And just what is life?

[polytropos]

A famous example is that people who live in arctic climates tend to have far more words to describe snow than those living in temperate zones. So which culture does it correctly? Are the temperate folk right in insisting that all icy precipitation shares the same essence, or does nature/the universe/God/metaphysics concur with the arctic people, and regard different degrees of precipitation as essentially different?

Well, I am also not committed to the idea that essence maps one-to-one onto natural language. In many cases (like this one, it appears), there is not a conflict. Those in arctic climates have seen different types of snow, so they have better grasped its essence; they’ve furthermore grasped that what those in more temperate areas takes to be a species of phenomena (“snow”) is really a genus.

(Though I’m just being illustrative here. “Snow” is a form of water, and is that sort of substance. There are a number of accidental changes that water can undergo. I think that those in arctic regions simply have a better grasp of the essence of water and what it can do in various conditions.)

Do tomatoes have the essence of vegetables or the essence of fruit? Does salmon have the essence of red meat or not?

I’m not versed enough in the biology to say in these cases. I would think that a hylemorphist would probably classify tomatoes as a vegetable. They are not very committed to biological cladism as a species concept. Essence is known by properties rather than evolutionary history. (Though evolutionary history can be a good guide to essence.)

If you accept that the labels are conventions, these cease to be issues, because then we can just say that the classification depends on one’s intentions.

Well, as I’ve argued, we are unable to accept essences as strictly conventional; the position is inconsistent since it requires quantifying over a human community with a particular nature so as to conventionally determine other essences. That isn’t to say that natural language is not largely conventional and interest relative.

Regarding tomatoes as vegetables is perfectly acceptable if you’re emphasizing the fact that they taste like vegetables and are a common ingredient in vegetable soup, for example. Regarding them as fruits is more appropriate if you’re commenting on their biology. Neither definition is the “correct” or “real” one, they’re just conventions.

Regarding them as fruits only makes sense under the assumption that a thing is of the same essence as its evolutionary ancestors, which I don’t see much justification for. (Naturally there is also a problem of specifying the proximity of evolutionary ancestors which are essence-determining.) Biology can proceed uninhibited by acknowledging that tomatoes are descended from fruits. (Or can call them fruit in a technical sense, ie. a mature ovary of a plant.) That doesn’t imply that tomatoes are not vegetables, even for the purposes of biology.

Likewise, we can note that chickens are descended from reptiles without having to accept that chickens are reptiles.

I’m not saying that the classification doesn’t make sense, I’m saying that it seems arbitrary to say that certain objects require explanation but others don’t. In particular, it seems that you’ve just deliberately defined things so that objects will need to have other metaphysical objects to account for them.

Well, in a strict sense, essences do have explanations, in that they are consequent upon substantial form. If the question is “Why does that substance have that substantial form?”, then one is probing areas like Aquinas’s Second Way.

I haven’t defined things so that they need to be explained. There are, however, observable unities in nature, and I’ve argued that they are not accounted for by conventionalism or reductionism, which leaves us with form as an objective principle of unity and organization. (This isn’t an argument, and it’s a very abbreviated account. Conventionalism, reductionism, and hylemorphism don’t, of course, constitute an exhaustive disjunction of possibilities for accounting for natural structures.)

 

[MPat]

Firstly, it’s interesting that you say it’s non-ambiguous when one of the articles you referenced actually attributes two different meanings to the word.

Ah, I actually did get a confirmation that you looked at those articles! Of course, I did qualify “non-ambiguous” for a reason.

But I dislike -isms because they are often much broader than the belief system of the individual they purportedly describe. Atheism is a prime example. Even such a seemingly simple concept takes a variety of forms, and I’ve had countless Christians say “atheists believe such-and-such” when in fact I don’t believe any such things. So I question the utility of -isms in many cases.

Well, avoiding “-isms” will not prevent people from being mistaken. It will only result in mostly pointless interrogations, asking many superfluous questions.

Speaking of which… Such “-isms” are analogous to “essences” in some way, aren’t they…? Thus you will probably believe that those labels are somewhat arbitrary, right…?

In fact, I will pose that question to you: Suppose a new type of object comes into being, so that it has a unique essence associated with it that is unlike the essences of other objects (otherwise it wouldn’t be new). It might be the first computer, for example. Was there just some essence of computers floating around in existence somewhere, lying in wait for its time to be applicable to the physical world?

I don’t know. I can think of three solutions at the moment, but I do not know which of them is correct (I am not a professional philosopher, after all). First, it could be that the essence is really “created” at the moment the first thing with the essence is created. Second, it could be that it is enough for the essence that God knows what the thing with the essence will be (or even would be). Third, it might have something to do with the difference between artifacts and natural objects. More solutions might be possible.

I don’t see how. If all I’ve done is replaced some of your terminology, we should expect everything to remain conceptually the same, just with different terms.

Our approaches seem to differ in only two respects: 1) I use “definitions” and “properties” instead of “essences” and “accidents”. 2) You think objects are classified by nature, whereas I think they’re just classified by convention. In other words, “computers” originated as a concept when humans designed a tool that was meant to carry out computations. The matter needn’t be complicated by speaking of “essences” that existed before computers were possible.

Does this sound like a fair assessment?

Well, St. Thomas Aquinas says in “De ente et essentia” paragraph 100 (dhspriory.org/thomas/DeEnte&Essentia.htm): “And because essence, as has been said, is that which is signified by the definition,”. Thus essences and definitions are definitely related. But maybe saying that they are completely equivalent would be too strong…

Other than that, yes, I do think that our positions cannot be too different. After all, Darwinian evolution does take care of Nominalists that are too consistently wrong…

I agree, but it seems we’re again in the same boat here. If I gave you a substance and asked you what its essence is, you would need to make the same observations to be sure that it has the essence of water.

This is obviously not how either of us would do it outside of a laboratory, though. We would just note that whatever substance we’re dealing with has some characteristics that we typically observe in water and use induction to reach the conclusion that it’s probably water.

The “real world” approach to problems is almost always inductive.

Good, no more obvious circularity here.

But they didn’t use essences. They observed that this sample of water has a property, this one has the same property, this other one has the same property…Hey, maybe all samples of water will have this property! So they published their results and challenged others to refute them. After extensive testing the results of the initial experiments were corroborated. This is just the scientific method.

Er, that’s what things might be supposed to work, but, by the principle of causality, comics phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=761 do not get drawn without a cause…

More seriously, once again, it depends on what one means by “using essences” (I suspect that you imagine our position on that differently)…

For example, I would say that “Hey, maybe all samples of water will have this property!” presupposes essences. A truly consistent Nominalism would result in something different: “Hey, maybe all odourless things boil at 100 degrees Celsius!” (tries to boil gold), “Hey, maybe all odourless and colourless things boil at 100 degrees Celsius!” (tries to boil glass), “Hey, maybe all things in a cup boil at 100 degrees Celsius!”…

That is, one cannot conclude that essences haven’t been “used” just because they haven’t been “used” explicitly. When we add numbers, we also do not use laws of commutativity and associativity in an explicit way, but it doesn’t mean that we do not use them implicitly.

 

[MPat]

I don’t see the difference between classifying and determining classification.

I’ve already brought up the issue of inventions to MPat: If a new type of object is invented, was its essence just lying in wait to be realized in concrete form all along? But another issue with letting nature/the universe/God/metaphysics do the classifying for us is that there are multiple ways of classifying objects depending on your intentions. How do we know that our classifications concur with the “determined” ones?

A famous example is that people who live in arctic climates tend to have far more words to describe snow than those living in temperate zones. So which culture does it correctly? Are the temperate folk right in insisting that all icy precipitation shares the same essence, or does nature/the universe/God/metaphysics concur with the arctic people, and regard different degrees of precipitation as essentially different? Food also presents problems. Do tomatoes have the essence of vegetables or the essence of fruit? Does salmon have the essence of red meat or not?

You seem to be implying that essences are words or somehow strongly correspond to them. But they are not words.

I’ll take a different example. When synonyms are being explained to schoolchildren in Lithuania, one example considers three words: “arklys”, “žirgas” and “kuinas”. All those words would translate to English as “horse”, although their meaning is not the same: “arklys” is the horse in general or the horse used in agriculture, “žirgas” is the horse used for riding, “kuinas” is an old and weak horse that can hardly be used for anything. Does it mean that Lithuanians think those types of horses are completely different while Englishmen think they are the same…? No, that’s why those words are considered to be synonyms - different words with (mostly) the same meaning. Or the words that denote the same essence, if you wish (that might not be perfectly accurate, but it should give you a right idea).

I’m not saying that the classification doesn’t make sense, I’m saying that it seems arbitrary to say that certain objects require explanation but others don’t. In particular, it seems that you’ve just deliberately defined things so that objects will need to have other metaphysical objects to account for them. I’m saying that it works just as well to simply regard physical objects as existing and differing from each other in their own right. Whatever work the essences do in your theory could be constructed through the use of conventional classifications–we needn’t begin by assuming they exist independently of our efforts.

No, I don’t expect anyone here to find the simplification appealing, and I’m not asking whether you guys would like it. I am only inquiring about what we would lose with this simplification. It doesn’t seem as if we lose anything.

Well, what would we lose if we had addition as we know it, but denied laws of commutativity and associativity as “needless assumptions”…?

First of all, we would lose the ability to explain why add in this way, and not some other. Likewise, if you reject essences and accept Nominalism, it becomes much harder to explain, why, for example, a scientist who climbs to a mountain and discovers that in that case water boils at a lower temperature shouldn’t just declare that we should assign that water to a new class (“Faster boiling water”) and leave it at that.

Second, we would lose the ability to think about addition, generalise it etc.

Also, there are all those things that elliminative materialists deny, for example, life (as mentioned in the original post). Explaining them just by the material components doesn’t seem to be very effective, if there are some who are ready to give up…

 

[Oreoracle]

The analogy limps exactly where it needs not to: scientific practice has not led to the reduction of biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, etc.

But we know that every natural science is a subset of physics. The language of physics is perhaps not well-suited to discussing, say, biology, but this is an issue of translation, not philosophy. For starters, I don’t think biologists have devised a non-ambiguous definition of “life” yet. Once they iron out the definitions, I think physics will become more applicable. As it stands, the softer sciences are so vague that the underlying physics is murky.

But again, that’s not unexpected. We would expect a discipline based mostly on math to require precision to be applicable.

How do we identify the “parts” of the Bolazno-Weierstrass theorem?

But theorems are not mathematical objects; they are at best meta-mathematical objects. It would be more fair to compare theorems with theories (or at least laws), and indeed we can see that scientific theories and laws don’t seem to have parts either.

I do think that reductionism is insufficient. If components are sufficient for determining essence of some object (call it O), then one would have to specify how the components are arranged. But in doing so, on pain of circularity, one cannot quantify over the structure of the object O. But one has to specify why the sum of the components of an object with a certain essence are the components of that object.

Strictly speaking, my position has not been that properties can be used to determine essences. My position has been that phenomena can be explained adequately without essences; in particular, without appealing to extraneous metaphysical entities.

Consider: I don’t think a non-philosopher (or even just a non-Platonist) has ever been skeptical of the existence of physical objects until he “learned” that they are particular instances of essences. The essences don’t really make me feel any more assured about the physical world. If anything they seem like post hoc justifications for things we already took for granted since, as I’ve pointed out, classification is firstly an issue of language before the metaphysics are even disputed. It comes across as a “cheap” way of trying to prove a god, and that is indeed how it’s been used (as Linus so charitably alludes to).

This is not an accusation, it’s just meant to tell you where I’m coming from on this.

Consider two objects. One is red, and one is blue. We classify them as red and blue respectively. Their colors determine their classifications but are not their classifications.

But to illustrate my point: Perhaps they are both cars, so in that regard they are not distinguished. Now if nature really had a classification in mind before we made our own determinations, then nature either sides with us and distinguishes them or it disagrees and thinks color is less important than the use of the object for the purposes of distinction. So how do we know if our opinion jives with nature’s?

You could concede, as you do later in the post, that perhaps objects have a multiplicity of essences. But with this position you must be willing to accept that any given object may have at least a countable infinity of essences, as we could no doubt come up with a hierarchy of increasingly broad definitions, each of which describe the object. In fact I don’t think it would be tough to make the infinity uncountable.

For example: Lay a baseball bat against a ruler, so that the bat is touching the ruler at all points. Define all objects with essence x to have the property that they touch the ruler at the x-th inch. If we accept that the real numbers, or a larger set such as the hyperreals, are required to describe the points on the ruler exhaustively, then clearly the bat has an uncountable infinity of essences. Are you sure this is simpler than just taking the existence of the bat for granted at the outset? Is it more satisfying to assume an uncountable infinity of entities?

And let’s not forget: To decide how similar two objects are, you need to be able to compare these infinities of essences.

In many cases (like this one, it appears), there is not a conflict. Those in arctic climates have seen different types of snow, so they have better grasped its essence; they’ve furthermore grasped that what those in more temperate areas takes to be a species of phenomena (“snow”) is really a genus.

You said there was no conflict, and yet you’ve chosen a side. You’ve sided with the arctic people, from the sound of it, because you’ve chosen their classification as the “species”.

But are they right, really? Since precipitation differs by degrees, there is no theoretical limit to how many distinctions one could make. So perhaps the arctic folk have only grasped a genus, and we actually found a family.

You could say, again, that this is because our knowledge is imperfect. But I think the more elegant explanation is that we’re vainly attempting to use discrete objects–essences–to describe something that we know to be continuous–differing degrees of precipitation. You could accept that each degree of snow has a unique essence, just as every point on a curve is distinct, but then every flake of snow would differ essentially from other flakes, and on what grounds could we then lump them into the same category?

Well, as I’ve argued, we are unable to accept essences as strictly conventional; the position is inconsistent since it requires quantifying over a human community with a particular nature so as to conventionally determine other essences.

I don’t understand this objection. Could you explain it differently?

 

[Oreoracle]

Speaking of which… Such “-isms” are analogous to “essences” in some way, aren’t they…? Thus you will probably believe that those labels are somewhat arbitrary, right…?

There seems to be some confusion: I would maintain that the words are conventions, yes, but that is not the same as saying they are arbitrary. Obviously humans had a motivation to devise terms like “liberalism” and “conservatism” because of the invention of political parties. The distinction is conventional because people could have separated into different parties based on different issues, so the details of the -ism are contingencies. (Indeed, those terms mean very different things today than when they originated.)

What I find remarkable, though, is the idea that we humans somehow created a metaphysical construct when we chose to form parties; we created the “essence of liberals” for example. I’m not sure how to describe how bizarre that notion is. I don’t think an act of creation really took place. We simply reached a consensus and agreed to call people who had certain convictions liberals because it’s convenient to have a shorthand term for such things.

I suppose you could say we “created” a word, but your position in your next post is that essences are indeed more than words and their denotations. I would even have reservations about saying we created a concept, really. All of the “parts” of liberalism were known before the term, so when the word was invented, the only pioneering that took place was a classification, not the literal invention of liberalism’s tenets.

Well, St. Thomas Aquinas says in “De ente et essentia” paragraph 100 (dhspriory.org/thomas/DeEnte&Essentia.htm): “And because essence, as has been said, is that which is signified by the definition,”. Thus essences and definitions are definitely related. But maybe saying that they are completely equivalent would be too strong…

An essence strikes me as a sort of “preferred definition”. As polytropos insists, grasping an essence is to grasp its “real definition”. But the problem is that definitions are conventional, period. There is no “correct” definition.

Consider a simple historical example (so you can’t say this one’s contrived!): 1 used to be considered a prime number, but now it isn’t. To achieve this change, we need only slightly modify the definition of “prime” to “a number with exactly two factors” when it was originally “a number with fewer than three factors”. Either definition gives the same results in number theory, except sometimes you have to make a remark exempting 1 from a result. Both definitions yield perfectly consistent views of mathematics in their own right.

Now we may ask the question: Does 1 have the essence of prime numbers? In other words, which definition does metaphysics prefer? The answer is that there simply is no preference other than a conventional one. The reason we chose the definition of “prime” that we did is because some theorems are slightly shorter if 1 isn’t regarded as prime. There is no “correct” choice of 1 as a prime or not.

For example, I would say that “Hey, maybe all samples of water will have this property!” presupposes essences. A truly consistent Nominalism would result in something different: “Hey, maybe all odourless things boil at 100 degrees Celsius!” (tries to boil gold), “Hey, maybe all odourless and colourless things boil at 100 degrees Celsius!” (tries to boil glass), “Hey, maybe all things in a cup boil at 100 degrees Celsius!”…

And if we knew nothing about boiling prior to those experiments, I have no doubt that we would have suspected such things. Remember that we are the same species that once believed damaging a doll that looks like a person would injure the person himself. We have a history of making silly associations, like the association of odors and boiling points.

 

[polytropos]

But we know that every natural science is a subset of physics.

Actually, that’s what is at issue, and what can’t be claimed given that scientific practice does not proceed by reducing the other natural sciences to physics. It is not an empirical datum that the natural sciences can be accounted for by some fundamental laws of physics (whatever those might turn out to be). If it is not an empirical datum, and if the natural sciences have not (yet?) given us evidence for it, then we need an alternative basis if we are to believe it.

But theorems are not mathematical objects; they are at best meta-mathematical objects. It would be more fair to compare theorems with theories (or at least laws), and indeed we can see that scientific theories and laws don’t seem to have parts either.

Well logically speaking a theorem is a tautology derived from a set of definitions. Is not a tautology a “logical object”? But then why shouldn’t a theorem be a “mathematical object?”

However, the point can be made alternatively: take a limit superior. I would suppose that would have to be a mathematical object if anything is. One can define a limit superior either as a). the limit of the supremums of the sequences of tails of a sequence or b). the largest limit point of a sequence. It can be shown that a). implies b). and b). implies a). But in either case, what are we showing? “A point is the limit superior of a sequence if and only if it is the largest limit point of the sequence.” How does one separate the necessary and sufficient conditions offered by this definition (or theorem, depending on how you want to take it) from the “parts” of the limit superior qua mathematical object? There seems to be no coherent way to do so; the “parts” of mathematical objects, if sense can be made of that phrase, don’t seem to be at all extricable from the expression of mathematical essences in definitions and theorems.

Maybe you have something else in mind with respect to mathematical objects. I don’t see how mathematics can be taken to model theoretical reduction, however.

Consider: I don’t think a non-philosopher (or even just a non-Platonist) has ever been skeptical of the existence of physical objects until he “learned” that they are particular instances of essences. The essences don’t really make me feel any more assured about the physical world. If anything they seem like post hoc justifications for things we already took for granted since, as I’ve pointed out, classification is firstly an issue of language before the metaphysics are even disputed. It comes across as a “cheap” way of trying to prove a god, and that is indeed how it’s been used (as Linus so charitably alludes to).

OK. But what does this show? There are a lot of things non-philosophers are not skeptical about because, as non-philosophers, they have not subjected their ideas to scrutiny. That we classify things using language before we do metaphysics does not even provide evidence for, let alone show, the idea that essences are not necessary conditions for the unity we observe in the world. The fact that we take something for granted does not mean that it is explanatorily sufficient and that any explanation of it is extraneous. (Compare with any article, say, of human anatomy. I can get by doing quite a bit taking my own anatomy “for granted.” That doesn’t mean that biological explanations thereof are “post hoc justifications.” It also doesn’t mean that any explanations thereof are repudiations of the fact that human anatomy or, say, linguistic categories, can be taken for granted without a huge amount of practical difficulty.) It’s just that we don’t need explanations of everything in our day-to-day lives.

I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say that essences are a “cheap” way of trying to prove God’s existence (though even if they were, that would obviously be irrelevant to their coherence, simplicity, or explanatory power). The suggestion is false because so many contemporary essentialists (Crawford Elder, Brian Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, Hilary Putnam, E.J. Lowe, etc.) are non-theists (or, in Putnam’s case, do not believe that God’s existence can be proved). Furthermore, a number of contemporary theists (William Lane Craig, Bill Alston, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne) are not essentialists. (And it’s not impossible to formulate something like Aquinas’s First Way without reference to essences anyway, although I think it would weaken the argument and the subsequent derivations of the divine attributes.)

But to illustrate my point: Perhaps they are both cars, so in that regard they are not distinguished. Now if nature really had a classification in mind before we made our own determinations, then nature either sides with us and distinguishes them or it disagrees and thinks color is less important than the use of the object for the purposes of distinction. So how do we know if our opinion jives with nature’s?

Again, my position is not that “nature had a classification in mind,” but that there are objective principles of unity in nature which fix the limits of classification.

In the case of the cars, there is no difficulty. The question here is not of whether the color difference between two cars is essential (it’s not, since cars are artifacts and don’t have natural essences), but whether the objective difference in accidents determines our classification of the accident (color in this case).

 

[polytropos]

You could concede, as you do later in the post, that perhaps objects have a multiplicity of essences.

I don’t know what you are referring to, but I don’t concede that. (My response to the question of the essence of snow should not be taken as a concession that snow has multiple essences. I apologize if that was unclear.)

Accidents can have essences as well as substances. So I would say that an object has an essence and its accidents have essences. But since an object is not identical to its accidents, that does not imply that objects can have multiple essences.

But with this position you must be willing to accept that any given object may have at least a countable infinity of essences, as we could no doubt come up with a hierarchy of increasingly broad definitions, each of which describe the object. In fact I don’t think it would be tough to make the infinity uncountable.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to be taking my statement that essences are grasped through real definitions, which can differ in their scope and specificity, as a concession that objects have multiple essences. But that does not follow, because as I have claimed earlier, it is in fact rare that our real definitions are exhaustive. A multiplicity of less-than-exhaustive real definitions which aim at a single essence does not get us to multiple essences.

For example: Lay a baseball bat against a ruler, so that the bat is touching the ruler at all points. Define all objects with essence x to have the property that they touch the ruler at the x-th inch. If we accept that the real numbers, or a larger set such as the hyperreals, are required to describe the points on the ruler exhaustively, then clearly the bat has an uncountable infinity of essences. Are you sure this is simpler than just taking the existence of the bat for granted at the outset? Is it more satisfying to assume an uncountable infinity of entities?

If it helps, you might read “essence” as “nature” as in “the nature of a thing.” I do not think the term “essence” is getting the right idea across.

Essence must correspond to formal principles of unities in substances. We cannot define an “essence x” as “touch[ing] the ruler at the x-th inch.”

Furthermore, your proposed property (which is a property, ie. something that expressed by a first-order predicate, and so not an essence because essences are not properties) is not even a real property; it is a Cambridge property (ie. it is fundamentally relational and extrinsic, and an object having the property can lose the property without undergoing real change). Since essence is immanent and is rooted in the principle of unity (form) of an object, your “essence” is not an essence.

You said there was no conflict, and yet you’ve chosen a side. You’ve sided with the arctic people, from the sound of it, because you’ve chosen their classification as the “species”.

What I mean is that there seems to be no reason to regard the two parties as in conflict; their difference seems to have to do with levels of description and epistemic access rather than ontological commitment. If those from temperate climates would assert that, no, their linguistic usage in fact expresses the exact essence of snow, then OK, I will side against them. I find it incredibly implausible that they would argue that.

For what it’s worth, I’d also say that the arctic folk would be wrong to assert that they have the exhaustive real definition of the essence of water. Theirs may be closer, but it is almost certainly not exhaustive.

(There is a very interesting conception of essence, defended by James Ross, in terms of de re “overflow necessities,” ie. necessities that overflow our linguistic usages. The salient point is precisely that our linguistic conventions do not map onto essences. If I find the time I’ll try to articulate some of his insights.)

(This is on top of the fact that, as I’ve said before, essentialism is not the thesis that essences map one-to-one onto linguistic categories. Someone who uses a set of words in some way is not committed to the idea that each word corresponds to a distinct essence, or that the collection of words correspond to a single genus, or anything of the sort. That would be unreflective.)

I don’t understand this objection. Could you explain it differently?

Suppose all essences are determined by convention. Conventions are determined by a community of human language users. But it’s impossible to quantify (ie. be existentially committed to) a community with a determinate nature (humans capable of forming conventions) without having some essence prior to convention. So it cannot be the case that all essences are determined by convention. So essences must have some ontological correlate.

The conclusion is not even surprising; it is rather obvious, I think, that even conventional linguistic categories have ontological correlates. But then the question has moved from convention to metaphysics.

 

[MPat]

An essence strikes me as a sort of “preferred definition”.

Sorry, but how on Earth do you take “And because essence, as has been said, is that which is signified by the definition,” with “But maybe saying that they are completely equivalent would be too strong…”, cite it and conclude that???

Actually, this strange confusion of essences with words or groups of words seems to be the main problem here.

As polytropos insists, grasping an essence is to grasp its “real definition”. But the problem is that definitions are conventional, period. There is no “correct” definition.

That seems to be rather strongly worded. Do you have a proof…?

There seems to be some confusion: I would maintain that the words are conventions, yes, but that is not the same as saying they are arbitrary. Obviously humans had a motivation to devise terms like “liberalism” and “conservatism” because of the invention of political parties. The distinction is conventional because people could have separated into different parties based on different issues, so the details of the -ism are contingencies. (Indeed, those terms mean very different things today than when they originated.)

What I find remarkable, though, is the idea that we humans somehow created a metaphysical construct when we chose to form parties; we created the “essence of liberals” for example. I’m not sure how to describe how bizarre that notion is. I don’t think an act of creation really took place. We simply reached a consensus and agreed to call people who had certain convictions liberals because it’s convenient to have a shorthand term for such things.

Those “essences” are properly called “ideologies” (or “schools of thought”, if you wish). They do not have that much to do with political parties: several parties can correspond to one ideology, a party can exist with no ideology at all.

And they are not that arbitrary: some ideas logically lead to others. For example, idea that human freedom generally overrides everything does tend to lead to free market. It is a bit unlikely to lead to command economy…

Also, while ideologies are somewhat analogous with essences, they are not really essences.

Consider a simple historical example (so you can’t say this one’s contrived!): 1 used to be considered a prime number, but now it isn’t. To achieve this change, we need only slightly modify the definition of “prime” to “a number with exactly two factors” when it was originally “a number with fewer than three factors”. Either definition gives the same results in number theory, except sometimes you have to make a remark exempting 1 from a result. Both definitions yield perfectly consistent views of mathematics in their own right.

Now we may ask the question: Does 1 have the essence of prime numbers? In other words, which definition does metaphysics prefer? The answer is that there simply is no preference other than a conventional one. The reason we chose the definition of “prime” that we did is because some theorems are slightly shorter if 1 isn’t regarded as prime. There is no “correct” choice of 1 as a prime or not.

I doubt numbers (let alone “prime numbers”) are substances… And I am not sure they would have essences. After that the rest of your argument doesn’t seem to follow.

And if we knew nothing about boiling prior to those experiments, I have no doubt that we would have suspected such things.

OK, that is no longer a question of Philosophy, but of History. Here speculation is no longer a good research method (and making stuff up is not a good research method in any field). Can you offer any evidence that this (or something like that) actually happened…?

Remember that we are the same species that once believed damaging a doll that looks like a person would injure the person himself.

That would be magic, not science. Not even “science done badly”.

Actually, even in popular culture someone who works with voodoo dolls is not called a “mad scientist”…

I don’t think being unable to tell science and magic apart would be a sign of a good philosophical view… You’d better look for another example…

We have a history of making silly associations, like the association of odors and boiling points.

Yet you do see that “association of odors and boiling points” is silly (and not just wrong). Why?

Also, you didn’t answer the point about reclassification leading to “Faster boiling water”. It would be interesting to see how you would solve that problem.

 

[polytropos]

There seems to be some confusion: I would maintain that the words are conventions, yes, but that is not the same as saying they are arbitrary.

I think (to repeat) it will help to read “essence” as “nature” henceforth. Even if we suppose that language is purely conventional, it does not follow that essences or natures are conventional, since essences are not isomorphic to natural language.

Obviously humans had a motivation to devise terms like “liberalism” and “conservatism” because of the invention of political parties.
…]
What I find remarkable, though, is the idea that we humans somehow created a metaphysical construct when we chose to form parties; we created the “essence of liberals” for example. I’m not sure how to describe how bizarre that notion is. I don’t think an act of creation really took place. We simply reached a consensus and agreed to call people who had certain convictions liberals because it’s convenient to have a shorthand term for such things.

I also am not sure how to describe how bizarre that notion is, and how anyone could get from the idea that essences are objective natures of things rooted in and consequent upon their formal principle of unity, to the idea that humans can create essences, simply because they decided to use a word in a certain way. There is something here that is not getting through.

While I’ve said that real definition is that by which we grasp an essence, you seem to be taking the real definition which a person grasps as the essence. And then you go on to drop the “real” and suppose that an essentialist is somehow committed to the idea that by talking about things differently, we change their natures!

This article may clarify a bit. (But please don’t feel obliged to read it.)

 

[Oreoracle]

Polytropos and MPat,

To save ourselves a lot of trouble I would like for you guys to answer these two questions before I address anything else. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I think these analogies have begun to hurt more than help. Secondly, I’ve lost track of the extent to which we actually disagree.

So here are my two chief questions:

1. Do you believe science can be done without appealing to essences? Or to rephrase, do you believe that the application of the scientific method requires philosophical commitments to notions such as essence?
2. If essences are indeed necessary for the conduction of science, then how does one demonstrate their existence? Suppose you wish to convince someone who has never really contemplated his/her metaphysical commitments before, i.e., be sure to include any hidden assumptions in your derivation.

If you say that science can be done without essences, then we agree, as that has been my position all along. I was never trying to infer the existence of essences from properties, or equate essences to definitions. I was arguing that you simply don’t need them.

 

[MPat]

Polytropos and MPat,

To save ourselves a lot of trouble I would like for you guys to answer these two questions before I address anything else. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I think these analogies have begun to hurt more than help. Secondly, I’ve lost track of the extent to which we actually disagree.

Such confusion might be a sign of being wrong about something…

So here are my two chief questions:

1. Do you believe science can be done without appealing to essences? Or to rephrase, do you believe that the application of the scientific method requires philosophical commitments to notions such as essence?

I have already written something that (in my opinion) should count as an answer:

Well, what would we lose if we had addition as we know it, but denied laws of commutativity and associativity as “needless assumptions”…?

First of all, we would lose the ability to explain why add in this way, and not some other. Likewise, if you reject essences and accept Nominalism, it becomes much harder to explain, why, for example, a scientist who climbs to a mountain and discovers that in that case water boils at a lower temperature shouldn’t just declare that we should assign that water to a new class (“Faster boiling water”) and leave it at that.

Second, we would lose the ability to think about addition, generalise it etc.

Also, there are all those things that elliminative materialists deny, for example, life (as mentioned in the original post). Explaining them just by the material components doesn’t seem to be very effective, if there are some who are ready to give up…

I should note that you didn’t respond to that. Is there anything I should clarify here…?

1. If essences are indeed necessary for the conduction of science, then how does one demonstrate their existence?

So, you have a whole thread (with this your post being #50) where that was supposed to be done, and you want to know how does one argue in it…? Are we supposed to answer “Unsuccessfully.”…?

Suppose you wish to convince someone who has never really contemplated his/her metaphysical commitments before, i.e., be sure to include any hidden assumptions in your derivation.

I am afraid I find it hard to give an answer other than “I would improvise.”… It is hard enough to explain those things to real people. It it still harder to explain it to someone I can hardly imagine at the moment… Would even a child be “someone who has never really contemplated his/her metaphysical commitments before”…? On the other hand, it might be even easier with a child: are essences not something we implicitly accept just instinctively…?

If you say that science can be done without essences, then we agree, as that has been my position all along. I was never trying to infer the existence of essences from properties, or equate essences to definitions. I was arguing that you simply don’t need them.

Yes, I do suspect that when you said “An essence strikes me as a sort of “preferred definition”.”, you were not explaining your own position, but explaining how you understand our position. And we were pointing out that you seem to be understanding our position incorrectly.

And the main thing you seem to be misunderstanding is what the essences are supposed to be. Naturally, it becomes hard to understand arguments explaining why one should accept that “something” exists, if you misunderstand what that “something” is supposed to be…

 

[polytropos]

1. Do you believe science can be done without appealing to essences? Or to rephrase, do you believe that the application of the scientific method requires philosophical commitments to notions such as essence?

To the first question: no. To the second question: yes.

I would say that this relates, at least tangentially, to my argument about the inadequacy of reductionism:

There either are fundamental particles or there are not.* If there are fundamental components, then they can’t be reduces, and their natures have to be accounted for by some means other than reductionism. If there are not fundamental components, then there are not parts that we can quantify over. And since we are admitting, then, that it is possible (and necessary) to determine essence by quantifying over non-elementary entities, we would be conceding reductionism altogether.

At some level, science must deal in essences (whether or not it calls them that). I’d go further to say that essences are not restricted to fundamental particles, and that all of the natural sciences aim to capture the natures of things.

1. If essences are indeed necessary for the conduction of science, then how does one demonstrate their existence? Suppose you wish to convince someone who has never really contemplated his/her metaphysical commitments before, i.e., be sure to include any hidden assumptions in your derivation.

Well, take the humble electron. I have argued that its essence cannot be adequately dispensed with (and this is a point Oderberg develops). But it’s a fact that electrons are ontological unities with determinate natures. It is, though, their unity which is not accounted for by a bundle theory of properties. (And this is true regardless of whether electrons are simple, fundamental particles.) The principle of their unity from which their various properties flow can be encapsulated in a statement of their real definition, which gives an ontological genus and species (ie. a fundamental particle, with a negative charge, such and such a mass, etc.). The real definition is our own grasping of the essence (not the essence itself), so different people might have possess real definitions of electrons with differing scopes.

The inadequacy of reductive explanations is global, however, and there is no presumption of essentialism only applying at the micro-level. Other unified corporeal substances likewise have essences. (To be exact, I’d say that electrons in general do not have forms of their own but exist virtually in the substances of which they are a part.)

If you say that science can be done without essences, then we agree, as that has been my position all along. I was never trying to infer the existence of essences from properties, or equate essences to definitions. I was arguing that you simply don’t need them.

Well, I think science has an implicit commitment to essences. But it’s also worth noting that even if science could dispense with essences, it would not follow that it is more parsimonious to eliminate essences from our ontology, without the additional premise that science can in principle be a complete explanation of the corporeal world, which the current data about scientific practice doesn’t support.

 

[Oreoracle]

Such confusion might be a sign of being wrong about something…

It could be a sign of many things. We shall see.

I have already written something that (in my opinion) should count as an answer:

Well, what would we lose if we had addition as we know it, but denied laws of commutativity and associativity as “needless assumptions”…?

While I understand that you were going for an analogy here, it is important to point out the difference between mathematical statements and metaphysical commitments. The commutativity of addition, for example, is assumed as an axiom, but it’s not really an assumption in the same sense of assuming the existence of an immaterial thing (like an essence). In fact many mathematicians were not realists and didn’t regard such properties as “existent” anyway.

One doesn’t even need to regard it as an assumption at all, really. It’s part of the definition of “addition of real numbers”. It would be strange to say that we’re assuming properties of operations when, in fact, those operations have no meaning independent of their properties.

Likewise, if you reject essences and accept Nominalism, it becomes much harder to explain, why, for example, a scientist who climbs to a mountain and discovers that in that case water boils at a lower temperature shouldn’t just declare that we should assign that water to a new class (“Faster boiling water”) and leave it at that.

I don’t think it becomes much harder to explain. Eventually people would (and did) observe that boiling points depend on atmospheric pressure. There probably was a point in history when people attributed the phenomenon to something entirely wrong.

I imagine the scientist’s reasoning would be something like: “I have observed no change in the water I’m holding, so that can’t be the culprit. So what variable has changed?” He might not guess that his altitude was the relevant variable at first, but no one ever said science is algorithmic.

So I suppose the key idea here is the same one that motivates experiments: Only the variables that differ can account for differences between the control group (the water at sea level) and the experimental group (the water on the mountain). If one cannot observe differences between two water samples, their differing boiling points must be attributed to something else.

Explaining them just by the material components doesn’t seem to be very effective, if there are some who are ready to give up…

I sounds to me as like it’s only a fringe group who are seriously contemplating it. And I would disagree that it isn’t effective. Our understanding of biology is increasing at an exponential rate, so by what criterion is it not effective?

On the other hand, it might be even easier with a child: are essences not something we implicitly accept just instinctively…?

I can’t speak for all children, but when I was a child, I didn’t postulate immaterial entities to account for physical objects I observed. I just took the observations for granted.

Even if I could have grasped what it means for something immaterial to exist (I still don’t, frankly), the possibility for infinite regress would have struck me. And it’s amazing how easy it is to grasp infinite regression by comparison. All one needed was to ask one’s parents “What does that word mean? gets a synonym Well, what does that one mean, then?” and you were well on your way.

 

[TEPO]

When I think of everything around me as animated stardust, I can’t help but to think that there is a ‘force’ in the universe that causes this animation. Since I literally am a product of everything I’ve eaten or breathed (added to my composition), and since my children are as well -yet they look just like me, I view physical living beings as memory and I view the force (or essence) that imposes this memory life.

…so to me, life is a kind of force.

 

[Oreoracle]

If there are fundamental components, then they can’t be reduced, and their natures have to be accounted for by some means other than reductionism.

In what sense will they be accounted for with the proposed essences? Will they be accounted for in the same way that me kicking a ball accounts for its motion? Is the account a proposed explanation such as a falsifiable hypothesis? If not, please elaborate.

And since we are admitting, then, that it is possible (and necessary) to determine essence by quantifying over non-elementary entities, we would be conceding reductionism altogether.

I read over your quote a few times and I didn’t see anything to substantiate the claim that it is possible to determine essence by any means. You gave a reason for why you think it would be good to have essences, but not an actual demonstration for the possibility of determining their existence.

Regarding the next part of your post: What is an “ontological unity”? All that came up on Google was a single Catholic site that was talking about something unrelated.

The inadequacy of reductive explanations is global, however, and there is no presumption of essentialism only applying at the micro-level. Other unified corporeal substances likewise have essences. (To be exact, I’d say that electrons in general do not have forms of their own but exist virtually in the substances of which they are a part.)

I’ve always been curious: What is the primary means of investigation in ontology? Deductive reasoning? Inductive reasoning? Do the metaphysical results inform our understanding of physics, or does it typically work the other way around? I ask because you seem to have arrived at many conclusions with varying degrees of certainty, and I’m wondering if this is because you use a mixture of approaches.

But it’s also worth noting that even if science could dispense with essences, it would not follow that it is more parsimonious to eliminate essences from our ontology, without the additional premise that science can in principle be a complete explanation of the corporeal world, which the current data about scientific practice doesn’t support.

I think the crux of the matter is what counts as an “explanation”. As I’ve said before, positing that intangible objects exist doesn’t make me feel more assured about anything. I’m not sure in what sense an intangible thing could interact with tangible things, for example.

 

[MPat]

While I understand that you were going for an analogy here, it is important to point out the difference between mathematical statements and metaphysical commitments. The commutativity of addition, for example, is assumed as an axiom, but it’s not really an assumption in the same sense of assuming the existence of an immaterial thing (like an essence). In fact many mathematicians were not realists and didn’t regard such properties as “existent” anyway.

One doesn’t even need to regard it as an assumption at all, really. It’s part of the definition of “addition of real numbers”. It would be strange to say that we’re assuming properties of operations when, in fact, those operations have no meaning independent of their properties.

Um, that was an explanation of a thesis, not an argument in favour of it. Of course you are going to disagree with it - we wouldn’t be discussing anything here otherwise.

It has been offered because you have said that you do not understand what our position is (that is also the impression I get). That’s when it would be best to keep things simple. Thus at the moment, please, do one thing at a time: resist the temptation to say that you disagree with position (yes, you do, we know that by now) and try to find out if you understand it correctly.

I think that the relationship between doing science and essences is similar to relationship between doing addition and laws of commutativity and associativity. I have stated the things I find similar. Yes, you are going to disagree with them, but can you confirm that this position is *clear *to you?

 

[oldcelt]

I haven’t read the entire thread, but has anyone mentioned dark matter? Scientists have shown that it exist, but can explain nothing further except that the vast majority of the universe is composed of it. What might it be…do…cause…, etc?
Just another of the unanswered, for now, questions.

 

[Oreoracle]

Thus at the moment, please, do one thing at a time: resist the temptation to say that you disagree with position (yes, you do, we know that by now) and try to find out if you understand it correctly.

I didn’t actually state that I just disagreed anywhere in that quote. I simply gave reasons for why the analogy isn’t appropriate.

Honestly I find this tactic of yours terribly confusing. You guys spent the majority of this thread maintaining that numbers don’t have essences and that the math analogies are woefully inadequate. You say that the discovery of an essence isn’t comparable to posing a definition. So then I gave you a golden opportunity to explain your position and to show me an essence.

So what do you do? You turn toward a math analogy and compare the act of defining an operation to the discovery of essences. What am I to make of this? Could it be that such comparisons are what led to my initial “confusion” to begin with?

The bottom line is this: If you don’t want me to think that the recognition of an essence amounts to settling on a definition, then don’t compare it to that. It’s that simple.

I think that the relationship between doing science and essences is similar to relationship between doing addition and laws of commutativity and associativity. I have stated the things I find similar. Yes, you are going to disagree with them, but can you confirm that this position is *clear *to you?

The position isn’t clear because the act of defining something is very different than asserting the existence of an intangible object that is tied to the physical world somehow. The former is arbitrary, but the latter requires substantiation.

I haven’t read the entire thread, but has anyone mentioned dark matter? Scientists have shown that it exist, but can explain nothing further except that the vast majority of the universe is composed of it. What might it be…do…cause…, etc?
Just another of the unanswered, for now, questions.

Indeed, I was tempted to use a more mundane example, like heat. There seems to be an impression that scientists immediately know what “type” of object they’re dealing with, yet it took ages for them to realize that treating heat as a form of energy is best. The classifications are made after years of experimentation, not philosophizing.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

I didn’t actually state that I just disagreed anywhere in that quote. I simply gave reasons for why the analogy isn’t appropriate.

Honestly I find this tactic of yours terribly confusing. You guys spent the majority of this thread maintaining that numbers don’t have essences and that the math analogies are woefully inadequate. You say that the discovery of an essence isn’t comparable to posing a definition. So then I gave you a golden opportunity to explain your position and to show me an essence.

So what do you do? You turn toward a math analogy and compare the act of defining an operation to the discovery of essences. What am I to make of this? Could it be that such comparisons are what led to my initial “confusion” to begin with?

The bottom line is this: If you don’t want me to think that the recognition of an essence amounts to settling on a definition, then don’t compare it to that. It’s that simple.

The position isn’t clear because the act of defining something is very different than asserting the existence of an intangible object that is tied to the physical world somehow. The former is arbitrary, but the latter requires substantiation.

Indeed, I was tempted to use a more mundane example, like heat. There seems to be an impression that scientists immediately know what “type” of object they’re dealing with, yet it took ages for them to realize that treating heat as a form of energy is best. The classifications are made after years of experimentation, not philosophizing.

You are tilting at windmills. Scientists, whoever they are, in whatever field, all assume the basic underlying structure of material substances. Placing them in various categories of animate and inanimate classifications testifies to this fact. Every science does it. Now whether you or any scientist adverts to the fact that the name of a substance in its particular genera, species, difference location actually indicates a substance with a particular nature or essence, from which all its properties flow is immaterial.

Certainly a scientist can do science without reflecting on that. That does not change the truth of the fact that if the particular essence did not exist, the scientist would not only not know what he was dealing with, but he would not be dealing with anything at all - because absolutely everything that exists has a particular essence or nature, specific to itself and to the other individuals which are instantiations of that particular nature or essence.

And of course, when you get down to molecules, atoms, and other ultimate particules, there will be disagreement as to what a substance actually is or , as Aristotle would say, what exactly its " whatness " actually is. That does not alter the fact that it is an actually existing " what " of some sort - that it has a particular nature or essence, from which all its properties flow.

So why not admit the truth of this and just ignore the implications you seem to fear. That would seem to be the proper way to think.

Linus2nd

 

[Oreoracle]

You are tilting at windmills. Scientists, whoever they are, in whatever field, all assume the basic underlying structure of material substances.

They assume the structure that has been corroborated by generations of experimentation, yes.

Placing them in various categories of animate and inanimate classifications testifies to this fact. Every science does it.

Yes, every science makes classifications. But as I’ve pointed out numerous times, making a classification is not equivalent to making an existential claim. When chemists divide compounds into organic and inorganic varieties, this is not meant to be interpreted as a claim about the existence of intangible objects. There is no “essence of inorganic matter” being posited, for example.

Now whether you or any scientist adverts to the fact that the name of a substance in its particular genera, species, difference location actually indicates a substance with a particular nature or essence, from which all its properties flow is immaterial.

Again, going back to the chemistry example: A chemist would say that organic compounds exhibit different properties than inorganic ones because they have carbon (by definition). Likewise, the substance is called organic because it contains carbon. No intangible entity needs to be postulated to account for the differences.