{"id":6573,"date":"2016-03-20T16:56:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T16:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/03\/20\/a-question-about-tropes\/"},"modified":"2016-03-20T16:56:03","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T16:56:03","slug":"a-question-about-tropes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/03\/20\/a-question-about-tropes\/","title":{"rendered":"A Question About Tropes"},"content":{"rendered":"

EL: I have been reading with great pleasure and enlightenment certain sections of your superb work, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated<\/em>. Your skill and poise in framing and unfolding your argument, your marvelous dexterity with rebuttal of adversarial views, and your insistence that existence remain at the center of metaphysical inquiry instead of being reduced to an afterthought \u2013 or cast out of the mind altogether \u2013 reward and refresh the reader.<\/span><\/p>\n

BV:  Thanks for the kind words.  The book snagged some favorable reviews from Hugh McCann, Panayot Butchvarov, and others.  But the treatment it received at Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews was pretty shabby.  Kluwer sent the then editor Gary Gutting a copy and he sent it to a reviewer who declined to review it.  So I requested that the copy be returned either to me or Kluwer so that it could be sent elsewhere.  Gutting informed me that the reviewer had sold the book.  So the reviewer accepted an expensive book to review, decided not to review it, and then sold it to profit himself.     A person with a modicum of moral decency would first of all not agree to have a book sent to him if he had no intention of reviewing it.  But if he finds that for some reason he cannot review it, then he ought to return it.  The book is the payment for the review; it is wrong to keep a book one does not review after one has agreed to review it.
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EL: My question concerns your statement, in A Paradigm Theory of Existence<\/em>, that tropes \u201cfloat free\u201d (221). Is this correct?<\/span><\/p>\n

BV:  It depends on what 'float free' means.  Here is what I said in PTE<\/em>, 221-222:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Tropes differ from Aristotelian accidents in that they do not require the support of a substratum.  They 'float free.'  They need individuation ab extra<\/em> as little as they need support ab extra<\/em>:  they differ numerically from each other without the need of any constituent to make them differ.  In that respect they are like bare particulars except of course that they are not bare.  Each is a nature. Each is at once and indissolubly a this<\/em> and a such<\/em>.  Tropes are the "alphabet of being" (D. C. Williams), the rock bottom existents out of which all else is built up.  Ordinary, concrete particulars are bundles or clusters of these abstract particulars.  Thus Socrates is a bundle of tropes, a system of actually compresent tropes, and to say that he is pale is to say that a pale trope is compresent with other tropes comprising him.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Therefore, to say that tropes 'float free' is to say that they are unlike Aristotelian accidents in at least two ways. <\/span><\/p>\n

First,  they do not require for their existence a substratum in which to inhere.  An accident A of a substance S cannot exist except 'in' a substance, and indeed, 'in' S, the very substance of which it is an accident.  To exist for an accident is to inhere.  But to exist for a trope is not to inhere.  That is what it means to say that tropes do not need support ab extra<\/em>.  They stand on their own, ontologically speaking.  Otherwise they wouldn't constitute the "alphabet of being" in Donald C. Williams' felicitous phrase. <\/span><\/p>\n

If an ordinary particular, my coffee cup say, is a bundle of compresent tropes, then surely there must be a sense in which the tropes are ontologically prior to the bundle, and a corresponding sense in which the bundle is ontologically posterior to the constituent tropes.  This is obvious from the fact that my cup is a contingent being.  In trope-theoretic terms what this means is that the tropes that compose my cup might not have been compresent.  The possible nonexistence of my cup is then the possible non-compresence of its constituent tropes.  The tropes composing my cup could have existed without the cup existing, but the cup could not have existed without those tropes existing. Crude analogy: the stones in my stone wall could have existed without the wall existing, but the wall — that very wall — could not have existed without the stones existing.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is not to say tropes can exist on their own apart from any<\/em> bundle.  It could be that they can exist only in some bundle or other but not necessarily in the bundle in which they happen to be bundled.  The perhaps infelicitous 'float free' need not be read as implying that tropes can exist  unbundled.  By the way, here is where the crude analogy breaks down.  The stones in my wall could have existed in a wholly scattered state.  But presumably the tropes composing my cup could not have existed unbundled.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, tropes, unlike accidents, do not need something external to them for their individuation, or rather ontological differentiation.  What makes two accidents two rather than one?  The numerical difference of the substances in which they inhere.  The metaphysical ground of the numerical difference of A1 and A2 — both accidents — is the numerical difference of the primary substances in which they inhere.  But tropes need nothing external to them to ground their numerical difference from one another. <\/span><\/p>\n

Example.  My cats Max Black and Manny Black are asleep by the fire. Each is warm, both metabolically, and by the causal agency of the fire.  Consider only the warmth in each caused by the fire.  Assume that the degree of warmth is the same.  If warmth is either an Aristotelian accident or a trope then it is a particular (an unrepeatable, non-instantiable) item, not a universal.  On either theory,  each cat has its own warmth.  But what makes the two 'warmths' two?  What is the ground of their numerical difference?  On the accident theory, it is the numerical difference of the underlying substances, Max and Manny.  On the trope theory, the two warmths are just numerically different: they are self-differentiating.<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:  I understand that tropes are self-individuating, each being a numerically distinct, particularized, and unrepeatable quality. As Maurin explains,  \u201cTo a trope theorist, therefore, the fact that each particular redness (each trope) is such that it resembles every other particular redness is a consequence of the fact that each particular redness is what it is <\/em>and nothing else\u201d (2002, 57). But I don\u2019t understand how tropes \u201cfloat free.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

BV:  I believe I have just given a satisfactory explanation of what 'floats free' means in this context.   I would agree, however, that 'floats free' is not a particularly happy formulation.
<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:  Your clarification would be keenly appreciated. When reading about trope theory, I sometimes feel that I\u2019ve fallen down a rabbit hole.  Then you need some music therapy<\/a>.
<\/span><\/p>\n

BV:  If you want from me a defense of the coherence and tenability of trope theory, that I cannot provide.  I suspect that every philosophical theory succumbs in the end to aporiai<\/em>.  And that goes for the theories I propose in PTE<\/em> as well. 
<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:  On the one hand, tropes (abstract particulars) are logically prior to things (concrete particulars), because through their compresence tropes bring things into existence.<\/span><\/p>\n

BV: Right.<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:  On the other hand, things are logically prior to tropes because, lacking existential independence, tropes are<\/em> only through compresence in the thing they constitute.<\/span><\/p>\n

BV:  Not quite.  Tropes are<\/em> only when compresent in some bundle or other.  But this is not to say that tropes composing my coffee cup could not have existed in other bundles.<\/span><\/p>\n

EL: Indeed, Lowe argues that trope theory \u201cfall[s] into a fatal circularity which deprives both tropes and trope-bundles of well-defined identity-conditions altogether\u201d (1998, 206).<\/span><\/p>\n

BV: What is the title of the book or article? <\/span><\/p>\n

The following view is fatally circular. An ordinary particular is a system of compresent tropes.  Its existence is just the compresence of those tropes.  The tropes themselves  exist only as the relata of the compresence relation within the very same ordinary particular.<\/span><\/p>\n

To avoid this circularity one could say what I said above:  while tropes cannot exist apart from some bundle or other, there is no necessity that the tropes composing a given bundle be confined to that very bundle.  Saying this, one would grant some independence to the trope 'building blocks.' But then the problem is to make sense of this independence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Suppose that in the actual world trope T1 is a constituent of Bundle B1, but that there is a merely possible world W in which T1 is a constituent of bundle B2.  But then T1 threatens to turn into a universal, a repeatable item.  For then T1 occurs in two possible worlds, the actual world and W.
<\/span><\/p>\n

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EL: I have been reading with great pleasure and enlightenment certain sections of your superb work, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated. Your skill and poise in framing and unfolding your argument, your marvelous dexterity with rebuttal of adversarial views, and your insistence that existence remain at the center of metaphysical inquiry instead of … Continue reading “A Question About Tropes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-constituent-ontology","category-trope-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}