I was asked if I have any thoughts about Michael Egnor’s article “Why Aristotle and Aquinas?”.
I think that there some pretty serious confusions here, about the history of modern philosophy and also about the relation between science and metaphysics.
Firstly, Egnor writes as if systematic philosophy begins with Aristotle and ends with Aquinas. I disagree with both claims. There’s no reason to think that comprehensive metaphysics ends with Aquinas — at least, one would need a really good argument for why Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, or Whitehead don’t make the cut. (Let alone non-Western metaphysics such as Madhyamaka Buddhism, etc.)
Secondly, Egnor conflates hylomorphism and realism about universals. These are different issues, and they need to be teased apart.
Hylomorphism says that for something to be a thing is for it to be a structured stuff: there is a structure that a thing has and there’s the stuff of which its made. So there’s the structuring aspect, what unifies something as a thing and makes it the kind of thing that it is. and then there’s the stuff which is held together by the structure.
Realism about universals says that concepts are part of the furniture of the world: the world has its own conceptual structure, and then what we need to do is figure out what that structure is. Inquiry is ultimately about bringing our own conceptual structures into alignment with the underlying conceptual structure of the world.
What holds these two ideas together, and makes them seem so wedded to one another, is the idea of essentialism: the idea that things have essences, or structures or forms that make it the kind of thing that it is, and which are also reflected or expressed in the concept of that thing.
(As an aside, I regard essentialism as both false — there aren’t any such things as essences — and also as evil — the belief in essences has legitimized millennia of atrocities.)
Now, I am (probably) a kind of nominalist. I don’t think that the world has any underlying conceptual structure. I think that conceptual structures are part of how complex organisms navigate their environments. I don’t think that the causal relationships between phenomena have the same underlying structure as the inferential relationships between thoughts. Egnor seems to think that nominalism is the Root of All Evil, and that just seems utterly baffling to me.
I can agree with Egnor that it is a profound error of much of modern thought that mind is conceived of as being independent of the world, so that the relationship between them is then a problem to be solved. And we do find the canonical version of this problem presented in Descartes. But this situation — what Jay Rosenberg calls “the Myth of the Mind Apart” — is really quite separate from whatever one’s views are about the nature of concepts.
It may be a contingent truth of the history of philosophy that the rise of mechanistic physics and nominalism about concepts rendered Thomism untenable. I think the Egnor simplifies the history in unhelpful ways. But Egnor seems to think that Darwinism and nominalism are part of the Highway to Hell, and I think he’s completely mistaken about that.
Scientists ought to be realists about universals.
ok, so Darwinism is the highway to hell and nominalism is just the path to purgatory.
🙂
Scientists ought to think that the universe has some actual regularities and irregularities that can be modeled through the empirical inquiry practiced by rational finite minds — but that’s different from saying that the regularities themselves have the same exact structure as that of concepts. That distinction eliminates the need to be a realist about universals in order to engage in science.
I’ll refrain from commenting on what I think the real highway to hell here is.
KN:
Not just an aside. A pivotal concept.
Why?
Yes, that seems right to me.
However, the argument over nominalism vs. realism seems pointless. It is how we use concepts that matters. What they are is far less important.
Is this the sort of moderate Nominalism you have in mind that you are [nominally] defending?
Is the soul a part of the worlds? No! its immaterial and that essence makes it not part of a material world.
The mind is , to me, only the memory and so its bvery much part of the world. Its mechanical.
Again in these things the soukl in Christendom, the west, is being rejected even as a option.
Robert Byers,
Is soukl in any way similar to covfefe?
So Christendom rejects the concept of the soul? Then why is it called Christendom at all?
I only gave a brief glance at Egnor’s piece, but I think I can confidently say he does not claim or imply this. Instead, he says that Aristotle and Aquinas came up with the best idea on philosophy (namely, hylomorphism). Philosophy moved on from there, but it’s downhill in Egnor’s view. So no, it didn’t end once Aristotle and Aquinas had hit upon the best in philosophy. (As for my own view, I think the best idea insight philosophy ever came up with is the distinction of reality and appearance, essential versus accidental properties, and other such fundamental distinctions.)
Perhaps he does elsewhere. In the brief piece, Egnor opposes nominalism. Not much more should be expected when the plan is to keep it short and simple.
When you are arguing against Egnor, then this cannot be an aside, because it’s the squarely incompatible presupposition or premise with regard to Egnor. This is why you need to spell it out more fully, make an actual argument out of it, particularly when you fault him for failing to spell out an argument.
Why aren’t there any such things as essences? What are there instead?
How has belief in essences legitmized millennia of atrocities? How about current atrocities? Are current atrocities also due to belief in essentialism or are current atrocities simply unlegitimized and it’s better to have unlegitimized atrocities than to have legitimized atrocities?
Hi Kantian Naturalist,
I’m afraid I cannot agree with your anti-essentialist position. In chemistry, the periodic table attests to the fact that the elements fall into clear-cut, natural categories. Elements have essences, and compounds do, too: they have well-defined properties which enable scientists to readily distinguish them from one another. In chemistry, there is only black-and-white; there are no shades of gray.
In physics, we have elementary particles which fall into families: three generations of matter (quarks and leptons), plus gauge bosons and the Higgs boson. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model .) That sounds very essentialist to me.
What about biology? Certainly, phyla can be objectively defined according to body plans, although other classifications (based on genetics) also exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylum#Definition_based_on_body_plan
It’s harder to argue that taxa such as class, order, family and genus have an objective basis, although future research might come up with a better way of defining taxa, which “carves reality at the joints.” Species are certainly blurry when viewed chronologically (exactly when did Homo ergaster evolve into Homo antecessor or Heidelberg man?); nevertheless, at any given point in time, species are pretty clearly defined. (By the way, there are no ring species, after all.) So even in biology, some form of essentialism holds true. After all, it is an objective fact that there are certain things that are conducive to the flourishing of species A but antithetical to the flourishing of species B: chocolate is good for people but can be fatal for dogs.
Regarding realism vs. nominalism, I think there are moderate versions of nominalism (e.g. class nominalism) which are defensible: some class nominalists even affirm the reality of “natural classes.” For my part, I think Aristotle’s position is a common-sense one, which I find appealing, although I’m open to persuasion otherwise.
I note that even scientist and skeptic H.G. Wells, in his Outline of History (scroll down to p. 334), acknowledges that “Nominalism had ultimately to abandon the idea that, names were as insignificant as labels,” and he points out that “the difference of a cat and dog is so profound that the microscope can trace it in a drop of blood or a single hair.” Hopefully there will be a convergence of views between the two camps, in the decades to come.
At any rate, I agree with you that Egnor’s demonization of nominalists and his implication that philosophy went downhill from the 14th century onwards (sadly, a common view amongst Thomists) is rather over-the-top.
Not sure how strict nominalist KN is himself, probably a loose one. In the OP I noticed him using the term “nature of concepts”. A strict nominalist would not be able to bring himself to say such a thing, because natures, insofar as they are the same as essences, should not exist on strict nominalism.
Doesn’t usage of concepts have something to do with what they are? Insofar as there are wrong and right ways to use concepts, what would you use as the basis for calling out anyone when they use concepts wrongly?
I disagree with this in that I see it as an oversimplification of chemistry. The known elements can be grouped in many different ways depending on the characteristic of interest. The standard periodic table is arranged by groups of similar valency. However, very few of the elements exist in nature in the state represented on the table. Many have a wide range of naturally occurring isotopes, are only stable as polyatomic molecules, or have a wide range of stable electron configurations. Noble gases are the closest things to the essences you are describing, but there is certainly a great deal of ‘gray’ in chemistry.
It doesn’t sound very essentialist to me. It sounds like we have a number of stable configurations of the constituent parts of matter that we have been able to identify. If we were having this conversation a century ago, an essentialist would have identified protons, neutrons, and electrons as the ‘elementary’ particles that formed the essences of matter. That position is no longer defensible and our current level of understanding of the constituent parts of matter will be similarly obsolete before long.
Under the heading In Defense of Modest Nominalism would it be too much to expect a defense of modest nominalism? For example, on modest nominalism, how does one conclude that essentialism (or any other ism) is both false and evil? On modest nominalism, can anything be properly evil, instead of nominally or modestly evil?
It is the other way around. How we use them has to do with what we say that they are.
Whatever we say, whenever we say anything, it involves usage of concepts, so we cannot first say what they are and then use them. They have to exist first in order for us to be able to say what they are. Except that when they already are there, ready to be used for talking and to be talked about, they are something fit for that particular purpose and no amount of saying can change that.
Your view of concepts is thoroughly twisted. Luckily I am used to this from nominalists by now.
Unless there are transitional forms of these body plans…
The basic idea of ‘modest nominalism’ is that only concrete particulars are real. Abstracta and universals have indispensable roles to play in our conceptual structures, but that role does not consist ultimately of referring to or indicating entities. There’s no problem with talking about universals, kinds, sorts, resemblances (etc.) — and they are indispensable for epistemology — but we can’t get metaphysics out of them.
The main reason why modest nominalism is attractive to me is because I’m exploring process ontology, and processes are concrete particulars. So if everything is a process or processual, then everything is a concrete particular.
On this point I am rather inclined towards John Dupre’s version of pragmatism: in some contexts it makes good sense to treat species as kinds (e.g. when doing ecology, or talking about what is conducive to flourishing) and in other contexts we’re better off treating species as populations (e.g. when doing evolutionary theory).
Weird. You seem to completely missed my point.
We use concepts. And then we say what they are, based on how we think we use them. And notice that my comment was about “what we say they are” rather then about “what they are”.
Are colors concepts too?
Hi RoyLT,
All true. Nevertheless, each element has certain well-defined properties which distinguish it from other elements, giving it a separate essence. Take gold, for instance. Here are just a few of its distinctive properties, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Melting point 1337.33 K (1064.18 °C, 1947.52 °F)
Boiling point 3243 K (2970 °C, 5378 °F)
Heat of fusion 12.55 kJ/mol
Heat of vaporization 342 kJ/mol
Molar heat capacity 25.418 J/(mol·K)
Electronegativity Pauling scale: 2.54
Ionization energies 1st: 890.1 kJ/mol
2nd: 1980 kJ/mol
Atomic radius empirical: 144 pm
Covalent radius 136±6 pm
Van der Waals radius 166 pm
Crystal structure face-centered cubic (fcc)
Yes, some of these might vary under different conditions, and chemists have models of atomic nuclei and their surrounding electrons that can explain why they vary as they do. But there’s one thing that doesn’t vary: atomic number 79. That is the essence of gold, and it’s what principally grounds the distinctive chemical properties of gold.
What about physics?
It hardly matters if our current understanding becomes obsolete. What matters is that no matter how far down the scale we go, we see particles falling into well-defined categories. It’s only at the biological level that essences become blurred.
Hi Kantian Naturalist,
Would you mind explaining what you mean by “real”? I’m just curious. I’m trying to understand your position, that’s all.
I noticed that. This is why it’s a conceptually defective comment. Or at least metaphysically incomplete. Such comments have no point.
The concept color refers to the thing color. As long as you have not properly excluded the concept from the discussion, it’s part of the discussion.
There’s much to dispute in what you say there. As that very Wikipedia page points out, attempts at objective definition of “phylum” have all been flawed, and certainly don’t point toward any essence, either of the designation “phylum” or of the individual phyla. It isn’t clear whether your other remarks refer to the various ranks or to the taxa themselves. In the former case, like phyla, ranks have no clear basis, and there is no reason to suppose they ever will. But taxa do: they are clades. Still, no essences anywhere.
Nor do species have anything recognizable as essences. There may be characters shared by all members of a species and no others. But is that enough to make an essence? As the Wikipedia article points out, such characters are accidents of history, and exceptions may arise at any time. At any given time, most species are pretty clearly defined, but since we see populations in every conceivable stage of divergence, not all of them are, and there are abundant exceptions. Ring species are not required for that, just intermediate steps in speciation. Species can be blurry in space as well as time. The argument for essentialism in biology fails.
I’m genuinely trying to understand this.
He have these photoreceptor cones in our eyes that are sensible to red blue and green. We know we perceive those colors when the light has a certain frequency.
Is there a color concept out there for each frequency?
If you are seeing green and progressively decrease the frequency, when does it stop beeing green and starts being yellow? Is there an objective conceptual set of colors to answer that question? Or are those things we call color arbitrary categories? Or perhaps our concept of colors are determined by how our eyes work, with those specific frequency sensitive cones?
What about boiling and melting points of other isotopes of gold (other than the single stable isotope, that is)?
Have you compared boiling and melting points of protium vs. deuterium? Stability and tendency of fission of U-235 and U-238?
Still, I’d tend to see chemical elements as being closer to “essential” than most things, as even isotopes of hydrogen are chemically quite similar, despite some very real differences in reactivity. That’s because an extra proton and electron make for quite different chemical reactions (although nuclear reactions depend on more than just proton numbers). You really don’t get that with organisms, as they’re all related in any case, and even clades are seen as separated by what are sometimes rather “accidental” differences. Weather phenomena tend to have rather hazy lines of distinction, while geologic phenomena seem to be mixes of physics and “accident.” We know a bit about the arbitrariness of planet designations, with Pluto being out of the club for now.
Glen Davidson
That’s fair — for sure, ‘real’ is an unfortunately ambiguous term!
Let me put this way: my contention is that a scientific description of the world would only contain terms referring to concrete particulars.
It’s still the same element and not some other element.
Biology is essentialist to it’s core.
Care to elaborate?
When Carbon-14 decays to Nitrogen-14 by splitting a Neutron into a Proton and Electron, how did its essence change? Did it already have the Nitrogen essence in it as well as the Carbon essence?
From a quantum mechanical standpoint, this is emphatically not the case. We do not see particles at all. Only what we nominally describe as particles.
dazz,
Here’s a little homework for you.
1. Write “dog” on a piece of paper.
2. Look at what you wrote and answer the question, “Is this a dog?”
To preclude any mental short-circuit on your part, I’m even providing the correct answer: No, it’s not a dog on the paper. It’s the word (i.e. the concept) “dog”, not a dog. If the word is to have a meaning, it may refer to a dog, but it could also be self-referential as a concept.
Same with color. When you ask “Are colors concepts too?”, it can be understood in (at least) two ways, and “Yes” and “No” are both valid answers depending on what’s understood. Every word is a concept, but the concept as the self-referential meaning is ordinarily secondary. Your question has the word “concept” in it, thus giving it focus and raising the possibility that the concept could be the primary meaning.
If you understand this, then you should also understand how off the mark your latest post is. It makes no sense to ask about concepts if they are “out there” or if there’s an “objective conceptual set” of them. Such questions involve a category error, an assumption that when you write “dog”, the result is a dog.
The concept of color is a concept, but colors aren’t concepts.
In getting a grip on the question, “what are concepts?”, I like to start with the core idea of inferentialism: a concept is a node in a nexus of inferences.
Here’s an example from the philosopher Robert Brandom: you can train a parrot to say, “that’s red” whenever it shown red things and never otherwise, but does the parrot understand what “is red” means? He thinks the answer is “no”, because to understand what a concept means involves being able to track the inferential relations between concepts, to use the concepts appropriately, to understand that one can be mistaken, and so on. When you or I say, “that’s red”, we implicitly understand that since it is red, it has a color; that if something is red, then it is a determinate shade of red (which may or may not have a name in the language), then if it is red then it cannot also be green, and so on.
The question of realism vs nominalism is, as I understand it, a question as to whether general terms are meaningful by virtue of referring to some kind of entity in the same way that particular terms are meaningful by virtue of referring to particulars. Does the term “dog” refer to the form of dog (“dogness”, “doghood”) or does it just name the set of all particular dogs?
You’ve obviously never dropped acid.
True (sad to say), but would I believe otherwise if I had dropped acid? Or would I have experienced a radical transformation of my sensory consciousness? Or experienced novel sensations? Sensations aren’t concepts!
I saw God
Kantian Naturalist:
Are you serious? You think that one day, scientists will be able to describe the world without making any reference to types of elementary particles, elements, or species of living things? Frankly, I can’t even imagine how someone would express their concerns about, say, global warming or species extinction, in nominalist terms.
He is serious, but only in one particular way. I think he’s trying to change the subject.
RoyLT,
You seem to be under the impression that essentialists believe essences hang around inside things, like spooky Cartesian souls, and that whenever a thing changes into a new kind of thing, another one of these spooky souls takes over the driving wheel from the old one, which then takes a back seat. Not so. This is a crude caricature of essentialism.
On an atomic and molecular level, we can equate form with structure (including 3-D arrangement, when we’re talking about molecules). On a biological level, we also have to take into account the flow of control inside a living body, or which part regulates which. In any case, forms are not “things,” and they’re not even quasi-things which hang around inside things, like spooks. Rather, things simply instantiate forms. And when their structure and/or flow of control radically changes, they come to instantiate new forms. That’s all there is to say.
I take it your remark about us not seeing elementary particles was a facetious one. When I wrote that in physics, we see particles falling into well-defined groups, I meant: it is readily apparent to physicists that particles fall into well-defined groups.
I thought he was saying that particles aren’t really particles after all. So you can’t really add particles together, or subtract them. So when Carbon-14 decays to Nitrogen-14 by splitting a Neutron into a Proton and Electron, those aren’t actually particles. Or if they are, they are not themselves made up of particles.
When you get down to it, there is just stuff and the form it takes. Oh, wait.
Hi GlenDavidson,
You make a valid point about different isotopes of gold having slightly different boiling and melting points. However, you’re right in regarding chemical elements as being “closer to ‘essential’ than most things,” on account of the very real differences in reactivity between each element.
Regarding species: you mention that “even clades are seen as separated by what are sometimes rather ‘accidental’ differences,” and in a similar vein, John Harshman remarks that for each species, its distinctive characteristics are “accidents of history, and exceptions may arise at any time.” I don’t think this is fatal to essentialism, as such. It is quite consistent to attribute the origin of a species, and its distinctive traits, to an accident of history, while maintaining that the distinctive set of adaptive traits which it possesses in its particular niche at time T tend to be mutually reinforcing, and have a unified explanation: they help the species to thrive in that niche. Of course, other biological traits, which are of no survival value, may also be shared by members of a species due to factors such as random genetic drift, but I wouldn’t see those as belonging to the essence of a species, anyway.
Over the course of time, however, as a species’ environment changes, individual adaptive traits may gradually replaced by other ones, which is why biological essentialism fails in the long term. In the short term, however, I think a version of biological essentialism can be salvaged, as outlined above.
Kantian Naturalist,
Hi KN
Thank you for the very interesting post. I think my philosophical vocabulary is now at the first grade level.:-) A couple of thoughts:
-How do you think mathematics fits into the discussion as it has been a critical tool for the advancement of science. I assume mathematics is considered conceptual and not material?
– Do you think the double slit experiment can be a useful bridge to accepting the mind and thought as part of the material world? https://youtu.be/DfPeprQ7oGc
How does one define when structure or flow of control change ‘radically’ without it being meaninglessly arbitrary?
It was not facetious, but perhaps poorly worded. My point was that physicists don’t actually believe that matter is made of particles. In quantum theory we only deal in probabilistic wave functions. We only categorize things as ‘particles’ for convenience.
This part is atomism, not nominalism. Atomism in turn often enough entails nominalism.
Not only has parrot no clue about what “is red” means, he does not understand “that” either.
Well put. This is indeed the problem. And the solution may dawn when you think: If there be no dogness, how do you know that you are having a set of all particular dogs at hand?
I’m aspiring to a Kindergarten level of metaphysical understanding, so I tip my hat to you sir;-)
I hope that you don’t mind my butting in to your comment which was directed at KN, but I’m curious about the same topic. It appears to me that mathematical objects have no existence of their own and only serve as simplified placeholders for actual individual objects. A possible analogy would be the way that a solid cuboid object can be approximately described by a set of coordinates in the x, y, and z axes. I think that I would agree with the assumption that they are conceptual rather than material. At least I can’t figure out any way to understand them as having material instantiations.
Why must predicates refer in the “same way” that singular terms do?
I think it’s pretty obvious that the term “dog” can’t “just name the set of all particular dogs.” Such a view would seem to make communication impossible.
This isn’t obvious to me. Our large experiential database of canine breeds gives us a general idea of what we name a ‘dog’. But how do we objectively delineate ‘dog’ as a kind? Do coyotes and jackals partake of the ‘dog’ kind?