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Token physicalism and functional individuation

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Abstract

Token physicalism is often viewed as a modest and unproblematic physicalist commitment, as contrasted with type physicalism. This paper argues that the prevalence of functional individuation in biology creates serious problems for token physicalism, because the latter requires that biological entities can be individuated physically and without reference to biological functioning. After characterizing the main philosophical roles for token physicalism, I describe the distinctive uses of functional individuation in models of biological processes. I then introduce some requirements on token identity claims that arise from a position on individuation and identity known as sortalism. An examination of biological examples shows that these sortalist requirements cannot be plausibly met due to differences between individuation by functional biological criteria and by physical criteria. Even without assuming sortalism, token physicalism faces the more basic problem of excluding functionally irrelevant detail from the individuation of biological tokens. I close by suggesting that the philosophical roles for token identity are better fulfilled by a notion of token composition, which promotes a hierarchical picture of individuality.

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Notes

  1. That is, assuming that all minds inhere in organisms.

  2. I thank Tom Bontly for suggesting these distinctions. Note that some have argued that in fundamental physics there are no “individuals” (i.e., substances) as traditionally conceived (Ladyman and Ross 2007). Structuralists can understand the term “physical individual” in the present context as a placeholder for whatever item plays the categorial role conventionally assigned to traditional individuals—i.e., bearer of properties, logical subject of persistence—which can also be fulfilled by items like fields, structures, or regions of spacetime.

  3. The role of biological processes in individuating the objects/units that serve them is also discussed in Griesemer (2000).

  4. See Grandy (2016) and Ferner (2016, 14 ff.) for some informative historical background on sortals and sortalism. The thesis I am calling “sortalism” is often more specifically referred to as “the sortal dependency of individuation” (Wiggins 2001, 22). It is important to note that, as the term is used here, sortalism does not require commitment to other more controversial theses with which it is sometimes associated, such as Geach’s (1962) claim that identity itself is sortal-relative. Sortalism, in the sense of the sortal dependency of individuation, can also be dissevered from Wiggins (2001) and Lowe’s (2009) versions of essentialism, and even, I suggest, from their substance ontology.

  5. For views of processes as non-countable items akin to masses or stuffs, see Seibt (2009) and Steward (2013). For simplicity, I will refer to criteria of identity and composition together under the heading of criteria of identity.

  6. A view of events that seems to bypass this requirement is one advanced by Quine (1985), who held that events are identical iff they occupy the same spatiotemporal region. This view arguably fails two of the standard adequacy conditions for criteria of identity, however (see Horsten 2010). For one thing, it meets intuitively compelling counterexamples. Davidson (1985) pointed out that it would sometimes identify causally distinct events such as a ball’s rotating and simultaneously heating up. The Quinean view is also uninformative, for the property of being uniquely located in spacetime does not itself determine spatiotemporal boundaries around an event. The problem of informativeness also afflicts attempts to adjudicate identity claims about unsorted individuals solely by means of Leibniz’s Law. For example, faced with the claim that the ball’s rotating and its heating up have different properties and are thus numerically distinct events, the Quinean could agree that these properties differ while simply construing them as different properties of the same inclusive event. This is just to say that we will be unable to establish that the events are identical or distinct just by inspecting “their” properties. Background determinations about the sort of event in question are needed.

  7. A further reason why possession of a physical property should not be viewed as sufficient for being a physical individual is that it allows token physicalism to be satisfied too easily. As Latham (2003, 283) points out, Descartes (1996, AT III, 690, AT VII, 442) himself wrote that immaterial minds can be viewed as having a spatial extension that parallels the extension of the bodies to which they are united. If spatial extension is a physical property, and having a physical property is sufficient for being a physical individual, then token physicalism would paradoxically be compatible with the existence of Cartesian immaterial minds.

  8. The argument in Kim (2012) and Latham (2003) specifically applies to the view of events as property exemplifications (Fodor 1979), but not to events as concrete particulars in their own right. On Fodor’s conception of events, for x and y to be the same event they must exemplify the same property, but (so the argument goes) this just means they belong to the same event type.

  9. For detailed theoretical models of such systems, see Rosen (1991), Gánti (2003), Rasmussen et al. (2009). My simplified model in what follows is loosely based on Rosen (1991).

  10. A notion of type composition physicalism could be fomulated by analogy to type identity to express the idea that every special scientific type is composed of items belonging to a physical type. By analogy to multiple realizability, “multiple composition” or “multiple constitution” phenomena would pose a problem for type composition (see Gillett 2013a). Many traditional representations of levels of organization in terms of type composition are vulnerable to exactly this problem (e.g., Oppenheim and Putnam 1958).

  11. Note that Wiggins and Lowe diverge on whether realism about individuation should take the form of a “conceptualism,” which prioritizes the cognitive over the metaphysical aspect of individuation. Wiggins (2001, 6) maintains that “That which individuates [. . . ] is in the first instance a thinker,” whereas Lowe (2003a, 93) holds that any satisfactory ontology must contain some “self-individuating” entities, on pain of a regress of determination. See Lowe (2003b, 2005) and Wiggins (2001, 159-60) for further discussion.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Ken Aizawa, Tom Bontly, Daniel S. Brooks, Markus I. Eronen, Johanna Seibt, and Jonathan Sholl for helpful comments and discussion. Thanks also to the audience at the 2016 Society for Metaphysics of Science meeting in Geneva, as well as the audience at the Colloquium for Theoretical Analytical Philosophy at Aarhus University, where earlier drafts of this paper were presented.

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    James DiFrisco

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DiFrisco, J. Token physicalism and functional individuation. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 8, 309–329 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-017-0188-y

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