Abstract
Kevin Mulligan has brought the distinction between thick and thin descriptions into the philosophy of relations, and with its help he has put forward the theses that all relations are “thin” and internal, and that none is “thick” and external. Accepting and using Mulligan’s thin–thick distinction, I argue that not all internal relations are thin. There are thick internal relations, too; and they abound in mathematical physics. Also, I claim that there might be thin external relations. However, introducing a distinction between strongly and weakly internal relations, I agree with Mulligan that all strongly internal relations are thin relations.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
“I do not admit that any relation whatever can be merely external and make no difference to its terms” (Bradley 1908, p. 575).
- 3.
Let it be added, though, that he cautiously calls his view a “suggestion” and “speculative”; furthermore, he ends the paper by saying that “we may well find ourselves on the slippery slope towards either conceptualism or eliminativism about relations” (Mulligan 1998, p. 326, 327, and 350, respectively).
- 4.
I know only of two papers where his view is discussed, not only mentioned. In the first, D.v. Wachter (1998) argues that if all relations are internal (with which he agrees) then there are no relations, since internal relations do not (contra Mulligan) add anything to being; in the second, Trettin (2004) speaks positively of how Mulligan analyzes relations by means of ontological dependence relations, and she supports (contra Wachter) the view that there can be relational tropes. I will not discuss this issue, where I side with Mulligan and Trettin; see Johansson (2012).
- 5.
I am using hyphens since Mulligan is using hyphens.
- 6.
- 7.
If the example is analyzed as Frege wants, i.e., that the sentence claims that the two names refer to the same object, then one should perhaps say that the truth-maker is not only Venus but also two name–named relations. This does not affect Mulligan’s main thesis, since the naming relation can be regarded as a thin relation.
- 8.
He also mentions two other thin relational predicates, “–inheres in–” and “–is between–and–” (1998, p. 327), but he seems to regard these as reducible to the relations of dependence and greater than/lesser than. Also, he seems to regard greater than and lesser than as two distinct relations, but I think there is only one relation referred to by the two converse predicates “–greater than–” and “–lesser than–” (Johansson 2011). In his so-called The 1913 Manuscript, Russell is of the same opinion (Russell 1992, pp. 86–87).
- 9.
This analysis makes it possible to claim that the order or direction that is part of the meaning of the social relational predicates does not correspond to anything in a relation, not even a thin one, but to something in the first relatum. I have argued in favor of such a view (Johansson 2010b), but Mulligan does not touch upon this issue.
- 10.
I have earlier made this distinction (Johansson 2004/1989, Chaps. 8 and 9), but then in terms of “internal relations” ( = strongly internal) and “grounded relations” ( = weakly internal). However, since the wide definition of “internal relation” has become the predominant one, I think the new name proposals are better.
- 11.
Mulligan could retort that spatial relational property predicates such as “–occupies rn” must, when applied to tropes, be regarded as representing something that is part of the identity of the tropes in question.
- 12.
For more details about how the distinctions differ, especially in the formal structure of the corresponding classification hierarchies, see Johansson 2008, Sect. 3.
- 13.
The difference is that I regard the resemblances grounded in and emerging “bottom-up” from instances of a determinate monadic universal, whereas the trope nominalist regards the instances (tropes) as receiving their general property identity “top-down” from the exact resemblance relation under discussion.
- 14.
It might be argued, though, that the resemblances between the classes at bottom are first-order resemblances between tropes in the different classes.
- 15.
The common view that tropes are simple is nicely worked out in Maurin (2002); since Mulligan says nothing to the contrary, I have interpreted him as having the same view.
- 16.
A French version of the paper, “Toutes les relations sont internes—la nouvelle version,” is published in Philosophiques 38 (1/2011), 219–39.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jan Almäng, Christer Svennerlind, and Erwin Tegtmeier for comments on an earlier version of the chapter.
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Johansson, I. (2014). All Relations Are Internal: The New Version. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04199-5_16
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