Milinda’s Questions

Sometime in the mid-70s, as a high school student, I ran across a book with an intriguing title on the remainder cart at Walden’s Books at the local mall. The book was World Hypotheses by one Stephen Pepper, and since it was marked down to a couple of bucks, I picked it up. When I got it home, I couldn’t make very much out of it, and it sat on my shelves, unread, through the remainder of high school, college, the Wanderjahre, and into grad school in the early ’90s, where it turned up as one of the three required texts in a metaphysics seminar I took with Doug Browning. (The other two books were Everett Hall’s Philosophical Systems and Browning’s own Ontology and the Practical Arena.)
The moral of the story? That grad students can pick up books a lot cheaper if they buy them 15 years ahead of time.
But seriously, folks . . .

In the opening pages of WH, Pepper announces his purpose as follows:

Among the varieties of objects which we find in the world are hypotheses about the world itself. For the most part these are contained in books such as Plato’s Republic, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, Descartes’ http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/, Spinoza’s Ethics, Hume’s Treatise, Kant’s three Critiques, Dewey’s Experience and Nature, Whitehead’s Process and Reality. . . . I wish to study world hypotheses as objects existing in the world, to examine them empirically as a zoologist studies species of animals, a psychologist varieties of perception, a mathematician geometrical systems.

The results of this examination begin to emerge in Chapter 5:

The method in principle seems to be this: A man desiring to understand the world looks about for a clue to its comprehension. He pitches upon some area of commonsense fact and tries if he cannot understand other areas in terms of this one. This original area becomes then his basic analogy or root metaphor. He describes as best he can the characteristics of this area, or, if you will, discriminates its structure. A list of its structural characteristics becomes his basic concepts of explanation and description. We call them a set of categories. In terms of these categories he proceeds to study all other areas of facts whether uncriticized or previously criticized. He undertakes to interpret all facts in terms of these categories. . . . Some root metaphors prove more fertile than others, have greater powers of expansion and of adjustment. These survive in comparison with the others and generate the relatively adequate world theories.

Pepper claims that in the history of metaphysical system-building we can discern four basic root metaphors, which have given rise to four “relatively adequate world theories.” His names for the latter are formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism. For my purposes in this post (which I hope will become clear as I go along), I’m just interested in the first two of those. Here are ostensive definitions of those terms (couched in the language of mid-20th century English-speaking philosophy):

Formism is often called “realism” or “Platonic idealism.” It is associated with Plato, Aristotle, the scholastics, neoscholastics, modern Cambridge realists. Mechanism is often called “naturalism” or “materialism” and, by some, “realism.” It is associated with Democritus, Lucretius, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reichenbach.

Pepper unpacks the root metaphor of formism as follows:

The root metaphor of formism is similarity . . . the simple common-sense perception of similar things. The world is full of things that seem to be just alike: blades of grass, leaves on a tree, a set of spoons, newspapers under a schoolboy’s arm, the sheets of a single ream of paper. . . . Let us select two sheets from the . . . ream so closely alike that, if anybody exchanges them one for the other without our following the process, we are unable to tell which is which.
. . .
The mature root metaphor of . . . formism consists in simply describing this experience of two exactly similar objects minutely, and accepting literally the results of this description.

Pepper likewise claims that the root metaphor of the mechanistic world-hypothesis is that of a machine, and he provides an elucidation analogous to the above in terms of what happens when one uses a lever and a fulcrum to lift a weight.
He claims, furthermore, that the main categories of formism are:

• characters (qualities and relations)
• particulars
• participation (or “ties”)

and that the analogous mechanistic categories are:

• a field of locations
• primary qualities
• primary laws (which hold for configurations of primary qualities)
• secondary qualities
• a principle for connecting the secondary qualities with the first three categories
• (optional)laws describing regularities among secondary qualities

Now, the reason I find all of this interesting is that it seems to me that a great deal of the interminability of discussions of issues in analytic metaphysics stems from the implicitly conflicting root metaphors involved; specifically, from conflicts between formism and mechanism.(footnote)

From the given list of categories, we can see that the conflicts between formism and mechanism center around these categorial issues:

• a different conception of particulars
• the fundamental role of laws in mechanism (vs their absence in formism)
• the mechanist distinction between primary and secondary qualities

Let’s examine these three loci of conflict in order.

ARE PARTICULARS SPATIOTEMPORAL?

It’s worth looking in some detail at some things Pepper says on this topic. From his discussion of formism:

It would seem probable that all concrete existences participate in the laws of physical time and space, whatever other forms they may also participate in. . . . [T]he possible ubiquity of the physical laws of time and space easily lead many formists to identify them with basic particulars. In other words, many formists identify the second formistic category with physical time and space.

This identification seems to me unjustified by the root metaphor, and a source of unnecessary categorial confusion. For then the relational structures of time and space must be converted into ties among particulars, which unnecessarily aggravates the prolblem of ties, and threatens, moreover, to plunge formism into mechanism and thereby wreck the whole categorial structure of formism.

And again, from his discussion of mechanism:

In mechanism, as its proponents are fond of reiterating, “only particulars exist.” Moreover, these particulars of mechanism are not the bare or basic particulars of formism, but the structural particulars of space and time loci. Spatial and temporal structure define the nature of existence and the limitations of reality. That is why mechanism can be safely defined, as it frequently is, as the theory which makes space and time fundamental. And that is why formism is in danger of dissolving into mechanism when it identifies its category of existence with space and time.

This observation seems to me to shed some light into the murk that surrounds discussions of particulars, thick, thin, bare, and otherwise. Consider, for example, this from David Armstrong’s Universals: An Opinionated Introduction:

[L]et us take note of an important matter of terminology. In the British Empiricist tradition, ’substance’ has usually meant the factor of particularity, what Locke called the substratum. The great hostility to substance that you find in the British tradition has been hostility to substratum. Let us call the substratum substance in the thin sense, or the thin particular. But now notice that substance can also mean substratum plus properties. This is a usage that we associate with Aristotle and the Scholastic philosophers. Let us call this substance in the thick sense. Substratum plus properties constitutes the thick particular. Aristotle’s primary substances–individual things, this man, this horse–are thick particulars.

Come back now to Locke. For him the substratum, the factor of particularity, the thin particular, is a mere postulate, even if it is one he said that the mind has to make. He called it “something I know not what” that in some mysterious way supports the doctrine of things. It was this rather unsatisfactory doctrine that led to the British Empiricist suspicion of substance. They were really reacting against Locke’s unknowable substratum. This in turn created a climate of opinion favorable to the Bundle theory, which gets rid of substratum by identifying a thing with the bundle of its properties.
. . .
Once Locke’s view is rejected and substratum is brought into our actual experience of the world, we can begin to wonder just what in experience substratum is to be identified with. An important candidate is the place that a thing is said to occupy or, perhaps even better, the place and time that it occupies. Properties, according to this suggestion, including maybe spatial and temporal properties (shape, size, duration), are supported by, inhere in, or qualify places or place-times.(emphasis added)

Note that Armstrong has to make the slide to the mechanistic hypothesis in order to render the notion of thin particular intelligible! This is legitimate for a scientific realist like Armstrong, but I have the notion that there are folks around who countenance talk of thin particulars in defense of antinaturalist or antimaterialist positions; and something about that smells fishy to me. (Now that I’ve gotten a little clearer on the issues involved myself, perhaps I’ll go snooping around and try to nose them out.)

Note, furthermore, that an ambiguity between thick and thin particulars infects Pepper’s presentation of the basic root metaphor underlying formism. Consider again the “two exactly similar sheets of yellow paper.” Pepper says:

[W]e perceive two particulars (sheets of paper) with one quality(yellow). . . . This turns out to be a radical duality. Any number of particulars may have a single quality, and any number of qualities may characterize a single particular. There may be a thousand or ten thousand sheets of just the same yellow. And each sheet of paper, besides having the quality yellow, is rectangular, thin, smooth, clean-edged, and so on. Moreover, these qualities can be shuffled about among different particulars in different ways. One particular may be yellow, thick and circular; another, white, rough, thin, and triangular, and so on.

OK so far. But what exactly are these “particulars” we’re talking about? On the thick conception, the answer is simple: This yellow sheet of paper is one particular, and that yellow sheet of paper is another particular. But on the thin conception, the particular is the substratum: that which you have left when you imagine the sheet of paper minus its yellow color, and its rectangular shape, and its matte finish, etc., etc. This may be an indication of “lack of metaphysical talent” on my part, but it seems to me that the only plausible candidate for what’s left over when you abstract away all of that is a location in space, or maybe space-time. Which is the mechanist position. But if you go on to say that the location of the piece of paper is also something that can be abstracted away, leaving some thing-in-itself devoid of even that, I no longer have any idea what you’re talking about. Which makes Pepper’s following statements very puzzling:

As far as particulars in their own right go, they make no demands on qualities, nor vice versa. That is, there is nothing about a particular as a particular to restrain it from having any quality whatever. Nor is there anything about a quality as a quality to restrain it from characterizing any particular.

I am unable to figure out what Pepper means by saying “particulars make no demands on qualities.” Seems to me that every particular makes a demand on some or all of its qualities: Enable me to be picked out!

This conjures up an image of a particular as a wallflower at a high school dance, and when I start getting imagery like that, it’s time to change the subject. (And I’m going to be much, much briefer.)

PROPERTIES AND LAWS

Books can, and have, been written on this topic. For example, David Armstrong is known for his characterization of “scientific realism” as the view that scientific laws fit the the philosopher’s traditional job description for Universals. In terms of Pepper’s root metaphor, the lever, the law is, or develops out of, the regular connection between the weight or exertion at one end of the lever and the motion at the other end. Let me note that scientific laws, unlike the paradigmatic examples of properties, are not things we can be said to have direct acquaintance with, and this tension may have all kinds of effects on attempts, like Armstrong’s, to merge or to harmonize talk of properties and talk of laws.

PRIMARY VS. SECONDARY QUALITIES

Think I’m going to leave this one as an exercise for the reader. (In the extraordinarily unlikely event that anyone has read this far, is actually interested in this, but is unfamiliar with the primary/secondary quality distinction, there’s a brief intro here.)