Mainly I blog, but today I bleg.
I prefer the Firefox browser to Google Chrome, but the former crashes on a regular basis, like every other day. Yes, I have done the obvious things like make sure I am running the latest version. I take it that others have this crash problem. Any suggestions?
Hitchens says somewhere that he didn't suffer from cognitive dissonance of the sort that arises when a deeply internalized religious upbringing collides with the contrary values of the world, since he never took religion or theism seriously in the first place. But then I say religion was never a Jamesian live option for him. But if not a live existential option, one that engages the whole man and not just his intellect, then not an option explored with the openness and sympathy and humility requisite for understanding.
So why should we take seriously what Hitchens says about religion? He hasn't sympathetically entered into the subject. He hasn't fulfilled the prerequisites for understanding. One such prerequisite is openness to the pain of cognitive dissonance as suffered when the doctrines, precepts and practices of a religion taken seriously come into conflict with a world that mocks them when not ignoring them. But in Hitchens by his own account there was not even the possibility of cognitive dissonance.
Consider two working class individuals. The first is a sensitive poet with real poetic ability. His family, however, considers poetry effete and epicene and nothing that a real man could or should take seriously. The second is a lout with no appreciation of poetry whatsoever. The first suffers cognitive dissonance as his ideal world of poetic imagination collides with the grubby work-a-day-world of his unlettered parents and relatives. The second fellow obviously suffers from no comparable cognitive dissonance: he never took poetry seriously in the first place.
The second fellow, however, is full of himself and his opinions and does not hesitate to hold forth in the manner of the bar room bullshitter on any and all topics, including poetry. Should we credit his opinions about poetry? Of course not: he has never engaged with it by practice or careful reading or the consultation of works of literary criticism. He knows not whereof he speaks. His nescience reflects his lack of the poetic 'organ.'
Similarly, a fellow like Hitchens, as clever as he is, lacks the religious 'organ.' So religion is closed off from him and what he says about it , though interesting, need not be taken all that seriously, or is to be taken seriously only in a negative way in the manner of the pathologist in his study of pathogens.
Companion post: David Lewis on Religion
J. P. Moreland defines an "impure realist" as one who denies the Axiom of Localization (Universals, McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, p. 18):
No entity whatsoever can exist at different spatial locations at once or at interrupted time intervals.
An example of an impure realist is D. M. Armstrong. An example of a pure realist is R. Grossmann. Moreland writes,
Impure realists like D. M. Armstrong deny the axiom of localization. For them, properties are spatially contained inside the things that have them. Redness is at the very place Socrates is and redness is also at the very place Plato is. Thus, redness violates the axiom of localization. Impure realists are naturalists at heart. Why? Because they accept the fact that properties are universals; that is, as entities that can be exemplified by more than one thing at once. But they do not want to deny naturalism and believe in abstract entities that are outside space and time altogether. Thus, impure realists hold that all entities are, indeed, inside space and time. But they embrace two different kinds of spatial entities: concrete particulars (Socrates) that are in only one place at a time, and universals (properties like redness) that are at different spatial locations at the very same time. For the impure realist, the exemplification relation is a spatial container relation. Socrates exemplifies redness in that redness is spatially contained inside of or at the same place as Socrates. (18-19)
The above doesn't sound right to me either in itself or as an interpretation of Armstrong.
Is Exemplification a Container Relation?
Take a nice simple 'Iowa' example. There are two round, red spots on a piece of white paper. It is a datum, a Moorean fact, that both are of the same shape and both are of the same color. Moving from data to theory: what is the ontological ground of the sameness of shape and the sameness of color? The impure realist responds with alacrity: the spots are of the same color because one and the same universal redness and one and the same universal roundness are present in both spots. The qualitative sameness of the two spots is grounded in sameness of universals. What is the ontological ground of the numerical difference of the two spots? The bare or thin particular in each. Their numerical difference grounds the numerical difference of the two spots. The bare/thin particular does a second job: it is that which instantiates the universals 'in' each spot. For not only do we need an account of numerical difference, we also need an account of why the two spots are particulars and not (conjunctive) universals.
The upshot for both Bergmann and Armstrong is that each spot is a fact or state of affairs. How so? Let 'A' designate one spot and 'B' the other. Each spot is a thick particular, a particular together with all its monadic properties. Let 'a' and 'b' designate the thin particulars in each. A thin particular is a particular taken in abstraction from its monadic properties. Let 'F-ness' designate the conjunctive universal the conjuncts of which are roundness and redness. Then A = a-instantiating F-ness, and B = b-instantiating-F-ness. A and B are concrete facts or states of affairs. A is a's being F and B is b's being F.
From what has been said so far it should be clear that instantiation/exemplification cannot be a spatial container relation. Even if F-ness is spatially inside of the thick particulars A and B, that relation is different from the relation that connects the thin particular a to the universal F-ness and the thin particular b to the universal F-ness. The point is that instantiation cannot be any sort of container, constituency, or part-whole relation on a scheme like Armstrong's or Bergmann's in which ordinary concrete particulars are assayed as states of affairs or facts. A's being red is not A's having the universal redness as a part, spatial or not. A's being red is a's instantiating the universal redness. Instantiation, it should be clear, is not a part-whole relation. If a instantiates F-ness, then neither is a a part of F-ness nor is F-ness a part of a.
Contra Moreland, we may safely say that for Armstrong, and for any scheme like his, exemplification/instantiation is not a container relation, and therefore not a spatial container relation.
Could an Ontological Part be a Spatial Part?
Moreland makes two claims in the quoted passage. One is that exemplification is a spatial container relation. The other is that there are two different kinds of spatial entities. The claims seem logically independent. Suppose you agree with me that exemplification cannot be any sort of container relation. It seems consistent with this to maintain that universals are spatial parts of ordinary concrete particulars. But this notion is difficult to swallow as well.
A constituent ontologist like Bergmann, Armstrong, or the author of A Paradigm Theory of Existence maintains that ordinary concrete particulars have ontological parts structured ontologically. Thus thin particulars and constituent universals are among the ontological parts of ordinary particulars when the latter are assayed as states of affairs or facts. The question is: could these ontological parts be spatial parts?
Consider a thin or bare particular. Is it a spatial part of a round red spot? By my lights, this makes no sense. There is no conceivable process of physical decomposition that could lay bare (please forgive the wholly intended pun) the bare particular at the metaphysical core of a red spot or a ball bearing. Suppose one arrived at genuine physical atoms, literally indivisible bits of matter, in the physical decomposition of a ball bearing. Could one of these atoms be the bare or thin particular of the ball bearing? Of course not. For any such atom you pick will have intrinsic properties. And so any atom you pick will be a thick particular. As such, it will have at its metaphysical core a thin particular which — it should now be obvious — cannot be a bit of matter. Bare particulars, if there are any, lie too deep, metaphysically speaking, to be bits of matter.
Obviously, then, bare particulars cannot be material parts of ordinary particulars. Hence they cannot be spatial parts of ordinary particulars.
What about universals? Could my two red spots — same shade of red, of course — each have as a spatial part numerically one and the same universal, a universal 'repeated' in each spot, the universal redness? If so, then the same goes for the geometrical property, roundness: it is too is a universal spatially present in both spots. But then it follows that the two universals spatially coincide: they occupy the same space in each spot. So not only can universals be in different places at the same time; two or more of them can be in the same place at the same time.
If nothing else, this conception puts considerable stress on our notion of a spatial part. One can physically separate the spatial parts of a thing. A spherical object can be literally cut into two hemispheres. But if a ball is red all over and sticky all over, the redness and the stickiness cannot be physically separated. If physical separability in principle is a criterion of spatial parthood, then universals cannot be spatial parts of spatial concrete particulars.
Any thoughts?
Three Views
Van Inwagen: The only parts of material particulars are ordinary spatial parts. The only structure of a material particular is spatial or mereological structure. The notion of an ontological part that is not a spatial part in the ordinary mereological sense is unintelligible. And the same goes for ontological structure. See here.
Armstrong as Misread by Moreland: There are ontological parts in addition to ordinary spatial parts and they too are spatial.
Vallicella (2002): There are ontological parts but they are not spatial.
Yes, the ones in Israel.
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UPDATE 4/15: J. S. writes:
I happen to live in Beirut and feel safe enough in the Christian area, which is the eastern quarter of the city along with big chunks of Mt. Lebanon and the coastal area as far north asTripoli, which is a Sunni hotbed.
I've asked a lot of Lebanese Christians if they feel safe. They worry more about Sunnis than Shia, and they are especially worried about the de facto resettlement here of a million Syrian refugees, who are mostly Sunnis. There's no love lost between the Christians and Hizbollah, which is Shia, but there is an unspoken toleration of it as long as Hizbollah helps keep Lebanon a ISIS-free zone. The security at Beirut airport, for example, is almost certainly penetrated by Hizbullah partisans. Most Lebanese see that as a line of defense against ISIS bomb-smugglers.
Safety is a relative concept. I wish my reader the best. Twenty years ago I spent a year in Turkey in Ankara, the capital. We travelled all over. I wouldn't risk living in Turkey nowadays or travelling all over. I would only feel safe now with a quick in and out to Antalya or Bodrum or one of the other seaside resort towns.
The magnificent Graeco-Roman, Christian, and other antiquities in Turkey! I am glad I got to see them at Hierapolis, Ephesus, Cappadocia, and so many places. It is sickening to think of them being destroyed by jihadi savages. Remember what they did to the Buddhist statuary? Recently. the destruction in Palmyra. Have the archeologists spoken out?
If Islam is the religion of peace, then it is also the religion of archeological preservation. Modus tollens or modus ponens?
A tip of the hat to Karl White for alerting me to this YouTube video that runs about 20 minutes. Professor Craig explains, with characteristic lucidity, why he does not accept the doctrine of divine simplicity and its entailments.
See my divine simplicity category and my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic.
One of the deep issues here is whether or not Christianity was early on infected by Hellenism, or whether Greek thought, far from being a foreign intrusion, is intrinsic to Christianity. I side with David Bentley Hart on this question. In The Lively God of Robert Jensen, Hart writes,
. . . it is arguable that “Hellenism” is already an intrinsic dimension of the New Testament itself and that some kind of “Platonism” is inseparable from the Christian faith. In short, many theologians view the development of Christian metaphysics over the millennium and a half leading to the Reformation as perfectly in keeping with the testimony of Scripture, and “Hellenized” Christianity as the special work of the Holy Spirit—with which no baptized Christian may safely break. To such theologians, the alliance struck in much modern dogmatics between theology and German idealism is a far greater source of concern than any imagined “Greek captivity” of the Church.
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UPDATE (4/16): Ed Feser's detailed rejoinder to Craig is here wherein the former makes a number of clarifying comments and rebuts some outright misrepresentations on Craig's part.
My only objection to the image below is to the filtered cigarette. Real men smoke unfiltered Camels.
My man Hanson. I can't touch him, so I quote him:
There are two characteristics common to popular uses of the term “white”: It is almost always used pejoratively, and it is mostly voiced by elites of all backgrounds — and usually as a slur against the white working and “clinger” classes. So “the Latino vote” reflects shared aspirations; “the white vote” merely crude resentment. Those who benefit from affirmative action are not privileged, but those who do not certainly are. Whites cling in Neanderthal fashion to their legal rifles; inner-city youth hardly at all to their illegal handguns. Buying a jet-ski on credit is typical redneck stupidity; borrowing $200,000 to send a kid to a tony private university from which he will graduate more ignorant and arrogant than when he enrolled is wise. White “evangelicals” are puzzling for their crude hypocrisies; not so the refined paradoxes of Congregationalists and Episcopalians. Smoking is self-destruction, while injecting a strain of botulism toxin into your face is not self-mutilation.
Bret Stephens: "The political orthodoxy of the left is the gateway drug to jihad." Quite so.
See my Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam
Contemporary liberals use 'racist' as an all-purpose semantic bludgeon. It can mean almost anything depending on what the lefty agenda is at the moment. For example, if you point out the dangers of radical Islam you may get yourself labeled a 'racist' even though Islam is not a race but a religion. Examples are legion. Here is one that just came to my attention thanks to Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:
You’re a private landlord, renting apartments in a building you bought with your savings from years of hard work and modest living. You take pride in maintaining your property, keeping it clean, comfortable, and attractive. You charge a fair rent and treat your tenants with courtesy and respect. Your tenants, in turn, appreciate the care you put into the building. And they trust you to screen prospective tenants wisely, accepting only residents who won’t jeopardize the building’s safe and neighborly character. That’s why you only consider applications from individuals who are employed or in school, whose credit scores are strong, and who have no criminal record.
Most Americans would look at you and likely see a prudent, levelheaded property owner. Not the Obama administration. The Department of Housing and Urban Development warned last week that landlords who refuse to rent to anyone with a criminal record are in violation of the Fair Housing Act and can be prosecuted and fined for racial discrimination. (Emphasis added.)
Next stop: The Twilight Zone. I'll leave it to you to sort though the 'disparate impact' 'reasoning' of the ruling should you care to waste your time.
Obama has proven to be a disaster on all fronts and not just for the United States. And so you are going to vote for Hillary and a third Obama term? You ought to ask yourself what is in the long-term best interest of yourself, your country, and the world. Assuming, of course, that you are not a criminal, a member of Black Lives Matter, a pampered collegiate cry bully . . . .
My attitude has softened a bit since the following was written two and half years ago. But I'll leave it at full strength. Trenchancy of expression and all that.
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There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.
Still, religion would have its immanent life-enhancing role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.' And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule. Why rename confession 'reconciliation? What is the point of such a stupid change?
A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need. Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people?
People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.
The church should be a liberal-free zone.
Spencer Case concludes:
If white moderates deserve blame for their inaction against Jim Crow, then perhaps moderate Muslims today can be faulted for failing to combat a culture of jihad.
Thanks again to Professor Levy to getting me 'fired up' over this topic.
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Is the notion of a trope intelligible?
If not, then we can pack it in right here and dispense with discussion of the subsidiary difficulties. Peter van Inwagen confesses, "I do not understand much of what B-ontologists write." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge UP, 2001, p. 2) 'B' is short for 'Bergmann' where the reference is to Gustav Bergmann, the founder of the Iowa School. B-ontology is what I call constituent ontology. I will refer to it, and not just out of perversity, as C-ontology and I will contrast it with NC-ontology. Van Inwagen is a premier example of an NC-ontologist, a non-constituent ontologist.
The fundamental idea of C-ontology is that concreta have ontological parts in addition to their spatial parts if the concreta in question are material things. To invoke a nice simple 'Iowa' example, consider a couple of round red spots on a white piece of paper. Each spot has spatial parts. On C-ontology, however, each spot also has ontological parts, among them the properties of the spots. For a C-ontologist, then, the properties of a thing are parts of it. But of course they are not spatial or mereological parts of it. A spot can be cut in two, and an avocado can be disembarrassed of its seed and exocarp, but one cannot physically separate the roundness and the redness of the spot or the dark green of the exocarp from the exocarp. So if the properties of a thing are parts thereof, then these parts are 'ontological' parts, parts that figure in the ontological structure of the thing in question.
Examples of C-ontologies: a) trope bundle theory, b) universals bundle theory, c) tropes + substratum theory, d) Castaneda's Guise Theory, e) Butchvarov's object-entity theory, f) the ontological theories of Bergmann, Armstrong, and Vallicella according to which ordinary particulars are concrete facts, g) Aristotelian and Scholastic hylomorphic doctrines according to which form and matter are 'principles' (in the Scholastic not the sentential sense) ingredient in primary substances.
If van Inwagen is right, then all of the above are unintelligible. Van Inwagen claims not to understand such terms as 'trope,' 'bare particular,' 'immanent universal' and 'bundle' as these terms are used in C-ontologies. He professes not to understand how a thing could have what I am calling an ontological structure. "What I cannot see is how a chair could have any sort of structure but a spatial or mereological structure." (Ibid.) He cannot see how something like a chair could have parts other than smaller and smaller spatial parts such as legs made of wood which are composed of cellulose molecules along with other organic compounds, and so on down. If this is right, then there is no room for what I call ontological analysis as opposed to chemical analysis and physical analysis. There can be no such intelligible project as an ontological factor analysis that breaks an ordinary particular down into thin particular, immanent universals, nexus of exemplification, and the like, or into tropes and a compresence relation, etc.
In sum: trope theory stands and falls with C-ontology; the project of C-ontology is unintelligible; ergo, trope theory is unintelligible resting as it does on such unintelligible notions as trope, and bundle of tropes. Van Inwagen delivers his unkindest cut with the quip that he has never been able to understand tropes as "anything but idealized coats of paint." (Ibid.) Ouch!
Let's assume that van Inwagen is right and that the properties of concrete particulars cannot be construed as parts of them in any intelligible sense of 'part.' If so, this puts paid to every C-ontology I am familiar with. But can van Inwagen do better? Is his NC-ontology free of difficulties? I don't think so. It bristles with them no less than C-ontology does. I refer the interested reader to my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica, vol, 12, no. 2 (2015), pp. 99-125. Here is a pre-print version. I will now reproduce some of it so that you can see how a C-ontologist can go on the attack:
Van Inwagen's Ostrich Realism and Commitment to Bare Particulars
Van Inwagen rejects both extreme and moderate nominalism. So he can't possibly be an ostrich nominalist. He is, however, as he himself appreciates, an ostrich realist or ostrich platonist. (214-15)
Suppose Max is black. What explains the predicate's being true of Max? According to the ostrich nominalist, nothing does. It is just true of him. There is nothing in or about Max that serves as the ontological ground of the correctness of his satisfying the predicate. Now 'F' is true of a if and only if 'a is F' is true. So we may also ask: what is the ontological ground of the truth of 'Max is black'? The ostrich reply will be: nothing. The sentence is just true. There is no need for a truth-maker.
The ostrich realist/platonist says something very similar except that in place of predicates he puts abstract properties, and in place of sentences he puts abstract propositions. In virtue of what does Max instantiate blackness? In virtue of nothing. He just instantiates it. Nothing explains why the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'x is black' is instantiated by Max. Nothing explains it because there is nothing to explain. And nothing explains why the saturated assertible expressed by 'Max is black' is true. Thus there is nothing concrete here below that could be called a state of affairs in anything like Armstrong's sense. There is in the realm of concreta no such item as Max-instantiating-blackness, or the concrete fact of Max's being black. Here below there is just Max, and up yonder in a topos ouranos are 'his' properties (the abstract unsaturated assertibles that he, but not he alone, instantiates). But then Max is a bare particular in one sense of this phrase. In what sense, then?
Four Senses of 'Bare Particular'
1. A bare particular is an ordinary concrete particular that lacks properties. I mention this foolish view only to set it aside. No proponent of bare particulars that I am aware of ever intended the phrase in this way. And of course, van Inwagen is not committed to bare particulars in this sense. Indeed, he rejects an equivalent view. “A bare particular would be a thing of which nothing could be said truly, an obviously incoherent notion.” (179)
2. A bare particular is an ontological constituent of an ordinary concrete particular, a constituent that has no properties. To my knowledge, no proponent of bare particulars ever intended the phrase in this way. In any case, the view is untenable and may be dismissed. Van Inwagen is of course not committed to this view. He is a 'relation' ontologist, not a 'constituent' ontologist.
3. A bare particular is an ontological constituent of an ordinary concrete particular, a constituent that does have properties, namely, the properties associated with the ordinary particular in question, and has them by instantiating (exemplifying) them. This view is held by Gustav Bergmann and by David Armstrong in his middle period. Armstrong, however, speaks of thin particulars rather than bare particulars, contrasting them with thick particulars (what I am calling ordinary concrete particulars). When he does uses 'bare particular,' he uses the phrase incorrectly and idiosyncratically to refer to something like (1) or (2). For example, in Universals and Scientific Realism, Cambridge UP, 1978, vol. I, p. 213, he affirms something he calls the "Strong Principle of the Rejection of Bare Particulars":
For each particular, x, there exists at least one non-relational property, P, such that x is P.
This principle of Armstrong is plausibly read as a rejection of (1) and (2). It is plainly consistent with (3). But of course I do not claim that van Inwagen is committed to bare or thin particulars in the sense of (3). For again, van Inwagen is not a constituent ontologist.
4. A bare particular is an ordinary concrete particular that has properties by instantiating them, where instantiation is a full-fledged external asymmetrical relation (not a non-relational tie whatever that might come to) that connects concrete objects to abstract objects, where abstract objects are objects that are not in space, not in time, and are neither causally active nor causally passive. What is common to (3) and (4) is the idea that bare particulars have properties all right, but they have them in a certain way, by being externally related to them. A bare particular, then, is nothing like an Aristotelian primary substance which has, or rather is, its essence or nature. The bareness of a bare particular, then, consists in its lacking an Aristotle-type nature, not it its lacking properties. My claim is that van Inwagen is committed to bare particulars in sense (4). Let me explain.
Van Inwagen's Bare Particulars
Consider my cat Max. Van Inwagen is committed to saying that Max is a bare particular in sense (4). For while Max has properties, these properties are in no sense constituents of him, but lie (stand?) outside him in a realm apart. These properties are in no sense at him or in him or on him, not even such properties as being black or being furry, properties that are plausibly held to be sense-perceivable. After all, one can see black where he is and feel furriness where he is. None of Max's properties, on van Inwagen's construal of properties, are where he is or when he is. None of them has anything to do with the concrete being of Max himself. As I made clear earlier, the realms of the concrete and the abstract are radically disjoint for van Inwagen. They are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive realms: for all x, x is either concrete or abstract, but not both and not neither. So Max is here below in the realm of space, time, change, and causality while his properties exist in splendid isolation up yonder in the realm of abstracta. They are far, far away, not spatially and not temporally, but ontologically.
Max and his properties are of course connected by instantiation which is a relation that is both external and abstract. In what sense is the relation external? X and y are externally related just in case there is nothing intrinsic about the relata that entails their being related. Max is two feet from me at the moment. This relation of being two feet from is external in that there are no intrinsic properties of me or Max or both that entail our being two feet from each other. Our intrinsic properties would be just the same if we were three feet from each other. But Max and his brother Manny are both black. In virtue of their both being intrinsically black, they stand in the same color as relation. Hence the latter relation is not external but internal. Internal relatedness is supervenient upon the intrinsic features of the relata; external relatedness is not.
Suppose I want to bring it about that two balls have the same color. I need do only two things: paint the one ball red, say, and then paint the other ball red. But if I want to bring it about that there are two balls having the same color ten feet from each other, I have to do three things: paint the one ball red, say; paint the other ball red; place them ten feet from each other. The external relatedness does not supervene upon the intrinsic properties of the relata. Given that concrete particulars are externally related to their properties, these particulars are bare particulars in the sense defined in #4 above.
And What is Wrong with That?
Suppose you agree with me that van Inwagen's concrete particulars are bare, not in any old sense, but in the precise sense I defined, a sense that comports well with what the actual proponents of bare/thin particulars had in mind. So what? What's wrong with being committed to bare particulars? Well, the consequences seem unpalatable if not absurd.
A. One consequence is that all properties are accidental and none are essential. For if Max is bare, then there is nothing in him or at him or about him that dictates the properties he must instantiate or limits the properties he can instantiate. He can have any old set of properties so long as he has some set or other. Bare particulars are 'promiscuous' in their connection with properties. The connection between particular and property is then contingent and all properties are accidental. It is metaphysically (broadly logically) possible that Max combine with any property. He happens to be a cat, but he could have been a poached egg or a valve lifter. He could have had the shape of a cube. Or he might have been a dimensionless point. He might have been an act of thinking (temporal and causally efficacious, but not spatial).
B. A second consequence is that all properties are relational and none are intrinsic. For if Max is black in virtue of standing in an external instantiation relation to the abstract object, blackness, then his being black is a relational property and not an intrinsic one.
C. A third consequence is that none of Max's properties are sense-perceivable. Van Inwagen-properties are abstract objects and none of them are perceivable. But if I cup my hands around a ball, don't I literally feel its sphericalness or spheroidness? Or am I merely being appeared to spheroidally?
D. Finally, given what van Inwagen himself says about the radical difference between the abstract and the concrete, a difference so abysmal (my word) that it would be better if we could avoid commitment to abstracta, it is highly counter-intuitive that there should be this abymal difference between a cucumber, say, and its greenness. It is strange that the difference between God and a cucumber should “pale into insignificance” (156) compared to the difference between a cucumber and the property of being green. After all, the properties of a thing articulate its very being. How can they be so ontologically distant from the thing?
If you deny that concrete things as van Inwagen understands them are bare in the sense I have explained, then you seem to be committed to saying that there are two sorts of properties, van Inwagen properties in Plato's heaven and 'sublunary' properties at the particulars here below. But then I will ask two questions. First, what is the point of introducing such properties if they merely duplicate at the abstract intensional level the 'real' properties in the sublunary sphere? Second, what justifies calling such properties properties given that you still are going to need sublunary properties to avoid saying that van Inwagen's concreta are bare particulars?
Perceivability of Properties
Let us pursue point C above a bit further. "We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties." (179) I honestly don't know what to make of the second clause of the quoted sentence. I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light. Van Inwagen's claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue. Here I balk. If I don't see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I literally see that the cup is blue? 'That it is blue' is a thing that can be said of the cup, and said with truth. This thing that can be said is an unsaturated assertible, a property in van Inwagen's sense. Van Inwagen is telling us that it cannot be seen. 'That the cup is blue' is a thing that can be said, full stop. It is a saturated assertible, a proposition, and a true one at that. Both assertibles are abstract objects. Both are invisible, and not because of any limitation in my visual power or in human visual power in general, but because abstract objects cannot be terms of causal relations, and perception involves causation. Both types of assertible are categorially disbarred from visibility. But if both the property and the proposition are invisible, then how can van Inwagen say that "we see that certain things have certain properties"? If van Inwagen says that we don't see the proposition, then what do we see when we see that the cup is blue? A colorless cup? A cup that is blue but is blue in a way different from the way the cup is blue by instantiatiating the abstract unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is blue'? But then one has duplicated at the level of abstracta the property that one sees at the concrete cup. If there is blueness at the cup and abstract blueness in Plato's heaven, why do we need the latter? Just what is going on here?
To van Inwagen's view one could reasonably oppose the following view. I see the cup. I see blueness or blue at the cup. I don't see a colorless cup. To deny the three foregoing sentences would be to deny what is phenomenologically given. What I don't literally see, however, is that the cup is blue. (Thus I don't literally see what van Inwagen says we literally see.) For to see that the cup is blue is to see the instantiation of blueness by the cup. And I don't see that. The correlate of the 'is' in 'The cup is blue' is not an object of sensation. If you think it is, tell me how I can single it out, how I can isolate it. Where in the visual field is it? The blueness is spread out over the visible surfaces of the cup. The cup is singled out as a particular thing on the desk, next to the cat, beneath the lamp, etc. Now where is the instantiation relation? Point it out to me! You won't be able to do it. I see the cup, and I see blue/blueness where the cup is. I don't see the cup's BEING blue.
It is also hard to understand how van Inwagen, on his own assumptions, can maintain that we see that certain things have certain properties. Suppose I see that Max, a cat of my acquaintance, is black. Do I see a proposition? Not on van Inwagen's understanding of 'proposition.' His propositions are Fregean, not Russellian: they are not resident in the physical world. Do I see a proposition-like entity such as an Armstrongian state of affairs? Again, no. What do I see? Van Inwagen claims that properties are not objects of sensation; no properties are, not even perceptual properties. I should think that some properties are objects of sensation, or better, of perception: I perceive blueness at the cup by sight; I perceive smoothness and hardness and heat at the cup by touch. If so, then (some) properties are not abstract objects residing in a domain unto themselves.
Van Inwagen's view appears to have the absurd consequence that things like coffee cups are colorless. For if colors are properties (179) and properties are abstract objects, and abstract objects are colorless (as they obviously are), then colors are colorless, and whiteness is not white and blueness is not blue. Van Inwagen bites the bullet and accepts the consequence. But we can easily run the argument in reverse: Blueness is blue; colors are properties; abstract objects are colorless; ergo, perceptual properties are not abstract objects. They are either tropes or else universals wholly present in the things that have them. Van Inwagen, a 'relation ontologist' cannot of course allow this move into 'constituent ontology.'
There is a long footnote on p. 242 that may amount to a response to something like my objection. In the main text, van Inwagen speaks of "such properties as are presented to our senses as belonging to the objects we sense . . . ." How does this square with the claim on p. 179 that properties are not objects of sensation? Can a property such as blueness be presented to our senses without being an object of sensation? Apparently yes, "In a noncausal sense of 'presented.'" (243, fn 3) How does this solve the problem? It is phenomenologically evident that (a definite shade of) blue appears to my senses when I stare at my blue coffee cup. Now if this blueness is an abstract object as van Inwagen claims then it cannot be presented to my senses any more than it can be something with which I causally interact.
