Are Holes Material Items?

Here is a version of materialism:

1) All and only material things exist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where to Send Illegal Immigrants

Send them to 'sanctuary' jurisdictions.

Eric Adams, mayor of NYC, would be happy to show his hospitality and humanity. I am using 'jurisdiction' to cover cities, counties, and states.  Here is a nifty map and a list brought to you from the fine folks over at the Center for Immigration Studies. I am proud to report that no city or county in Arizona is on the list. 

Note the clustering of 'sanctuary'  counties. The nastiest such cluster appears to be in the Pacific Northwest in Washington and Oregon with an increase in the density of clustering as you 'migrate' toward the Left Coast.  

From the map, I judge that the majority of the 'sanctuary' jurisdictions are coastal with most of the 'fly-over' jurisdictions in THC-rich Colorado.

A state is composed of counties, and counties are composed of cities (towns, etc.).  Would I be wrong to infer that if a state is a 'sanctuary' state (Illinois, e.g.), that every county  in that state has the same status, and every city in every county? OR can counties and cities in a 'sanctuary' state retain non-'sanctuary' status? I don't know, which is why I am asking.

(By the way, it annoys me when I ask someone a question of the form 'Do you know why ___?' and he responds, 'Why?')

Now for a trio of polemically-intended witticisms:

There  is more of sanctimony than of sanctuary in a 'sanctuary' jurisdiction.

It is easy to be sanctimonious if you have no skin in the game.

Only the inmates of an asylum could confuse an illegal immigrant with an asylum-seeker.

Mockery is a weapon not to be sneered at in our battle with our political enemies. And throw in a little contumely for good measure.

 

Back to Kant! The Aporetics of Appearance

Ed Buckner writes and I respond in blue:

1) The expression “this table” refers to something, i.e. has a referent.

BV: Yes.

2) What it refers to is extended in space and persists through time.

BV: No doubt. (1) and (2) are 'datanic claims' in my terminology. They simply must be accommodated by any theory worth its salt.

A Kantian will sum up (1) and (2) by saying that 'this table' refers to something empirically real. 'Empirically' means via the senses. To say that the table is empirically real is to say that it exists independently of any particular perceiver such as Ed and his mental states, and is given via the outer senses (sight, touch, etc.).  It follows, of course, that the table is not an object of inner sense. For if it were an object of inner sense, it could not be in space. Ed's perceivings, which he can become aware of by inner sense, are in time, but not in space. Because the table is in space, it is not in Ed's mind, i.e., it is not one of his mental states.

3) Kant claims that a thing in itself is not extended in space and does not persist through time.

BV: Kant does indeed say that, but what does it mean? On one interpretation, what Kant means by the above claim is that a thing such as a table, when considered as a thing in itself, and thus not as it appears to us under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us, is not extended in space and does not appear in time.

On this interpretation, promoted by such noted Kant scholars as Gerold Prauss and Henry Allison, there are not two tables, a phenomenal table and a noumenal table; there is one table considered in two ways. Phenomena and things in themselves are not two types of thing, but two different ways of considering the same things. It is not as if, 'behind' the phenomenal table, there is a 'table in itself': there is only one table  viewed either from the human (finite) point of view or from the absolute point of view of an intellectus archetypus.

One advantage of this interpretation is that it allows the accommodation of  Kant's repeated insistent claim that he is not a Berkeleyan idealist. For Berkeley, spatial things such as tables are in the mind. For Kant, they are not in the mind, for the following reason. What is in the mind is accessible to inner sense, but not to outer sense. Tables and such, however, are accessible only to outer sense. So tables and spatial things generally are not in the mind. They are in space outside the mind.  It must be understood, of course, that for Kant space is a mere a priori form of our sensibility, and thus one of the epistemic conditions above mentioned.

4) Therefore what “this table” refers to is not a thing in  itself.

BV: The validity of the inference is questionable. On the above interpretation, what "this table" refers to is not a thing as it would be when considered apart from the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us. It refers to a thing under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us. It could therefore be said that what "this table" refers to is indeed that table itself, albeit under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us.  These conditions include space and time, the a priori conditions of our sensibility (Sinnlichkeit), and the categories, the a priori forms of our understanding (Verstand).

I cannot fault these. In which case, what does “this table” refer to, for a Kantian?

BV: "This table," in line with the above interpretation, refers to a table under the epistemic conditions (space, time, and categories) under which alone it can appear to us. It thus refers to a phenomenon or appearance (Erscheinung). But this phenomenon is not a private mental content of a particular perceiver.  It is an intersubjectively accessible thing, the table in our example.  

So, from a Kantian point of view, 'this table' refers to a table which to employ a signature Kantian phrase, is "empirically real but transcendentally ideal." 

Pace Ed Buckner, and other English commentators, Kant is not a Berkeleyan idealist. This is not to say that that Kant's transcendental idealism is in the the clear. It remains problematic for reasons we cannot go into now.

On ‘Materialize’ and Materialism

 

Mind no matter

It is interesting that 'materialize' is often used in ordinary English as an intransitive verb to mean: come to be real.  "Rain clouds materialized on the horizon." "The Hezbollah counterattack never materialized." A thing or state of affairs is real if and only if it exists independently of (finite) mind. To be real is to exist outside the mind and outside its causes. The last two sentences may need some tweaking and some commentary, but let's move on to the question of the relation of materiality and existence.  Is the following true?

1) Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff x is a material thing.

(1) formulates a version of materialism: everything that exists is a material thing, and everything that is material exists. If true, (1) necessarily true. We surely don't want to say that (1) just happens to be true. The type of necessity? Not analytic and not narrowly logical. And of course not nomological: (1) is not a law of nature given that the laws of nature are logically contingent.  (1), if true, formulates a law of metaphysics. So I'll say it is metaphysically necessary. 

Are there counterexamples to (1)? Are there existing things that are not material? Are there material things that do not exist?

Wanted are nice clean  counterexamples that are not as questionable as (1) itself. I want to refute (1) if I can. Bear in mind that 'refute' is a verb of success. So angels won't do. How about numbers? Numbers are more credible than angels; numbers presumably exist; numbers are so-called 'abstract' objects outside of space and time and thus not material.  Hartry Field and other nominalists, however, will argue with some plausibility that numbers and other abstracta either do not exist or that there is no good reason to posit them.  Field wrote a book entitled Science Without Numbers.  (And of course he was not proposing that one could do physics without mathematics.) 

What is left by way of counterexamples to (1) if we exclude spiritual substances (God, gods, angels, demons, unembodied and disembodied souls) and so-called abstract objects (numbers, mathematical sets, Fregean-Bolzanian propositions, Chisholmian-Plantingian states of affairs, etc.)? 

Well, consider my present occurrent visual awareness of my lamp.  (Better yet: you consider your present occurrent awareness of anything .) This awareness of the lamp (genitivus obiectivus) is not the lamp; it exists, and it cannot be material in nature. The awareness is not a state of my body or brain, even if correlated with some such state. If it were a state of my body or brain, it would be material which is precisely what it cannot be. Why not? Because the awareness is an intentional or object-directed state and no material/physical state can exhibit intentionality.

This is as clean a counterexample as I can muster.  The awareness of material things is not itself a material thing. Less clean, but still a contender, is the subject of (genitivus subiectivus) the object-directed state , the mind, ego, self that is in the state.  If there is a self along the lines of a Cartesian res cogitans that is aware of a lamp when BV is aware of his lamp, then that self exists but is not material.

Have these considerations refuted (1)?  You tell me. What I will say is that they make the rejection of (1) reasonable.

The other class of putative counterexamples to (1) are items that are material but do not exist.  Unicorns and flying horses come to mind. Suppose that there are four categories of entity  item:  (i) immaterial minds, (ii) occurrent and dispositional states of minds, whether intentional or non-intentional; (iii) so-called 'abstract' objects; (iv) material things.  Where do such Meinongian nonentities as unicorns belong?  Obviously they belong in the fourth category.  They are material things even though they don't exist!

Has this second set of considerations refuted (1)? You tell me. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs from a Passage in Thomas McGuane

Here is a passage from Thomas McGuane, Nothing but Blue Skies, Houghton-Mifflin, 1992, pp. 201-202, to which I have added hyperlinks.

He [Frank Copenhaver] turned on the radio and listened to an old song called "Big John": everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John.  Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.

On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: "You've gotta lot of nerve to say you are my friend." No one compares with this guy, thought Frank.  I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it.  Frank paused in his thinking , then realized he was suiting up for his arrival in Missoula.  In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky the voice of Sam Cooke: "But I do know that I love you." Frank began to sweat.  "And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be."

[. . .]

All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: "Give me water, my work is so hard."  What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead.

Wandering the Sam Cooke wing of the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies, we may as well cue up Bring It On Home to Me and Cupid.

Literary Addendum

My go-to literary guys, one dead, the other alive, D. G. Myers and Patrick Kurp respectively,  have little to say about McGuane. Myers says nothing while Kurp reports, "I do remember reading the early novels of Thomas McGuane but I couldn’t tell you a thing about them."

Well, there are novels like that. I am now thinking of a novel I read a few years ago by a female, competently done, but I can't remember her name, or the title: forgettable and forgotten. To tell the truth, most of us will soon be forgotten no matter what we write or how well we write it: we're lucky if a few read us now. But if you are writing in the right spirit, it ought to be a matter of indifference to you whether you are read or not. Kerouac at one point spoke of "self-ultimacy." 

One novel I've never forgotten I read well over a half-century ago while an undergraduate. It made the cut at Myers' place, where we find:

Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (Serbo-Croatian, 1945; English, 1959). Anyone still interested in the former Yugoslavia must read two books—Rebecca West’s magisterial two-volume travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and the masterpiece of Serbian literature, published four years later. Compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude for its multi-generational sweep, Andrić’s novel is a hundred pages shorter, scrupulously avoids the magic in magical realism, and might be more accurately described as The Painted Bird with a conscience.

Another Reason to Pity Leftists

Leftists lack self-awareness. (That is what is called a generic statement.) They claim, against the evidence of his first term, that Donald J. Trump is a 'fascist,' a dictator, etc.  This is pure projection. Projection is a psychological defense mechanism. Not willing to admit their own totalitarian tendencies, lefties block them from view by projecting them into Trump, thereby displaying a remarkable lack of psychological self-transparency. A member of the MavPhil commentariat nails it:

Memo to the Left:

DJT will be a dictator? You don't say ! 

Maybe Donald Trump will: forbid me to use tungsten light bulbs, take away my gas stove, force me to drive an electric car, outlaw my propane-fired forced air house heater, and make me rewire my house for electric heat, to the tune of thousands of dollars, and force me to use [invented] "pronouns," and thus unwillingly participate in another's mental illness ! [As when a confused teenage girl, under peer-group pressure, lacking critical-thinking skills, allows herself to be surgically mutilated so as to change her 'gender.']

You mean Trump will be a dictator like that?

Really ?

Further question: should we pity leftist fools or hate them? Hate has its uses. It energizes and inspires ameliorative action in a way that pity does not. Is there not such a thing as righteous anger? That's a rhetorical question, a declarative in the guise of an interrogative. It declares: there is such a thing as righteous anger!

Pity or hate? If they are projecting, then perhaps pity is the appropriate response. But many if not most of these bastards are lying. Truth, we know, is not a leftist value. Ergo, etc.

Another School Shooting

And so, predictably, the gun-grabbers will howl. Their howling is music to my ears and your signal to buy more guns, ammo, supplies, to pay range fees, training fees, and so on and so forth.  

This is something concrete that you can easily do and it makes a difference.  It puts money in the hands of firearms manufacturers (and their suppliers and subsidiaries) entities which fund the NRA and other lobbying groups who defend 2A against the totalitarian shites of Swamp Land. 

You cannot reason with gun-grabbing fools. They do not inhabit the plane of reason.  We of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable  have all the best arguments; they don't have jack. 'Jack' is elliptical for 'jack shit,' an urban quantifier if you will. It means 'anything.'  A curious linguistic bagatelle: 'squat,' 'diddly squat,' 'shit,' 'jack shit,' 'jack' — all have uses as 'urban quantifiers,' a phrase I just now coined.  But you won't find these quantifiers in any logic book, which is yet another reason why you need my blog.

As for the school and other shootings, we of the aforementioned coalition are against them, and recommend that existing laws be enforced, something that won't happen as long as Dementocrats have power.

Start with Hunter Biden.  But see this Reason piece for a contrary view.

Crises There Will Always Be

I cite the example of Nicolai Hartmann in a Substack entry from March, 2022.

So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.

We won't give up and we won't give in. We will battle the bastards that are out to destroy our Republic.  But the wise among us know that this world is a vanishing quantity and that to expend all one's energies in the defense of the fleeting finitudes of the here and now is folly. There are things worth living for that transcend the passing scene. So apportion your time accordingly.  

Annus Horribilis in Excelsis

That is what 2024 is shaping up to be. Ben Shapiro:

All of which means that 2024 is going to be the most insane and ugly presidential election in American history. And that’s saying a lot, since 1968 and 2020 are both years that existed. Under what circumstances, precisely, would Democrats accept the result of a Trump election? Under what circumstances, precisely, would Republicans accept the result of a Biden election?

The weaponization of the legal system creates an all-consuming fire, burning everything in its path. There is simply no 2024 result likely to result in anything but complete—and perhaps violent—chaos at this point.

One quibble, though. Shapiro ignores an important difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Dems, not inaptly describable as successor commies, are under party discipline: you can expect them all to toe the party line. There is no counterpart of the RINO among them. The Republicans, by contrast, are lousy with RINOs and cuckservative lapdogs of the Left.

To put it in terms of political 'circularity': the Dems circle the wagons while the Repubs favor the circular firing squad. And the Libertarians (Losertarians)? They expend themselves in the circle jerk.

Since Dementocrat scum will do anything to stop Trump, I predict that they will succeed, even if they have to 'raise' John Gotti to do so. And the Republicans, 'conservatives' who manage to conserve nothing, will acquiesce in the result and go back to writing learned articles about the Constitution and the rule of law.

Please disagree with me on this. I don't want to believe it. 

Happy New Year!

(Since some of you suffer from irony deficiency, I mean that ironically. I will be happy to explain the pun too, if that is necessary.)