Abstract
Dasgupta (Philos Stud Int J Philos Anal Tradit 145(1):35–67, 2009) has argued that material individuals, such as particles and laptops, are metaphysically objectionable and must be eliminated from our fundamental theories of the world. He proposes to eliminate them by redescribing all the fundamental facts of the world in a variant of predicate functor logic. We study the status, on this theory, of a putative fact particularly recalcitrant to a formulation within predicate functor logic: his own claim that there are no fundamental or primitive material individuals. We consider three regimentations of the denial of primitive individuals and show that—under some plausible hypotheses about fundamental truths and the fundamentality operator—they cannot be consistently translated in predicate functor logic by Dasgupta’s usual strategy. We conclude by discussing two approaches to salvage Generalism, in the absence of such a translation.
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Notes
The sentences describing «the fundamental facts of the world»(Dasgupta 2009, p. 51).
We follow Dasgupta in restricting ourselves to predicate functor logic when discussing the relation of his system to first order theories [ibid. p. 64]. The reader can check that nothing in our argument will depend on the use of the predicate ‘Occurs ...’ until we discuss the introduction of quantifiers in the language of \(T_{PFL}\) in Sect. 4.
We call a translation a mapping between languages satisfying certain syntactical criteria. We do not assume that a translation sends sentences to synonymous sentences, nor that it sends true sentences to true sentences. Dasgupta (2009) denies that the above mapping preserves meaning and it is not clear whether he thinks it preserves truth value.
Dasgupta calls his own approach to dispense with primitive individuals ‘Generalism’.
We sometimes assume for the sake of the argument that the language \(T_{PFL}\) has been augmented by a sentential operator to express (1). To contest to \(T_{PFL}\) some resource merely makes it less expressive and a fortiori less capable to express (1). It is not difficult to extend the usual mapping to cover occurrences of operators such as [Fundamentally].
By the negation of sentences \(\textit{a}^{\prime }\), \(\textit{b}^{\prime }\) and \(\textit{c}^{\prime }\) in predicate functor logic we mean the sentences obtained by prefixing \(\textit{a}^{\prime }\), \(\textit{b}^{\prime }\) and \(\textit{c}^{\prime }\) with the combinator Neg or by omitting the initial Neg. As we have already mentioned, the mapping preserves logical relations and therefore these sentences are logically incompatible with \(\textit{a}^{\prime }\), \(\textit{b}^{\prime }\) and \(\textit{c}^{\prime }\).
This depends on what is meant by individual, of course. In a wide sense of the term, one may insist that an individual is anything that can be the value of an objectual variable. But it seems to us clear that Dasgupta understands ‘individuals’ in this context as opposed to ‘universals’ (p. 47). In the bundle theory, also according to Dasgupta, individuals are bundles of universals but universals are not individuals. Turner (2017, p. 7) notes that universals may be as idle as fundamental individuals for the purposes of physics, in the sense that their specific identities may matter little to the laws. But this does not by itself obliterate the distinction between individuals and properties and relations.
It has been suggested to us by many people that terms such as ‘Individual x’ ought to be done away in \(T_{PFL}\) and that the translation ought to send them to the ‘empty predicate’. If Dasgupta abandons the predicate ‘Individual x’, the sentences \(a^{\prime }\), \(b^{\prime }\) and \(c^{\prime }\) cease to be formulable in his system and certainly cannot be used to express a, b and c (to formulate Generalism).
To abandon such a principle leads to the loophole we discuss in Sect. 4.
Note that the sentence (1), while not necessarily a fundamental truth, is at least about what is fundamentally the case. This implies that the realm of the fundamental is not descriptively closed, in the sense that statements delimiting its confines are not themselves fundamental truths. This is already incompatible with the metaphysics in Writing the book of the World; at least if one identifies the fundamentality operator with Sider’s ‘structure’ operator. For Sider, to every truth about the fundamental structure we can append the structure operator to get another truth about the fundamental structure (p. 137).
Dasgupta appears to be sympathetic to precisely such an approach to define fundamentality in terms of ground. See for instance (Dasgupta 2014, p. 24).
A motivation for restricting the quantifiers, which has been suggested to us, is the idea that the only quantifiers ranging over properties must be second order and higher order quantifiers. First order quantifiers are then to be restricted to individuals. But we are not aware of any independent argument to adhere to this principle.
This move is distinct from the mere claim that the individuality predicate is in some sense unhelpful. If the concept of individuality is expelled from our fundamental theory, but retained and put to work in our philosophical papers, we are now back to the first strategy discussed above.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Dino Calosi, Fabrice Correia and the anonymous referee for many helpful and detailed comments on this paper.
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Babic, J., Cocco, L. A note on Dasgupta’s Generalism. Philos Stud 177, 2153–2162 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01303-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01303-2