Abstract
Many hold an Aristotelian metaphysic of objects: fundamentally, objects fall under sortals and have persistence conditions befitting their sort. Though sometimes offered as a theory of material objects, I argue this view is in fact incompatible with physicalism. Call a ‘sortal’ a kind of object, a ‘sortal identity’ a particular’s nature specified in sortal terms, and ‘sortal properties’ properties that are determined by an object’s sortal identity, such as its persistence conditions. From here the argument runs as follows. Something is physical only if it is physically fundamental or is determined by what is physically fundamental (P1), but sortal identities and properties are neither physically fundamental (P2) nor determined by the physically fundamental (P3). I defend each premise in turn. P1 falls out of the standard conception of physicalism. Rejecting P2 is tantamount to positing Aristotelian substantial forms and formal causes—which are themselves incompatible with physicalism. I defend P3 by showing that extant solutions to “the grounding problem”—the problem of showing how (nonfundamental) sortal properties are determined by (nonsortal) physical properties—are either physicalistically unacceptable, or else physicalistically acceptable but opposed to the sortalist metaphysic.
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Notes
Traditionally ‘everything’ is taken to be unrestricted, though some might wish to exclude abstracta. I won’t because, as I explain in §2, my goal in this paper concerns physicalism as it is traditionally understood. Nothing in my argument turns on this point, however, so one may restrict as one wishes.
Because sortal identities and properties do not satisfy this necessary condition (or so I will argue), sufficiency conditions for physicality are not germane here.
Many now understand fundamentality in terms of “grounding”, a relation appearing quite similar to what I’ve said about determination: Schaffer (2009), for instance, holds that some x is fundamental iff nothing grounds x, akin to my claim that something is fundamental iff nothing determines it. This may be because ‘grounding’ and ‘determination’ are two names for the same relation (Audi 2012 suggests as much). Others are skeptical, however (e.g. Wilson 2014). Still others have been critical of understanding physicalism in terms of grounding (e.g. Sider 2011, ch.8, though see Dasgupta 2014 for a response). Whether such criticisms also apply to determination is not entirely clear. Nothing here turns on adjudicating these issues, however. If it turns out that grounding and determination are the same relation then of course my determination talk can be substituted with grounding talk. If there are important reasons to distinguish them then grounding should be put aside for the purposes of my discussion.
Because I will argue that sortalism violates this condition, I will not discuss other conditions for being physically fundamental.
Papineau (2001, p. 20) makes a similar though weaker point. According to Papineau the success of the physical sciences through the 1950’s sufficed to show only that no distinctly vital forces exist—not that determination was demonstrated. But the stronger claim is warranted: for in the absence of nonphysical or sui generis forces it is not clear what else could determine chemical and biological properties. And as what was being worked out was how to explain these properties in physical terms, this seems at (at least partially) tantamount to demonstrating determination. Thanks to Andrew Melnyk for discussion on this point.
Of course, a subset of everyone—physicalists—believe this has been or will be shown shortly.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for raising this concern.
Lowe (2006) defends the substance-kind vs. attribute-kind distinction, which he too attributes to Aristotle’s Categories, and which he claims is generally unrecognized by contemporary metaphysicians.
Armstrong even goes so far as to claim that the Euthyphro dilemma “is in many ways the most useful dilemma in metaphysics,” and that he relies on variations of it “at a number of points” (p. 40).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
One may think this first option obvious on the grounds that physicists simply define an electron as whatever has a certain mass, charge, and spin, say (thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for the suggestion). Though I don’t think matters are so simple—see my discussion in §4—this view is of course consistent with my overall defense of P2. Because my aim in this section is to explore the implications of each Euthyphro-option, however, I will temporarily put the issue aside.
It may help to recall that Aristotle uses the same word—‘aition’—for ‘cause’ and ‘explanation’; these concepts were inextricably linked for Aristotle and his Scholastic follows. Of course such causation is not diachronic but synchronic, though according to the Scholastic it is causation all the same.
Though it may well be that this was more a promissory note than something actually redeemed during the Early Modern period.
I thank an anonymous referee for pressing an objection along these lines.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, even Grandy notes that “many philosophers (e.g. Wallace 1965) have claimed that the notion of a sortal is the same notion as developed by Aristotle under the label ‘secondary substance”’—a claim which Grandy does not dispute. Also telling is that the term ‘sortal’ was coined by Locke in order to discuss Scholastic notions of kind–essence (EssayConcerning Human Understanding, Bk.III, Ch.III, 15). Moreover, it’s not a coincidence that Baker calls her own assumptions “Aristotelian”, nor that the Scholastics were Aristotelians in the first place: something’s substantial identity being fundamental and yielding sort-specific properties such as persistence conditions just is a basic plank of the Aristotelian worldview that Scholastics and contemporary sortalists inherited.
I thank two anonymous referees for this journal for pressing me on this point.
For example, suppose the sortalist claims that unlike the Scholastic the sortalist’s explanation of sortal properties by a sortal identity is not meant metaphysically, and in so doing she denies any metaphysical relation whereby a sortal identity yields a sortal property—whether formal causation or metaphysical determination or anything else. Instead, the distancing suggesting goes, sortal identities explain sortal properties in some other way (say, conceptually or logically). But if so sortalism would no longer answer my Euthyphro-style question, which queries metaphysical explanation and seeks to reveal ontological—rather than logical or conceptual—priority. (Moreover, sortalism has hitherto been understood as a metaphysical theory of sortals, not a theory about how we employ sortal concepts or vocabulary.) Consequently the sortalist must have real metaphysical explanation and so real metaphysical determination in mind. (Surely this is how Baker’s passage is to read in any case.) But then if indeed the sortalist’s metaphysically explanatory determination relation is different than what the Scholastic calls ‘formal causation’, the sortalist should be able to articulate the difference in conversation. Because I can think of nothing plausible the sortalist might say here I can only conclude that the views are equivalent.
Keeping in mind the metaphysics constraint discussed in the previous note, there is one candidate which may seem plausible: viz., that the historical view advocates a teleology the contemporary view lacks. But this is no defeater either, for two reasons. First, if the contemporary and historical views are the same except for a further posit of teleology, then teleology is not actually a logical commitment of the shared core and so could in principle be excised by a proponent of the historical view as well. Second, note that I made no appeal to teleology in order to show that substantial forms are incompatible with physicalism; it is simply the fundamentality of sortal identity and formal causation, I claimed, that renders the Scholastic view incompatible with physicalism. So even if there are further or additional Scholastic views that go beyond what I’ve discussed that the contemporary sortalist might disavow, this is irrelevant to my argument here: as long as the contemporary and historical views overlap or are substantively identical with respect to the tenets discussed above, this is sufficient to show that the contemporary view is incompatible with physicalism for the same reason the historical view is.
Paul considers this a kind of bundle theory, but with the familiar mereological notion of fusion replacing the more traditional (and perhaps more obscure) notions of compresence or bundling.
Even if the distribution of sortalish properties would supervene on the fundamental physical properties in this scenario, the latter would not determine the former. And as Bennett herself is at pains to point out, supervenience is insufficient for determination (2004, pp. 342–344, passim).
An early instance is Gibbard (1975), whose famous case of Lumpl and Goliath spawned much of the material coincidence literature. In particular Gibbard argued for the (contingent) identity of the statue and the clay on the grounds that the denial of their identity has statues taking on a “ghostly air” (p. 192).
Moreover, what the eliminativist ontology has instead of ordinary objects—namely, mereological simples in various arrangements—lacks precisely those features associated with a sortal identity. For instance, rather than being one unified tiger, say, simples arranged tigerwise are merely many loosely assembled objects. These simples would also lack the persistence conditions associated with tigers. And so on for all Fwise arrangements, for any putative sortal F.
Strictly speaking Lewis only advocates identity for what might be called a ‘permanent overlap’ case, i.e., a case where x and y are created and destroyed simultaneously. For a ‘temporary overlap’ case—where one of x or y precedes or succeeds the other—Lewis thinks x and y are not identical, but are rather partially overlapping four-dimensional space-time “worms”. Even so, Lewis does not advocate material coincidence because in the temporary case there is “partial identity”, i.e., identity in the restricted region where otherwise distinct objects overlap; just as two intersecting roads completely overlap at their intersection (and so are identical there) but differ in virtue of nonshared parts elsewhere (the rest of each road). Accordingly, my discussion of Lewis’ “identity thesis” should be restricted to permanent overlap cases. That being said, I address the possible objection that this assumption isn’t innocent in footnote 32. I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for discussion on this point.
Some reject the possibility of sortally-neutral reference (e.g. Thomasson 2007). Requiring sortally-specific reference does not sit well with Lewis’ mereological universalism, however. For Lewis, “arbitrary” mereological fusions (such as the sum of the Eiffel Tower and this sentence-token) do not fall under any familiar sortals—unless highly generic terms such as ‘object’ or ‘thing’ count. So if these are not sortal terms yet one can determinately refer to any given mereological sum reference need not be sortal-specific (and ‘Object’ may refer determinately absent a sortal). But even if ‘object’ and ‘thing’ do count as sortals my point goes through: because statues and lumps are both things (or objects), referring to this thing via the thing-name ‘Object’, without invoking either statues or lumps of clay, is legitimate.
See Sidelle (2010) for criticism of this sortally-neutral view of objects.
This scenario generalizes across worlds. In presenting Lewis’ view I took it for granted that Statue/Clay/Object has some counterparts that exist after a squashing and others that do not. But suppose we pick out a counterpart via a sortally neutral name; call one Object\(_{\mathrm{w1}}\). Does Object\(_{\mathrm{w1 }}\) survive the squashing in its world? Well, it does if it’s a lump but not if it’s a statue. But Object\(_{\mathrm{w1}}\) is no more a statue to the exclusion of a lump of clay (or vice versa) than Object is, in this world. So the scenario is reiterated at each world: at each world none of Object’s counterparts has an intrinsic sortal identity.
It’s also worth noting that this is not simply a product of vagueness (or “semantic indecision”); even if ‘Object’ is initially ambiguous between any number of referent-candidates, for any given precisification of ‘Object’ it remains an open question whether it is a statue, lump, or something else.
I noted earlier that my discussion of Lewis pertains to his account of permanent rather than temporary overlap cases (footnote 27). But one might think this assumption is not innocent. An anonymous referee for this journal points out regarding my “Object” argument that if Statue and Clay are squashed at \(\hbox {t}_{2}\) then Lewis can say Statue ceases to exist and Clay survives without even invoking his sortal–relative counterpart theory. Even if true this does not affect my argument, however. To see this note one can distinguish temporary from permanent overlap cases only if one comes equipped with knowledge of persistence conditions, such that one can judge that x continued while y ended. But then what are we to say about Object? Consider two variations. In the first Statue is destroyed but Clay remains, such that this is a temporary overlap case as far as Statue and Clay are concerned. But what about Object? Does Object continue to overlap with Clay or not? Because ‘Object’ is sortally neutral the answer is indeterminate, and as a result it is indeterminate whether this is a permanent or temporary overlap case. So consider the second variation: both Statue and Clay are destroyed at \(\hbox {t}_{2}\), rendering it a permanent overlap case as far as Statue and Clay are concerned. But is Object also destroyed? Because ‘Object’ is sortally neutral the answer again is indeterminate, and so again it is indeterminate whether this is a permanent or temporary overlap case. So regardless of the permanent/temporary distinction the sortal identity of Object is indeterminate, and my argument goes through.
Worth noting is that Scholastics cited this consequence of a sortal-free world in defense of substantial forms against materialist atomism; Scholastics claimed that if there were no substantial forms, but only atoms moving about in the void, then there would be no distinction between substantial change and mere alteration, i.e., no substances would ever come to be or cease being, but, rather, there would only be the mere alterations of atoms taking on various accidental shapes or arrangements. Thinking this situation absurd Scholastics rejected atomism in favor of substantial forms (Pasnau 2011, pp. 553, 677).
For instance, on Melnyk’s (2003) “realization physicalism” a sortal counts as physical if it is realized by physical entities, rather than being determined by them. So insofar as the (physical) lump realizes Statue’s and Clay’s sortal properties, sortals count as physical. There may remain the worry, though (as with Paul and Fine), that this presupposes that sortal properties exist rather than accounting for them given only a physical base (which is surely a task of the physicalist on any conception). Alternately, one might define ‘physical’ in terms of paradigm physical objects (Stoljar 2001; Strawson 2006). Such views either beg the question against the idealist, however—surely the idealist’s paradigms of mental objects look awfully similar to the physicalist’s paradigms of physical objects—or else this strategy fails to distinguish physicalism from idealism at all (though perhaps this is something that Strawson, who advocates panpsychism, might actually embrace). Another option is the via negativa strategy—defining the physical as the non-mental; see e.g. Montero and Papineau (2005). Whether the physical as the non-sortal will avoid the present difficulties, though, is not clear.
One might wonder, as an anonymous referee for this journal did, whether on my account functional kinds or properties (such as being a clock) are inimical to physicalism. Space forbids in-depth discussion, but the brief answer is that they are not (at least, not necessarily). The reason is that something can posses the (physical) qualities or attributes necessary for fulfilling a function (e.g. being a clock) without that functional kind being what something most fundamentally is (i.e., its sortal identity), or without that functional kind governing or determining its persistence conditions (something might still exist after ceasing to function as a clock, for example). Moreover, and as a result, functional kinds so-construed would not yield coincidence-problems, and as a result would not be subject to the arguments given above. That being said, functional kinds, like everything else, are subject to the generic physicalist constraint of having to be physically fundamental or determined by what is fundamental in order to be counted physical (cf. my comments in the previous note regarding Melnyk’s 2003 “realization physicalism”).
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Peter Godfrey-Smith, Tommy Kivatinos, Barry Loewer, Andrew Melnyk, Barbara Montero, Alyssa Ney, Graham Priest, and Peter Simpson for helpful comments and discussion on earlier drafts. I also wish to thank two anonymous referees for Synthese for immensely helpful suggestions and comments, which are greatly appreciated.
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Goldwater, J. Physicalism and the sortalist conception of objects. Synthese 195, 5497–5519 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1459-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1459-z