out a complex item that is analyzable into F-ness, a, and the referent of 'of.' Therefore, tropes are not property instances.
A second, related, argument. Tropes are in no way proposition-like. Property instances are proposition-like as can be gathered from the phrases we use to refer to them. Ergo, tropes are not property instances.
One can see from this that tropes on standard trope theory, as ably presented by Maurin in her Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, are very strange items, so strange indeed that one can wonder whether they are coherently conceivable at all by minds of our discursive constitution. Here is one problem.
How could anything be both predicable and impredicable?
Properties are predicable items. So if tropes are properties, then tropes are predicable items. If the redness of my tomato, call it 'Tom,' is a trope, then this trope is predicable of Tom. Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Tom is red.' On one way of parsing this we have a subject term 'Tom' and a predicate term '___ is red.' Thus the parsing: Tom/is red. But then the trope would appear to have a proposition-like structure, the structure of what Russell calls a propositional function. Clearly, '___ is red' does not pick out a proposition, but it does pick out something proposition-like and thus something complex. But now we have trouble since tropes are supposed to be simple. Expressed as an aporetic triad or antilogism:
a. Tropes are simple. b. Tropes are predicable. c. Predicable items are complex.
The limbs of the antilogism are each of them rationally supportable, but they cannot all be true. Individually plausible, collectively inconsistent. The conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (b) and (c) entails ~(a).
We might try to get around this difficulty by parsing 'Tom is red' differently, as: Tom/is/red. On this scheme, 'Tom' and 'red' are both names. 'Tom' names a concrete particular whereas 'red' names an abstract particular. ('Abstract' is here being used in the classical, not the Quinean, sense.) As Maurin relates, D. C. Williams, who introduced the term 'trope' in its present usage back in the '50s, thinks of the designators of tropes as akin to names and demonstratives, not as definite descriptions. But then it becomes difficult to see how tropes could be predicable entities.
A tomato is not a predicable entity. One cannot predicate a tomato of anything. The same goes for the parts of a tomato; the seeds, e.g., are not predicable of anything. Now if a tomato is a bundle of tropes, then it is a whole of ontological parts, these latter being tropes. If we think of the tomato as a (full-fledged) substance, then the tropes constituting it are "junior substances." (See D. M. Armstrong, 1989, 115) But now the problem is: how can one and the same item — a trope – be both a substance and a property, both an object and a concept (in Fregean jargon), both impredicable and predicable? Expressed as an aporetic dyad or antinomy:
d. Tropes are predicable items. e. Tropes are not predicable items.
Maurin seems to think that the limbs of the dyad can both be true: ". . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance." If the limbs can both be true, then they are not contradictory despite appearances.
How can we defuse the apparent contradiction in the d-e dyad? Consider again Tom and the redness trope R. To say that R is predicable of Tom is to say that Tom is a trope bundle having R as an ontological (proper) part. To say that R is impredicable or a substance is to say that R is capable of independent existence. Recall that Armstrong plausibly defines a substance as anything logically capable of independent existence.
It looks as if we have just rid ourselves of the contradiction. The sense in which tropes are predicable is not the sense in which they are impredicable. They are predicable as constituents of trope bundles; they are impredicable in themselves. Equivalently, tropes are properties when they are compresent with sufficiently many other tropes to form trope bundles (concrete particulars); but they are substances in themselves apart from trope bundles as the 'building blocks' out of which such bundles are (logically or rather ontologically) constructed.
Which came first: the whole or the parts?
But wait! This solution appears to have all the advantages of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. For now we bang up against the above Antinomy, or something like it, to wit:
f. Tropes as substances, as ontological building blocks, are logically prior to concrete particulars. g. Tropes as properties, as predicable items, are not logically prior to concrete particulars.
This looks like an aporia in the strict and narrow sense: an insoluble problem. The limbs cannot both be true. And yet each is an entailment of standard (bundle) trope theory. If tropes are the "alphabet of being" in a phrase from Williams, then they are logically prior to what they spell out. But if tropes are unrepeatable properties, properties as particulars, then a trope cannot exist except as a proper ontological part of a trope bundle, the very one of which it is a part. For if a trope were not tied to the very bundle of which it is a part, it would be a universal, perhaps only an immanent universal, but a universal all the same.
Furthermore, what makes a trope abstract in the classical (as opposed to Quinean) sense of the term is that it is abstracted from a concretum. But then the concretum comes first, ontologically speaking, and (g) is true.
Interim conclusion: Trope theory, pace Anna-Sofia Maurin, is incoherent. But of course we have only scratched the surface.
Pictured below, left-to-right: Anna-Sofia Maurin, your humble correspondent, Arianna Betti, Jan Willem Wieland. Geneva, Switzerland, December 2008. It was a cold night.
Your theory is that existence is the unity of a thing’s constituents. What I wasn’t entirely clear on is just what those constituents are. In one section of your book, you argue for the real distinction between essence and existence, which gave me the impression that existence was a constituent (rather than, as Miller would say, a component) along with essence (which seems to me the traditional compositional analysis);however, elsewhere you deny existence is a constituent. I am sure the misunderstanding is on my part, but clarification would be most helpful.
My question at the beginning of the book is: What is it for a concrete contingent individual to exist? My cat Max is an example of a concrete individual. Max exists. Nothing can exist without properties. So Max has properties. Some are essential, some are accidental, some are monadic, and some are relational. Take the conjunction of all of these properties and call it the wide essence or quiddity (whatness) of Max. Now one of my claims is that existence is not included in the wide essence of any contingent being. (Max is of course a contingent being which is to say that, although he exists, at every moment at which he exists his nonexistence is possible.) At the same time, though, existence is predicable of Max: 'exists' is an admissible first-level predicate, pace the 'Fressellians.' Barry Miller and I agree about this.
I have said enough to motivate a version of the famous distinctio realis, the real distinction of essence and existence. About anything whatsoever we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?) In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in Max there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold.
Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the distinction is real, not projected by us. The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it.
So, to answer the reader's first question, while I do hold to some version of the real distinction, I do not maintain that the existence of a contingent being is a constituent thereof. The existence of a contingent being is not a spatial, temporal, or ontological part of it. It is the contingent unity or contingent togetherness of all of its ontological parts; it could not possibly be one of them. The whole thing exists; the existence of the thing cannot be assigned to one proper part thereof. I believe I call this "The holism of existence" in my book.
To get some idea of what an ontological part might be, consider a bundle theory of ordinary concrete particulars. The ontological parts are the properties, whether universals or tropes, the bundling of which constitutes the particular. The existence of an ordinary particular, Max, for example, would then be the contingent compresence of the properties, where the compresence of the properties is not itself a property. (Exercise for the reader: explain why compresence cannot itself be a property or a relation.)
Now the bundle-approach is not the approach to constituent ontology that I espouse in my book, but it is in some ways similar. In my book I assay ordinary particulars as concrete facts, taking Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong as inspirations. The latter's thick particulars are facts of the form a's being F, where F is a maximal conjunction of properties and a is a thin particular. On this assay, my beloved Max has as ontological constituents a thin particular and a maximal bunch of properties construed as universals. The existence of Max then turns out to be the peculiar fact-making contingent unity of all of his ontological constituents, a unity that equips him to serve as the truth-maker of all the wonderful truths (true truth-bearers) about him.
There is a problem with this view and it is similar to the mess the hylomorphic constituent ontologists get into when they find that they have to posit materia prima which is, arguably, a Grenzbegriff if not an Unbegriff.
Facts are the logical objects corresponding to whole declarative sentences, or rather to some of them. When it comes to facts, Panayot Butchvarov appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of both realism and anti-realism. For the realist, there are facts. For the anti-realist, there are no facts. Let us briefly review why both positions are attractive yet problematic. We will then turn to semirealism as to a via media between Scylla and Charybdis.
Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as 'Al is fat.' Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true. There must be something external to the sentence that contributes to its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person, or anything like that. 'Al is fat' is true because there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true. There is this short man, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs. There is nothing linguistic or mental about the man or his weight. Here is the sound core of correspondence theories of truth. Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured. The 'because' is not a causal 'because.' The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat. He is fat because he eats too much. The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.' Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true — given that it is not true in virtue either of its logical form or ex vi terminorum – we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true. I myself, a realist, don't see how this can be avoided even though I admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear.
Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker? It can't be Al by himself, and it can't be fatness by itself. Nor can it be the pair of the two. For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, but the first does not instantiate the second. What's needed, apparently, is the fact of Al's being fat. So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory. Veritas sequitur esse is not enough. It is not enough that 'Al' and 'fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. Truth-makers cannot be 'things' or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort. (Or at least this is so for the simple predications we are now considering.)
The argument I have just sketched, the truth-maker argument for facts, is very powerful, but it gives rises to puzzles and protests. There is the Strawsonian protest that facts are merely hypostatized sentences, shadows genuine sentences cast upon the world. Butchvarov quotes P. F. Strawson's seminal 1950 discussion: “If you prise the sentences off the world, you prise the facts off it too. . . .” (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, 174) Strawson again: “The only plausible candidate for what (in the world) makes a sentence true is the fact it states; but the fact it states is not something in the world.” (174)
Why aren't facts in the world? Consider the putative fact of my table's being two inches from the wall. Obviously, this fact is not itself two inches from the wall or in any spatial position. The table and the wall are in space; the fact is not. One can drive a nail into the table or into the wall, but not into the fact, etc. Considerations such as these suggest to the anti-realist that facts are not in the world and that they are but sentences reified. After all, to distinguish a fact from a non-fact (whether a particular or a universal) we must have recourse to a sentence in the indicative mood: a fact is introduced as the worldly correlate of a true sentence. If there is no access to facts except via sentences, as the correlates of true sentences, then this will suggest to those of an anti-realist bent that facts are hypostatizations of true declarative sentences.
One might also cite the unperceivability of facts as a reason to deny their existence. I see the table, and I see the wall. It may also be granted that I see that the desk is about two inches from the wall. But does it follow that I see a relational fact? Not obviously. If I see a relational fact, then presumably I see the relation two inches from. But I don't see this relation. And so, Butchvarov argues (175) that one does not see the relational fact either. The invisibility of relations and facts is a strike against them. Another of the puzzles about facts concerns how a fact is related to its constituents. Obviously a fact is not identical to its constituents. This is because the constituents can exist without the fact existing. Nor can a fact be an entity in addition to its constituents, something over and above them, for the simple reason that it is composed of them. We can put this by saying that no fact is wholly distinct from its constituents. The fact is more than its constituents, but apart from them it is nothing. A third possibility is that a fact is the togetherness of its constituents, where this togetherness is grounded in a a special unifying constituent. Thus the fact of a's being F consists of a, F-ness, and a nexus of exemplification. But this leads to Bradley's regress.
A fact is not something over and above its constituents but their contingent unity. This unity, however, cannot be explained by positing a special unifying constituent, on pain of Bradley's regress. So if a fact has a unifier, that unifier must be external to the fact. But what in the world could that be? Presumably nothing in the world. It would have to be something outside the (phenomenal) world. It would have to be something like Kant's transcendental unity of apperception. I push this notion in an onto-theological direction in my book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated. But by taking this line, I move away from the realism that the positing of facts was supposed to secure. Facts are supposed to be ontological grounds, extramental and extralinguistic. If mind or Mind is brought in in any form to secure the unity of a truth-making fact, then we end up with some form of idealism, whether pschological or transcendental or onto-theological.
So we are in an aporetic pickle. We have good reason to be realists and we have good reason to be anti-realists. (The arguments above on both sides were mere sketches; they are stronger than they might appear. ) Since we cannot be both realists and anti-realists, we might try to mediate the positions and achieve a synthesis. My book was one attempt at a synthesis. Butchvarov's semi-realism is another. I am having a hard time, though, understanding how exactly Butchvarov's semi-realism achieves the desired synthesis. Butchvarov:
Semirealism regarding facts differs from realism regarding facts by denying that true sentences stand for special entities, additional to and categorially different from the entities mentioned in the sentences, that can be referred to, described, and analyzed independently of the sentences. [. . .] But semirealism regarding facts also differs from antirealism regarding facts by acknowledging that there is more to truth than the sentences . . . that are true. (180)
In terms of my simple example, semirealism about facts holds that there is no special entity that the sentence 'Al is fat' stands for that is distinct from what 'Al and 'fat' each stand for. In reality, what we have at the very most are Al and fatness, but not Al's being fat. Semirealism about facts also holds, however, that a sentence like 'Al is fat' cannot just be true: if it is true there must be something that 'makes' it true, where this truth-maker cannot be another sentence (proposition, belief, judgment, etc.) or somebody's say-so, or something merely cultural or institutional or otherwise conventional. And let's not forget: the truth-maker cannot be Al by himself or fatness by itself or even the pair of the two. For that pair (ordered pair, set, mereological sum . . .) could exist even if Al is not fat. (Suppose Al exists and fatness exists in virtue of being instantiated by Harry but not by Al.)
How can semirealism avoid the contradiction: There are facts and there are no facts? If the realist says that there are facts, and that anti-realist says that there aren't, the semi-realist maintains that 'There are facts' is an “improper proposition” (178) so that both asserting it and denying it are improper. In explaining the impropriety, Butchvarov relies crucially on Wittgenstein's distinction between formal and material concepts and his related distinction between saying and showing. Obscurum per obscurius? Let's see.
The idea seems to be that while one can show that there are facts by using declarative sentences, one cannot say or state that there are facts by using declarative sentences, or refer to any particular fact by using a declarative sentence. If there are facts, then we should be able to give an example of one. 'This page is white is a fact,' won't do because it is ill-formed. (179) We can of course say, in correct English, 'That this page is white is a fact.' But 'that this page is white' is not a sentence, but a noun phrase. Not being a sentence, it cannot be either true or false. And since it cannot be either true or false, it cannot refer to a proposition-like item that either obtains or does not obtain. So 'that this page is white' does not refer to a fact. We cannot use this noun phrase to refer to the fact because what we end up referring to is an object, not a fact. Though a fact is not a sentence or a proposition, it is proposition-like: it has a structure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. No object, however, is proposition-like. To express the fact we must use the sentence. Using the sentence, we show what cannot be said.
On one reading, Butchvarov's semirealism about facts is the claim that there are facts but they cannot be named. They cannot be named because the only device that could name them would be a sentence and sentences are not names. On this reading, Butchvarov is close to Frege. Frege held that there are concepts, but they cannot be named. Only objects can be named, and concepts are not objects. If you try to name a concept, you will not succeed, for what is characteristic of concepts, and indeed all functions, is that they are unsaturated (ungesaettigt). And so we cannot say either
The concept horse is a concept
or
The concept horse is not a concept.
The first, though it looks like a tautology, is actually false because 'The concept horse' picks out an object. The second, though it looks like a contradiction, is actually true for the same reason. Similarly, we cannot say either
The fact that snow is white is a fact
or
The fact that snow is white is not a fact.
The first, though it looks like a tautology, is actually false because 'The fact that snow is white' picks out an object. The second, though it looks like a contradiction, is actually true for the same reason.
It is the unsaturatedness of Fregean concepts that makes them unnameable, and it is the proposition-like character of facts that makes them unnameable.
Semirealism about facts, then, seems to be the view that there are facts, but that we cannot say that there are: they have a nature which prevents us from referring to them without distorting them. But then the position is realistic, and 'semirealism' is not a good name for it: the 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological.
Other things Butchvarov says suggest that he has something else in mind with 'semirealism about facts.' If he agrees with Strawson that facts are hypostatized declarative sentences, and argues against them on the ground of their unperceivability, then he cannot be saying that there are facts but we cannot say that there are. He must be denying that there are facts. But then why isn't he a flat-out antirealist?
Can you help me, Butch? What am I not understanding? What exactly do you mean by 'semirealism about facts'?
BUTCHVAROV RESPONDS:
Your grasp of the issue is excellent, Bill. “[T]he 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological” seems to me right; this is why it is semirealism, not realism. But it is logical semirealism: “Logical semirealism differs from both logical antirealism and logical realism much as Kant’s position on causality differed from both antirealism and realism regarding causality, and Wittgenstein’s position on other people’s sensations differed from both antirealism and realism regarding “other minds” (page 166).
The reason facts are only “semireal” in my view is that they have a logical structure. As you say in your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated, “facts could be truth-making only if they are “proposition-like,” “structured in a proposition-like way” – only if “a fact has a structure that can mirror the structure of a proposition.” The structure of a proposition is its logical structure. In Part Two of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy I argue against realism regarding logical structure, but I also reject the simplistic antirealism regarding logical structure that says “there is only language.” Surely there are no ands, ors, or iffs in the world. It’s not just that logical objects and structures cannot be perceived or even “said.” Surely words like “and,” “or,” and “if” do not stand for anything physical, mental, or other-worldly. Yet no less surely they are not merely words.
Since facts necessarily, indeed essentially, possess a logical structure, my argument against logical realism applies also to realism regarding facts but, again, I reject the simplistic antirealism regarding facts that says “there is only language.” I wrote: “[T]here is a third way of understanding facts, which is neither realist nor antirealist. It is semirealist. In general, if a proposition is in dispute between realism and antirealism, with the realist asserting and the antirealist denying it, the semirealist would differ from both by holding that it is an improper proposition, perhaps even that there is no such proposition, and thus that both asserting and denying it are improper. There is an analogy here with sophisticated agnosticism. The theist asserts the proposition “God exists” and the atheist denies it, but the sophisticated agnostic questions, for varying reasons we need not consider here, its propriety” (pages 178-9).
I would share your discomfort if a philosopher said “There are facts and there are no facts”( I can’t find the sentence in Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). But I would understand it, just as I understand Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,” and Wittgenstein’s “some things cannot be said but show themselves.” All four are puzzling. Sometimes we have to content ourselves with truths that puzzle us, make us wonder. But philosophy begins in wonder. We could, of course, invent new terms, perhaps saying that while facts do not exist they subsist, but I doubt that this would lead to better understanding.
Thanks for the response. You never say "There are facts and there are no facts." But it seems to me that you give good arguments for both limbs of this (apparent) contradiction. Because the arguments on both sides are impressive, we have a very interesting, and vexing, problem on our hands, especially if you hold, as I think you do, that there are no true contradictions.
I was under the impression that the doctrine of semirealism (about facts) was supposed to eliminate the contradiction and show it to be merely apparent. It seems to me that if we distinguish between existence and subsistence as two different modes of Being, then we could say that while facts do not exist in the way their constituents do, they are not nothing either — they don't exist but subsist. This would seem to be a way between the horns of the dilemma. In your brilliant formulation, "There is more to the truth of sentences than the sentences that are true." On the other hand, there are the Strawsonian and other arguments against facts. On this way of looking at things, semirealism comes down to a doctrine of modes of Being.
What I don't understand however, is how this is supposed to square with Wittgenstein's say vs. show distinction.
On p. 76 of Anthropocentrism you refer to the existence-subsistence distinction. But then on p. 77 you say that this distinction is not the same as W's distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown — though it resembles it in motivation.
So here is my criticism: you are not using 'semirealism' univocally. If a subsistent, a number say, is semireal, then that is clear to me since I myself advocate (against most contemp. anal. phils.) distinctions between modes of Being. But if you say that numbers are semireal in the sense that 'There are numbers' cannot be *said,* that the existence of numbers can only be *shown* by the use of numerals, then that is a quite different use of 'semireal.'
Why? Because one could take the say-show line while holding that there are no modes of Being, and vice versa.
So I have two problems. One is that you seem to equivocate on 'semireal.' The other is that W's say-show distinction is not clear to me. So if you explain semirealism in terms of the latter, then we have a case of *obscurum per obscurius.*
>>Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,”<<
You assimilate these to each other. But I see a crucial difference. Meinong employs a paradoxical formulation for literary effect, a formulation that expresses a proposition that is in no way contradictory. All he is saying is that some items are beingless which you will agree is non-contradictory. In other words, the proposition, the thought, that Meinong is expressing by his clever formulation is non-contradictory despite the fact that the verbal formulation he employs is either contradictory (assuming that 'there are' is used univocally) or equivocal.
But what is going on in "The concept *horse* is not a concept" is quite different. What Frege is saying in effect is that we cannot refer to concepts in a way that preserves their predicative function, their unsaturatedness. 'The concept *horse*' is a name, and only objects can be named. So when we try to say anything about a concept we must fail inasmuch as a reference to a concept transforms it into an object thereby destroying its predicative function.
Frege anticipates Wittgenstein in this. I can say '7 is prime' but not 'Primeness is instantiated by 7.'
This is similar to the problem we have with propositions and facts (which have a proposition-like structure).
As you point out, 'Snow is white is true' is ill-formed. But 'That snow is white is true' is false inasmuch as 'That snow is white' is a nominal phrase that picks out an object, and no object can be true.
At his point someone might propose a disquotational-type theory according to which 'true' in 'That snow is white is true' does not express a property of something but merely serves to transform the nominal phrase back into the sentence 'Snow is white.'
What refutes this is your point that "There is more to the truth of sentences than the sentences that are true."
I am answering two posts. As to the one about Anscombe and GeacH, I agree completely, Bill. I’ve always marveled that philosophers like Anscombe and Geach were so easily influenced by Russell’s attacks on Meinong. Russell of course did know what Meinong meant and initially even agreed with him but then invented his theory of definite descriptions that allowed him to “analyze away” Meinong’s examples.
Now I come to the other post. I am not sure there is genuine disagreement between us. Regarding existence and subsistence, we might look at [Gustav]Bergmann. He “renounced his earlier distinction between existence and subsistence, subscribing now to the seeming paradox that ‘whatever is thinkable exists.’ Yet he acknowledged that ‘the differences among some of the several existents…are very great indeed…momentous, or enormous,’ thus acknowledging the rationale for the distinction” (page 142 of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). Whether we “distinguish between existence and subsistence as two different modes of Being” or say that everything (‘thinkable’) exists though the differences among some existents are enormous seems to me a matter of words. I am uneasy about using the phrase “modes of Being” because it has had numerous other applications, e.g., matter and mind, universals and particulars, infinite and fine, and so on. As to the meaning of “semireal,” let me begin with a quotation from the Introduction: “[I]n the case of metaphysical antirealism, numerous qualifications, distinctions, and explanations are needed. No metaphysical antirealist denies the reality of everything, just as no metaphysical realist asserts the reality of everything, including, say, the Easter Bunny. The solipsist says, ‘Only I exist,’ not ‘Nothing exists.’ Berkeley denied that there are material objects, he called them ‘stupid material substances,’ but he insisted on the existence of minds and their ideas. According to Kant…. material objects are ‘transcendentally ideal,’ dependent on our cognitive faculties, but they are nonetheless ‘empirically real,’ not mere fancy. Bertrand Russell distinguished between existence and subsistence: some things do not exist, yet they are not nothing – they subsist; for example, material objects exist but universals only subsist. According to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, some things cannot be “said,” i. e., represented in language,but they “show” themselves in what can be said. Among them, he held, are those that matter most in logic, ethics, and religion” (page 15).
I try to explain Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing as follows: “The distinction has a straightforward, noncontroversial application even to ordinary pictures, say, paintings and photographs, indeed to representations generally. And the [associated] picture theory [of meaning] is merely a subtler version of the traditional theory of meaning and thought, which was unabashedly representational, ‘pictorial’: thought involves ‘ideas,’ often explicitly understood as mental images or pictures, and the meaning of an expression is what it stands for” (page 67).”
“In a painting, much is shown that is not and cannot be pictured by the painting or any part of it. For example, the painting may represent a tree next to a barn, each represented by a part of the painting, and the spatial relation between the parts of the painting that represent the tree and the barn would represent their relation of being next to each other. But nothing in the painting represents that relation’s being a relation, nothing ‘says’ that their being next to each other is a relation (rather than, say, a shape or color). Yet the painting shows this, indeed must show it in order to represent what it does represent. What it shows cannot be denied as one might deny, for example, that the painting is a portrait of Churchill. The absence from the painting of what it only shows would not be like Churchill’s absence. Of course, paintings do not consist of words, and sentences are only ‘logical’ pictures. But like all pictures, physical or mental, paintings are logical pictures, though not all logical pictures are paintings” (page 68).
You write, “What I don't understand however, is how this [the distinction between real and semireal] is supposed to square with Wittgenstein's say vs. show distinction.” My concern is with logical semirealism, and Wittgenstein applied his distinction mainly to logical expressions. If some things cannot be said but show themselves, neither calling them real nor calling them unreal would be quite right. So I opted for calling them semireal. Of course, nothing of philosophical importance hangs on what word is chosen.
You write, “if you say that numbers are semireal in the sense that 'There are numbers' cannot be *said,* that the existence of numbers can only be *shown* by the use of numerals, then that is a quite different use of 'semireal.'” I have offered no view about numbers, though Wittgenstein did include “number” in his list of formal concepts: “’Object,’ ‘complex,’ ‘fact,’ ‘function,’ ‘number’ signify formal concepts, represented in logical notation by variables, for example, the pseudo-concept object by the variable ‘x’ (Tractatus 4.1272). The properties they appear to stand for are formal, internal, such that it is unthinkable that what they are attributed to should not possess them (4.123). For this reason it would be just as nonsensical to assert that something has a formal property as to deny it (4.124).” But Wittgenstein was aware that the status of numbers is far too complicated an issue to be resolved by just saying that “There are numbers” cannot be “said.” Much later he wrote his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.
Please forgive me for resorting to such lengthy quotations. I tried to avoid them but found what I was writing inferior to what I had already written.
Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but only alphabetically.) Here is footnote 3:
Catholic philosophers have often said not that God’s existence is a consequence of his nature but that his existence and his nature are identical. This doctrine is one of the many implications of the more general “doctrine of Divine Simplicity”, according to which phrases like ‘God’s power’, ‘God’s wisdom’, ‘God’s love’, ‘God’s nature’ and ‘God’s existence’ all denote one and the same thing, namely the Divine Substance – that is, God, God himself, God full stop. The doctrine of Divine Simplicity, however, presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute (for present purposes, “Aristotelianism”). From the point of view of a Platonist like myself, the doctrine of Divine Simplicity is wrong simply because it presupposes Aristotelianism, and Aristotelianism is false.
Here is Dominik's question:
Where does that idea come from? [The idea that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology.] Seriously, I don't understand. It might be disputable whether we can reconcile Plotinus' understanding of the way the One exists with a Thomistic view about God, but divine simplicity is a core pillar of (Neo-)Platonist arguments, e.g. the argument from composition. As said, perhaps the identification of God with existence is a newer concept due to development by philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition, but prima facie I think formulating the dispute the way van Inwagen does, muddies the water. Divine Simplicity mustn't be identified with an explicitly Thomistic formulation, this just undersells the disputes the doctrine has historically surrounded [undersells the disputes that have historically surrounded the doctrine].
1) Kowalski is right that the ontological simplicity of the Absolute is at the core of Platonism and Ne0-Platonism. The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, and the God of Aquinas are all ontologically simple. The theology of Aquinas quite obviously incorporates this neo-Platonic element, along with other elements, some of which do not comport well with the neo-Platonic element. No Absolute worth its salt can fail to be simple, and the God of Aquinas is the Absolute in his system. For Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. Literally translated, God is self-subsisting To Be. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that this God concept teeters on the brink of unintelligibility. But it is defensible as a Grenzbegriff, a boundary or limit concept. See The Concept GOD as Limit Concept.
God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. In this respect God is like the One of Plotinus. There is no Many in which the One is a member. The ONE is not one of many. Similarly, in Aquinas there is no totality of beings in which God is a member. God is not one being among many. He is utterly transcendent like the One of Plotinus and the Good of Plato. And yet, God is not other than every being, every ens, for he himself is. If God were other than every being, then he would be other than himself, which is impossible. This distinguishes the God of Aquinas from Heidegger's Being. For Heidegger, das Sein ist kein Seiendes, Being is other than every being, everything that is. For Aquinas, Gott oder das Sein ist selbst seiend, God or Being is himself being. Or, as I say in my existence book, The Paradigm Existent, the Unifier, is not a being (which would imply that it is a being among beings), but the being, the one and only being (ens) that is identical to its Being (esse) . That is indeed one of the entailments of DDS: there is no real distinction in God as between God and Being and between God and his Being.
2) As for Peter van Inwagen, he, like so many hard-core analytic types, uses 'Platonism' and related expressions in a loose and historically uninformed way. He calls himself a Platonist but he certainly does not accept 'into his ontology' — as these types say — Platonic Forms or Ideas (eide), Platonic participation (methexis) of phenomenal particulars in Forms, and the rest of the conceptual machinery which naturally within Plato's system implies levels/grades of Being and modes of Being which Dominik, as a German speaker, can understand as Seinsweisen or Seinsmodi. In the essay in question, van Inwagen comes out unequivocally against modes of Being. (I employ the majuscule 'B' in 'Being' so as to mark the crucial distinction between Being and beings, esse et ens/entia, das Sein und das Seiende. Observing that distinction is initium sapientiae in ontology.)
Van Inwagen's main man is Willard van Orman Quine who contributed to the misuse of the good old word 'abstract' with his talk of 'abstract objects.' So-called abstract objects are not products of abstraction. Van Inwagen buys into this lapse from traditional usage along with his colleague Alvin Plantinga. Accordingly, there are properties, but they are 'abstract objects' which exist just as robustly (or just as anemically) as 'concrete objects.' So-called abstract objects are, besides being outside of space and time, causally inert. So it is no surprise that Plantinga and van Inwagen reject the DDS claim that God is identical to each of his omni-attributes or essential properties. To their way of thinking, that identity claim makes of God a causally inert abstract object, which of course God, as causa prima, cannot be.
3) When van Inwagen says that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute, what he says is true inasmuch as said ontology is a constituent ontology (C-ontology). This is what he, as a self-styled 'Platonist' objects to. I explain C-ontology in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophyentry on DDS. See section 3. Here is part of what I say in that section:
Since a Plantinga-type approach to ontology rules out DDS from the outset, no sophisticated adherent of the doctrine will adopt such an approach. The DDS defender will embrace an ontology that accommodates an ontologically simple being. Indeed, as Nicholas Wolterstorff (1991) notes, classical proponents of DDS such as Aquinas had a radically different ontological style, one that allowed for the coherent conceivability of DDS. They did not think of individuals as related to their properties as to abstracta external to them, but as having properties as ontological constituents. They, and some atheist contemporaries as well, think in terms of a “constituent ontology” as opposed to what Wolterstorff calls a “relation ontology” or what might be called a “nonconstituent ontology”. Bundle theories are contemporary examples of constituent ontology. If properties are assayed as tropes and a concrete particular as a bundle of tropes, then these tropes or abstract particulars are parts of concrete particulars when suitably bundled. Properties so assayed are brought from Plato’s heaven to earth. The togetherness or compresence of tropes in a trope bundle is not formal identity but a kind of contingent sameness. Thus a redness trope and a sweetness trope in an apple are not identical but contingently compresent as parts of the same whole. A model such as this allows for an extrapolation to a necessary compresence of the divine attributes in the case of God. Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval proponents of DDS, is of course an Aristotelian, not a trope theorist. But he too is a constituent ontologist. Form and matter, act and potency, and essence and existence are constituents of primary substances. Essence and existence in sublunary substances such as Socrates are really distinct but inseparably together. Their unity is contingent. This model permits an extrapolation to the case of a being in which essence and existence are necessarily together or compresent. Constituent ontology, as murky as it must remain on a sketch such as this, at least provides a framework in which DDS is somewhat intelligible as opposed to a Plantinga-style framework on which DDS remains wholly unintelligible. The arguments for DDS amount to arguments against the nonconstituent ontological framework.
Combox open. I invite Dominik to tell me whether I have answered his question to his satisfaction.
I have already shown that the concept prime matter is a limit concept. The same holds for the concept bare particular. Both are lower limits of ontological analysis. I will be using 'bare particular' in Gustav Bergmann's sense.
What is a Particular?
Particulars in the sense relevant to understanding 'bare particular' may be understood in terms of impredicability. Some things can be predicated of other things. Thus being black can be predicated of my cat, and being a property can be predicated of being black; but my cat cannot be predicated of anything. My cat is in this sense 'impredicable.' Particulars are subjects of predication but cannot themselves be predicated. Particulars, then, are ultimate subjects of predication. Thus my cat is an ultimate subject of predication unlike being black which is a subject of predication, but not an ultimate subject of predication. Particulars have properties but are not themselves properties. Properties may be characterized as predicable entities. The particulars I am referring to are of course concrete particulars. They are not those abstract particulars known in the trade as tropes. (This curious nomenclature derives from Donald C. Williams. It has nothing to do with tropes in the literary sense.) A trope is a particularized property; better: a property assayed as a particular, an unrepeatable, as opposed to a universal, a repeatable entity. Unrepeatability is the mark of particulars, whether concrete or abstract.
What is a Bare Particular?
First, what it is not. It is a complete misunderstanding to suppose that philosophers who speak of bare or thin particulars, philosophers as otherwise different in their views as Gustav Bergmann, David Armstrong, and J. P. Moreland, mean to suggest that there are particulars that have no properties and stand in no relations. There is no such monstrosity as a bare particular in this sense. What makes a bare particular bare is not its having no properties, but the way it has the properties it has.
A bare particular is a particular that lacks a nature or (real) essence. It is therefore quite unlike an Aristotelian primary substance. Every such substance has or rather is an individual nature. But while lacking a nature, a bare particular has properties, and it cannot not have them. This 'having' is understood in terms of the asymmetrical external nexus of exemplification. A bare particular is thus tied to its properties by the external nexus of exemplification. To say that the nexus that ties a to F-ness is external is to say that there is nothing in the nature of a, and nothing in the nature of F-ness to require that a exemplify F-ness. After all, a, as bare, lacks a nature, and F-ness, while it has a nature, is not such that there is anything in it to necessitate its being exemplified by a. In this sense a bare particular and its properties are external to each other. So, while it is necessary that bare particulars have properties, none of the properties a bare particular has is essential to it.
This mutual externality of property to bearer entails promiscuous combinability: any bare particular can exemplify any property, and any property can be exemplified by any bare particular.
Similarities between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter
S1. Bare particulars in themselves are property-less while prime matter in itself is formless. The bare particular in a thing is that which exemplifies the thing's properties. But in itself it is a pure particular and thus 'bare.' The prime matter of a thing is the thing's ultimate matter and while supporting forms is itself formless.
S2. Bare particulars, though property-less in themselves, exemplify properties; prime matter, though formless in itself, is formed.
S3. There is nothing in the nature of a bare particular to dictate which properties it will exemplify. This is because bare particulars do not have natures. Correspondingly, there is nothing in the nature of prime matter to dictate which substantial forms it will take. This is because prime matter, in itself, is without form.
S4. Bare particulars, being bare, are promiscuously combinable with any and all first-level properties. Thus any bare particular can stand in the exemplification nexus with any first-level property. Similarly, prime matter is promiscuously receptive to any and all forms, having no form in itself.
S5. Promiscuous combinability entails the contingency of the exemplification nexus. Promiscuous receptivity entails the contingency of prime matter's being informed thus and so.
S6. Bare particulars are never directly encountered in sense experience. The same holds for prime matter. What we encounter are always propertied particulars and formed matter.
S7. A bare particular combines with properties to make an ordinary, 'thick' particular. Prime matter combines with substantial form to make a primary substance.
S8. The dialectic that leads to bare particulars and prime matter respectively is similar, a form of analysis that is neither logical nor physical but ontological. It is based on the idea that things have ontological constituents or 'principles' which, incapable of existing on their own, yet combine to from independent existents. Hylomorphic analysis leads ultimately to prime matter, and ontological analysis in the style of Bergmann and fellow travellers leads to bare or thin particulars as ultimate substrata.
Differences Between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter
D1. There are many bare particulars each numerically different from every other one. They differ, not property-wise, but solo numero. In themselves, bare particulars are many. It is not the case that, in itself, prime matter is many. It is not, in itself, parceled out into numerically distinct bits.
D2. Bare particulars are actual; prime matter is purely potential.
D3. Bare particulars account for numerical difference. But prime matter does not account for numerical difference. (See Feser's manual, p. 199) Prime matter is common and wholly indeterminate. Designated matter (materia signata) is the principle of individuation, i.e., differentiation.
Bare Particular as Limit Concept in the Positive Sense
It is obvious that the concept of bare particular, in the early Bergmann at least, is a limit concept. (The item-sort distinction in the later Bergmann of New Foundations of Ontology complicates matters.) But is the limit concept bare particular negative or positive? There is no prime matter in itself, which fact makes the concept of prime matter a limit concept in the negative sense: the concept does not point to anything real beyond itself but merely sets a limit to our hylomorphic analysis of the real. Should we say the same about the concept of bare particular? Not in Bergmann's constituent ontology. If an ordinary concrete particular — a round red spot to use an 'Iowa' example — is built up out of more basic constituents, then the 'building blocks' must be real.
The following is from a work in progress by Tim Mosteller, posted with his permission. I thank him for his critical engagement with my work. Here are some responses. My corrections in red; my comments in blue.
One question I am discussing with Micheal Lacey is whether any sense can be attached to the notion of metaphysical explanation. I answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he can tell me whether he agrees with the following, and if not, then why not.
Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. The predicate 'red' is true of Tom. Equivalently, 'Tom is red' is true. Now the sentence just mentioned is contingently true. (It is obviously not necessarily true in any of the ways a sentence, or the proposition it expresses, could be necessarily true. For example, it is not true ex vi terminorum.)
Now ask: could a contingently true sentence such as 'Tom is red' just be true? "Look man, the sentence is just true; that is all that can be said, what more do you want?" This response is no good. It cannot be a brute fact that our sample sentence is true. By 'brute fact' I mean a fact that neither has nor needs an explanation. So the fact that 'Tom is red' is true needs an explanation. And since the fact is not self-explanatory, the explanation must invoke something external to the sentence.
This strikes me as a non-negotiable datum, especially if we confine our attention to present-tensed contingently true sentences.
I hope it is clear that what is wanted is not a causal explanation of why a particular tomato is red as opposed to green. Such an explanation would make mention of such factors as exposure to light, temperature, etc. What is wanted is not a causal explanation of Tom's being ripe and red as opposed to unripe and green, but an explanation of a sentential/propositional representation's being actually true as opposed to possibly true. The question, then, is this: WHAT MAKES A CONTINGENTLY TRUE PRESENT-TENSED SENTENCE/PROPOSITION TRUE?
Our contingently true sentence is about something, something in particular, namely Tom, and not about Tim. And what the sentence is about is not part of the sentence or the (Fregean) proposition it expresses. It is external to both, not internal to either. And it is not an item in the speaker's mind either. Tom, then, is in the extralinguistic and extramental world. Now I will assume, pace Meinong, that everything exists, that there are no nonexistent items. Given that assumption I say: VERITAS SEQUITUR ESSE (VSE). Truth follows being. Truth supervenes on being if we are talking about contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearers.
That is to say: every contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearer has need of at least one thing in the extralinguistic world for its truth. Thus 'Tom is red' cannot be true unless there is at least one thing external to the sentence on which its truth depends. What I have just said lays down a necessary condition for a contingent sentence's being true.
But VSE is not sufficient for an adequate explanation of the truth of 'Tom is red.' If Tom alone was all one needed for the explanation, then we wouldn't be able to account for the difference between the true 'Tom is red' and the false 'Tom is green.' In short, the truth-maker must have a proposition-like structure, but without being a proposition. The truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is not Tom, not is it any proposition; the truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is the state of affairs, Tom's being red. (I am sketching the Armstrong line; there are other ways to go.)
The state of affairs Tom's being red is the ontological ground of the truth of the corresponding sentence/proposition. It is not a logical ground because it is not a proposition. Nor is it a cause.
It seems to me that I have just attached a tolerably clear sense to the notion of a metaphysical explanation. I have explained the truth of the sentence 'Tom is red' by invoking the state of affairs, Tom's being red. The explanation is not causal, nor is it logical. And so we can call it metaphysical or ontological.
I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125] I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but it also got me curious about where the explanation is going on in ontological accounts (especially of properties, however construed).
I'm doing a Ph.D. in metaontology and I'm contrasting neo-Quinean (van Inwagen) and neo-Aristotelian (Lowe) approaches.
Can you direct me to where you might have written about, if indeed you have, how it is ontology/metaphysics explains?
Well, I haven't discussed the issue head-on in a separate publication, but I have discussed it en passant in various contexts. Below is a re-do of a 2012 weblog entry that addresses the question and may spark discussion. Combox open.
………………………
Let 'Tom' name a particular tomato. Let us agree that if a predicate applies to a particular, then the predicate is true of the particular. Predicates are linguistic items. Tomatoes are not. If Tom is red, then 'red' is true of Tom, and if 'red' is true of Tom, then Tom is red. This yields the material biconditional
1. Tom is red iff 'red' is true of Tom.
Now it seems to me that the following question is intelligible: Is Tom red because 'red' is true of Tom, or is 'red' true of Tom because Tom is red? 'Because' here does not have a causal sense. So the question is not whether Tom's being red causes 'red' to be true of Tom, or vice versa. So I won't speak of causation in this context. I will speak of metaphysical/ontological grounding. The question then is what grounds what, not what causes what. Does Tom's being red ground the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom, or does the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom ground Tom's being red?
I am not primarily concerned with the correct answer to this question, but with meaningfulness/intelligibility of the question itself.
Grounding is asymmetrical: if x grounds y, then y does not ground x. (It is also irreflexive and transitive.) Now if there is such a relation as grounding, then there will be a distinctive form of explanation we can call metaphysical/ontological explanation. (Grounding, even though it is not causation, is analogous to causation, and metaphysical explanation, even though distinct from causal explanation, is analogous to causal explanation.)
Explaining is something we do: in worlds without minds there is no explaining and there are no explanations, including metaphysical explanations. But I assume that, if there are any metaphysical grounding relations, then in every world metaphysical grounding relations obtain. (Of course, there is no grounding of the application of predicates in a world without languages and predicates, but there are other grounding relations. For example, if propositions are abstract objects that necessarily exist, and some of the true ones need truth-makers, then truth-making, which is a grounding relation, exists in worlds in which there are no minds and no languages and hence no sentences.)
Grounding is not causation. It is not a relation between event tokens such as Jack's touching a live wire and Jack's death by electrocution. Grounding is also not a relation between propositions. It is not a logical relation that connects propositions to propositions. It is not the relation of material implication, nor is it entailment (the necessitation of material implication), nor any other logical relation wholly situated at the level of propositions. Propositions, let us assume, are the primary truth-bearers.
In our example, grounding is not a relation between propositions — it is not a logical relation — since neither Tom nor 'red' are propositions.
I want to say the following. Tom's being red grounds the correctness of the application of 'red' to Tom. 'Red' is true of Tom because (metaphysically, not causally or logically) Tom is red, and not vice versa. 'Red' is true of Tom in virtue of Tom's being red. Tom's being red is metaphysically prior to the truth of 'Tom is red' where this metaphysical priority cannot be reduced to some ordinary type of priority, whether logical, causal, temporal, or what have you. Tom's being red metaphysically accounts for the truth of 'Tom is red.' Tom's being red makes it the case the 'red' is true of Tom. Tom's being red makes 'Tom is red' true.
I conclude that there is at least one type of metaphysical grounding relation, and at least one form of irreducibly metaphysical explanation.
We can ask similar questions with respect to normative properties. Suppose Jesus commands us to love one another. We distinguish among the commander, the act of commanding, the content of the command, and the normative property of the commanded content, in this case the obligatoriness of loving one another. If Jesus is God, then whatever he commands is morally obligatory. Nevertheless, we can intelligibly ask whether the content is obligatory because Jesus/God commands it, or whether he (rightly) commands it because it is obligatory. The 'because' here is neither causal not logical. It is metaphysical/ontological.
This of course a variation on the old Euthyphro Dilemma in the eponymous Platonic dialog.
I freely admit that there is something obscure about a grounding relation that is neither causal nor logical. But of course logical and causal relations too are problematic when subjected to squinty-eyed scrutiny.
I conclude with a dogmatic slogan. Metaphysics without metaphysical explanation is not metaphysics at all.
Bo R. Meinertsen, Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress, Springer 2018, 174 + xviii pp.
Summary
Professor Meinertsen's detailed treatment of states of affairs agrees with the spirit and much of the letter of David M. Armstrong's middle period as represented in his A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge UP, 1997). States of affairs in this acceptation are not abstract objects, as they are for some philosophers, but concrete denizens of the natural world of space-time. They are “unified complexes that are instantiations of properties or relations by particulars.” (1) Unlike Armstrong, however, Meinertsen is not concerned to argue for their existence (3, 13), or to show their utility in different philosophical areas. His focus is on states of affairs themselves, their main theoretical role, the nature of their constituents, and the problem of their unity.
Their main role is to serve as truthmakers. Suppose it is contingently true that Tom is red, where 'Tom' denotes a tomato of our acquaintance. (The use and justification of such “toy examples” is nicely explained on p. 5) Intuitively, such a truth is not just true; it needs an ontological ground of its truth. What might that be? Rejecting both tropes (Chapter 3) and D. W. Mertz's relation instances (Chapter 4) as truthmakers, Meinertsen argues that states of affairs do the job. In this example, the truthmaker is Tom's being red. On Meinertsen's use of terms, all and only states of affairs are truthmakers (84-85).
A state of affairs is a complex, and complexes are composed of distinct constituents. The composition of a state of affairs, however, is non-mereological. Mereological complexes are governed by the unrestricted composition axiom of classical mereology. (8) What the axiom states is that any plurality of items composes something: the existence of some items entails the existence of the sum of those items. The constituents of a state of affairs, however, can exist without the state of affairs existing. For example, Tom's being red entails the existence of the sum, Tom + instantiation + the universal redness. But the existence of the sum does not entail the existence of the state of affairs. A state of affairs, then, is a non-mereological complex. We will return to this important point when we come to the problem of the unity of a state of affairs.
First-order states of affairs have as their constituents particulars, properties or relations, and instantiation. The particulars are bare or thin (Chapter 5). What makes them bare is not that they lack properties, but the way they have them. The bareness of a bare particular consists in its instantiating, as opposed to including, its properties. (73) The properties that enter into states of affairs are sparse as opposed to abundant: not every predicate picks out such a property. In addition, the properties in states of affairs are universals, and thus multiply instantiable. If an immanent (transcendent) universal is one that cannot (can) exist uninstantiated, then Meinertsen's universals are immanent. Immanence so defined admits of abstractness. Meinertsen's universals, however, are concrete. (Chapter 8) The concrete is that which is “spatially and/or temporally located.” (119) Given naturalism, which Armstrong endorses and to which Meinertsen “inclines” (119), every existent is concrete and therefore located, including universals. The locatedness of universals, which is unlike that of particulars, has three implications. The first is that a universal is “wholly located in many places at the same time.” (120) The second implication is that “the region occupied by any such universal is not a mereological part of the region occupied by the whole thick particular.” (121) The third implication is that “more than one universal can have the same spatiotemporal location.” (121)
I note in passing that the banishing of so-called abstract objects demanded by uncompromising Armstrongian naturalism exacts a high price. The price is paid in the coin of the three implications just listed. The abstract-concrete distinction is replaced by a distinction between two categories of concreta, particulars and universals. This replacement requires that one accept the view that universals are ones-in-many (as opposed to ones-over-many) not merely in the sense that a universal cannot exist uninstantiated, but also in the sense that, if it exists, it is wholly present in each of its many spatiotemporal instances without prejudice to its being one and the same universal. This is a highly counter-intuitive consequence, as philosophers from Plato to R. Grossmann have appreciated, but it must be accepted by a states-of-affairs ontologist who is both a naturalist and an upholder of universals. (121)
Chapter 7 is devoted to relations, but in the interests of brevity I will not report on this chapter but advance to Chapters 9 and 10 which treat the problem of unity and Bradley's Regress respectively. This is the most exciting and original part of the book.
Meinertsen and I agree that the problem of the unity of a state of affairs is the central problem for a states of affairs ontology. The problem arises because states of affairs have “non-mereological existence conditions” (7): the existence of the constituents does not entail the existence of the state of affairs. What then accounts for there being one state of affairs having several distinct constitutents? What makes a one out of the many? A state of affairs is not just its constituents; it is these constituents unified. Something more is needed to make of the constituents a state of affairs. “I believe that it is the relating of a unique relation that is needed.” (8)
We can call this 'something more' the unifier. On Meinertsen's approach the unifier is internal to the state of affairs: “the unifier of a state of affairs is a [proper] constituent of it.” (135, emphasis in original) I added 'proper' in brackets to underscore that Meinertsen is not maintaining that states of affairs are self-unifying either in the positive sense that they unify themselves or in the privative sense that they are not unified by another. They are truth-making unities, but not as a matter of brute fact: they need a unifier to account for their unity. The unifier U is a special sort of relation, indeed it is a unique relation as I have just quoted him as saying. It relates the material constituents in the state of affairs, but it does so by being related to them. It is not just a relator of what it relates; it is a relator of what it relates by being related to what it relates. So if U relates the constituents of R(a, b), U does this by being related to each of them, including the relation R. This implies, of course, that U is not identical to R. Some say it is the business of a material relation to relate; not so on Meinertsen's view: it is the business of the formal relation U, and it alone, to relate. We also note that a consequence of U's being related to what it relates, and not merely a relator of what it relates, is that U enters as a constituent into every state of affairs. On an externalist view, by contrast, U unifies the constituents of a state of affairs S without entering into S as a constituent.
Now U is either related by another to what it relates, or it is related by itself to what it relates. If the former, then Bradley's regress is up and running, a regress both infinite and vicious. (Chapter 10) To avoid it, Meinertsen posits that “The U-relation is related to its relata by itself.” (143). This is what makes it unique: it is the only relation that has this “ability,” a word Meinertsen employs. This view, which he dubs “self-relating internalism,” has not been maintained before as far as I know. “To emphasize this unique self-relating ability of U on self-relating unternalism, I shall call it the 'U*-relation.'” (143) Because U* is a constituent of every state of affairs whose constituents it unifies, the monadic case of a's being F may be depicted as follows: U*(U*, F, a). The occurrence of the sign 'U*' both outside and inside of the parentheses indicates that the concrete universal U* is both the bringer of unity and one of the items brought into unity. It is a constituent of every state of affairs without which there would be no states of affairs.
Is U* the same as the instantiation relation? Meinertsen waxes coy: he is “inclined” to say that it is, but this would be an “extrinsic thesis.” What he means, presumably, is that a full assay of R(a,b) might list the following constituents: U*, dyadic instantiation, R, a, and b. Or it might list the foregoing items except instantiation. In the latter case, U* is instantiation. For example, “Edinburgh's being north of London is unified if and only if the U*-relation relates itself to being north of, Edinburgh and London.”(143). Either way, it would seem that U* must be a multi-grade relation, one that can be had by a variable number of items, and which therefore has different 'adicities.' For example, if U* is the instantiation relation, then U* is tetradic in U*(U*, R, a, b) but triadic in U*(U*, F, a). If U* is distinct from the instantiation relation I, then U* is pentadic in U*(U*, I, R, a, b) and tetradic in U*(U*, I, F, a). Meinertsen is aware of all this, and of the apparent problems that arise, but he thinks that they can be adequately dealt with. (157-159) The reasoning is intricate and obscure and to save space I will not comment on it.
The main point is that U* is the master concrete universal without which no state of affairs could exist. A state of affairs exists if and only its constituents are unified, and no plurality of constituents is unified in the state-of-affairs way as a matter of brute fact; ergo, unity demands a unifier as its ground. Being a universal, the unifier U* is multiply instantiable. Being concrete implies that U* cannot exist uninstantiated. It also implies that U*, if multiply instantiated, is multiply located and 'at work' in every state of affairs as that which ties its constituents into a state of affairs. As a self-relating relation, it does its work without igniting Bradley's vicious regress. (Chapter 10) To cop a line from Armstrong, “Nice work if you can get it.”
Critique: The Problem of Unity
I will focus my critical remarks on Meinertsen's fascinating and original internalist theory of the unifier U*. What struck me about his theory is its structural similarity to the externalist suggestion I made in a number of my writings. (I thank Meinertsen for his close attention to them.) The points of similarity are the following. Meinertsen and my earlier self both accept that there are middle-Armstrongian states of affairs; that their main role is to serve as truthmakers; that they are complexes composed of distinct constituents; that the composition of these complexes is non-mereological; that their material constituents are particulars and universals; that the unity of a state of affairs, and therewith its difference from the mere plurality of its constituents, needs accounting in terms of a unifier; and above all, that there is a very special, indeed a unique, entity that serves as unifier. The main difference is that Meinertsen's unifier is a constituent of states of affairs while mine is external to states of affairs. Not only is there a similarity, but the two theories, as different as they are, are open to some of the same objections. But before discussing these objections, I want to state my objections to Meinertsen's account of unity, and how my theory avoids them.
First Objection
If there is a constituent of a state of affairs that explains its unity, this constituent must have a unique feature: it must be self-relating. But 'self-relating' has two senses, and this duality of senses give rise to a dilemma. Either (1) U* is self-relating only in the privative sense that it is not related by another to what it relates, supposing it is actually related to what it relates, or (2) U* is self-relating in the positive sense that it actually relates itself to what it relates. If (1), then U* blocks Bradley's regress, but fails to ground unity. It fails to ground the difference between the state of affairs, which is one entity, and the corresponding plurality of its constituents, which is a mere manifold of entities. If (2), then U* is an active as opposed to an inert ingredient in the state of affairs. It is a unity-maker, if you will. It plays a synthesizing role. It brings together the constituents, including itself, which otherwise would be a mere plurality, into a truthmaking unity.
But analysis cannot render this synthesizing intelligible, and therein lies the rub. All ontological analysis can do is to enumerate the constituents of a state of affairs, or, more generally, the parts of a whole. Analytic understanding proceeds by resolving a given whole into its parts, and ultimately into simple parts. But there is more to a (non-mereological) whole than its parts. There is the unity in virtue of which the parts are parts of a whole. The whole is one entity; the parts are many entities. Now if we try to understand this 'more' analytically we can do so only by positing a further part, a unifying part. I say 'posit,' not 'find.' In Fa, one can reasonably be said to find a particular and a character, but not a distinct copulative entity that grounds the truthmaking unity of the constituents. And so Meinertsen posits a unity-grounding entity. But the attempt to understand synthesis analytically is doomed to failure. First of all, no proper part of a whole is its unity, and this for the simple reason that the unity is the unity of all the parts. What one could say, though, is that the unity of the parts, which is distinct from any part, and from all of them, is brought about by a special part, the unifier. But then that special part, without ceasing to be a proper part, would have to exercise a synthesizing function. This synthesizing is what eludes analytic understanding. Simply to posit that the unifier U* has the ability to synthesize is make a kind of deus ex machina move. Leaving God out of it, Meinertsen's U* is a principium ex machina. I will come back to this later in connection with Meinertsen's talk of “inference to the best explanation.” (144) My present point is that even if there is some occult constituent internal to states of affairs that grounds and thus explains their contingent unity, its existence and its operation must remain a mystery and cannot be rendered perspicuous by the analytic method of constituent ontology. Let me explain further.
Does Meinertsen's U* exist? If there are states of affairs as Meinertsen conceives them, then U* has to exist. But if U* exists, then it is (a) a distinct entity independent of us and our synthetic activities, and (b) a distinct item that we can single out in thought if not in perception. If I see that a book is on a table, then I see a book, a table, and possibly also the relation referred to by 'on.' What I don't see, however, is the referent of 'is': the being of the book's being on the table. Since I don't see the being of the book's being on the table, I do not see U*. I cannot single it out in perception. Can I single it out in thought? To do so I would have to be able to distinguish U* from S, the state of affairs the unity of whose constituents U* grounds. There is a problem here. The ordinary (material) constituents in a state of affairs S are weakly separable: each such constituent could exist apart from every other one in S and apart from S itself, but not apart from every other entity. For example, let S = Fa. If Fa is a Meinertsenian state of affairs, then a can exist without instantiating F, and F can exist without being instantiated by a, and each can exist without being constituents of S. (The separability is said to be weak because a cannot exist without properties, and F cannot exist uninstantiated.) Now the immanent universal relation U* can exist apart from a and apart from F provided it is instantiated elsewhere, but not if it is the actual unifier of a and F. As the latter, as the active ingredient in S, it is inseparable from a, from F, and from S. But then U* is quite unlike the material constituents in S, which are all inert, and it is unintelligible in what exact sense U* is a constituent of S. The analytic assay lays out the constituents of a state of affairs, but it can do this only because of the logically antecedent unity of the constituents in virtue of which there is a state of affairs to assay. To understand this unity analytically by positing a special unifying constituent would make sense only if said constituent were inert like the material constituents. But of course it cannot be inert if its is to be a unity-grounder.
Another way of appreciating the problem is by asking what the difference is between U* as an active ingredient in S, and S. Clearly, S cannot exist without U*. But it is also true that U*, as the active ingredient in S that unifies precisely a and F, cannot exist without S. This is because U* is a unifying unifier only when instantiated/located in a state of affairs with determinate material constituents. In every state of affairs S in which the in rebus immanent universal U* exists, it unifies precisely the constituents of S, and cannot do otherwise. So U* and S are mutually inseparable. It follows that U* both is and is not weakly separable from S. As a constituent of S, U* is weakly separable from S. As an active ingredient and unity-maker, however, U* is not weakly separable from S. We ought to conclude that it is unintelligible how a (proper) constituent of a state of affairs could serve as its unifier. As a constituent, U* must be inert in S; as unifier, U* must be active. But it can't be both because it cannot be both weakly separable from S and not weakly separable from S.
An analogy may help clarify my criticism. The existence of two boards and some glue does not entail the existence of two boards glued together. That is obvious. It is also obvious that there would be no need for super-glue to glue the glue to the boards should someone glue the boards together. If there were a need for super-glue, then one would need super-duper-glue to glue the super-glue to the glue and to the boards, and so on. We can express this by saying that ordinary glue glues itself to what it glues; it is not glued by another to what it glues. In this sense, ordinary glue is self-gluing. This is in analogy to Meinertsen's claim that U* is self-relating. But note that 'self-gluing' can only be taken in a privative, not a positive, sense. The same goes for 'self-relating.' By 'privative' I simply mean that the self-gluing glue is not glued by another. If the glue and the relation U* were self-gluing and self-relating in a positive sense, then they would be agents of an action. They would be active as opposed to passive or inert. But surely self-gluing glue does not do anything: it does not apply itself to the boards or bring it about that the two boards are glued together; self-gluing glue is merely such that if the two boards are glued together by a genuine agent, no further glue would be needed to glue the glue to what it glues. Likewise, self-relating U* does not do anything: it does not bring it about that U*, a, and F are 'cemented' into a state of affairs; it is merely such as to insure that if U*, a, and F are brought together to form a state of affairs, no further formal U-type relations are needed to do the job.
Meinertsen credits me with appreciating that the problem of regress-avoidance and the problem of unity are two and not one. “As Vallicella (2004, p. 163) . . . eloquently puts it: 'A regress-blocker is not eo ipso a unity-grounder, pace Russell, Alexander, Blanshard, Grossmann, et al.'” If I am right, however, Meinersten has not really taken this insight on board. My point against him is that his U* can do only the regress-blocking job but not the unifying job. The problem is that no constituent of a state of affairs can do the unifying job. A fortiori, no relational constituent can do the job. By my lights, Meinerten fails to appreciate this, and it may be that he fails to appreciate it because he illicitly slides from the privative sense to the positive sense of 'self-relating.'
Second Objection
On Meinertsen's internalist theory, the unifier U* is a constituent of every state of affairs. Now corresponding to every state of affairs there is the sum of its constituents. So, corresponding to a's being F, there is the sum a + U* + F. Clearly, the particular a in the state of affairs is numerically the same as the particular a in the sum, and the universal F in the state of affairs is numerically the same as the universal F in the sum. The state of affairs and the sum share these material constituents and do not differ in respect of them. But what about the concrete universal U*? Is it numerically the same entity in the state of affairs and in the sum? If yes, then trouble, and if no, then trouble.
States of affairs are contingent. The contingency of a state of affairs derives from the contingent unity of its constituents. So it must be possible that the same constituents exist either unified or not unified. Thus the state of affairs and the sum must have the same constituents. Now U* is a constituent. It follows that U* must be be numerically the same in both the state of affairs and the corresponding sum. Two items, x, y, are numerically the same just in case thay have all the same properties. So U* must be either inert in both state of affairs and sum, or active in both. Now if U* is inert in both, then no state of affairs is constituted. If, on the other hand, U* is active in both, then the unity of the state of affairs is necessary. (For if U* is active in both, then there is no difference between the state of affairs and the sum. ) Either way, no contingent state of affairs is constituted. Therefore, U* cannot be numerically the same in both state of affairs and corresponding sum.
If, on the other hand, U* is active in the state of affairs, but inert in the sum, we get the same problem. A state of affairs is contingent just in case its constituents can exist without forming a state of affairs. It must be possible for the same constituents to be either unified into a state of affairs or not so unified. But active U* is not the same as inert U*. It follows that the state of affairs and the sum do not have the same constituents, which implies that the state of affairs is not contingent, but necessary. We ought to conclude that the unifier of a state of affairs cannot be a constituent thereof.
Third Objection
The first objection focused on the existence conditions of states of affairs; the third focuses on the existence conditions of concrete universals, in particular, the existence conditions of U*. What I will try to show is that Meinertsen's theory is involved in an explanatory circulus vitiosus. Roughly, he attempts to explain the unity, and thus the existence, of a state of affairs by positing a special unifying constituent when that very constituent can exist only in a state of affairs. Here is my argument:
a) A state of affairs exists if and only if its constituents form a unity. b) U* is a constituent of states of affairs that explains their unity. Therefore c) U* is a constituent of states of affairs that explains their existence. (from a, b) d) U* cannot exercise its explanatory function unless it exists. Therefore e) The existence of U* explains the existence of states of affairs. But f) U* cannot exist except in a state of affairs. Therefore g) The existence of states of affairs explains the existence of U* h) Given the asymmetry of explanation, (e) and (g) are contradictory, and Meinertsen's explanation of the existence of states of affairs in terms of U* is viciously circular.
The above argument rests on the following assumptions. First, there is such a procedure as metaphysical explanation. Second, it is asymmetrical: if x explains y, then it is not the case that y explains x. Third, a circular explanation, violating as it does the asymmetry of explanation, is not an explanation, or is not a successful explanation. Fourth, the unity/existence of states of affairs, being modally contingent, needs explanation, i.e., it cannot be a factum brutum. Meinertsen is committed to all four assumptions. He is committed to the first since he accepts truthmaking. The truthmaker metaphysically (not logically and not causally) explains the truth of the truth-bearer. He is obviously committed to the second and third. He is committed to the fourth because he takes seriously the problem of unity, which is the problem of explaining the difference between a state of affairs and the mere plurality of its constituents.
An External Unifier Avoids the Above Objections
I admit that the theory of my earlier self is not much better than Meinertsen's: in the final analysis they are both unsatisfactory, although for different reasons. But my theory does avoid the above objections. Meinertsen gets into trouble by making his unifier U* a constituent of states of affairs. This exposes him to the first objection because no constituent of a state of affairs could be an active, unity-grounding ingredient. Or at least it is unintelligible how anything like that could exercise a synthesizing function. A state of affairs is a synthetic unity the synthetic character of which cannot be understood by ontological analysis. Analytical understanding here reaches one of its limits. An ontological assay is merely a list of constituents. But the unity of these constituents is not a further item on the list. Nor can adding a special constituent to explain this unity avail anything. For either this further constituent is inert or it is active. If the former, no progress as been made in accounting for unity. If the latter, then the further constituent must be ascribed a special synthesizing power that nothing else has, and that nothing that analysis could reveal could have. How could analysis reveal such an occult power?
U*'s being a constituent opens Meinertsen to the second objection because a state of affairs is contingent only if the same constituents can exist either unified or not. But this sameness is impossible if U* is both a constituent and a unifier. U*'s being a constituent also exposes him to the third objection because no constituent can exist without being a constituent of some state of affairs or other. So if the unifier is a constituent, then it cannot exist unless states of affairs exist. This however gives rise to the explanatory circle. We ought to conclude that if there is a unifier, then it cannot be internal.
My external unifier unifies but without thereby entering into the states of affairs whose unity it brings about. It thereby evades all three of the objections lately listed. Kant's transcendental unity of apperception provides a model of an external unifier. That which brings about the synthesis of representations in the unity of one consciousness, thereby constituting an object of experience, is not itself a part of the object so constituted. One obvious objection from a realist, naturalist, and empiricist point of view to an external unifier, whether developed along transcendental lines or, as in my 2002, along onto-theological lines, is that it leads us away from realism to idealism. It brings mind into the picture as the synthesizing factor. But if (irreducible) mind is brought in, then naturalism is abandoned for some sort of 'spiritualism.' Empiricism too is abandoned if one invokes an external unifier along either transcendental or onto-theological lines.
The brings me to the deus ex machina objection that has been lodged against my proposal. Roughly, I put God to work to solve the problem of the unity of states of affairs. (“God has his uses,” my teacher J. N. Findlay once said.) Curiously, Meinertsen is open to a similar objection, call it principium ex machina. He does not call upon God, but upon a sui generis entity, U*, which is unique among concrete universals due to its synthesizing power. Well, what exactly is wrong with these ex machina moves? Meinertsen and I will be told that the moves are objectionably ad hoc. Meinertsen is sensitive to the criticism:
The U*-relation is of course an 'ad hoc' entity in the sense that it is only introduced to solve a problem, viz. the problem of unity. Some authors, such as Betti (2015), would consider that a big drawback of self-relating internalism. However, one man's 'ad hoc' – solution is another man's inference to the best explanation. (143)
If any of my three objections above are sound, however, Meinertsen's inference to the best explanation is an inference to an explanatory entity that cannot exist or at least cannot be intelligibly posited.
This is the second in a series on Bo Meinertsen's 2018 book. It is part of a 'warm-up' for a review article to appear in Metaphysica. Here is the first installment.
A thick particular in the parlance of David Armstrong is an ordinary particular taken together with its non-relational properties. But an ordinary particular is distinct from each and from all of its properties: it is that which has these properties. If we consider an ordinary particular in abstraction from its properties, what we have before our minds is the particular qua particular. From here it is but a short step to the much maligned and hotly contested bare or thin particular. Meinertsen ably defends bare or thin particulars as constituents of states of affairs in Chapter 5.
A tomato will serve as an example. Call it 'Tom.' There are any number of contingent truths about Tom. Tom is red; Tom is ripe; Tom is round; etc. Meinertsen and I agree that these truths need truthmakers. As I would put it, they can't just be true. What in the world makes them true? For Meinertsen, states of affairs (STOAs) play the truthmaker role. A (first-order) state of affairs is a unified complex consisting of the instantiation of a property by a thin particular, or the instantiation of a relation by two or more thin particulars. Instantiation is an asymmetrical external relation that, in the monadic case, connects a thin particular to a property thereby forming a state of affairs. The truth that Tom is red is thus made true by the state of affairs, Tom's being red, where the subject constituent is a thin particular, thin-Tom if you will, and not thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties. And the same goes for the truth that Tom is ripe, and the truth that Tom is round. For each truth there is a truthmaking state of affairs, a thin state of affairs we can call it since it includes only one of thick-Tom's properties.
Now take the conjunction of all of Tom's intrinsic properties. The result is a conjunctive property. Call it the nature N of Tom. The instantiation of this nature by a thin particular is a state of affairs. This is because N is a bona fide property, and the instantiation of any property by a thin particular is a state of affairs. This state of affairs is a thick state of affairs, and is identical to the thick particular, Tom. So the following comment (in the earlier thread) by Meinertsen comes as a bit of a surprise:
As to (4), well, in my view, thick particulars aren’t real STOAs, merely apparent ones. It’s true that I assay a thick particular as the instantiation of N, the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties. But I also argue that conjunctive properties are truthmaking reducible (TM-reducible) – i.e. only existing at the level of truths, not at the level of truthmakers – and that the instantiation (‘instantiation’) of a TM-reducible property isn’t a real STOA.
This is puzzling because the dialectic started with a really existent thick particular, Tom together with his properties, but seems to end with the elimination of the starting point and the demotion of the thick particular to a mere appearance.
The reasoning seems to proceed as follows. The contingent truth that a is F needs a truthmaker, and so does the contingent truth that a is G. But the conjunction of the two truths — which is 'automatically' true given the truth of the conjuncts — does not need its own truthmaker. So these three truths need only two truthmakers. There is no need for a third truthmaker because the truth of the conjunctive proposition supervenes on the truth of its conjuncts. It's an aletheiological 'free lunch.'
Now consider the conjunction C of all the truths about a, or about Tom in our example. What makes this conjunction true are the 'thin' states of affairs corresponding to and grounding each of the truths in the conjunction. The 'thin' states of affairs do all the truthmaking work: there is no need for a separate 'thick' state of affairs to serve as truthmaker for the conjunction itself. But if there is no need for 'thick' states of affairs, then there is no need to posit thick particulars in reality. (A thick particular just is a 'thick' state of affairs.) So thick particulars are best regarded as merely apparent.
That is the argument as far as I can tell. Did I get it right, Bo?
Critique
But if there is no thick particular in reality, then what makes it the case that each of the thin particulars in each of the thin states of affairs is the same thin particular? Meinertsen speaks above of "the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties." (emphasis added) What is the antecedent of the pronoun 'its'? That would have to be Tom in our example, thick-Tom, Tom together with all its properties. So the very identity of C — its being the conjunction it is and not some other conjunction — presupposes the reality of thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties. For C to exist and to be true, thick-Tom must exist.
I conclude that one cannot take thick particulars to be merely apparent. Their reality is presupposed if the STOA style of ontology is to get off the ground in the first place.
Now the tomato example is what Meinertsen rightly calls a "toy example." (5). We philosophers employ such examples for convenience ignoring the fact, if it is fact, that tomatoes and other meso-particulars are not ontologically fundamental. So it may make sense to say that thick-Tom and his colleagues do not really exist. But surely the micro-entities of physics do exist and are thick particulars and thus 'thick' states of affairs. There have to be some thick particulars somewhere.
On p. 70, Meinertsen tells that at the level of truthmakers, there are no such things as molecules. Presumably he will say the same about their constituent atoms. But what about sub-atomic particles? Could he be telling us that, no matter how far down we go, we will never encounter anything fundamentally real?
I am presently writing a review article for Metaphysica about Bo R. Meinertsen's Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress (Springer 2018). Since I will probably incorporate the following critical remarks into my review, I want to give Bo a chance to respond.
Substantial and Non-Substantial Change
One way a thing can change is by coming into being or passing away. This is called substantial change. We could also call it existential change. The other way could be called alterational change. This occurs when a thing, persisting for a time, alters in respect of its intrinsic properties during that time. Consider the ripening of a tomato. This typically involves the tomato's going from green to red. This change in respect of color is an alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change. One and the same entity (substance) persists through a non-zero interval of time and instantiates different properties (accidents) at different times. As I would put it, there is no alterational change without existential unchange: numerically the same tomato is green, hard, inedible, etc. at time t and red, soft, and edible at later time t*. Bo and I are both assuming that things in time persist by enduring, not by perduring.
The Problem of Non-Substantial Change of Continuants
This is
. . . the problem of how to ground the fact that continuants 'persist through change'. For instance, a tomato's changing from red to green [sic] is a case of non-substantial change, and how do we ground the fact that the tomato that has changed exists both before and after the change? The bundles of basic trope theory essentially have the members they actually have and are therefore incompatible with such change. (Meinertsen 2018, 49)
The problem is that we want to say that one and the same tomato goes from being green to being red. We want to be able to uphold the diachronic identity of the tomato as it alters property-wise. But this is impossible on basic bundle-theoretic trope theory because trope bundles have their members essentially. This means that if bundle B has trope t as a member, then it is impossible that B exist without having t as a member. The counterintuitive upshot is that a green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes ceases to exist when it ceases to be green. This implies that our tomato when so assayed cannot undergo alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change when it goes from green to red, hard to soft, etc. It implies that every change is a substantial change. I agree with Meinertsen that this is a powerful objection to the basic bundle-of-tropes assay of ordinary particulars.
Does a State of Affairs Ontology Face the Same Problem?
Meinertsen says that it does not:
State of affairs ontology has no problem in dealing with the problem of non-substantial change. None of the properties of a particular in a state of affairs — which as we shall see in Chap. 5 is a bare particular — is included in it, as opposed to instantiated by it. Hence, it changes non-substantially if and only it ceases to instantiate at least one of these properties or whenever it instantiates a new property. (49)
It seems to me, though, that states of affairs (STOA) ontology faces, if not the very same problem, then a closely related one.
Critique
It is true that a bare particular does not include its properties: the bare or thin particular stands to its properties in the asymmetrical external relation of instantiation. So what Meinertsen is telling us is that it is the bare particular that remains numerically the same over time while some of its properties are replaced by others. This is what grounds the diachronic numerical identity of the continuant. The substratum of change is the bare particular 'in' the tomato, not the tomato as a whole.
But this answer is less than satisfactory. What changes over time is not a thin particular, but a thick particular. It is the green tomato with all its properties that loses one or more of them and becomes a red tomato. This is supported by the fact that we do not see or otherwise perceive the thin particular; we do, however, see and otherwise perceive thick particulars. What we have before us is a tomato that we see to be green and feel to be hard, etc., and that we then later see to be red and feel to be soft, etc.
Arguably, then, it is the thick particular that is the substratum of non-substantial change, not the thin particular. If so, then a problem arises similar to the problem that arose for the bundle-of-tropes theory. How?
Well, the green tomato is a STOA whose nature is N1, where N1 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the green tomato. The red tomato is a STOA whose nature is N2, where N2 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the red tomato. These STOAs differ numerically for they differ in one or more constituents. The first has greenness as a constituent, the second does not. A STOA is a complex, and two complexes are the same iff they have all the same constituents.
So what's the problem? The problem is that any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a STOA destroys its identity just as surely as any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes destroys its identity. On either account, there is no adequate explanation of non-substantial change. This is because there is no numerically self-same substratum of change that endures through the change in properties. The thin particular is not plausibly regarded as the substratum. I note en passant that Gustav Bergmann regarded bare particulars as momentary entities, not as persisting entities.
The problem set forth as an aporetic sextad:
There is no change in intrinsic properties of an ordinary particular over time without a numerically self-same substratum of change. (endurantist assumption)
The green tomato changes to red. (pre-theoretical datum)
The green tomato that changes to red is a thick particular. (pre-theoretical datum)
Thick particulars are STOAs. (theoretical claim)
STOAs are complexes. (true by definition)
Two complexes are the same iff they share all constituents. (theoretical claim)
These six propositions are collectively inconsistent. My question to Meinertsen: which of these propositions will you reject? Presumably, he will have to reject (3) and say that 'the green tomato' refers to an invisible thin particular, and it is this item that changes from green to red and that serves as the substratum of change.
What do I say? For now I say merely that, pace Bo, on the issue before us, STOA ontology is no better than the bundle-of-tropes theory.
Joe, who describes himself as "a high school student with a passion for philosophy of religion and metaphysics," asked me a long series of difficult questions. Here is one of them:
After reading [Edward] Feser's Five Proofs, I have had difficulties with the concept of sustaining causes. First, Feser argues that composites require a sustaining cause in order to "hold them together" or keep them conjoined. But this seems to presuppose that all composite things (be it physical composites or metaphysical composites) are contingent.
But why suppose that, necessarily, all composites are contingent? What is incoherent about this:
X is a necessary being (i.e. X cannot fail to exist). X has metaphysical parts A, B, and C. Each of A, B, and C are also necessarily instantiated in reality, and the relations between A, B, and C are all necessarily instantiated in reality.
Why ought we to rule out this epistemic possibility? This seems to be a necessary being which is composite. It would be a counter-example to the assumption that composition entails contingency (where contingency means can fail to exist).
If we take composition broadly enough, composition does not entail contingency. Consider the set, {1, 3, 5}. Assume that numbers are necessary beings. Then of course the set will also be a necessary being. Furthermore, the relations that hold between the members of this set hold necessarily. For example, necessarily, 3 < 5, and necessarily, 3 > 1. So if we think of sets as composite entities, then it is not the case that all composites are contingent.
But what Feser is concerned with are material particulars, or material substances, to use the Aristotelian-scholastic jargon, e..g., a horse, a statue, a man. And of course these cannot be taken to be sets of their metaphysical parts. If I understand Feser, what he is asking is: what makes a contingent being such as Socrates contingent? The question is not whether he is contingent, but what makes him contingent. What is the ground of his contingency? The answer is that Socrates is contingent because he is composite. Composition or rather compositeness is the ground of contingency. His contingency is explained by his compositeness, in particular, his being a composite of essence and existence. So at the root of contingency is the real distinction (distinctio realis) of essence and existence in finite substances.
The claim is not that every composite entity is contingent, but that every contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composite.
Now if a contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composed of essence and existence, then a necessary being, or rather, a necessary being that has its necessity from itself and not from another, is necessary in virtue of its being simple, i.e., absolutely non-partite. This is how Thomists feel driven to the admittedly strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine of divine simplicity.
If there is to be an ultimate explanation of the existence of contingent beings, this explanation must invoke an entity that is not itself contingent. The ultimate entity must exist of metaphysical necessity and have its necessity from itself. Thomism as I understand it plausibly maintains that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. God is necessary because in God essence and existence are one and the same.
A good discussion with links to various people including your humble correspondent. His vanity notes the following:
Bill Vallicella’s account of the two approaches and a moderate defence of Constituent Ontology. Very accessible – W.V. does a lot more for philosophy in his retirement than certain philosophers of Law who will remain nameless do in their professional capacity.
The nameless one, I take it, is the notorious Ladder Man.
Comments appreciated if you are en rapport with the subject matter.
The Case Against Facts
Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 296 + xxvii
If Buridan's contribution to the bestiarum philosophorum was the ass, and David Armstrong's the ostrich, Arianna Betti's is the hedgehog bristling with spines. The hedgehog is an appropriate totemic animal inasmuch as her book too bristles with sharp distinctions and prickly arguments designed to inflict pain upon the friends of facts. In this penetrating and beautifully organized volume Professor Betti deploys her distinctions and arguments against two sorts of facts, compositional and propositional, as she calls them. The states of affairs of David Malet Armstrong's middle period (Armstrong 2007) are examples of the first kind of fact. These items are the main target of Betti's animadversions in the first part of her two-part book. She does not go so far as to claim that Armstrongian facts do not exist; her claim is the rather more modest one that we have no reason to posit them, since the work they do, if it needs doing at all, can be done just as well by a certain sort of mereological sum. (101) Betti ignores, however, Armstrong's very different later conception of states of affairs or facts. (Armstrong 2009; Armstrong 2010, 26-34; Vallicella 2016) This later conception also counts as compositional in her sense and ought to have been discussed for the sake of completeness, especially since it in some ways approximates to Betti's mereological position.
One might wonder how a fact could fail to be compositional. Facts are complex or composite items, after all, not simples. So they must all have some internal composition or other, whether they be truthmaking facts or facts of the Chisholmian-Plantingian sort. At a bare minimum, a's being F is composed of a and F-ness. Thus I find less than felicitous Betti's talk of propositional facts in contrast to compositional facts as “noncompositional objects at the level of reference.” (24) She makes it clear, however, that she is using 'compositional' in a narrow sense that implies that compositional facts and their constituents are “part[s] of the furniture of the world.” (37) We shall soon see that being in the world involves being real as opposed to being ideal. An example of a compositional fact is the fact of Guido's being hungry. This fact has Guido himself, all 200 lbs of him, as a constituent. An example of a propositional fact is the putative referent of the that-clause in a sentence like 'Guido sees that Francesca is serving spaghetti puttanesca.' This putative referent is the fact that Francesca is serving spaghetti puttanesca. This propositional fact is like a (Fregean) proposition, though it is not a proposition, in that it does not have Francesca herself as a constituent, but rather an abstract surrogate that represents her. (170) (This fact-of vs. fact-that terminology is mine, not Betti's. I got it from Milton Fisk.)
Betti describes in marvellous detail seven features of compositional facts (18) and five of propositional facts (170). I will speak of C-facts and P-facts. Here are some salient differences. C-facts are in the world, and thus suited to play the truthmaking role whereas P-facts are not in the world and hence not fit for truthmaking. To be in the world is to be real where to be real is to exist “through time and in time as causes or effects in a causal chain.” (22) So C-facts are real while P-facts are ideal. The ideality of P-facts, however, is not that of propositions since P-facts are not propositions. Betti is greatly and rightly exercised by the curious in-between status of these “ghostly critters” (114) that are neither truthbearers nor truthmakers and yet are championed by such distinguished philosophers as Roderick Chisholm, Alvin Plantinga, and Kit Fine. These “ghostly critters” are not truthbearers because they are neither true nor false. But while they are not bivalent in terms of truthvalue, they are 'bipolar' (my term): while all exist, some of them obtain while some do not. They are not truthmakers since truthmakers are real and 'monopolar': if they don't exist they are nothing. Thus the fact of Guido's being hungry does not exist at all if Guido is not hungry. Propositional facts are neither fish nor fowl. The conclusion Betti arrives at strikes me as correct: “Propositional facts collapse into true propositions.” (179) Propositional facts are thus not a distinctive category of entity. We need them, she thinks, as little as we need compositional facts. Actually, her position is far more radical than this since she denies that that-clauses are referential parts of speech. So her position is best expressed conditionally by the following quotation: “If there were nominal reference to facts, facts would be true propositions . . . . (113) Her view, if I understand it, is eliminativist not identitarian: she is not saying that there are propositional facts and that what they are are true propositions; she is saying that that there are no propositional facts.
Leaving propositional facts to languish in their ghostly realm, the rest of this article will take issue with Betti's critique of compositional facts, the ones dear to my heart, the facts involved in the flux and shove of the real order. On a personal note, I want to thank Professor Betti for her very close attention to my articles on the topic.
The Case Against Compositional Facts
A compositional fact, as opposed to a propositional fact, is an entity fit to play the role of truthmaker. The truthmaker role may be introduced as follows. Consider the assertive utterance of some such contingent sentence as 'Tom is sad.' If true, this assertively uttered sentence cannot just be true: if true, it is true because or in virtue of something external to it. This use of 'because' is not causal which is why philosophers reach for the weasel phrase 'in virtue of,' which, despite its slipperiness, may well be indispensable for metaphysics. I say it is indispensable. (Or do hedgehogs eat weasels?) Roughly, there has to be something that 'makes' the sentence true. This external something cannot be another declarative sentence, even if true. More generally, a truth is a true truthbearer (a Fregean proposition, say, or perhaps an Aristotelian proposition, see pp. 31-32 for Betti's helpful explanation of the difference) and no true truthbearer is made true by another such item in the specific sense of 'makes true' in play in truthmaker theory. Nor can someone's say-so be what makes true a true truthbearer. The truthmaker has to be something 'in the world,' something extralinguistic and mind-independent in the realm of reference as opposed to the realm of sense. The friends of truthmakers are realists about truth: they are convinced that at least some truths are in need of an ontological ground of their being true.1
Truthmaker maximalists hold that all truths need such grounds, but one needn't be a maximalist to be a truthmaker theorist. As for 'makes true,' this is neither entailment nor causation. Not entailment, because entailment is a relation between propositions, assuming that truthbearers are propositions, whereas truthmaking is a relation between extra-propositional reality and propositions. So if x makes true y, then y is a truthbearer, but x is not. If someone says that the proposition expressed by 'Snow is white' makes true the proposition expressed by 'Something is white,' then that person, while talking sense, is not using 'makes true' in the specific way in which the phrase is used in truthmaker theory. Truthmaking is not causation for a similar reason: causation does not connect the extra-propositional to the propositional whereas truthmaking does. As Armstrong says, truthmaking is “cross-categorial.” (Armstrong 2004b, 5) It links the extra-propositional to the propositional.
It is important to note, however, that while truthmakers cannot be Fregean or Aristotelian propositions, and thus must be extra-propositional, they must also be proposition-like on Armstrong's approach. This is a point I think Betti misses. Speaking of compositional facts, she tells us that “facts are neither linguistic nor languagelike entities at the lowest level of reference. (28, emphasis in original) But this is certainly not Armstrong's view, the view that is supposed to be the target of Betti's critique of compositional facts. His view is that the world is a world of states of affairs, a “totality of facts not of things” (Wittgenstein) and “sentence-like rather than list-like.” (Armstrong 2010, 34) If the world is sentence-like, then, pace Betti, it is language-like. Armstrong was profoundly influenced by his teacher in Sydney, the Scots philosopher John Anderson, who held that “reality, while independent of the mind that knows it, has a 'propositional' structure.” (Armstrong 1997, 3) Armstrong goes on to say that “the propositional view of reality which he [Anderson] championed is the facts or states of affairs view of reality.” (Armstrong 1997, 3-4) That Armstrongian facts are proposition-like and thus language-like is fairly obvious when we consider the truthmakers of contingent predications of the form 'a is F.' The truthmaker cannot be a by itself, or F-ness by itself, or the mereological sum a + F-ness. It must be a-instantiating F-ness, which has a proposition-like structure. Armstrongian facts have a logos-like and thus logical articulation contrary to what Betti says in opposition to Kit Fine. (28) But now I am getting ahead of myself.
Suppose you accept the legitimacy of the truthmaker role and the need for some type of entity to play it. It doesn't follow straightaway that the entities needed to play the role must be what Betti calls compositional facts or what David Armstrong calls states of affairs. This is so even if we confine ourselves to the really clear examples of truthbearers in need of truthmakers, namely, synthetic, contingent predications such as 'Guido is hungry' or the propositions expressed by assertive utterances of such sentences. Nevertheless, a powerful argument can be mounted for compositional facts as truthmakers. The argument Armstrong and I consider powerful, however, Betti calls “unsound.” (106) Surprise!
Although she is skeptical of the need for truthmakers, she is willing to grant the need arguendo, insisting only that if we need truthmakers, a certain type of mereological complex can do the job thus rendering Armstrong's facts, as unmereological complexes, unnecessary. (102) This is why she thinks the truthmaker argument for Armstrongian facts is unsound. As she sees it, compositional facts are not givens, but theoretical posits, and unnecessary ones at that. They were invented to solve a problem, the unity problem, that arises only because of certain optional assumptions about relations and properties that one is not bound to make. (94-95) Compositional facts are an ad hoc, indeed a “maximally ad hoc,” solution to a pseudo-problem. (64)
Now let me say something in exposition of Armstrong's argument for facts or states of affairs as truthmakers on the assumption that the truthmaker role is legitimate and needs to be filled by some category of entity or other. I will then consider Betti's counter-proposal.
If it is true that Tom is sad, could the truthmaker of this truth be the item that Betti calls (8) the sentence-subject of 'Tom is sad,' namely, Tom? No, since Tom needn't be sad. So Tom by himself cannot be what makes true 'Tom is sad.' The same goes for the property of being sad. By itself the property cannot be the truthmaker of the sentence in question. (I am assuming, with Armstrong, that properties are immanent universals. Immanent, in that they cannot exist uninstantiated; universal, in that they are repeatable.) Now if Tom exists and sadness exists, then so does the mereological sum Tom + sadness. But this sum cannot be the truthmaker either. For the sum exists whether or not Tom is sad. How so?
Suppose that Tom is not sad, but Shlomo is. If properties are immanent universals, then sadness cannot exist uninstantiated; suppose it exists in virtue of being instantiated by Shlomo. So Tom exists, sadness exists, and their sum exists. But this does not suffice for Tom's being sad. There is a missing ontological ingredient: something to connect sadness to Tom. You might think that the missing ingredient would have to be the worldly correlate of the 'is' of predication. But if you take this correlate to be an exemplification/instantiation relation then you ignite Bradley's relation regress which is unfortunately vicious. Other moves invoking Strawsonian nonrelational ties, Bergmannian nexus, Fregean unsaturated concepts, and benign fact-internal infinite regresses (see Vallicella 2010), are equally unavailing. The unifier of a fact's constituents cannot be a further constituent or anything internal to the fact. This leaves two possibilities: (i) the unifier is external to the fact, which Betti rejects, and (ii) Armstrong's middle-period suggestion that facts are entities in addition to their consituents and it is they who hold fact-appropriate constituents together so that they can exercise the truthmaking function. Betti has mastered the dialectic and considers the least bad solution to be Armstrong's: facts hold their constituents together. Although she doesn't say so, she considers my solution in terms of an external unifier to be the worst. The extant putative solutions to the unity problem of course presuppose that it is a genuine problem. Betti thinks it isn't.
Betti's Dissolution of the Unity Problem
After rejecting the extant putative solutions to the unity problem, Betti proposes to dissolve it by collapsing the distinction between “relations that relate relata and relations that do not: all relations relate relata and carry out their own unifying work.” (95) She means this to apply to properties as well. All properties qualify their bearers and carry out their own qualifying work. Thus there needn't be anything to hold the constituents of a relational or as monadic fact together: nothing internal to the fact, nothing external, and not the fact itself. Betti's point is that there is no need for Armstrongian facts, facts as entities in addition to their constituents. (Cf. Armstrong 1997, 117) Her point is not that there are no facts. There may well be facts; it is just that if there are, they are a special sort of mereological sum. Perhaps we can say that she is an identitarian about compositional facts, not an eliminativist, whereas she is an eliminativist about propositional facts, not an identitarian. More on this in a moment.
What Betti has to do is block a possibility like the following. In the actual world, call it Charley, Tim loves Tina. In a merely possible world w in which Tim and Tina both exist, Tim does not love Tina, but Tim loves Toni. In Charley we have both the relational fact of Tim's loving Tina and the mereological sum Tim + loves + Tina. In w, we have the sum Tim + loves + Tina but not the corresponding fact. This implies that there is more to the fact than the sum of its constituents: the sum can exist without constituting a fact. The something more is that which makes of the constituents a real truthmaking unity. Call it the unifier. Betti thinks that the least bad of the extant proposals as to what the unifier is is Armstrong's: facts hold their constituents together; facts are unmereological complexes over and above their constituents. In short, what Betti needs to do is counter the seductive thought that in an actual relational situation such as that of Tom's loving Tina, the constituents can exist without forming a real truthmaking unity. What she needs to maintain is that, necessarily, if all the constituents exist, then the relatedness exists. If the mere existence of the constituents ensures their connectedness, then there is no need for Armstrongian facts. You would then have real unity on the cheap, real truthmaking unity from mereology alone, or rather from mereology operating upon the right sorts of constituents. The mereological principle of the extensionality of parthood would hold for all complexes. Nice work if you can get it!
Betti can achieve her end if she holds that relations are relata-specific where “A relation is relata-specific if and only if it is in its nature to relate specific relata.” (89) Suppose that the relation loves as it figures in the sum Tom + loves + Tina is necessarily such that, if it exists, then it relates Tom and Tina. Then there would be no distinction in reality between loves as a relating relation and loves as an inert relation that is merely a constituent but not also a unifier of the complex into which it enters.
Betti's contention, then, is that all relations, just in virtue of existing, are relating relations, active ontological ingredients if you will, and none are inert ingredients. A relation cannot exist without actually relating its relata. If so, there cannot be a difference between the mereological sum a + R+ b and the fact of a's standing in R to b. Given the constituents, the fact is given: it is not an ontological extra, something over and above the constituents. There is no possibility of the constituents existing without the fact existing. It follows that there is no need for facts as unmereological compositions, facts as “additions to being,” in a phrase from Armstrong. If a fact just is a mereological complex, then it is an “ontological free lunch,” to employ yet another signature phrase of the late Australian. Of course, not just any old mereological sum is a fact; only those with the right constituents.
And the same goes for properties: all properties, just in virtue of existing, qualify their bearers. There is no need for a tertium quid such as an instantiation relation to tie a property to its bearer. Nor is there any need for monadic facts as entities in addition to their constituents to do this unifying work. There is no difference between the sum a + F-ness and the fact of a's being F. For this to work, all properties have to be “bearer-specific.” “A property is bearer-specific if and only if it is in its nature to be had by specific bearers.” (90) Suppose it is true that Hargle is happy, and that being happy is “bearer-specific.” We can display the property as follows: __(H) being happy. '__' indicates that the property is unsaturated or incomplete or gappy in something like Frege's sense: if it is had by an individual it is had directly without the need of a connector such as an instantiation relation or Strawsonian nonrelational tie or a Bergmannian nexus. '(H)' indicates that the property is bearer-specific or rather bearer-individuated: if the property is had, it is had by Hargle and nothing else. That the property is had follows from its existence: necessarily, if the property exists, then it is had, had by Hargle and nothing else, and had directly without the service of a tertium quid. What this all implies is that the mereological sum Hargle + __(H) being happy suffices as truthmaker of 'Hargle is happy.' There is no need for a fact over and above this sum. Indeed, as Betti points out, the property alone suffices as truthmaker since it cannot exist unless Hargle exists. (101)
Questions and Objections
1. Why is Betti's proposal superior to Armstrong's?
Betti presents us with an alternative way of thinking about truthmaking facts, namely, as mereological sums whose parts include relata-specific relations and bearer-specific properties. Betti's main point is that “mereological complexes are viable as truthmakers; facts are not needed for the role.” (101) When she says that facts are not needed, she means Armstrongian, middle-period facts. She is not denying that there are truthmakers. Nor is she is denying the existence of facts as long as they are assayed as mereological complexes. If a fact is a complex entity that functions as a truthmaker, then her mereological complexes containing relata-specific relations and bearer-dependent properties are facts, though not in Armstrong 's robust sense. She is denying, or rather refusing to countenance on grounds of theoretical economy, facts as unmereological complexes. Her claim is that there is no explanatory need for facts as the middle-period Armstrong conceives of them, namely, as “additions to being.” Betti may bristle at my use of 'facts' in describing her position but surely there is an innocuous and nearly datanic, as opposed to theoretical, use of 'fact' according to which an individual's having a property, or two or more things standing in a relation, is a fact. Indeed, she needs this use of 'fact' just to state her theory, according to which the fact aRb is identical to the sum a + R + b, when R is relata-specific. On her view facts are a proper subset of mereological sums. That is not a denial of facts, but an acceptance of them. Unfortunately, Betti sometimes expresses herself in a misleading way. She tells us, for example, that “the thought that the world is a world without facts – one in which there is no difference between facts and sums – is shown to be perfectly sensible.” (88) This formulation equivocates on 'fact.' What she wants to say is that the world is without Armstrongian facts, not that the world is without truthmaking facts. It is the latter that are no different from sums, namely those sums whose constituents include relata-specific relations and object-dependent properties.
Betti thinks her theory is preferable to Armstrong's. I question whether she is justified in this preference. We face a tough choice. Armstrong's theory violates the extensionality of parthood and countenances unmereological complexes. This is a strike against it. Betti's theory avoids unmereological complexes, thereby upholding the extensionality of parthood, but accepts relata-specific relations and bearer-dependent properties. How plausible is it that all relations are relata- specific and all properties bearer-dependent? Are these notions even coherent? Let's consider the coherence question.
2. Against Relata-Specific Relations and Bearer-Dependent Properties
Suppose Argle is two feet from Bargle. There is nothing in the nature of either relatum to necessitate their standing in this external relation. Each can exist apart from the relation. And as I see it, there cannot be anything in the nature of the relation itself to necessitate that it be precisely these two critters that the relation relates. So on my view a relational situation such as Argle's being two feet from Bargle involves a double externality: there is nothing in the nature of the terms to dictate their standing in the external relation in question, and there is nothing in the nature of the external relation to dictate the terms. But as Betti sees it, it is the nature of this relation to relate Argle and Bargle and nothing else: the relation cannot exist/be instantiated without relating precisely these two. This implies that “as soon as” (105) the relation exists, it relates Argle and Bargle. If this conception is coherent, it has the desired consequence of undercutting Bertrand Russell's distinction between actually relating relations and those same relations as inert, and with it the distinction between a fact as a real unity of fact-appropriate constituents and the 'mere' mereological sum of those very same constituents. If this works, it puts paid to Armstrong's commitment to unmereological complexes: mereology suffices for truthmakers provided the parts of the sums include relata-specific relations or bearer-dependent properties.
It seems to me, however, that the notion of relata-specificity reduces to absurdity by way of the following argument in which R is any relata-specific dyadic external relation, and a and b are its individual relata. (See also my critique of D. W. Mertz in Vallicella 2004.) Generalization beyond the dyadic case is straightforward but unnecessary. Betti's definition of 'external relation' is standard and perfectly serviceable: “A relation is external if and only if it is not grounded in corresponding properties of its relata, that is, is an entity over and above its relata.” (89) An internal relation is then one that is grounded in corresponding properties and is not an entity in addition to its relata. Now to the argument:
P1. R is entirely dependent for its existence on both a and b. (Betti's theory of relata-specificity)
This is because (i) R cannot exist without being instantiated and thus cannot exist without actually relating some pair of individuals or other, and (ii) R cannot, as relata-specific, relate any pair of individuals other than a, b. If dyadic R were an immanent universal, then it could not exist without relating some pair or other; but it would not necessarily have to relate the precise pair, a, b. R's existence would then not depend on its relating a and b. But as it is, R is a particular (an unrepeatable), not a universal (a repeatable); it is a non-transferable relational trope. It is as particular as the particulars it relates. Its being or existence is exhausted by its particular occurrence, unlike an immanent universal the being or existence of which is not exhausted by its instantiation in a particular case. So R, as a relational trope, is entirely dependent for its existence on the exact relata it has: its being or existence is exhausted by its relating of those exact relata, the individuals a and b. Therefore,
C1. R is not distinct in reality from the particular relatedness aRb: R = aRb.
Of course, R can be thought of in abstraction from aRb. But R in reality is identical to aRb. You cannot say that they are different because aRb has constituents a, b while R does not. For R exists when and only when it is relating a and b. Apart from them it is nothing at all.
P2. The particular relatedness or relational fact aRb is identical to the mereological sum a + R + b, given that R is relata-specific. (Betti's theory) Therefore,
C2. R is identical to the sum a + R + b. (from C1 and P2 by Transitivity of Identity)
P3. No proper part of a mereological sum having two or more members is identical to the sum of which it is a proper part. (Principle of mereology) Therefore,
C3. R is not identical to the sum a + R + b. (from P3) Therefore,
C4. R is and is not identical to the sum a + R + b. (from C2, C3) Contradiction! Therefore,
C5. Either P1 or P2 is false; either way, Betti's theory fails.
Betti will presumably reject (C1). But how? She tells us that it is the nature of R to relate exactly a and b. Now if it is the nature of R to relate exactly these relata, then it is intrinsic to R that it do so. But then R is intrinsically relational, relational in and of itself. If this is neither contradictory nor magical, then it involves importing mind (intentionality) into the bowels of R. For if it is intrinsic to R that it relate exactly a and b, then R, quite apart from actually relating a and b, 'pre-selects' a and b as its relata. But this is what mind in its intentional states does. Such states are intrinsically relational: it is their nature to be of or about items that need not exist for the states to be of or about them. But surely there is no intentionality within the non-transferable relational trope R!
But what is the alternative? Will we be told that a and b are constituents of R? But then R is identical to aRb, when it cannot be given that aRb is a + R + b.
Now let's consider bearer-dependent properties. Suppose we grant, along with Armstrong (2004, 49), that some mereological complexes are truthmakers. Is it not also the case that some are not? Suppose that Gargle is lachrymose but Hargle is not. Then the following sum exists: Hargle + __(G)being lachrymose. The sum exists because its two parts exist. But the parts are not connected to form a truthmaker. This implies that on Betti's account there are two sorts of mereological sum: those that are truthmakers and those that are not. It also implies that what makes a mereological sum a truthmaker is not its being a mereological sum. What makes a sum a truthmaker is the nature of its members. Thus what makes Hargle + __(H)being happy a truthmaking sum is its second member.
But this second member has a rather intricate and puzzling structure. It is a bearer-individuated property, a property that exists only if instantiated by Hargle. Hargle can exist without being happy, but the property in question cannot exist unless Hargle exists. It is in the nature of the property to qualify precisely Hargle “as soon as it exists,” (105) i.e., as soon as the property exists. But when does it exist? When Hargle instantiates it. So it is not as if the property has its individuated nature apart from its being instantiated; rather, it receives its individuated nature by being instantiated by Hargle. It is only the existing Hargle that can make the property individuative of precisely Hargle and nothing else. So Hargle supplies the nature that makes the property Hargle-specific, or rather Hargle-individuated.
Does this not smack of absurdity? The nature of an entity is intrinsic to it; it cannot consist in a relation to an item external to it. So it cannot be instantiation by Hargle that gives the property its nature. If, on the other hand, Hargle were a constituent of the property in question, namely, __(H)being happy, then it would make sense to say that it is the nature of the property to be instantiated by Hargle. But Hargle is not a constituent of the property; otherwise the property would not be a property but the fact of Hargle's being happy.
Betti seems to face a dilemma. Either Hargle is not a constituent of the property or he is. If Hargle is not a constituent of the property, then the property has no nature that makes it dependent on precisely Hargle and nothing else. But if Hargle is a constituent of the property, then the property is a fact.
If Betti's account is incoherent, as I have just argued that it is, then it cannot be superior to Armstrong's even if Armstrong's is also incoherent. I should make it clear that I am not defending Armstrong; I admit that his view of facts is problematic. In fact, I argue that it is incoherent in Vallicella 2016. My point is that Betti's theory is not an acceptable replacement for it. Even if her theory is not incoherent, it is problematic as I will now further demonstrate.
3. Digging Deeper: Further Questions about Betti's Theory of Relations
Betti faults me (92-93) for failing to distinguish between externality and relata-unspecificity. A relation is external just in case it is not “grounded in corresponding properties of its relata . . . .” (89) “A rela tion is relata-unspecific if and only if it is not in its nature to relate specific relata.” (90) I fail to distinguish externality from relata-unspecificity in that I hold that, in Betti's words, “A relation is external if and only if it could have related another pair (or triple, quadruple, etc.) of relata.” (93, citing Vallicella 2002, 14-15, 31; 2004, 164). As I see it, no external relation has a nature that dictates that it relate only a particular pair, triple, quadruple, etc. of relata. As against this, Betti envisages the following possibility: an external relation such as being two feet from that holds, if it holds at all, between Argle and Bargle but cannot hold between any other pair of relata. The relation is external in that there is nothing in the natures of the relata that dictates that they stand in the relation in question; the relation is relata-specific in that there is something in the nature of the relation to dictate that, if it holds, it holds only between Argle and Bargle.
Now if Betti's scenario is possible, then I have blundered by conflating externality and relata-unspecificity. But while I grant that Betti's 'possibility' is combinatorially possible given her definitions, it is not metaphysically possible. I gave an argument above. So my conflation of externality and relata-unspecificity strikes me as justified.
I found Betti's theory of relata-specific relations (which draws on the work of her student Jan Willem Wieland) obscure and in need of further development. One intriguing suggestion is that “relata-specific relations can still be universals.” (91) Now there is a wholly uncontroversial sense of 'relata-specific universal' which Betti does not intend. Consider the universal taller than. This is a dyadic relation that is instantiated by ordered pairs of objects, but not just by any old pair. The pairs must be pairs of things having height. Taller than is thus specific to all and only such pairs and not to pairs of numbers or pairs of sets or pairs of propositions or pairs of angels or pairs of acts of thinking. But Betti means something different. She is apparently envisaging the possibility of a relation that is universal but that, say, relates only Guido, Francesca, Giacomo, and Maria in respect of height. Unfortunately, she gives no exemples and I am not sure what she is driving at. She brings this up because she thinks that her solution to the unity problem works whether or not one assays properties as universals or as tropes. (91) But this is all very obscure and here is a lacuna that needs filling.
Conclusion
My interim verdict with respect to compositional facts is that Betti has not provided a viable mereological alternative to the admittedly untenable facts or states of affairs of Armstrong's middle period.
REFERENCES
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1It is an interesting question whether one could be an idealist and also a truthmaker theorist. Consider a Kantian who holds that phenomenal objects and events are “empirically real but transcendentally ideal” to employ a signature Kantian phrase. It seems to me that such a philosopher could maintain a need for truthmakers for some truthbearers, namely those synthetic aposteriori, and thus contingent, judgments about empirical objects and events. It seems one could combine realism about empirical truth with transcendental idealism.
Do you prefer the term 'facts' to 'states of affairs'? I take it you do — you certainly used the former most. But why, actually, did you use the latter in your Nous article?
Personally, I used 'facts' in my Ph.D. dissertation, but afterwards started using 'state of affairs', very much to be in the spirit of Armstrong, so to speak. But it is quite inconvenient and a little disagreeable-sounding. And one can — as demonstrated by important philosophers in the area, like you — perfectly well use 'facts' for worldly entities, as opposed to true propositions. One can also use it for both, in one and the same text, as in Arianna Betti's book, Against Facts (though that might give rise to some problems.)
So I wonder if I should return to using the term 'fact' for my book, which is derived from my dissertation. In my case, it's a terminological question only, so in principle I guess I can postpone deciding on this till later.
In the Nous article I used 'states of affairs' because I was drawing heavily from Armstrong. I now use 'fact' and 'state of affairs' interchangeably, but favor 'fact' on account of its brevity. If facts are truth-makers, however, then we cannot mean by 'fact' what Frege means by Tatsache, namely, a true proposition, where a proposition or thought (Gedanke) is the sense (Sinn) of a context-free declarative sentence (Satz). (Frege 1976, 50) Propositions are either true or false, but no fact is either true or false. A proposition is a truth-bearer, but a fact is a truth-maker. Propositions are bivalent, but there is no corresponding bivalence with respect to facts on the concretist conception. It is not as if some facts obtain and others do not: a fact cannot exist without obtaining.
By my count there are at least three correct uses of 'fact.'
Logical: A fact is a true proposition.
Epistemological: A fact is a proposition either known to be the case or believed on good evidence to be the case.
Ontological: A fact is not a proposition, but a proposition-like entity in external reality that can serve as truth-maker for declarative sentences and the propositions they express. For example, Al's being fat is a fact in the ontological sense, a complex having as primary constituents Al and the property of being fat. This fact in the ontological sense makes true the fact in the logical sense expressed by 'Al is fat.' The fact that Al is fat is made true by the fact ofAl's being fat.
I use 'fact' in the ontological sense. But what reason do we have to posit facts in this ontological sense?
There is more to the truth of a contingent sentence than the sentence that is true. 'Al is fat' is a true contingent declarative sentence. By my lights it cannot just be true: there has to be something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true, that 'grounds' its being true. This external something cannot be another sentence or someone's say-so. This external something is something 'in the world,' i.e., in reality outside mind and language. What's more, this external something cannot be Al construed as an individual. It must be a proposition-like entity, Al's being fat. This is what Armstrong calls a state of affairs and what I call a fact (and sometimes a state of affairs). It is not a proposition though it is proposition-like: it has a structure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. Clarity is served if we refer to such truth-making facts as concrete facts to distinguish them from abstract facts and a abstract states of affairs. As concrete, the fact of Al's being fat is spatially located.
This truth-maker principle goes beyond what we could call the veritas-sequitur-esse principle. The latter says merely that every true contingent sentence/proposition is about something that exists. It says that there are no truths about nonexistent items, contra Meinong. The VSE principle is satisfied by 'Al is fat' if just Al exists in reality or just Al and fatness. The TM principle takes it a step further. It requires Al, fatness, and their togetherness in the fact of Al's being fat.
Your grasp of the issue is excellent, Bill. “[T]he 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological” seems to me right; this is why it is semirealism, not realism. But it is logical semirealism: “Logical semirealism differs from both logical antirealism and logical realism much as Kant’s position on causality differed from both antirealism and realism regarding causality, and Wittgenstein’s position on other people’s sensations differed from both antirealism and realism regarding
“other minds” (page 166).
The reason facts are only “semireal” in my view is that they have a logical structure. As you say in your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated, “facts could be truth-making only if they are “proposition-like,” “structured in a proposition-like way” – only if “a fact has a structure that can mirror the structure of a proposition.” The structure of a proposition is its logical structure. In Part Two of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy I argue against realism regarding logical structure, but I also reject the simplistic antirealism regarding logical structure that says “there is only language.” Surely there are no ands, ors, or iffs in the world. It’s not just that logical objects and structures cannot be perceived or even “said.” Surely words like “and,” “or,” and “if” do not stand for anything physical, mental, or other-worldly. Yet no less surely they are not merely words.
Since facts necessarily, indeed essentially, possess a logical structure, my argument against logical realism applies also to realism regarding facts but, again, I reject the simplistic antirealism regarding facts that says “there is only language.” I wrote: “[T]here is a third way of understanding facts, which is neither realist nor antirealist. It is semirealist. In general, if a proposition is in dispute between realism and antirealism, with the realist asserting and the antirealist denying it, the semirealist would differ from both by holding that it is an improper proposition, perhaps even that there is no such proposition, and thus that both asserting and denying it are improper. There is an analogy here with sophisticated agnosticism. The theist asserts the proposition “God exists” and the atheist denies it, but the sophisticated agnostic questions, for varying reasons we need not consider here, its propriety” (pages 178-9).
I would share your discomfort if a philosopher said “There are facts and there are no facts”( I can’t find the sentence in Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). But I would understand it, just as I understand Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,” and Wittgenstein’s “some things cannot be said but show themselves.” All four are puzzling. Sometimes we have to content ourselves with truths that puzzle us, make us wonder. But philosophy begins in wonder. We could, of course, invent new terms, perhaps saying that while facts do not exist they subsist, but I doubt that this would lead to better understanding.
Butch