Existence and Nature: New Perspectives 9783110321807, 9783110321548

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
A Naturalistic Paradox: Existence and Nature in the Philosophy of Mathematics
“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”: Existence and Nature in Analytic Metaphysics
Dividing Fiction from Reality: Existence and Nature in Christian Wolff’s Metaphysics
“Nature Is the Realm of the Incomprehensible” (E. Husserl, 1920): Existence and Nature, with a Phenomenological Tale

Citation preview

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero | Matteo Plebani (Eds.) Existence and Nature New Perspectives

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero Matteo Plebani (Eds.)

Existence and Nature New Perspectives

Bibliographic information published by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

North and South America by Transaction Books Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 [email protected] United Kingdom, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Turkey, Malta, Spain, Portugal by Gazelle Books Services Limited White Cross Mills Hightown LANCASTER, LA1 4XS [email protected]

Livraison pour la France et la Belgique: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin 6, place de la Sorbonne ; F-75005 PARIS Tel. +33 (0)1 43 54 03 47 ; Fax +33 (0)1 43 54 48 18 www.vrin.fr

2012 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-173-3 2012 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by CPI buch bücher.de

Contents

Introduction Matteo Plebani 1. A Naturalistic Paradox: Existence and Nature in the Philosophy of Mathematics Matteo Plebani

1

9

2. “To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”: Existence and Nature in Analytic Metaphysics Francesco Berto

33

3. Dividing Fiction from Reality: Existence and Nature in Christian Wolff’s Metaphysics Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

65

4. “Nature Is the Realm of the Incomprehensible” (Husserl, 1920): Existence and Nature, with a Phenomenological Tale Matteo Giannasi

99

Introduction Matteo Plebani

If there were no substances other than those formed by nature, physics would be the first science. – Aristotle, Metaphysics 1026a 27–9

Aristotle did not believe physics to be the “first science”, i.e., the discipline that studies being qua being. He believed there to be self-subsistent things (i.e., substances) not formed by nature, and that there being such substances allowed “first science” to emancipate itself, to some extent, from the study of our natural world. Arguably, such a belief had as its background Aristotle’s views on the two key notions at issue: existence or being, and nature. Although these two notions have thus been key concepts in philosophy since the ancient Greeks, they are currently at the heart of lively philosophical debates. The first reason for this is the fact that staunch analytic philosophers nowadays often disagree with Aristotle: they label, or define, themselves as “Naturalists”, and deny that there are non-natural things that surpass the domain of physics. To sustain such a non-Aristotelian viewpoint, of course, one needs a clear account of such a basic category as the one of nature. Additionally, one needs to explain what “exists” means when we claim that what exists coincides with, or rather goes beyond, the natural world. The relation between existence and nature (the difference between what is and what is not natural; the existence of non-natural things; the ontological status of nature itself as a human-independent realm) is a relevant historical, hermeneutical, and theoretical issue. As such, it may thus serve as a unifying framework connecting different and distant philosophical approaches, such as the phenomenological-hermeneutical,

2

Matteo Plebani

the critical-historical and the analytic-linguistic. In this book, we will be looking at themes connected to the notions of nature and existence from some rather puzzling and paradoxical angles. The reader will be surprised to learn that a self-describing “Naturalist” philosopher like Quine was content to admit into his ontology nonnatural entities like numbers and sets; whereas, on the other side, more liberal-looking philosophers like (Neo)-Meinongians or Rationalists a là Wolff will reveal to be very parsimonious in their ontology, ruling out non-natural entities on the ground that they do not (and, at times, cannot) exist. Another original feature of the volume is its combining critical examinations of ontological and meta-ontological debates typical of the analytic tradition (Essays 1, 2) with a careful analysis of the very notion of nature (Essay 4) that pays a lot of attention to the contributions of the phenomenological school. As already mentioned, debates over the problem of naturalism are a lively topic among analytic philosophers.1 At the root of the debate there seems to be the variety of meanings attached to the term “naturalism” and its cognates. At one end of the spectrum, naturalism is simply taken as a methodological attitude, according to which science and philosophy are on the same epistemic and methodological boat and philosophers should be respectful of scientific standards. On the other side, naturalism is sometimes taken as an ontological doctrine, according to which only natural entities exist.2 This immediately raises the problem of finding a place for mathematics, which seems to have a rather nonnatural subject matter: it deals, after all, with abstract objects like numbers, sets, functions, etc.—peculiar entities which require a peculiar Lively discussed even in non-academic context, as witnessed by Williamson [2011], Rosenberg [2011]. 2 Actually, things are even more complicated: even methodological naturalism admits various versions. According to some version of methodological naturalism, respect should be paid not just to science without qualification (understood as including mathematics), but primarily to natural science (physics, biology, chemistry, etc.). In any case, in the present context we will take methodological naturalism as the thesis that philosophy cannot overrule scientific standards (without qualification) of acceptance. See Paseau [2010] for a survey of various versions of methodological naturalism. 1

Introduction

3

method of investigation. Mathematicians do not formulate hypotheses to be tested by experiments, but rather proceed by logical deduction. This kind of problem is clearly present in the work of Quine, the pioneer of ontological research within the analytic tradition and the first advocate of a naturalistic attitude in philosophy. According to his version of naturalism, science (and science alone) is the arbiter of ontological debates. But, for an empiricist like Quine, science is primarily “a tool for predicting future experience in the light of past experience”;3 so that it is natural science, i.e. Physics, that Quine takes as his primary point of reference. The famous “indispensability argument”4 for the existence of mathematical entities, usually credited to Quine, clearly sees mathematics as legitimate just as long as it is an (indispensable) part of natural science, whereas natural science, for the naturalist, is not in need of an external justification. This gives the impression of a tension between the methodological and the ontological aspect of naturalism. Methodological naturalism requires respect for science. But as an ontological doctrine, naturalism suggests much more austerity in ontology than what seems to be required by current scientific practice, in which reference to abstract objects is often made and, if the indispensability arguments go through, is also unavoidable. In his essay, Matteo Plebani argues that the impression of a tension between this two aspects of the Quinian doctrine is not just mere appearance: the various ways in which philosophers have tried to argue that there is no real tension in Quine’s position, are unsatisfactory. One way to see the problem at issue here is to understand naturalism as a legitimate concern for a coherent overall view of the world, and then notice that there are reasons to think that admitting the existence of abstract mathematical entities, which lack any causal power, introduces an element of incoherence into our (scientific) picture of the world. This position can be motivated by reflecting on epistemological arguments against the existence of mathematical objects, like the one put forward by Field,5 according to which our knowledge of abstract mathematical 3

Quine [1951], Section 6. See Colyvan [2001]. 5 See Field [1989], pp. 230–2. 4

4

Matteo Plebani

objects could not be accounted for in a scientifically respectable way. Some philosophers have invoked naturalism to undermine Field’s argument and dismiss epistemological considerations against the existence of mathematical objects as an attempt from philosophy to overrule scientific standards of justification.6 According to Plebani, this is not the case: Field’s argument is based on considerations very similar to those applied in the standard methodology of scientific research, like the principle that a systematic correlation between our beliefs about a subject matter and facts belonging to that subject matter should admit of an explanation. Therefore, arguments like Field’s are perfectly in tune with the naturalist attitude of looking at philosophy as in continuity with science. The moral to be drawn is that admitting non-natural entities into one’s ontology creates problems that must be dealt with, and cannot merely be put aside. Frascesco Berto offers a diagnosis and a solution of the tension between methodological naturalism and naturalism in ontology, based on an analysis and criticism of Quine’s meta-ontology, i.e., the methodology Quine proposed to address questions about the existence of entities of this or that kind. According to Quine, questions like “Are there Iraqi weapons of mass-destruction?”, and questions like “Do entities like numbers, fictional characters, possible worlds, really exist?” are of the same sort. At the bottom, both kind of questions are scientific questions, and both should be answered by applying the same methodology: looking at the theoretical benefits of making reference to these entities in our scientific theories. Making reference to some kind of entities—let us say, the F’s—for Quine, amounts to quantifying over that kind of entities, which means: it amounts to claiming something of the form “There are F’s”. Existential questions, in this approach, are therefore treated like quantificational questions. For neo-Meinongians like Berto, this is methodologically wrong: quantificational questions are questions about how many things of a certain kind are there, and they belong to science. But existential questions are questions about the nature of the reality, i.e., about which kinds of things are real—and they belong to philosophy. In the Meinongian framework, naturalism becomes compatible with the rejection of abstract objects, in the sense that scientific claims can be 6

See Burgess and Rosen [2005].

Introduction

5

accepted even though they make reference to non-existing entities. Respect for science demands us to accept that there are infinitely many prime numbers larger than 1000; but this is compatible with believing that numbers are unreal, that they do not really exist. The natural (!) question, at this point, becomes how to find an alternative criterion to draw a distinction between existing and non-existing objects. Berto submits as a criterion what is known under the label of the “Eleatic Principle”: to exist is to have causal powers. The Meinongian may also grant to existing things, and only to them, a spatiotemporal address. On the other hand, for the Meinongian “there is” does not mean the same as “exists”—for not everything exists: he rejects the view of existence summarized by the Kantian motto “Existence is not a (real) predicate”. Correspondingly, the Meinongian rejects the contemporary received view according to which, existence not being a property of individuals, it can be defined via logical notions, identity and the quantifier. For the Meinongian to exist, that is, to have causal powers, is a substantive feature of things: some things have it, others lack it. As a consequence, he accepts things devoid of causal features, which nevertheless we commonly speak about, both when we engage in science or philosophy, and in our everyday talk: fictional objects like Sherlock Holmes and Pegasus; ideal objects, such as frictionless planes; objects postulated by false scientific theories, like Vulcan, or the Phlogiston. The Meinongian does not need to engage in paraphrases to get rid of apparent reference to, or apparent quantification on, such things. His notion of existence is naturalized. His ontology, though, is not, as his catalogue of the furniture of the world lists imaginary, fictional, and unreal objects. One version of the Eleatic principle seems to have played an important role also in Wollf’s metaphysical system. In his essay, Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero argues that it is fair to trace back the Wolffian notion of existence to that of belonging to a series of relevant causal links—provided we qualify as “intelligible” the relevant causal connections. This interpretive key, which aims at bringing out a causal conception of existence, is put forth and clarified through the examination of Wolff’s theory of fictional entities. Indeed, these are characterized, according to Wolff, by a “repugnance” towards existence, that is, by the impossibility of being an existent thing. According to Wolffian meta-

6

Matteo Plebani

physics, the class of fictional entities includes not only traditionally fictitious things such as chimeras, but also theoretical constructions such as the Scholastic philosopher’s occult qualities, or Newton’s attractive force. In fact Wolff, adopting a strategy already put at work by Leibniz, fights against opposing scientific theories (particularly, Scholastic and Newtonian physics) blaming them for introducing in their ontological frame entities which do not and (what is crucial) cannot exist. The next issue is: which kind of impossibility is at stake in a fictional object’s ineligibility? In what sense are attractive forces or chimeras impossible fictions? Even granting that they do not exist, why are they such that they cannot even exist? The view argued for here is that such impossibility is not merely logical: Wolff does not claim that fictional entities are intrinsically paradoxical in the same way as, for instance, a square circle; rather, he maintains that their existence would contradict the principle of sufficient reason, intended as a principle of intelligibility for anything that exists. Paradigmatic examples of fictional entities are the “occult qualities” of Scholastic physics: things whose existence would be unaccountable in principle, and that lack any real explanatory role. Wolff argues for this point by making a distinction between the concept of cause and that of reason: in a world with fictional entities (a mundus fabulosus, which is for Wolff opposed to the “real world”), causal connections would appear to be unfathomable, lacking a sufficient reason. In this sense, the fabulous world is not a possible world. Fictional entities are thus distinct from possibilia inhabiting possible worlds. Understood in this way, Wolff’s rationalism may end up looking much more interesting. Having seen that the there is not just one notion of existence in play in philosophical debates, it should come no surprise to learn that the same goes for the other key notion of this volume. “Nature” seems characterized for human beings of all times as a primordial datum: an ontological background any other possible entity should be either included in or contrasted with—despite the fact that many languages (IndoEuropean ones, too) lacked corresponding expressions before they came in touch with Greek culture. Whether there is something like nature, whether it can be characterized in a non-circular fashion, and what are the features of what is natural, are issues contemporary philosophy does

Introduction

7

not pay particular attention to. This applies in particular to the contemporary analysis of naturalization, in which the questions of the status and existence of nature itself remain almost entirely in the background, or are settled via generic references to what physics shows, or will turn out to show. In his contribution, Matteo Giannasi takes issues with these two problematic assumptions, in order to raise the question of nature’s existence as such, and that of the intelligibility of its ontological primacy. The phenomenological approach works as a case study, because of its supposed radicalism and purity, and for the tensions it reveals between the necessity of considering the totality of reality starting from its being rooted in space-time regularities which can be experimentally investigated (nature as the realm of incomprehensibility), and the attempt of outlining an ontology of mental and institutional entities pivoting on the concept of motivation. The authors are thankful to the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy), and especially to the Head of Department, Prof. Luigi Perissinotto, for supporting this project.

References Burgess J., Rosen G. [2005], “Nominalism Reconsidered”, in S. Shapiro (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 515–35. Colyvan M. [2001], The Indispensability of Mathematics, Oxford University Press, New York. Field H. [1989], Realism, Mathematics and Modality, Blackwell, Oxford. Paseau A. [2010], “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics”, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010

8

Matteo Plebani

Edition), URL = . Quine W.V. [1951], Two Dogmas of Empiricism, reprinted in Quine [1953]. Quine W.V. [1953], From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Rosenberg A. [2011], “Why I Am a Naturalist”, The New York Times, September 17. Williamson T. [2011], “Naturalism and Its Limits”, The New York Times, September 4.

A Naturalistic Paradox: Existence and Nature in the Philosophy of Mathematics Matteo Plebani

According to Quine, we have “essentially scientific reasons”1 for admitting the existence of mathematical entities like numbers and sets. According to Quine, again, respect of the internal standards of scientific disciplines is the hallmark of a “naturalistic” attitude towards ontology. This means that we have a naturalistic argument for the existence of abstract mathematical entities. Abstract mathematical entities look much like non-natural entities. According to Quine, then, we have a naturalistic argument for the existence of non-natural entities. This train of thought has a certain paradoxical air. In what follows, I shall present the alleged paradox, show some ways in which one can try to tame it, and argue that each of the proposed solutions has some shortcomings. 1.

Quine on naturalism and abstract ontology

An important and long-standing debate in the philosophy of mathematics is that between platonists, on the one side, and nominalists, on the other. Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics is the view according to which mathematical objects, like numbers and/or sets, exist.2 These objects are generally taken to be abstract, so platonism is incompatible with nominalism, the doctrine according to which there are no abstract objects, be they mathematical or of any other kind. As already said, Quine’s mature choice is for platonism. What is interesting is that this ontological choice is connected with Quine’s ontological method, in 1

Quine [1969a], p. 97. See Linnebo [2009] for more on platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. 2

10

Matteo Plebani

which Quine’s insistence on the importance of a naturalistic attitude in philosophy plays an important role. Let’s review these two aspects, beginning with Quine’s appeal to naturalism. Call first philosophy the attempt to find a philosophical justification of science. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy3 is usually taken as a paradigmatic example of this attitude: in this work, it is only due to philosophical reflection that skeptical doubts about the foundation of science are put to rest. Philosophers devoted to first philosophy see the internal standards of justification of science as wanting, not sufficient to warrant true justification. In other words, according to first philosophy, the findings of science need to be judged by a “supra-scientific tribunal” before being accepted as genuine pieces of knowledge. According to Quine, naturalism is just: the abandonment of the goal of first philosophy. It sees natural science as an inquiry into reality, fallible and corrigible but not answerable to any suprascientific tribunal, and not in need of any justification beyond observation and the hypothetico-deductive method.4 naturalism: the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.5

This means that, for a naturalist, a claim accepted by the scientific community can be rejected for scientific reasons, but not for philosophical ones. If we add to this that some claims accepted by the scientific community entail that there are numbers, we see one way to mount an argument for the conclusion that naturalist philosophers should accept the existence of abstract mathematical objects. We can spell out in more detail this line of thought by considering Quine’s method of arguing for an ontological conclusion.6 The basic point of Quine’s method is to translate our current scientific theories into a semiformal language with a structure quite close to that of first order logic (what Quine calls “canonical notation”). Call the result of this pro-

3

Descartes [1641]. Quine [1981b, p. 72]. 5 Quine [1981c, p. 21]. 6 See Liggins [2008] for a clear exposition, very close to the one presented 4

here.

A Naturalistic Paradox

11

cess of paraphrasing a theory a paraphrased theory.7 Once we have a paraphrased theory, we are dealing with a (semi) formal theory, so we can check the kind of statements the theory entails, and so we can check the kind of entities the paraphrased theory is committed to. A paraphrased theory is ontologically committed to the Fs if and only if it entails that ∃xFx. If a paraphrased theory is committed to the Fs, then, according to Quine’s naturalism, one has to accept the existence of the Fs. According to Quine, the only plausible way to paraphrase some part of our scientific theories is by quantifying over numbers or other mathematical entities. For instance, Quine argues that the only way to paraphrase a statement like: (1)

Length of Manhattan is 11 miles.

is by using a binary predicate that links measured things to pure numbers (“x is-length-in-miles-of y”).8 Applying this method to (1), we get: (2)

Length-in-miles of Manhattan = 11.

which in turn can be rendered into canonical notation in this way: (3)

∃x∃y (x = 11 & y = Manhattan & x is-length-in-miles-of y).

(3) clearly entail that ∃x(x = 11), so it is committed to the existence of numbers. This means that the paraphrased versions of our best scientific theories are committed to numbers: so, according to Quine’s method for settling ontological disputes, we should accept the existence of abstract mathematical entities.9 Quine sums up the situation in this way: Existence statements in this philosophical vein do admit of evidence, in the sense that we can have reasons, and essentially scientific reasons, for including numbers ... in the range of the values of our variables [i.e., for asserting 7

These “translation” from the informal theory formulated in natural language to the paraphrased theory presented in canonical notation is by no means a mechanical procedure, Van Inwagen [1998] stresses. 8 Quine [1960], p. 245. 9 Terminology: call a theory (non) platonistic if and only if its paraphrased version is (not) committed to abstract objects.

12

Matteo Plebani things which entail that numbers and classes exist, see above]. ... Numbers and classes are favoured by the power and facility which they contribute to theoretical physics and other systematic discourse about nature.10

2.

The paradox

Mathematical objects are considered paradigmatic examples of abstract entities, at least after Frege [1884]. According to the most usual definition, an entity is said to be abstract if and only if it lacks spatio-temporal location and causal powers.11 One way to argue that numbers are abstract is to look at mathematicians’ methodology.12 If numbers where concrete entities, thus having a spatio-temporal location and causal powers, we would expect mathematicians to be interested in that features, and investigating them. But in no way does this seem to be the case: there has never been an inquiry into number ten’s location, or its date of birth. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that the kind of evidence mathematicians use to support their claims are not the empirical results of some experiments, but rather proofs obtained by application of logical methods. Despite the vagueness of the abstract/concrete division, it seems thus plausible to think of abstract entities as non-natural entities. Our predicament, then, amounts to this: for the reasons we have just reviewed, there seems to be a naturalistic argument for the existence of non-natural entities. One could even argue that we have found an argument from empirical science for the existence of non-empirical entities, given that (3) looks like a statement of physic (or geography, if you like), whereas the existence of the numbers seems not be the subject matter of physics.13 Even if the paradox just reviewed has not been addressed in the terms in which it is presented here, looking at the literature one gets the impression that some philosophers think that this kind of predicament is not real: rather than offering a solution to problems of a similar kind, they try to dismiss the considerations on which they are based and undermine the impression that there is a tension between natu10 11

Quine [1969a], pp. 97–8. About the problem of defining the notion of “abstract object,” see Rosen

[2012].

12

See Linnebo [2009]. On the problem of the subject matter of statement of physics, see Yablo [2010], pp. 3–5. 13

A Naturalistic Paradox

13

ralism and the acceptance of non-natural entities. In what follows, I will extract from the literature some strategies to tame the paradox, review them, and argue that each of them fails. 3.

The terminological solution to the paradox

According to this solution, the alleged paradox trades on a misunderstanding of Quine’s terminology. Admittedly, there is quite a bit of confusion surrounding the use of the term “naturalism” and its cognates. “Naturalism” in ontology, according to Quine, is just the commitment to all and only those entities that science is committed to. If it turns out that science is committed to numbers and sets, we should share such a commitment. Given that Quine believed that scientific practice requires us to accept mathematical entities, there is no contradiction for a naturalist in accepting them into her ontology. The world a naturalist believes in is the world of science: if the world of science comprises numbers, then a naturalist should believe in the existence of numbers. As far as we are concerned with inconsistency, one must admit there is nothing inconsistent in being a naturalist who believes in platonic entities. Still, one could think there is a tension between the main motivations for being a naturalist and the acceptance of abstract objects. One can see this by noticing that a main motive behind naturalism is the idea that we should admit only entities with a causal relevance. Given that abstract objects, at least according to one prominent definition of the notion of abstract objects, do not bear any such relation to anything, there seems to be a tension between being a naturalist and accepting entities without causal powers. This problem has been connected with a challenge for the realist about numbers to account for mathematical knowledge. The problem has firstly been addressed in Paul Benacerraf’s classic “Mathematical Truth”14 where it is framed in terms of an impossibility of finding a decent account of our knowledge of abstract mathematical objects. According to Benacerraf, every decent theory of knowledge should explain our knowledge of objects Fs by indicating a causal relation between the subjects of knowledge and the Fs. Given that there cannot be any such relation in the case where the Fs are, for instance, the numbers, there cannot be any decent account of our knowledge of mathematical objects. 14

Benacerraf [1973].

14

Matteo Plebani

There has been quite a bit of consensus against the plausibility of this line of thought, mainly because causal theories of knowledge have lost popularity since the times of Benacerraf, but also partly because an appeal to such theories looks quite question-begging from the standpoint of anybody seriously convinced that we have knowledge of entities such as the numbers. As Stephen Yablo put it: At one time ... [w]e had, or thought we had, good philosophical arguments to show that [numbers] did not exist, or could not be known about if they did.... That form of argument is dead and gone, it seems to me. It requires very strong premises about the sort of entity that can be known about, or that can plausibly exist; and these premises can always be exposed to ridicule by proposing the numbers themselves as paradigm-case counterexamples.15

Moreover, Burgess and Rosen have submitted: “The principle that one cannot justifiably believe in objects unless they exert a causal influence on oneself ... is too strong and has consequences the nominalist does not want, such as the impossibility of knowledge of the future.”16 Even accepting this, though, it can be argued that the problems here run deeper. Hartry Field [1989] has formulated a refurbished version of Benacerraf’s argument, which does not impose any constraint on theories of knowledge. Actually what Field gives is more a challenge rather than an argument.17 Field’s concern is with the problem of explaining the reliability of mathematicians’ beliefs. Mathematicians are usually taken to be accurate in their beliefs: in the vast majority of cases, if most mathematicians believe that S (where S is some mathematical claim), then S is true. This means that there is a correlation between the mathematicians’ beliefs and facts about numbers, and a quite systematic correlation. Systematic correlations should be explainable, so there must be an explanation of the mathematicians’ reliability. If platonism were correct, though, the prospect for an explanation of such a phenomenon would be quite discouraging: after all, if numbers are abstract entities, there cannot be any causal explanation of the correlation between our beliefs and facts about them. Of course there is still room for a non-causal account of reliability, but the point of Field’s challenge is that it is by no means clear which form such an account would take (mainly because, according to Field, so 15

Yablo [2001], p. 193. Burgess and Rosen [2005], p. 251. 17 See on this Linnebo [2006]. 16

A Naturalistic Paradox

15

far there is no such account in sight). Field illustrates the problem with a comparison: It is rather as if someone claimed that his or her belief states about the daily happenings in a remote village in Nepal were nearly all disquotationally true, despite the absence of any mechanism to explain the correlation between those belief states and the happenings in the village. Surely we should accept this only as a very last resort.18

There have been a number of replies to Field’s challenge, which try to dismiss it as misleading. Still, for the reasons summed up in Liggins [2009], none of them look convincing: Field’s challenge, differently from Benacerraf’s, does not hinge upon on a discredited theory of knowledge and it is not a skeptical doubt. It is simply the request to find an explanation of the phenomenon of mathematical reliability, combined with the suggestion of looking with suspicion at any philosophical theory that precludes the possibility of providing such an account. As Liggins points out,19 the same principle would lead us to look with suspicion at a philosophical account of perception that would make it impossible for us to understand how perception can be a reliable mechanism of belief-formation. Now, attention for the coherence of our overall theory of the world is considered by Quine as the kind of concern one who call herself a naturalist is animated by: The naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory as a going concern. He tentatively believes all of it, but believes also that some unidentified portions are wrong. He tries to improve, clarify, and understand the system from within.20

A naturalist can be convinced by Field’s argument that belief in abstract mathematical entities is in tension with some legitimate explanatory request and therefore reject it. Rejection of mathematical entities, by itself, does not demand disbelief in scientific claims. There are several ways to try to interpret mathematical discourse in such a way as to make it compatible with the lack of any mathematical entities.21 But 18

Field [1989], pp. 26–7. Liggins [2006], p. 140. 20 Quine [1981b], p. 72. 21 See for instance Hellman [1989]. 19

16

Matteo Plebani

even if one is convinced that the only plausible paraphrases of current scientific theories require quantification over or reference to mathematical entities, this does not force a naturalist to accept platonism, if there are sufficient strong reason that lead not to believe in abstract entities. If the findings of science raise epistemological problems, these problems should be addressed, not ruled out on the grounds that sentences which entail the existence of problematical entities have been accepted so far. The terminological solution to the paradox just presented could be framed in these terms: the world a naturalist believes in, i.e. the natural world, is not just the world of concrete entities, but the world depicted by our best scientific theories. The point of this section is that as far as this world reveals to be incoherent, there are reasons not to believe in it. What I have been arguing so far is that there are some reasons not to accept abstract entities, and that these reasons were appreciated by people defending the cause of what they used to call “naturalism.” This by no means shows that there is (or there was) any clearly shared understanding of the term “naturalism,” apart from the request of a coherent overall picture of our knowledge, in which empirical knowledge plays a prominent role. Naturalism, so understood, is really quite a weak constraint, which by itself doesn’t have very much to do with the acceptance only of purely physical entities. Still, it is enough for raising serious objections to the acceptance of certain kinds of entities and, for this reason, the problem of the compatibility of naturalism and the acceptance of abstract entities into our ontology should not be dismissed out of hand just on terminological grounds. 4.

A note on Quine’s naturalism

The terminological solution to the paradox is also in tension with some other aspect of Quine’s position. Naturalism, for Quine, seems not to mean just respect for science without qualification. It seems rather to mean respect for natural science. This is why he stresses so much the importance of empirical applications of mathematics. As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience.22 22

Quine [1951], p. 44.

A Naturalistic Paradox

17

He maintained that mathematics is good only as far as it is part of this business. Quine says that he accepts “higher set theory” and “indenumerable infinities only because they are forced on [him] by the simplest known systematizations of more welcome matters,” where the “welcome matters” are the part of mathematics “oriented to application in empirical science;” but the more speculative branches of set theory are dismissed as “mathematical recreation.”23 It is worth noting that Frege, the other major modern advocate of platonism in the philosophy of mathematics, took the same position as Quine on this issue, claiming that “it is applicability alone which elevates arithmetic from a game to the rank of a science.”24 I’m not claiming that this is the only possible way to understand naturalism. Penelope Maddy [2005] presents two versions of naturalism according to which respect is due to the internal standards of every scientific discipline, pure mathematics included. The ground idea of such an approach is that statements belonging to a certain discipline are accepted or rejected just by an application of the internal standards of the discipline they belong to. This means that pure mathematical statements, including existential statements, must be adjudicated by applying the usual methodology of pure mathematics, which includes logical deduction and reflection about the theoretical fruitfulness of proposed axioms, but in no way require consideration of applicability to empirical sciences. The problem with this line of thought, is that, at least until a convincing demarcation of the scientific vs. nonscientific disciplines is drawn, it is hard to make sense of the idea that naturalists should accept every mathematical claim licensed by mathematicians’ internal standards and still be free to reject an astrological claim licensed by astrology’s internal standards. It seems that Quine’s position can be interpreted as an attempt to compare the benefits of the theoretical utility of admitting numbers into one’s ontology and the epistemological costs this move has. What is important, from the point of view of this paper, is that Quine’s minimalism about abstract ontology is somewhat in tension with the idea that a naturalistic attitude toward ontology is sufficient to undermine any epistemological suspect about numbers. 23 24

Quine [1986], p. 400. Grundgesetze, vol. II, sec. 91, in Frege, Geach and Black [1960].

18 5.

Matteo Plebani Subject matter and hermeneutic nominalism

Moreover, the terminological solution to the paradox doesn’t address a problem quite close to the one we have just considered. The existence of mathematical entities seems neither to be the subject matter of physics nor of pure or applied mathematics, at least if the subject matter of a discipline can be recognized by the concern the practitioners of this disciple show for some kinds of statements. It seems mathematician don’t bother at all about the existence of mathematical entities, as one can see by reflecting on a famous fable by Burgess and Rosen: Finally, after years of waiting, it is your turn to put a question to the Oracle of Philosophy...you humbly approach and ask the question that has been consuming you for as long as you can remember: 'Tell me, O Oracle, what there is. What sorts of things exist?' To this the Oracle responds: 'What? You want the whole list? ...I will tell you this: everything there is is concrete; nothing there is is abstract....'25

Stephen Yablo has proposed a follow up of the story: Trembling at the implications, you return to civilization to spread the concrete gospel. Your first stop is [your university here], where researchers are confidently judging validity in terms of models and insisting on 1-1 functions as a condition of equinumerosity. Flipping over some worktables to get their attention, you demand that these practices be stopped at once. The entities do not exist, hence all theoretical reliance on them should cease. They, of course, tell you to bug off and am-scray. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what you yourself would do, if the situation were reversed.26

It seems that using this philosophical revelation to convince scientists to change their mind and reform their practice in order to avoid any reference to or quantification over numbers would be ridiculous. But how could scientific practice not be affected by the revelation that there are no numbers, if this very practice required that numbers existed? Yablo’s “oracle” argument is best understood as an inference to the best explanation: mathematicians’ most plausible reaction in the oracle scenario would be unintelligible, unless we assume that the existence 25 26

Burgess and Rosen [1997], p. 3 Yablo [2005], pp. 221–2.

A Naturalistic Paradox

19

of a mathematical object is not the subject matter of pure and applied mathematics. Given this, we should better make this assumption. 6.

The deferential27 solution to the paradox

The core of the preceding sections is that it is not easy to find a place in our overall theory of the world for abstract entities and that some of the people who call themselves naturalists urge for a coherent overall theory of the world. A reply that has been given to this argument is that this is just a problem for philosophers, not for scientists. In the scientific practice there is no place for this kind of skepticism: scientists are content to affirm a lot of statements that entail the existence of mathematical entities. The naturalist philosopher, the argument goes on, should defer to scientists: if they claim things that entail that there are numbers, she should share this commitment. They do claim things that entail that there are numbers, so the naturalistic philosopher should claim that there are numbers as well. One famous version of this argument has been put forward by Burgess and Rosen: 1. Standard mathematics, pure and applied, abounds in “existence theorems” that appear to assert the existence of mathematical objects, and to be true only if such objects exist; which is to say, to be true only if nominalism is false. Such, for instance, are: • There are infinitely many prime numbers. • There are exactly two abstract groups of order four. • Some solutions to the field equations of general relativity contain closed timelike curves. 2. Well-informed scientists and mathematician (the “experts”) accept these existence theorems in the sense both that they assent verbally to them without conscious silent reservations, and that they rely on them in both theoretical and practical contexts. They use them as premises in demonstrations intended to convince other experts of novel claims, and together with other assumptions as premises in arguments intended to persuade others to some course of action. 3. The existence theorems are not merely accepted by mathematicians, but are acceptable by mathematical standards. They, or at any rate the great majority of them, are supplied with proofs; and while the mathematical disciplines recognize a range of grounds for criticizing purported proofs, and 27

See Daly and Liggins [2011].

20

Matteo Plebani while it occasionally happens that a widely accepted proof is undermined by criticism on one or another of these grounds, nonetheless the proofs of the existence theorems, or at any rate the great majority of them, are not susceptible to this kind of internal mathematical criticism. 4. The existence theorems really do assert and imply just what they appear to: that there are such mathematical objects as prime numbers greater than 1000, abstract groups of various orders, solutions of various equations of mathematical physics with various properties, and so on. 5. To accept a claim in the sense of assenting verbally to it without conscious silent reservations, of relying on it in theoretical demonstrations and practical deliberations, and so on, just is to believe what it says, to believe that it is true. 6. The existence theorems are not merely acceptable by specifically mathematical standards, but are acceptable by more general scientific standards. Not only do empirical scientists in practice generally defer to the mathematicians on mathematical questions, existence questions included; they are by scientific standards right to do so. There is no empirical scientific argument against standard mathematical theorems, existence theorems included. 7. There is no philosophical argument powerful enough to override or overrule mathematical and scientific standards of acceptability in the present instance. From (1), (2), (4), and (5) there follows an intermediate conclusion: 8. Competent mathematicians and scientists believe in prime numbers greater than 1000, abstract groups of various orders, solutions of various equations of mathematical physics with various properties, and so on. Hence, if nominalism is true, expert opinion is systematically mistaken. From (8) together with (3), (6), and (7) there follows the ultimate antinominalism conclusion: 9. We are justified in believing (to some high degree) in prime numbers greater than 1000, abstract groups of various orders, solutions of various equations of mathematical physics with various properties, and so on, which is to say we are justified in disbelieving (to the same high degree) nominalism.28

The problems with this line of thought are nicely exposed in Daly and Liggins [2011]. Firstly, it should be noted that unconditioned acceptance of mathematical statements is an attitude that is compatible with mathematical practice, but is not a necessary condition for engaging in it. It is acceptable, but not mandatory. To take Liggins’ [2007] example, just imagine a mathematician at the top of her profession, who reminds in the abstracts of her papers that her results should be taken conditionally: whenever in the paper she claims that S, what she really 28

Burgess and Rosen [2005], p. 251.

A Naturalistic Paradox

21

believes in is that S follows from a set of relevant axioms. There is no reason to suppose that such an account (despite unconventional) would be found incompatible with mathematical standards. A different situation would be the one in which one accepts as true all the axioms of a standard mathematical theory and still rejects some of its theorems because she thinks there is some flaw in their proofs: this would be a case where the internal standards of mathematics are called into question. Mathematical standards require that, in order to accept P as a theorem, a (logically correct) proof of it be delivered. But this just shows that P is acceptable according to mathematical standards only if it is a logical consequence of some set of established axioms: it tells nothing about the truth of the axioms and consequently about the truth of P. This means that respect of the internal standards of mathematics is compatible with disbelief in its theorems. If rejecting the existence of mathematical entities is compatible with respect of mathematics’ internal standards, why should it be incompatible with naturalism? Moreover, respect for a given discipline doesn’t require complete deference.29 As Hartry Field repeatedly said, mathematics can be “good without being true.” In connection with this, one could add that respect for a discipline should be limited to its subject matter: respect for mathematics should be confined only to questions of mathematical importance. This points toward a problem for the so-called track-record argument for deferentialism, usually exemplified by this passage from David Lewis: Mathematics is an established, going concern. Philosophy is as shaky as can be. To reject mathematics for philosophical reasons would be absurd ... Even if we reject mathematics gently—explaining how it can be a most useful fiction, ‘good without being true’—we still reject it, and that’s still absurd. ... That’s not an argument, I know. Rather, I’m moved to laughter at the thought of how presumptuous it would be to reject mathematics for philosophical reasons. How would you like the job of telling the mathematicians that they must change their ways, and abjure countless errors, now that philosophy has discovered that there are no classes?30

One possibility to attack this “argument” is to argue that all the cases mentioned by Lewis are examples of bad philosophical arguments, so that the track record only shows that mathematicians do better than 29 30

Daly and Liggins, [2011]. Lewis [1991], pp. 58–9.

22

Matteo Plebani

bad philosophers, not that the internal standards of good philosophy are inferior to that of mathematicians.31 In the alternative, we can run an objection to this train of thought along familiar lines: mathematics has shown a remarkable track record in adjudicating mathematical questions, not philosophical ones. One way to appreciate the difference between naturalism and deferentialism is to reflect on the way the dichotomy between philosophical and scientific arguments is spelled out. There is no reason to consider Field’s argument against mathematical entities any more philosophical (or less scientific) than Burgess and Rosen’s case for their existence. As Daly and Liggins sum up: The dispute between Field, on the one hand, and Burgess and Rosen, on the other, is not a dispute between those who take philosophy to be superior to science and those who do not. Each party extracts some consideration from science—against the reliability of mathematical beliefs, or for the acceptability of mathematical sentences—and develops a philosophical argument on this basis. The conflict is not between philosophical argument and science, but between two philosophical arguments each of which draws on science.32

7.

The nominalist’s dilemma

Another way in which Burgess and Rosen [1997, 2005] try to press the previous point is by posing a dilemma to the nominalist. According to them, either a nominalist has a revolutionary attitude, and is trying to change our current mathematical theories and substitute them with better theories, or she has a more hermeneutic spirit, and is trying to interpret 31

One could respond to this by saying that Lewis’ point was only that many popular doctrines among philosophers have repeatedly shown to be ridiculous, whereas it is very rare that a statement endorsed by the vast majority of mathematician has subsequently revealed to be incorrect. This doesn’t undermine the replies to the track record argument presented here: one can think that sometimes even the vast majority of philosopher have failed to follow the right standard to adjudicate philosophical questions; and the fact that mathematicians have an impressive track record in solving mathematical problems says nothing about their ability to solve metaphysical problems. By the way, it’s interesting to note that Lewis denied to be offering an argument. 32 Daly and Liggins [2010], p. 227.

A Naturalistic Paradox

23

what is currently asserted in our mathematical discourse. In the first case, according to Burgess and Rosen, nominalists should provide scientific reasons for preferring their theories to the actual ones (which are platonistic). In other words, they should convince the scientific community to change its mind and adopt new theories that do not quantify over mathematical entities, and give scientific reasons for this theoretical change. Until now, no nominalist has submitted any paper to a mathematical or physical journal trying to convince the scientific community that old platonistic theories should be given up in favor of nominalistic ones. In the second case, if nominalists want to make hermeneutic claims, they should defer to linguists, who have not yet provided any reason to suppose that our mathematical language should not be taken at face value. There are several complaints one can make with this line of thought. First of all, it is not so clear that the only way in which a nonstandard theory can gain scientific legitimacy is by superseding the (actually) standard one. As Chihara [2007] argues, nonstandard analysis is now considered a legitimate mathematical theory, even if it didn’t rule out standard analysis. The reasons why the mathematical community still use and even prefer standard analysis can be various, but nonstandard analysis could still be taken as an important contribution due to the fact that it illuminates at a conceptual level the meaning of standard calculations. Something similar could happen with nominalist versions of pure and applied mathematics: they could be taken as helpful tools to understand how the standard theories work, while at the same time sticking with the standard theories at the practical level could still be considered the best option for reasons of simplicity, familiarity, etc. If one takes the hermeneutic line, she could say that the nominalistic theory reveals the real logical structure of our theories: the theory works because it is true, but it can be true without there being any abstract objects. On the revolutionary side, instead, the point is that the nominalistic theory can play a role in explaining how the standard theory can be “good without being true,” to use Hartry Field’s [1980, 1989] words.33 In both cases, there is no reason to think that the new theory needs to become the standard one in order to prove its legitimacy. 33

As Yablo [2005], p. 224, fn. 11, notes, the revolutionary nominalist needs to explain not just how a mathematical theory could be useful, but how mathematics, as practiced today, is useful.

24

Matteo Plebani

More importantly, it should be stressed that what a nominalist is looking for is the best overall theory of the world, which means the theory that offers the better trade-off between costs and benefits. Platonistic theories, as we have seen, have some shortcomings: for instance, they have problems in explaining the mathematicians’ reliability. If a naturalist is able to provide a theory that overcomes this problem and is able to account for current mathematical practice, a case can be made for considering this latter theory as superior to standard platonistic ones. Philosophical and scientific reason for and against a theory should be both considered in assessing which theory is the best.34 8.

Nominalism and the crystalline conception of ontology

According to MacBride, one can either assume that: […] the structure of state of affairs is crystalline-fixed quite independently of language

or that: the states of affairs lack an independent structure, that state of affairs are somehow plastic and have structure imposed upon them by language.35

Some contemporary anti-nominalist appeal to the idea that the crystalline conception of ontology is untenable to argue against nominalist positions. This kind of argument charge nominalists of guilt by association with a discredited meta-ontological view, discredited precisely for naturalist reasons. It could be useful to consider a quotation from Burgess: Metaphysical realists suppose, like Galileo and Kepler and Descartes and other seventeenth-century worthies, that it is possible to get behind all human representations to a God’s-eye view of ultimate reality as it is in itself. When they affirm that mathematical objects transcending space and time and causality exist, and mathematical truths transcending human verification obtain, they are affirming that such objects exist and such truths obtain as part of ul34

Moreover, different science, different verdicts: mathematics is maybe in line with platonism, psychology less. 35 MacBride [2003], p. 127.

A Naturalistic Paradox

25

timate metaphysical reality (whatever that means). Naturalist realists, by contrast, affirm only (what even some self-described anti-realists concede), that the existence of such objects and obtaining of such truths is an implication or presupposition of science and scientifically-informed common sense, while denying that philosophy has any access to exterior, ulterior, and superior sources of knowledge from which to ‘correct’ science and scientificallyinformed common sense. The naturalized philosopher, in contrast to alienated philosopher, is one who takes a stand as a citizen of the scientific community, and not a foreigner to it, and hence is prepared to reaffirm while doing philosophy whatever was affirmed while doing science, and to acknowledge its evident implications and presuppositions; but only the metaphysical philosopher takes the status of what is affirmed while doing philosophy to be a revelation of an ultimate metaphysical reality, rather than a human representation that is the way it is in part because a reality outside us is the way it is, and in part because we are the way we are.36

This consideration can be used to make an argument against nominalism in this way. First, assume that the stereotypical nominalist is arguing like this: We could re-formulate our scientific claims without using any kind of phrase which commits us to abstract objects (and maybe this reformulation just show what we have meant all the time we have been engaging ourselves in mathematical talk); this shows that the assumption of the existence of abstract objects is merely a projection of features of our language into the structure of reality; so, abstract objects are not part of the ultimate furniture of reality.

If one takes nominalists to be arguing like that, then it is possible to argue against them like this: 1) Nominalism is committed to the idea that it makes sense to discover the ultimate structure of reality (a structure that is independent from the way we conceptualize it). 2) Quine has shown us that this is impossible. 3) So nominalism should be abandoned. Of course 1) is questionable and I will turn to that, but let’s start with 2): how exactly did Quine manage to show the crystalline conception of ontology to be untenable? 36

Burgess [2008], pp. 1–2.

26

Matteo Plebani

Here are some quotes. Surely, Quine says something that seems to be addressed against the crystalline conception of ontology: The fundamental-seeming philosophical question, “How much of our science is merely contributed by language and how much is a genuine reflection of reality?” is perhaps a spurious question which itself arises wholly from a certain particular type of language.37

Sometimes he seems to think that this conclusion is linked with his refusal of the analytic/synthetic distinction: My present suggestion is that it is nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak of a linguistic component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement.38

An interesting fact is that he points out to an apparently different kind of argument when he writes that: Certainly we are in a predicament if we try to answer the [ontological] question; for to answer the question we must talk about the world as well as about the language, and to talk about the world we must already impose upon the world some conceptual scheme peculiar to our own special language.39

It is difficult to evaluate the force of these kinds of arguments, and at present time they have not been carefully scrutinized. In any case, this attempt to undermine the paradox fails because there is no reason to think that every possible case for nominalism must rely on a prior endorsement of any meta-ontological view, such as the crystalline conception of ontology. The case against abstract entities we reviewed in section 3 is a case against problematic entities. These entities are problematic because admitting them into our ontology poses a puzzle. One can recognize this just by appealing to a principle much in line with scientific methodology, namely the idea that a phenomenon like mathematical reliability can be explained. This by no means entails taking a stand on disputes about crystalline vs. plastic conceptions of reality or invoking extra-scientific consideration.

37

Quine [1953], p. 78. Quine [1951], p. 42. 39 Quine [1953], p. 78. 38

A Naturalistic Paradox

27

9. The naturalistic argument and the “indispensability argument” Some points made in this paper can be useful to better appreciate the significance of Quine’s argument for platonism. A key feature of Quine’s argument for the existence of abstract objects is that it is an a-posteriori argument. Traditionally, arguments for the existence of abstract mathematical entities used to be a-priori, probably because the existence of mathematical entities was thought to be a matter of necessity and because before Kripke [1980] it was customary to identify necessity with a-priori deducibility.40 Quine’ idea was to turn the way around and stress the fact that we need quantification over numbers in the empirical sciences. Sometimes his argument is labeled the “Quine-Putnam indispensability argument.” The indispensability argument is usually presented by saying that pure mathematics is committed to abstract objects and that it plays an indispensable role in our empirical science. If one adds an appeal to confirmational holism, according to which every part of a scientific theory is confirmed by the success of the theory, one can reach the conclusion that the reasons we have to believe in our best scientific theories are reasons to believe the mathematical part of these theories as well as in the empirical one. But this is by no means the only way to understand Quine’s argument, nor the most natural one. One reason is nicely exposed by Liggins.41 If we look at the way we presented Quine’s argument in section 1, we can note that we started by considering a sentence like:

40

See Shapiro [2005], pp. 14–5: “Indispensability arguments are anathema to those, like the logicists, logical positivists, and neologicists, who maintain the traditional views that mathematics is absolutely necessary and/or analytic and/or a priori. On such views, mathematical knowledge cannot be dependent on anything as blatantly empirical and contingent as everyday discourse and natural science. The noble science of mathematics is independent of all of that. From the opposing Quinean perspective, mathematics and logic do not enjoy the necessity traditionally believed to hold of them; and mathematics and logic are not knowable a priori.” This is not to say that a-priori arguments for the existence of mathematical objects cannot be found: the Neo-Fregean program (see Hale and Wright [2001]) is an impressive defense of an argument of this kind. But it is important to note that Quine’s argument broke with the tradition. 41 Liggins [2008], pp. 118–9.

28

Matteo Plebani (1)

The length of Manhattan is 11 miles.

Quine’s point is that in order to put (1) into canonical notation, we should quantify over numbers, thus committing us to the existence of abstract entities; but (1) is by no means a pure mathematical statement. It is a statement about measures, one belonging to natural science: this means that in order to argue for platonism following Quine’s method we don’t need to invoke confirmational holism.42 This makes Quine’s argument more powerful, by freeing it from a questionable premise, but it also raises other doubts about Quine’s ontological method. It looks like in a statement like (1) that numbers play the role of representational aids43 much more than the role of subject matter of the statement: anyone uttering (1) seems to be concerned with a physical fact about the length of Manhattan and not with a metaphysical fact about numbers’ existence. So there is room for doubting that Quine’s framework is capable of accounting for cases where quantification about some kind of entities is not synonymous with the assertion of the existence of such entities. But there is another problem with the interpretation of Quine’s argument in terms of indispensability, more interesting from the point of view of the present work. The problem can be seen by reflecting about a scenario where the nominalist program of finding non-platonistic versions of physics is completed and we are to choose which version is to be preferred: the old platonistic version, or the new nominalistic one. As we have already seen, Burgess and Rosen [1997, 2005] have argued that it is by no means clear that if quantification over abstract entities were dispensable, we should dispense with it. The naturalistic line of thought presses us to choose the best theory according to scientific standards, and the standard one will probably be superior (according to them) in so many respects to overweight the ontological economy of the nominalistic one. If the position defended in this paper has some plausibility, it can be used to support an intermediate position between the supporters of the indispensability argument and Burgess and Rosen’s version of naturalism. I agree with Burgess and Rosen on the point that costs and benefits of a theory should be established by taking into account many parameters beyond ontological parsimony. At the same time, I don’t think inter42 43

Liggins [2008], p. 125, makes the same point. See Yablo [2005].

A Naturalistic Paradox

29

nal standards of science can rule out considerations against the existence of abstract objects like the epistemological argument discussed in section 3. So I think a case against abstract objects can be made even from a naturalistic standpoint. 10.

Conclusions

The idea that somebody calling herself a “naturalist” could admit nonnatural entities like numbers and sets into her ontology strikes prima facie as something rather baffling. One could try to blame the terminology for this and argue that on a proper understanding of the doctrine of naturalism the problem evaporates. But this solution overlooks an important aspect present behind the label “naturalism,” namely the search for a coherent overall world-view: epistemological objections to platonism can lead us to think that a picture of the world including non-causal (i.e., non-natural) entities is incoherent.44 This line of thought can also help to understand why the paradox is not triggered by a misguided philosophical attitude that refuses to pay due respect to the internal standards of scientific disciplines, which license claims that entail the existence of abstract objects. Apart from the possibility of interpreting scientific discourse in a way that does not commit to the existence of mathematical entities, one could argue that respect for science is compatible with refusal to give complete deference to it. Moreover, the case against abstract entities does not hinge upon any meta-ontological view discredited by naturalist considerations. In sum, the attempts to undermine the paradox presented here fail. This does not mean that abstract entities need to be rejected. This just mean that naturalistic arguments for the existence of mathematical entities deserve close scrutiny, and that, if we are to find that we have strong reasons to accept abstract entities, epistemological challenges to platonism should be given a proper reply.

44

Liggins [2010] suggests that epistemological objections to Platonism can be used to support the so-called “Eleatic Principle”: that everything is causal.

30

Matteo Plebani

References Benacerraf P. [1973], “Mathematical Truth”, Journal of Philosophy, 70, pp. 661–79. Burgess J. P., Rosen G. [1997], A Subject with No Object: Strategies for Nominalistic Interpretation of Mathematics, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Burgess J. P., Rosen G. [2005], “Nominalism Reconsidered”, in S. Shapiro (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, pp. 515–35, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Burgess P. [2008], Mathematics, Models, and Modality: Selected Philosophical Essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Chihara C. [2007], “The Burgess-Rosen Critique of Nominalistic Reconstructions”, Philosophia Mathematica, 15 (1), pp. 54–78. Colyvan M. [2001], The Indispensability of Mathematics, Oxford University Press, New York. Daly C., Liggins D. [2010], “In Defence of Error Theory”, Philosophical Studies, 149 (2), pp. 209–30. Daly C., Liggins D. [2011], “Deferentialism”, Philosophical Studies, 156 (3), pp. 321–37. Descartes R [1641], Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, transl. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 3–62. Field H. [1980], Science without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Field H. [1989], Realism, Mathematics and Modality, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Frege G., Geach P., Black M. [1960], Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Frege G. [1884], Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, trans. J.L. Austin as The Foundations of Arithmetic, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1968. Kripke S. [1980], Naming and Necessity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Hale B., Wright C. [2001], The Reason’s Proper Study: Essays Towards a Neo-Fregean Philosophy of Mathematics, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Hellman G. [1989], Mathematics Without Numbers, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lewis D. [1991], Parts of Classes, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

A Naturalistic Paradox

31

Liggins D. [2006], “Is There a Good Epistemological Argument against Platonism?”, Analysis, 66, 135–41. Liggins D. [2007], “Anti-Nominalism Reconsidered”, in The Philosophical Quarterly, 57 (1), pp. 104–11. Liggins D. [2008], “Quine, Putnam and the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument”, Erkenntnis, 68, pp. 113–27. Liggins D. [2010], “Epistemological Objections to Platonism”, Philosophy Compass, 5 (1), pp. 67–77. Linnebo Ø. [2006], “Epistemological Challenges to Mathematical Platonism”, Philosophical Studies, 129, pp. 545–74. Linnebo Ø. [2009], “Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics”, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), URL = . Mac Bride F. [2003], “Speaking with Shadows: A Study of NeoLogicism”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 54 (1), pp. 103–63. Maddy P. [2005], “Three Forms of Naturalism”, in Shapiro [2005b], pp. 437–59. Putnam H. [1971], Philosophy of Logic, Harper, New York; reprinted in Putnam [1979], pp. 323–57. Putnam H. [1979], Mathematics, Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers (Vol. 1, 2nd. ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Quine W.V. [1948], “On What There Is”, Review of Metaphysics, 2; reprinted in Quine [1953], pp. 1–19. Quine W.V. [1951], “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”; reprinted in Quine [1953], pp. 20–46. Quine W.V. [1953], From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Quine W.V. [1960], Word and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Quine W.V. [1969a], “Existence and Quantification”, L’Âge de la Science, 1, pp. 151–64; reprinted in Quine [1969b], pp. 91–113. Quine W.V. [1969b], Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press, New York. Quine W.V. [1981a], Theories and Things, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA. Quine W.V. [1981b], “Things and Their Place in Theories”, in Quine [1981a], pp. 1–23.

32

Matteo Plebani

Quine W.V. [1981c], “Five Milestones of Empiricism”, in Quine [1981a], pp. 67–72. Quine W.V. [1986], “Reply to Charles Parson”, in L.E. Hans, P.A. Schlipp (eds.), The Philosophy of W.V.O. Quine, Open Court, La Salle, IL, pp. 396–403. Rosen G. [2012], “Abstract Objects”, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), URL = . Shapiro S. [2000], Thinking about Mathematics, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Shapiro S. (ed.) [2005], The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, Oxford University Press, New York. Van Inwagen P. [1998], “Meta-Ontology”, Erkenntnis, 48, pp. 233–50. Yablo S. [2001], “Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 25, pp. 72–102; reprinted in Yablo [2010], pp. 177–99. Yablo S. [2005], “The Myth of the Seven”, in M. Kalderon (ed.), Fictionalism in Metaphysics. pp. 88–115, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2005; reprinted in Yablo [2010], pp. 221–45. Yablo S. [2010], Things: Papers on Objects, Events, and Properties (Philosophical Papers, vol. II), Oxford University Press, Oxford.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”: Existence and Nature in Analytic Metaphysics Francesco Berto

Whatever has a native power, whether of affecting anything else, or of being affected in ever so slight a degree by the most insignificant agents, even on one solitary occasion, is a real being. In short, I offer it as the definition of beings that they are potency—and nothing else. – Plato, Sophist 247d–e

1.

Existential questions as quantificational questions

Quine notoriously claimed that one could answer the fundamental ontological question, that is, “What is there?”, in one word: “Everything”.1 This followed from his equation of ontological or existential questions with quantificational questions. Ontological theses have the typical form: “Ks exist”, where “K” stands for some kind of entity. Now for Quine as for many others before him—notably, Frege—the notion of being or existence is fully captured by the quantifier: “Ks exist”, thus, means nothing more and nothing less than “There are Ks”. But then, everything exists: according to Quineans, talk about non-existent stuff just doesn’t make sense: one cannot consistently claim that there are things such that there are no such things (a point to which we shall return). The Quinean equation of ontological and quantificational questions is expressed by his famous dictum, “To be is to be the value of a 1

See Quine [1953].

34

Francesco Berto

(bound) variable”. The motto does not aim at literally capturing the meaning (the intension, some authors might want to say)2 of being. As Nathan Salmon claimed, to be cannot seriously be taken as consisting of the state “being the value of a variable, under some assignment of values to variables”: When Hamlet […] agonized over the question of whether to be or not to be, he was preoccupied with weightier matters than the question of whether or not to be the value of a variable. If there were no variables, would there be nothing? The dinosaurs had existence, but they didn't have variables.3

But the Quinean dictum recapitulates a methodological strategy for ontology, that is, what nowadays is usually called a meta-ontology: a doctrine concerning the methods, possibilities, and limits of ontological inquiry. In On What There Is, Quine tells us that, once we eliminate (definite) descriptions as autonomously referring terms via the Russellian treatment proposed in On Denoting, and eliminate names as well taking them as synonyms of descriptions, “the burden of objective reference […] is now taken over by words of the kind that logicians call bound variables, variables of quantification, namely, words like ‘something’, ‘nothing’, ‘everything’”. The “burden of objective reference” is for Quine just the burden of existence. After claiming that predicates do not commit us to there being universals, and that singular terms like names and descriptions do not commit us to there being the items they were supposed to denote, Quine asks: is there anything at all that commits us to there being something? It turns out that there is: We can very easily involve ourselves in ontological commitments by saying, for example, that there is something (bound variable) which red houses and sunsets have in common; or that there is something which is a prime number larger than a million. But, this is, essentially, the only way we can involve ourselves in ontological commitments: by our use of bound variables. The use of alleged names is no criterion, for we can repudiate their namehood […] Whatever we say with the help of names can be said in a language which shuns names altogether. To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable. […] The variables of quantification, ‘something’, ‘nothing’, ‘everything’, range over our whole ontolo2

It is controversial whether the ordinary intensions of model-theoretic semantics, i.e., functions from circumstances or possible worlds to extensions, are fine-grained enough to capture meanings—hence the proviso. 3 Salmon [1987], p. 51.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

35

gy, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.4

The dictum “To be is to be the value of a (bound) variable” is thus called the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment—or at least it is claimed that this dictum summarizes the Quinean criterion. We commit ourselves to the existence of something by claiming that there is something, x, such that… x… . A given theory is committed to the things over which its quantifiers range: this form the set of items that must be there for the sentences of the theory to be true. As a methodological or meta-ontological principle, the Quinean criterion is not one by means of which we can directly settle the question of what there is. It just tells us what has to exist if statements that quantify over this or that must be true. If I say to my friend “There is a hole in your coat”, what I claim can only be true if at least one thing exists, which is both a hole and located in my friend’s coat—thus, only if there are holes. Unless, that is, I rephrase that claim so to avoid quantification over holes, by saying for instance that its ontologically more transparent logical form, beneath the surface grammar of ordinary talk, is along the lines of: “Your coat is perforated”. By so claiming I commit myself to the existence of coats, not to that of (spatiotemporally located) holes.5 This said, the Quinean passage above has a peculiar structure. Quine believes to have produced arguments for the claim that singular terms and predicates as such do not commit us ontologically. C.J.F. Williams and Graham Priest have emphasized6 how Quine quickly concludes from this that (bound) variables, instead, do commit us ontologically. There is no argument supporting the positive thesis that existential commitment is captured by quantification: Quine assumes that a quantifier domain can only encompass existing things. It is one purpose of this work to challenge such widespread meta-ontological assumption. Before we move to this, though, we need to say something on the positive Quinean strategy to settle ontological issues—namely, on his broad naturalism. 4

Quine [1953], p. 181. Lewis and Lewis [1970] makes for the mandatory reference on the topic of holes in ontology. See also Casati and Varzi [1994]. 6 See Williams [1981], pp. 156–7, Priest [2007]. 5

36 2.

Francesco Berto Naturalistic meta-ontology

Even though, for the Quineans, everything exists (in the aforementioned sense), ontological disagreement on specific questions obviously remains: are there really Platonic ideas, sets, properties, propositions, concepts, states of affairs? Do past and future things, like George Washington or the first black pope, exist? Do fictional objects such as Sherlock Holmes and Gandalf, or mythological objects like winged horses or unicorns, exist? Are there other things (which are likely to be) irreducible to the natural sciences, like spirits or ghosts or gods? Here Quine’s naturalism kicks in. At the core of the positive ontological theses of the Quineans are “indispensability arguments” of the form:7 If quantification over things of kind K is needed for our best theories of reality to be true, then we are, by the criterion of ontological commitment, existentially committed to the Ks. A typical example is the Quine-Putnam argument for the indispensability of some abstract objects, namely sets, on the basis of their being needed for mathematics; such argument also is what marked the divorce of Quine from hard-core nominalists like Goodman.8 However, Quinean indispensability arguments are broadly naturalistic, insofar as “our best theories of reality”, for Quine, means “our best scientific theories of reality”: sets themselves are indispensable insofar as they are indispensable for mathematics, and the latter is indispensable for science. Contemporary ontologists endorsing a naturalistic view tend to exclude from their ontologies especially such causally inert things as abstract, nonphysical, and fictional objects, insofar as these things are taken as non-naturalizable. The motto is Alexander’s famous one, which provides the title for this paper: “To be is to have causal powers”.9 But the idea dates back at least to Plato, as shown by our entry quotation. Even when they follow Quine in surrendering to sets, such ontologists still reject most of the other suspect ontological kinds mentioned above. In the Quinean meta-ontological framework, such rejections are to be phrased in a typical way: that no unicorns, no ghosts, no propositions, and perhaps—against Quine himself—no sets exist, doesn’t mean that there are such things as unicorns, ghosts, propositions, or sets, which nevertheless do not exist: it just means that there are no such things, full 7

See Eklund [2006], p. 318. See Quine [1951], [1953]. 9 Alexander [1920], p. 8. 8

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

37

stop. The existing things are precisely those we can in principle causally interact with. Then anything else we prima facie refer to in our ordinary or scientific language must be reduced to those things, for nothing else is available. Correspondingly, apparent reference to those things must be explained away via paraphrase, just as we can explain away our apparent quantifying on holes in “There is a hole in your coat” as an epiphenomenon of ordinary language, and turn it into the less committing “Your coat is perforated”. To what extent this paraphrase strategy can be successful on a large scale has been widely debated.10 But there is another kind of paraphrase the Quineans are committed to, which is required by the equation of ontological and quantificational issues—that is, by the equation of “Ks exist” with “There are Ks”. To what extent such paraphrase can be successful is the topic of the next, critical Section. 3.

Explaining existence away?

On the face of it, “exists” looks like an ordinary predicate of individuals, just like “flies” or “is blue” or “is a dog” or “runs”. But “flies”, “is blue”, “is a dog”, “runs”, and lots of other similar predicates express genuine, full-fledged and non-trivial features of things: properties like flying, being blue, being a dog, running. If “exists”, on the contrary, never stands for a genuine, non-trivial property of individuals for it is reducible to quantification, then all its occurrences should be dispensable, the statements in which they show up being replaced by other statements talking only in terms of quantification (or of property-instantiation, if one follows the Fregean view that quantifiers are second-order concepts or properties). As Barry Miller claims in the entry “Existence” of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “to accept the Fregean view of ‘exists’ as a second-level predicate is to accept that ‘exists’ can in fact always be rendered by ‘instantiates’”; and approval of the Quinean thesis that existence is quantification implies that “‘exists’ itself would be made redundant, being replaceable by the more general apparatus of quantifiers and identity”.11 But can we always make “exists” redundant in this way? The strategy of the Quineans in this regard has often been recognized to 10 11

A mandatory reference is Burgess and Rosen [1997]. Miller [2002], Sections 3 and 5.

38

Francesco Berto

achieve good results with general existential claims, such as “Horses exist”, or “Unicorns do not exist”. In these cases, paraphrases along the lines of “The number of horses is one or more”, or “The property of being a unicorn has no instances”, et similia, may seem to fare well. But how to treat singular existential statements like “Brad Pitt exists”, “Socrates exists”, “Holmes does not exist”? Says the aforementioned Stanford Encyclopedia entry: Although “Elephants exist” can be understood as “The property of being an elephant (or the species elephant) is instantiated at least once”, there are grave difficulties about regarding “Socrates exists” as “Socrates is instantiated at least once”. The problem is that individuals are just not the kind of thing that ever could be instantiated. Rather than being themselves instantiable they are the kind of thing in which instantiations occur, e.g. wisdom is instantiated in Socrates, but Socrates himself cannot be instantiated in anything. Russell and Quine would certainly have recognized this, and each in his own way attempted to get round it, though with questionable success.12

The Quinean can answer: when we say that Socrates exists, we are not claiming that something instantiates Socrates, but that some feature is instantiated by Socrates. If existence is property-instantiation, “Socrates exists” could be rendered as the claim that Socrates instantiates this or that property, i.e., there is some property P such that Socrates instantiates P. In second order symbolism adopting variables in predicative position which can be bound by quantifiers, this would be: ∃P(Ps). But as remarked by Colin McGinn, each thing x making “x exists” true might need the Quinean ontologist to supply a property instantiated exclusively by that x. For “the existence of an individual object is said to consist in the instantiation of a property sufficient for that object to exist and not some other object”.13 Then “Socrates exists” should mean, not just that some feature or other, but a specific, uniquely individuating one, is instantiated by Socrates. If it were only the feature of being a man (a Greek man, a Greek philosopher, a Greek philosopher from Athens, … etc.), then it would not be obvious why this would be enough to enlighten the meaning of “Socrates exists”, as opposed to a sentence asserting the existence of some other man (Greek, philosopher, coming from Athens, …). 12 13

Miller [2002], Section 5. Also see Miller [1975]. McGinn [2000], p. 29.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

39

To this, Quineans often answer that the property at issue would comply with the constraint by being a “haecceistic” property, a thisness: a property exactly one thing can have.14 What could this be? Things like being originated from specific zygote z, or having been generated by the specific gametes k and t are contentious in ontology; thus Quineans usually resort to less debatable candidates. The obvious one is the feature of being identical with oneself: being identical with o certainly is a feature that exactly object o enjoys: and if “Horses exist” means that the property of being a horse is instantiated, then, “Socrates exists” may well mean, by uniformity, that the property of being (identical with) Socrates is instantiated. Now, some metaphysicians contest the very idea of constitutively haecceistic properties. Can things like Socrates-identity (or Socrateity?) really be properties? Calling a property something deliberately defined in such a way that it can be instantiated by no more than one thing looks like a hoax: real properties are such that, in principle, more than one individual can enjoy them. But other metaphysicians don’t share this view (I find being Socrates quite a honest property of Socrates; some call these “individual concepts”, or “individual essences”). Thus many, from Quine himself to Hintikka and others, have understood “Socrates exists” as ∃x(x = Socrates). This latter expression we can also read as “Something is (identical with) Socrates”. Existence here is close to what Wittgenstein called formal concepts. Predications ascribing formal concepts in the Wittgensteinian sense might be such statements as “o is an object”, “o” naming whatever thing you want. These predications ascribe no real, non-trivial or discriminating property: they just place the thing in some very broad or even all-encompassing class. Is this a good account? The above characterization of a purely formal predicate is as such harmless. However, what has been so characterized may not really express what we ordinarily call existence. A Quinean can stamp his feet, bang the table, and maintain that it is existence—but he would thereby face the risk of begging the question against an ontologist who does not already subscribe to the Quinean metaontological equation of existential and quantificational claims. A thing that is identical with something is identical with itself (what else?). A thing that is identical with itself is identical with something: o = o is true, as a matter of logic, of any o, and ∃x(x = o) is entailed by existen14

On haecceitistic properties, see Adams [1979].

40

Francesco Berto

tial generalization. But that the existence of Socrates turns out to be his identity with something or his self-identity makes the proposed paraphrase weird. One claiming that Socrates exists does not mean that Socrates is self-identical or identical with something; for how could “Socrates exists” be either equivalent to, or immediately logically entailed by, a merely logical truth? “Kitty exists”, at the present time true of my cat, will be false when asserted after Kitty is dead. But in that future circumstance it seems that Kitty will still be Kitty, i.e., “Kitty = Kitty” will be true when asserted at that time; Kitty will still be identical with something.15 Or, I may tell you that Loch Ness’ Nessie is Nessie and not shock you; infer by existential generalization that Nessie is something, and still not shock you. But if I tell you that Nessie exists, this will convey informative and indeed thrilling news to you, in a way “Nessie is something” or “Nessie is Nessie” just cannot. “Brad Pitt exists” is true by a lucky accident: his parents may never have met; but it is no accident that Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt, or that Brad Pitt is something. Overall, “is identical with something”, or “is self-identical”, do not seem capable of carrying out the semantic job of “exists”: counterfactual considerations speak against their singling out the right intuitive meaning or (if one prefers) intension. As Meyer and Lambert once appropriately claimed: It is ridiculous that from x = x the logician may assert ‘Caesar = Caesar’, withhold comment on ‘Pegasus = Pegasus’ […], and ring up his archeological colleague with respect to ‘Romulus = Romulus’. […] we do not expect to hear him utter, while reading the paper over his morning coffee, ‘By God, Romulus is self-identical after all!’16

“Is identical with something”, or “is self-identical”, may not even get the right extension—unless, that is, one is a full-fledged Quinean already: some things, for instance Sherlock Holmes, Gandalf, the first newborn of the XXII Century, are identical with something— respectively with Holmes, Gandalf, and the first newborn of the XXII Century—thus self-identical, despite not being real, that is, not actually existing. If one considers non-existentially-loaded quantification as mak15

Compare Miller [1975], p. 342 and p. 353: “That there is a difference between Socrates being Socrates and Socrates existing is evident from the fact that, once true, ‘Socrates is Socrates’ can never be false, whereas ‘Socrates exists’ can”. 16 Meyer and Lambert [1968], p. 10.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

41

ing sense (and it is likely that it does, as we shall see below), something can be identical with Holmes—namely, Holmes (who else?)—even though Holmes is unreal. If existence is quantification, the unquestionable inference from o = o to ∃x(x = o) is a problem. If not, that inference becomes innocuous again, as a logical entailment of this kind is supposed to be. A variation on the Quinean strategy with singular existential claims consists in taking “exists” as an intensional predicate: one that applies to certain intensions and, more precisely, to individual concepts. The latter can be seen as functions mapping circumstances to individuals: president of France, for instance, is the individual concept which, given as argument some circumstance, maps it to the individual who is the French president in that circumstance. Some individual concepts may be partial functions that, for some circumstances as arguments, do not deliver an object. “Socrates exists”, then, would be true in a given circumstance if and only if the individual concept corresponding to Socrates (Socrates’ individual essence, or Socrateity) maps that circumstance to some object. How does the proposal fare? To begin with, we have the strong intuition that when one claims “Socrates exists” one is talking of Socrates, that very philosopher we all love, not of features of an individual essence, or of some individual concept, or of some abstract item ontologically quite different from Socrates himself. To maintain that we are in fact speaking, unbeknownst to us, of an individual concept’s outputting something, is odd. Besides, “exists” works quite differently from intensional predicates like “changes” or “is elected” in the classical Montagovian account.17 I claim: “The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen has changed”, or “The president of France is elected every four years”. I am not claiming that Ian Diamond has undergone some change (though that might be implied by what I say); or that Hollande is elected on a regular basis, every four years. I’m saying that the function ViceChancellor of the University of Aberdeen has come to be fulfilled by a different individual; or that who the position president of France is to be conferred to is determined every four years via an election. But replacing those predicates with the predicate “exists”, one gets a different effect: “The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen exists”, or “The president of France exists every four years” (?) either don’t ascribe properties to a concept, function, or role, or are ungrammatical. 17

See Montague [1973].

42

Francesco Berto

Singular negative existential claims like “Holmes does not exist”, “Gandalf does not exist”, or “Socrates does not exist”, only make the Quinean’s life worse. The view that “Socrates exists” means that Socrates has some feature, ∃P(Ps), requires that we take “It is not the case that Socrates exists” as saying that Socrates has no feature at all, ¬∃P(Ps), that is, ∀P¬(Ps). This makes of Socrates, in ontological jargon, a “bare particular”—which poses various problems. To begin with, the notion is not popular among ontologists, if not suspected of being inconsistent (lacking any feature seems to be a feature of the bare particular).18 Besides, the paraphrase is, again, hardly satisfactory: how can the negation of Socrates’ existence mean that? One who denies that Holmes is real does not seem to mean that Holmes is a bare particular lacking any property; and one claiming that, since Socrates passed away a long time ago, it is not the case that he exists anymore, hardly means that our beloved philosopher has become a bare particular after his passing away. It has been proposed to understand singular negative existentials in a meta-linguistic fashion. In “Holmes does not exist”, appearances notwithstanding, we are not talking of Holmes—nor of any other nonlinguistic entity: we are talking of the name “Holmes”. We speak of the historical and semantic vicissitudes of that name, and what we say is that the (prevailing) uses of the name do not track any individual: we say something along the lines of “‘Holmes’ does not denote”.19 This can be right in some cases, but it has too many exceptions to count as a fully general explanation. Many utterances of “Socrates does not exist” cannot be interpreted as having to do with the semantics of “Socrates”. In a modal setting, Plantinga has proposed to this effect a situation in which we speak of the contingency of Socrates’ existence. When we claim that “Socrates exists” is false in a possible circumstance in which his parents never meet, and so “Socrates does not exist” is true there, we don’t seem to be dealing with the semantics of the name “Socrates”. What we speak of is Socrates himself, and his lacking the property of existing in that circumstance. We are not just claiming that, in the counterfactual situation, “Socrates” does not refer.20 Singular negative existentials with demonstratives make the point vivid: one claims “That woman does not exist”, in the context of a movie which is talked about, or a tale, or a visual delusion. This cannot be explained as “This token 18

This goes back to Sellars [1952]. See e.g. Donnellan [1974]. 20 See Plantinga [1974], pp. 146–7. 19

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

43

use of ‘that woman’ does not refer”; grasping the latter sentence and grasping the former seem to be quite different things.21 Fred Kroon has appropriately stressed that allegedly non-denoting terms in negative existentials often pass what he has called “term-resilience tests”: they, or anaphoric terms hooking back to them, are used in non-existential sentences in the immediate surroundings. This provides evidence for such terms’ being used, not mentioned, in such contexts.22 For instance, here is an explanation of who Gandalf is: Gandalf is a wizard from Middle Earth (a fantasyland populated by elves dragons and dwarfs), struggling to save the good people of that world from an evil lord called Sauron and his army of orcs and werewolves. Of course, then, Gandalf does not exist. He is a character invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, and appears in his famous trilogy The Lord of the Rings. He has been interpreted by Sir Ian McKellen in the cinematographic adaptation by Peter Jackson.

“Gandalf” occurs twice in this passage, and its referent is also referred back to by two anaphoric pronouns, “he”, plus various implicit ones. Is it plausible to claim that I have been talking all along, unaware, of the semantics or history of a name? If in some of these occurrences the term is used, Kroon says, it is used in all of them, negative existential included. Can we deal with singular negative existentials by playing tricks with the scope of negation? In Russell’s treatment of “The present king of France is not bald” in the aforementioned On Denoting, the postulation of an ambiguity in the scope of negation was to do the job of avoiding a violation of Bivalence. Interpreted with a predicative negation taking narrow scope over the description, the sentence is false but not the contradictory of “The present king of France is bald”—and false for the same reason as the latter: there is no such thing as the king of France. Interpreted with a sentential negation taking wide scope, the sentence “The present king of France is not bald” is true because it is the negation of a false sentence. In fact, this move is available to the Quinean independently from the Russellian account of definite descriptions. Descriptions may or may not be genuine singular terms. But the important point for the Quinean is that, for any predicate, no nonexistent object can make true either it or its (predicative) negation: the present king of 21 22

Both the point and the example come from Evans [1982], p. 344. See Kroon [2000], pp. 98–9.

44

Francesco Berto

France can make true neither “is bald” nor “is non-bald”, and Gandalf can make true neither “is happy” nor “is unhappy”. Then we may read “Gandalf does not exist” as ambiguous: either (a) it means “Gandalf is nonexistent”, or (b) it means “It is not the case that Gandalf exists”. Now, one may say, (a) is plainly false for the usual reason: there is no Gandalf to make the nonexistence predicate true; but (b) is true, and the contradictory of the false “Gandalf exists”.23 However, according to some such scope distinctions cannot avoid having some feature ascribed to something also in reading (b). According to C.J.F. Williams’ What Is Existence?, properties in the broad sense just are what predicates stand for. Now one always gets a predicate by removing a name from a sentence including it. Just as “___ is nonexistent” is a predicate obtained by removing the name “Gandalf” from (a), so “It is not the case that ___ exists” is a predicate obtained by removing the same name from (b). Also when a whole sentence is negated, as in (b), for Williams “a property is ipso facto ascribed to an object”. Those denying that properties are what predicates stand for “owe us alternative accounts of property and predicable”.24 Besides, as the Quinean equation of ontological and quantificational claims starts being under pressure, charges of question-begging can surface. A non-Quinean believing in nonexistent objects may accept that some singular terms of English (on some occasions of use) do not denote. When that happens, distinctions between sentential and predicative negation or shifts in the scope of negation may well make a difference in the relevant truth conditions. However, postulating such shifts in a debate on the notion of existence just in order to bring under control talk of nonexistent objects would be ad hoc. We are dealing with two independent facts. Existence and denotation are orthogonal notions, one ontological, the other, semantic. Terms may or may not designate. Objects may or may not exist, or so the non-Quinean claims. She may allow herself a variety of options, having terms that denote existents, terms that denote nonexistents, and non-denoting terms too. But claiming that “Gandalf” does refer to something explains how many plainly true claims can be made: that Gandalf is a fictional character created by Tolkien, for instance. There may be lots of non-denoting (uses of) singular terms, but that “Gandalf” is one of them in “It is not the case that Gandalf exists”, and makes it true for this reason, needs independent justifi23 24

This is the route pursued in Plantinga [1974], Ch. VIII. Williams [1981], p. 126.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

45

cation to avoid begging questions. Even leaving the issue of who has the burden of proof aside, it is hard to see why we should accept another consequence of the same treatment, that is, that “Gandalf is nonexistent” turns out to be false, when one intuitively takes it as plainly true. To these paraphrase-related suspicions one should add further meta-ontological worries, recently raised against Quineanism by Kit Fine in his thoroughly argued paper The Question of Ontology. Metaphysical and, in particular, ontological questions, Fine stresses, are supposed to be hard questions about the ultimate nature of reality. This is why, after all, Quine did not take the fast answer to the ontological question, namely, “Everything”, as a conclusive answer at all. But the Quinean reduction of ontological issues to quantificational issues makes the former trivial: Given the evident fact that there is a prime number greater than 2, it trivially follows that there is a number (an x such that x is a number); and, similarly, given the evident fact that I am sitting on a chair, it trivially follows that there is a chair (an x such that x is a chair).25

Conversely, given that ontological questions are not trivial, an approach trivializing them, such as the Quinean, is to be rejected. Overall, Fine detects a twofold mistake in the Quinean meta-ontology; he links a mistaken approach to the question of existence or reality to a mistaken view of scientific naturalism as capable of settling the question (via indispensability arguments, or otherwise): Quine’s approach to ontology appears to be based on a double error. He asks the wrong question, by asking a scientific rather than a philosophical question, and he answers the question he asks in the wrong way, by appealing to philosophical considerations in addition to ordinary scientific considerations. This marriage of a misguided methodology to an ill-conceived question produces the semblance of a question properly asked and properly answered, since the philosophical considerations to which he appeals are in many ways appropriate to the question he should have asked; and it [is] no doubt partly because the one error compensates for the other that philosophers have found it so easy to be oblivious to both.26

25 26

Fine [2009], p. 158. Ibid, p. 161.

46 4.

Francesco Berto Meinongian existence

What does existence consist in, if it is not what the Quinean takes it to be? The alternative, non-Quinean approach to the question of ontology to be explored from now on is the one of Meinongianism. This is the view that some objects do not exist, but we can generally refer to them, quantify on them, and state true things about them.27 In short: ontological or existential questions ought not be equated with quantificational questions. What we are particularly interested in is a specific form of Meinongianism which, meta-ontologically, may be (surprisingly!) compatible with a naturalistic world view. To begin with, Meinongians take “exists” as a predicate of individuals just like the others. It is a predicate in the same sense that “eats”, “flies”, and “is a man” are. The ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis is that existence is a genuine, non-trivial feature of things, just like the properties of eating, flying, being a man. This said, one may want some further characterization. Exactly what kind of property of individuals is existence supposed to be? An intuitively plausible option some Meinongians have embraced,28 and which speaks in favour of a broadly naturalistic view, consists in claiming that existence is connected with the having of causal features—with taking part in causal relationships, or at least, with the disposition towards taking part in them. The Meinongian (of this kind) fully embraces Alexander’s motto. But this requires additional explanations. First, to say that to exist is to enjoy causal powers supplies an annotation to the concept of existence. It is not a philosophical analysis or reduction of the concept of existence, the specification of a necessary and sufficient condition C, such that an object exists if and only if it satisfies C. This may be taken by the Quinean as objectionable per se. After all, the Quinean does have a definition of existence: a reduction of the notion to the quantifier (and to identity). Peter Geach, however, has called “actuality-sense” of existence the conception of it as a nontrivial property of individuals. After glossing it just as proposed above, he has suggested that a theorist is not to blame for leaving it undefined: A provisional explanation of actuality may be given thus: x is actual if and only if either x acts, or undergoes change, or both; and here I count as “act27 28

This is the characterization provided e.g. in Sainsbury [2010], p. 45. See Routley [1980], Priest [2005], Berto [2011], [2012].

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

47

ing” both the inner activities of mind, like thinking and planning, and the initiation of changes in things. […] I do not think this explanation or criterion can be developed into a definition. For it is not yet clear what counts as a thing’s undergoing a change; when Plato counts being thought of as a change undergone by the object of thought, most of us will feel that he is playing a trick, whether or not he also deceived himself.29

Existence may not just be undefined de facto, because of our lacking conclusive characterizations of the concepts employed to elucidate it (having causal features, prompting and undergoing change). A reduction of existence to allegedly more primitive concepts that don’t involve existence may not be feasible in principle. For some concepts are so basic that we must limit ourselves to gloss them via terms that help understanding. That there must be such primitive concepts is uncontroversial: definitions must end somewhere, for if all notions were definable in terms of others, we would have either an infinite regress, or a circulus in definiendo. According to many philosophers, a good candidate for primitiveness is the concept of set. To be a set is to be an aggregate of objects, or a collection of them—or thus we usually speak. But we are not giving definitions: the concept of set remains a primitive one. Kripke has notoriously said the same of the notion of reference, claiming that “philosophical analyses of some concepts like reference, in completely different terms which make no mention of reference, are very apt to fail”.30 Reference and sethood are candidate primitives because of their basic theoretical role in our understanding of language and mathematics. But then, existence is so basic for our understanding of the world that it can certainly be primitive as well. In The Question of Ontology, Kit Fine has ascribed exactly such a primitive status to the notion of reality: this he also takes as a full-fledged, non-trivial feature of some things, playing in his theory a role similar to the one existence is to play for the Meinongian (we should see some possible divergences below; besides, Fine is no Meinongian in the traditional sense for sure). Fine claims he does “not see any way to define the concept of reality in essentially different terms”, because “the metaphysical circle of ideas to which it belongs is one from which there appears to be no escape”. Such a notion is nevertheless fully reasonable, also because “we seem to have a good intuitive grasp of the concept”.31 29

Geach [1968], pp. 7–8. Kripke [1972], p. 94. 31 Fine [2009], p. 175. 30

48

Francesco Berto

Second, about causal powers: to mention them in a characterization of existence is to leave things—intentionally—underspecified. For causality notoriously is a metaphysical conundrum. Philosophers have debated the concept for thousands of years; incompatible theories for it are on the market. However, one can keep a low profile on this. That to exist is to enjoy causal powers per se seemingly does not commit those who make the claim to a specific account of causality. It is true that a certain characterization of the notion may have conspicuous impact on its extension. One could, for instance, maintain that existing entails having a physical or spatiotemporal address.32 Says Aristotle in the Physics: For all men assume that things which are, are somewhere (for that which is not is assumed to be nowhere—for where is a goat-stag or sphinx?).33

Says Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature: Let us consider that no two ideas are themselves contrary, except those of existence and non-existence, which are plainly resembling, as implying both of them an idea of the object; though the latter excludes the object from all times and places, in which it is supposed not to exist.34

However, it is not uncontroversial that the having of causal features coincides with, or entails, the possession of a physical location. Can there be causal non-spatiotemporal relationships? Is noumenal causality—as a Kantian would say—viable? If noumenal causation makes sense, then something may have causal features, and thus exist, with no need to be physically located (take the God of the Christian tradition). It is likely that such a kind of causation would hardly be naturalizable. If on the other hand the only possible (or naturalizable) causal interactions take place in space and time, then whatever exists must also be located somewhere in the physical world. This said, a characterization of existence in terms of (disposition to) causal interactions is highly explicative. It agrees with most of our shared intuitions about what is and what is not real—much more than Quineanism. Try to find shared traits between those quite different things the layman considers nonexistent—Sherlock Holmes, Pegasus, 32

For existence as physical location (as opposed to existence being a formallogical property), see also Williamson [1990], [2002]. 33 Aristotle, Physics, D, 208a 29–31. 34 Hume [1739], I.1.5.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

49

Gandalf, a golden mountain, a merely possible brother, Santa Claus, George Washington, Socrates, Mr. Pickwick, or one hundred imaginary thalers. Certainly one common feature consists in the fact that we cannot kick Sherlock Holmes (or kiss him), while we can kick Brad Pitt (or kiss him); we can offer Varenne some fodder, but we cannot do the same with Pegasus; we can walk around and stumble upon Pitt, but we cannot (alas) walk around and stumble upon Socrates; we can climb the Alps, but no golden mountains; with one hundred existing thalers (or rather, some currently more fashionable currency) we can go shopping, can keep them in our pockets, pay at the grocery store, and receive back change. Nothing like this could be done with one hundred merely imaginary, unreal thalers.35 5.

Cambridge property?

One may summarize the opposition between Quinean and Meinongian accounts of existence by confronting their replies to three questions about “exists”: Is it a predicate (standing for a property) of individuals? Is it trivially true of everything? Is it definable? “Exists” is a (1) Predicate (2) Trivial (3) Definable

35

Quinean Yes Yes Yes

Meinongian Yes No No

One may object that nonexistents do seem to produce causal effects. I am obsessed by Kirienko, a Russian secret agent spying me. In fact, agent Kirienko doesn’t exist: I’m just paranoid. Then I think of good detective Holmes, and this brings me relief. Aren’t Holmes and the nonexistent Kirienko twisting my mood? I think not. I’d rather say that the paranoid thought of the agent and the one of Holmes are what affects my mood. These thoughts may be taken as mental representations I have of the corresponding things. Whatever mental representations are, the represented objects had better not be confused with the respective mental representations (for if Holmes were my mental representation of Holmes, since Holmes—let us assume—is more famous than any real detective, then by Leibniz’s Law a mental representation of mine would be more famous than any real detective; which doesn’t make much sense). Mental representations (let us assume) do exist, and can affect my mood.

50

Francesco Berto

To the first question the Quinean can answer Yes after reflecting upon the fact that her logic allows for an existence predicate of individuals in the well known way: x exists =df ∃y(y = x). The Quinean predicate is definable, reduced to the existential quantifier and identity. Given that both quantification and identity are logical notions, it is, in a precise sense, a logical predicate. And it is a trivial one. If to exist means to be something, since everything is something, everything exists. Correlatively, there is no non-trivial property of existing, similar to the property of being blond or to that of flying. For the Meinongian, “exists” is a predicate standing for a genuine property of individuals: a property that not all things possess, and which cannot be reduced to other properties—in particular, logical ones—through definition even though it can be glossed in the aforementioned ways. Now if to exist is a genuine property having to do with the possession of causal powers, or the (disposition to) engaging in causal processes, then it is likely that existence is not one of those properties some philosophers call Cambridge properties. The first use of the notion of Cambrigde property in connection to the issue of existence may date back to an article by Barry Miller.36 But before that, Peter Geach had labelled Cambridge change a change producing no qualitative or internal variation in the thing affected. Standard example: there’s a Cambridge change in butter when the price of butter grows. A change affecting the butter did take place, but the butter’s quantity, chemical composition, shape, etc., are not altered by the increase of price. If the butter gets spoiled, on the other hand, this is real, non-Cambridge change. The terminology is extended to properties. Being sold at a dime per ounce is a Cambridge property of the butter, while weighing eight ounces is not. Having a certain height or being brown-haired are genuine properties of mine, while being paid on my bank account or being mentioned in a contract are among my Cambridge properties. The distinction may coincide with a traditional one between intrinsic properties of an object, involving nothing but the object and the way it itself is, and extrinsic ones, involving something else, or being possessed in virtue of relations to other things. An eminent tradition in philosophy takes extrinsic properties as merely apparent or not genuine features of things (denominatio exstrinseca a natura rerum, in Medieval jargon).37 But overall, the 36

See Miller [1982], p. 183. Notice that the distinction does not coincide with that between intuitively essential properties and intuitively contingent ones. Some properties are genuine, 37

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

51

distinction between genuine-intrinsic and Cambridge properties is not easy to characterize. Then what use is it for the debate on existence? Faced with the difficulties plaguing the Quinean conception of existence, some philosophers allowed existence to be a full-fledged property of things. But they added that, to avoid troubles with the complementary property of nonexistence, we had better say that existence is a Cambridge property. For if existence were a genuine, intrinsic feature of things, nonexistence as its complement would be as well. Then, authors like David Londey and C.J.F. Williams claimed, we would have to face absurdities: we would need there to be things that are not, in order for them to bear the genuine or intrinsic property of being not. Think of a peasant that checks her herd daily, to tell apart the heads having the genuine property of existence from those having the genuine one of nonexistence; or of a situation in which, once informed that no blue buttercup exists, we check numerous blue buttercups before concluding that, indeed, none of them is real. Better to conclude that nonexistence, and thus existence, if they are properties of individuals, are not genuine but Cambridge features. The examples are quite funny. Such considerations suffer from problems, though, barely concealed by their being amusing. Their absurdity originates from a deceiving choice of properties. If something has the property of belonging to a herd, or that of being a buttercup, then non-Cambridge, because losing or acquiring them would be a genuine change. The circumstances in which a thing loses or acquires them count as possible: changing my weight is possible for me, so weighing 55 kilos is a contingent feature of mine. But changing my weight makes some qualitative or intrinsic difference for me, so weighing 55 kilos counts as a genuine property. Also being paid on my bank account is a contingent property of mine, but losing it would not make an intrinsic difference for me. What about properties many philosophers take as essential, like being a man? It may seem that being a man is intrinsic in the sense of not involving relations with other things; my being essentially a man is my being a man in virtue of what I myself am. And perhaps it makes sense to say that if I ceased to be a man, this would make quite an intrinsic difference for me, even if there is no possible circumstance in which I am not a man—think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: those counts as intrinsic changes for sure. So being a man is not a Cambridge feature of mine. It seems difficult to think of essential but Cambridge properties. Are there properties I cannot lose but such that, if I lost them, they would not make an intrinsic difference for me? These speculations turn on subtle issues about our capacity of conceiving impossible circumstances, and that this is even feasible is controversial.

52

Francesco Berto

presumably it is a material object. It has a physical address, and we can causally interact with it. In a word: it exists. The anecdote of checking blue buttercups and finding them all nonexistent, then, is certainly amusing: the disavowed expectation produced by “blue buttercup” and the subsequent “nonexistent” makes for a well-known comical effect. The question raised by the Meinongian, however, is whether this applies to all properties, including ones like being a purely fictional character, or being searched for by many, or having been president of the United States. Telling apart the existent former presidents from the nonexistent ones makes a lot of sense. While I am writing these lines, the existent ones are four: Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. All the others are nonexistent (with a proviso on the possible immortality of the soul—even a presidential soul). For the non-Quinean, some things do not exists; they can instantiate properties that don’t entail existence; and these may occasionally be intrinsic, non-Cambridge, properties. Being a purely fictional character may belong to this group: if I were a purely fictional character, this would make quite an intrinsic difference for me.38 Specifically, nonexistence itself seems to be genuine or intrinsic, not Cambridge. Acquiring and losing existence is intuitively not a Cambridge change: when Socrates ceased to exist, this made quite an intrinsic difference for him. Could there be some asymmetry between existence and its complement? Perhaps to exist is a genuine property, but not to exist is a Cambridge property. Or so claimed Barry Miller.39 According to Miller, that something, x, lacks a genuine property P, does not automatically imply that x has a genuine complementary property, non-P. This happens only when P and non-P are, Miller claims, “understood as determinates of a common determinable”;40 to speak Aristotelian: only if P and non-P are specific differences with respect to a common genus, must they both be genuine, non-Cambridge properties splitting this genus, if either of them is. Consider redness, for instance. If having a color (the genus, the determinable) applies to something, then that thing can avoid 38

Some claim that there is no possible situation in which I am a purely fictional character. If so, we cannot Cambridge-test this property by envisaging a possible situation in which I become purely fictional, and wondering how this would affect me. I think, though, that the intuition is the same as with the property of being a man: these are intrinsic features, not merely Cambridge ones, insofar as they are possessed by the thing in virtue of the way it itself is. 39 See see Miller [1982] and Miller [2002], Section 4. 40 Miller [2002], Section 4.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

53

being red only by having some non-red colour. A chair lacking the property of being red will have the non-Cambridge property of not being red, because it must have some colour. But a recursive function is not red either. This does not entail that it has the genuine, non-Cambridge property of not being red: being an immaterial object, a function does not belong in the genus of colored things. Thus, its not being red does not entail that it has any non-red colour, different from red, and a genuine non-redness property. Now let us apply this line of thought to existence and nonexistence: that x does not exist would entail that x enjoys the genuine, nonCambridge property of nonexistence, only if existence and nonexistence were “determinates of a common determinable”. Call this hypothetical determinable or common genus O. Just as being red means being colored in red, and being (genuinely) non-red means being colored other than red, so being existent would then mean being O existing, and being (genuinely) nonexistent would mean being O not existing. But what could this O be? According to Miller, there is no greater difference than that between to exist and not to exist: there can be no common genus between existents and nonexistents. Now, these considerations concede quite a lot to the Meinongian position: existence is a genuine, non-Cambridge property of individuals, making for an intrinsic feature (whatever that means in detail). A Quinean accepting to line up on this position would be a retreating one. Besides, the argument for the asymmetry between existence and nonexistence may be resisted. The key assumption is that there is no common genus O between existent and nonexistent objects. This may be rejected by the Meinongian, for according to her there probably is a common genus between existent objects like Brad Pitt or Bill Clinton, and nonexistent objects like Sherlock Holmes or George Washington: they are all objects, that is, at the very least, property-bearers, and thereby bearers of the property O = being an object, or being something, or being a property-bearer. For the Meinongian, “exists” is not a trivial predicate. But “is an object”, or “is something”, are trivial predicates. The entailment from being self-identical to being something, flagged in the previous paragraphs, comes into play. If there is a candidate condition for a trivial feature of anything whatsoever, that is self-identity. When existence was taken as being something, that entailment was the Quinean’s problem. If

54

Francesco Berto

being something, i.e., being an object, does not amount to existing, that entailment is as trivial as it ought to be.41 6.

Meinongian quantifiers

Existence turning out to be irreducible to quantification, Meinongians must provide an explanation of their own view of quantification. When one affirms that some things are nonexistent, one should state clearly what one means by “some”, if not what Frege and Quine taught us. The view of quantification that goes along with existence being a nonblanket property of individuals is both natural and intuitive. But intuitions only help that much when one has intuitions reshaped by the tradition of Frege and Quine. Meinong himself did not help. In his Theory of Objects (Gegenstandstheorie), he came up with an intentionally puzzling expression, one that has led many to conclude that “Meinongian quantification” is gibberish: Those who like paradoxical modes of expression could very well say: “There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects.”42

41

It is a further issue, how to provide an adequate logical treatment for such a notion. If we admit a set that is the extension of O, we may stumble upon the classical set-theoretic paradoxes of total sets. Philosophers like Dummett have rejected similar all-encompassing notions, on the basis that there is no universal set. A solution might be that of treating the extension at issue as a proper class, in the sense of the von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel set theories. Or, it could be said that the notion of object is not univocal, meaning that object or thing is not a genus, similarly to what Aristotle maintained about being. In this case, the common genus O we discussed would be missing. On the other hand, I am inclined to reject the idea that the notion of object is not univocal. I find the idea of absolutely unrestricted quantification, and the property of being something that goes with it, quite intuitive, plausible, and unequivocal: a full-fledged genus, to keep talking classical. This just is the notion of everything without limitation, that is, of all things qua things: a formal or logical notion, if one wants—that which existence, for the Meinongian, is not. It is an idea we resort to all the time in philosophy, precisely when we say that everything is self-identical, or that everything is either an abstract object or a concrete one, or that everything is subject to this or that law of logic. For a convincing defence of the idea, I refer you to Timothy Williamson [2003]. 42 Meinong [1904], p. 83.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

55

This certainly looks like a blatant inconsistency. In canonical notation, “… there is no such object (say, x)” becomes ¬∃y(y = x). Then “There is some object, x, such that there is no such object” becomes ∃x¬∃y(y = x), which is tantamount to ∃x¬(x = x): something is not selfidentical. Thus, Meinong’s statement either is or immediately entails a logical absurdity. Thus William Lycan destroys “Meinongian quantification”: I have to take my place among those who find Relentlessly (i.e., genuinely or primitively) Meinongian quantification simply unintelligible. However, in saying this, I am not using the term “unintelligible” in its sneering postWittgensteinian use. So far as I am able to introspect, I am not expressing any tendentious philosophical qualm. (For this reason, my use of the term may be irrevocably misleading.) I mean that I really cannot understand Relentlessly Meinongian quantification at all; to me it is literally gibberish or mere noise.43

If the quantifier captures the sense of “exists”, then to quantify on things of which it is said that they do not exist is absurd. But that to quantify on something means to commit to the existence of that thing is denied by nonbelievers in the Quinean meta-ontology. For a Meinongian, to exist is not to be the value of a variable. Assuming the opposite, and from that concluding that Meinongian quantification proves to be unintelligible, or that it entails a logical falsity, at this point of the discussion would be another petitio against the Meinongian. Meinong’s statement, in fact, comes at the end of the two pivotal pages of the Gegenstandstheorie, in which he formulates his own Principle of the Independence of Sosein, the having of properties, from Sein, being, and establishes that “the principle applies, not only to Objects which do not exist in fact, but also to Objects which could not exist because they are impossible”.44 Thus, “There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects” expresses our anti-Quinean thesis: there are objects, property-bearers, that do not exist. The (openly) paradoxical statement escapes blatant inconsistency once we admit that the meaning of “there are” differs in its two occurrences in that satement. The difference may be highlighted by rephrasing the first part of the claim into “Some objects are such that…”; the second part may be rephrased as “… such objects do not exist”. 43 44

Lycan [1979], p.290. Meinong [1904], p. 82.

56

Francesco Berto

Formally, this is easily dealt with. Take “Λ” e “Σ” as standing for the two Meinongian quantifiers, to be read respectively “for all” and “for some”: the first is the universal quantifier; the latter had better be called the particular quantifier (a natural name, as “particular”, not “existential”, is the dual of “universal”). They bear no existential commitment, i.e., no commitment to the reality or existence of what is quantified over. It is legitimate to quantify on things like chimeras, fictional characters, etc., and to say that they all, or some of them, are … Like the standard quantifiers, these too are dual to each other, and inter-definable: Λ is definable as ¬Σ ... ¬, while Σ is definable as ¬Λ ... ¬. We can get rid of one by substituting it with the other plus negation. Let us now focus on the particular quantifier. As it is existentially unloaded, we should avoid reading formulas like ΣxPx as “Some x such that Px exists”. Thus I have suggested to read “Σ” just as “for some”, and labelled it particular, not existential: that standard jargon is misleading should be clear by now. For the same reason, I have changed the symbolism with respect to the canonical notation: using “∃” for the particular quantifier may bring with the symbol the temptation of reading existential commitment into it. In On What There Is Quine stated that terms like “man” or “red” don’t commit us to the existence of universals (the universal man, the universal red). According to Quine, as we have seen, even proper names do not commit us to the existence of their bearers, as they can be eliminated extending the Russellian technique for definite descriptions. For the Meinongian too, names don’t commit us to the existence of their bearers, this time for quite a different reason: their bearers may not exist. “Sherlock Holmes” for the Meinongian refers to Sherlock Holmes, but Sherlock Holmes does not exist. But for the Meinongian even the quantifiers, against the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, don’t commit us to the existence of what we quantify on. We might then ask, what does commit us to the existence of something? The fast answer is: to state that it exists. Because not everything exists, one has explicit commitment to the existence of something, an x, when the existence of x is declared. Such existential commitment is formally expressed by a designated existence predicate, “E”. Sentences like “Brad Pitt exists” (true) and “Gandalf exists” (false) are translated in standard notation exactly for what they seem to be in natural language, that is, atomic subjectpredicate sentences in which a property is ascribed to an individual: Eb, Eg. Simplex sigillum veri.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

57

Next, the existence predicate is used to recapture the Quinean reading of the quantifiers, thus, to define quantifiers endowed with existential commitment. The universal existentially loaded quantifier—say “∀”, the usual symbol—says that all existing things are such that… Formally: (Df∀)

∀xA[x] =df Λx(Ex → A[x]).

And the existential quantifier (the particular existentially loaded quantifier) says that something exists and it is such that… : (Df∃)

∃xA[x] =df Σx(Ex ∧ A[x]).

One sometimes hears that the Meinongian has two couples of quantifiers, the existentially neutral and the existentially loaded ones. But this is deceptive: the Meinongian quantifiers had better be called just quantifiers. The existentially loaded couple is defined, thus always eliminable, via the original quantifiers and the primitive existence predicate. “Existentially committing quantification” is restricted quantification (and quantification, of course, can be restricted in various ways). When I say “∀x...”, I am excluding from the domain of things I’m quantifying on those that do not exist. I want to talk only about existing things, if about all of them. Dually for “∃x...”. Now “There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects”, once the first occurrence of “there are” is understood as unrestricted quantification, and the second as (negated) quantification restricted to existent stuff, expresses not a paradox, but plain non-Quineanism; (unrestrictedly) some things are such that they are not identical with anything in a more restricted group, the existent stuff: Σx¬Σy(Ey ∧ (y = x)), i.e., Σx¬Ex, something does not exist. The “fast answer” given above was to the effect that, once freed from the received meta-ontological view, there is one obvious way to explicitly commit oneself to the existence of something: declaring that it exists. Admittedly, that was (a bit too) fast: people can be considered committed to the existence of something also when they don’t overtly declare its existence. In the majority of cases, on the contrary, such commitment is implicit, but easy to infer from the ordinary use of colloquial expressions of quantification, like “all”, “some”, “there is”, etc. A physicist’s very general claim to the effect that all things have mass might be disputed, but nobody would stand up to dispute it by saying

58

Francesco Berto

that Gandalf has no mass as he doesn’t exist: one would adduce examples of existing things with no mass. The phenomenon of contextual, implicit, and conversationally understood restrictions to quantification is familiar to everybody (Quineans included). When I say that all the beer is in the fridge,45 I am not affirming that all the beer in the world fits into a fridge. I am, on the contrary, ignoring the largest portion of the available beer, and limiting my quantification, say, to things that are in the house. I don’t need to declare my restriction explicitly: it can be easily inferred from the context. 7.

Naturalism enough

For the Meinongian (of the kind characterized above) to exist, that is, to have causal powers, is a substantive, non-Cambridge feature of things: some things have it, others lack it. As a consequence, he in a sense admits things devoid of causal features, of which nevertheless we commonly speak about both when we engage in science or philosophy and in our everyday talk: fictional objects like Sherlock Holmes and Pegasus; ideal objects, such as frictionless planes; objects postulated by false scientific theories, like Vulcan (Leverrier’s planet), or the Phlogiston. The Meinongian doesn’t need to engage in paraphrases to get rid of apparent reference to, or apparent quantification on, such things. His notion of existence is perfectly naturalized. If to exist or to be real is to have causal powers (and, possibly, to be spatiotemporal located), then these things are not part of reality anyway. We can talk of them, but we should not feel ontologically committed to them just because of this. At this point, an obvious objection is expected. Even if one grants that Meinongian quantification makes sense, the Meinongian certainly is in some sense committed to such weird things as fictional characters, chimeras, auras, spirits, etc. After all, the Meinongian catalogue of the furniture of the world lists imaginary, fictional, and unreal objects the Quinean and naturalized philosophers simply reject. Whereas for the latter there are no such things, for the Meinongian those things are out there in the world, despite their being deemed nonexistent: isn’t this what the traditional accusation that Meinongians have an inflationary, overstuffed ontology amounts to? Now those things are, of course, 45

See David Lewis [1986], p. 3.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

59

(mostly) objects that have no chance of being easily naturalized. Meinongianism, thus, remains a deeply anti-naturalistic ontology. The natural and naturalistic-friendly reply to this, in my opinion, should consist in simply turning tables around against the Quinean, on the basis of the non-Quinean meta-ontology underlying the Meinongian view. There is nothing wrong in quantifying on (supposedly) nonnaturalizable things, once one rejects the Quinean equation of ontological issues with quantificational issues. There is nothing wrong, that is, insofar as one makes clear that the (supposedly) non-naturalizable things one is quantifying over are not real or nonexistent, and provides a background account of what being real or existent is in terms of causal powers. And this is naturalism enough. The idea that full-fledged ontological commitment is captured not by quantification as such, but by a primitive predicate restricting “thin”, ontologically not committing quantification, has been put forth in the aforementioned paper by Kit Fine, The Question of Ontology. Fine is no Meinongian at all but, as we have seen above, he also criticizes and rejects the Quinean meta-ontological view that equates ontological issues with quantificational issues. For instance, the logical form of “Integers exist”, as expressing “thick” commitment to integers, according to him “is not ∃xIx [Fine adopts the usual quantifier notation], where I is the predicate for being an integer, but ∀x(Ix ⊃ Ex), where E is the predicate for existence”. And here, “the predicate ‘exists’ is being used in a ‘thick’, ontologically loaded sense. In saying that a particular number exists, we are not saying that there is something identical to it but saying something about its status as a genuine constituent of the world”.46 Later on in the essay, Fine prefers to substitute a reality predicate for the existence predicate. But in doing so, it seems that he is simply leaving the word “exist” to the Quinean, “given its customary association with the thin [quantificational] sense”. Fine’s reality predicate has a role structurally similar to our “E”: it is primitive, and the thickontologically committing quantifier is expressed by means of it and the thin quantifier.47 46

Fine [2009], p 168. See Ibid, p. 170. Some terminological subtleties are involved here. In this essay I have used “is real” and “exists” as interchangeable, speaking of real or existent vs. unreal or nonexistent objects. The Oxford English Dictionary agrees: the first meaning for “real” is “actually existent” and the first meaning for “reality” is “real existence”. But the philosopher and linguist Moltmann [2009] has stressed 47

60

Francesco Berto

Now, in such a framework for conducting ontological disputes,the naturalist and anti-naturalist can agree that there are Ks, where “K” stands for a non-naturalizable kind of entities. What they disagree on is Ks’ being real or existent—as opposed to fictional, nonexistent, hallucinated, simulated, fantasized, etc. In particular, a Meinongian accepting to characterize existence or reality in terms of the having of causal powers (and/or spatiotemporal location) can vindicate the compatibility of his position with a thorough naturalism. Such compatibility is not in any way undermined by his quantifying on non-naturalizable entities, for those things do not really exist anyway. Ontological commitment does not come with quantification as such, nor does our claim that Ks exist or are real rest on our referring to Ks or on our quantifying on them: we commit ourselves to Ks by claiming that (in general, some, all) Ks are existent, genuine constituents of actual reality. Following a similar line of thought, Fine concludes: The critical and distinctive aspect of ontological claims lies not in the use of the quantifier but in the appeal of a certain conception of what is real; and it is only by focusing on this concept, rather than on our understanding of quantification, that further clarification is to be achieved or disquiet over the debate is ultimately to be vindicated.48

... And I fully agree.

that the reality predicate “is real” can work differently from “exists”. Of course, “real” can be used as a modifier: “You are a real friend” means that you are a friend indeed, not that you are an existent friend (as opposed to false friends of mine that would be nonexistent). Also the definition in the dictionary, of reality as “real existence”, has “real” work more like “actual”, as opposed to “merely possible”; so “real existence” would mean existence in the actual situation, or in the circumstances that actually obtain (as opposed to circumstances that are hypothetic, or counterfactual, etc.). It is not clear to me, anyway, whether the terminological point mirrors a substantive conceptual difference. 48 Ibid, p. 171.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

61

References Adams R.M. [1979], “Primitive Thisness and Primitive Identity”, Journal of Philosophy, 76, pp. 5–26. Alexander, D. [1920], Space, Time and Deity, Macmillan, London. Aristotle, Physics, in Aristotelis Opera, 5 voll., ed. Bekker, Academia Regia Borussica 1831–70, tr. in The Complete Works, ed. Barnes, Princeton UP, Princeton, NJ, 1984, voll. I–II. Berto F. [2011], “Modal Meinongianism and Fiction: The Best of Three Worlds”, Philosophical Studies, 153, pp. 313–34. Berto F. [2012], Existence as a Real Property. The Ontology of Meinongianism, Synthèse Library, Springer. Burgess J., Rosen G. [1997], A Subject With No Object, Oxford U.P., Oxford. Casati R., Varzi A.C. [1994], Holes and Other Superficialities, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Donnellan K. [1974], “Speaking of Nothing”, Philosophical Review, 83, pp. 3–31. Eklund M. [2006], “Metaontology”, Philosophy Compass, 3, pp. 317– 34. Evans G. [1982], The Varieties of Reference, ed. by John McDowell, Oxford U.P., Oxford. Fine K. [2009], “The Question of Ontology”, in Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman [2009] (eds.), Metametaphysics. New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Clarendon, Oxford, pp. 157–77. Geach P. [1968], "What Actually Exists", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 42, pp. 7–30. Hume D. [1739], A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford U.P., Oxford 1951. Kripke S. [1972], Naming and Necessity, in Davidson and Harman [1972] (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language, Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 253–355 and 762–9, 2nd, expanded ed., Blackwell, Oxford 1980. Kroon F. [2000], “‘Disavowal Through Commitment’ Theories of Negative Existentials”, in Everett and Hofweber [2000] (eds.), Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, CSLI, Stanford, pp. 95–116. Lewis D.K. [1986], On the Plurality of Worlds, Blackwell, Oxford. Lewis D.K., Lewis S.R. [1970], “Holes”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 48, pp. 206–12.

62

Francesco Berto

Lycan W. [1979], “The Trouble with Possible Worlds”, in Loux [1979] (ed.), The Possible and the Actual, Cornell U.P. Ithaca, NY, pp. 274– 316. McGinn C. [2000], Logical Properties. Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity, Truth, Oxford U.P., Oxford. Meinong A. [1904], “Über Gegenstandstheorie”, in Meinong [1904] (ed.), Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, J.A. Barth, Leipzig, pp. 1–51, tr. “The Theory of Objects”, in Chisholm [1960] (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, The Free press-Collier-Macmillan, New York & London, pp. 76–117. Meyer R., Lambert K. [1968], “Universally Free Logic and Standard Quantification Theory”, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 33, pp. 8–26. Miller B. [1975], “In Defence of the Predicate ‘Exists’”, Mind, 84, pp. 338–54. Miller B. [1982], “Negative Existential Propositions”, Analysis, 42, pp. 181–8. Miller B. [2002], “Existence”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, CSLI, Stanford, Ca., http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ existence. Moltmann F. [2009], “The Semantics of Existence”, unpublished MS. Montague R. [1973], “The Proper Treatment of Quantification in English”, in Hintikka et al. (eds.), Approaches to Natural Language. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 242–70. Plantinga A. [1974], The Nature of Necessity, Oxford U.P., London. Plato, Sophist, in Platonis Opera, 5 voll., ed. Burnet, Oxonii 1900–07, tr. in The Sophist & The Statesman, ed. Taylor, Nelson & Sons, London 1961. Priest G. [2005], Towards non-Being. The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Oxford U.P., Oxford. Priest G. [2007], “Not to Be”, unpublished MS. Quine W.V.O. [1951], “On Carnap’s Views in Ontology”, Philosophical Studies, 2, pp. 65–72. Quine W.V.O. [1953], “On What There Is”, in From a Logical Point of View, Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass. Routley R. [1980], Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, Australian National University RSSS, Canberra. Sainsbury M. [2010], Fiction and Fictionalism, Routledge, London & New York. Salmon N. [1987], “Existence”, Philosophical Perspectives, 1, pp. 49– 108.

“To Be Is to Have Causal Powers”

63

Sellars W. [1952], “Particulars”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 13, pp.184–99. Williams C.J.F. [1981], What Is Existence?, Oxford U.P., Oxford. Williamson T. [1990], “Necessary Identity and Necessary Existence”, in Haller and Brandl [1990] (eds.), Wittgenstein: Towards a ReEvaluation, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, Vienna, pp. 168–75. Williamson T. [2002], “Necessary Existents”, in O’Hear [2002] (ed.), Logic, Thought and Language, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge. Williamson T. [2003], “Everything”, Philosophical Perspectives, 17, pp. 415–65.

Dividing Fiction from Reality: Existence and Nature in Christian Wolff’s Metaphysics* Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

Les chimères commencent à revenir et plaisent parce qu’elles ont quelque chose de merveilleux. Il arrive dans le paÿs philosophique ce qui est arrivé dans le paÿs poëtique. On s’est lassé des Romans raisonnables […] et on est revenu depuis quelque temps aux Contes des Fées. – Leibniz, Fifth Letter to Clarke, § 114.

According to a still widely received historiographical scheme, during the early modern period every philosopher aligned himself with one of two main opposite fronts, subsequently labelled “rationalism” and “empiricism”. And according to an equally established diagnosis, one of the most prominent faults of rationalism consists of its overall attitude of ontological prodigality. Modern rationalists primarily devoted themselves to building so-called “special metaphysics”, such as General Cosmology and Rational Psychology, which turned out to be nothing more than alleged sciences, dealing with objects of which we do not, and cannot, have any experience. The outcome of this typically modern undertaking is deemed, at best, a philosophical oddity: rationalist systems present us with highly sophisticated constructions that are notwithstanding quite far from our pre-theoretic intuitions and common sense and have no contact with the world we experience. Their hallmark is “extravagance”,1 name*

I wish to thank Vittorio Morato for helping me to clarify my thoughts in section 1. 1 Loux [1998], p. 6.

66

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

ly their tendency to introduce mysterious—and presumably unreal— entities in a rather uncontrolled way. The most striking aspect of this historiographical cliché is that the primal faults ascribed to rationalist philosophers (e.g., their distance from common sense, their lack of ontological parsimony, and their rather weak sense of reality) are, in fact, exactly what these philosophers were striving to defeat. In what follows, I shall try to show that the task of providing a justified and possibly conclusive answer to the ontological question about what exists had, indeed, a central place in the agenda of early modern metaphysicians. To do so, I will draw mainly on the works of Christian Wolff, who soon became and still remains one of the favourite targets of those who are eager to criticize rationalism. A recurring theme of Wolffian propaganda is the claim that, far from introducing fictitious entities, a sound metaphysics would enable us to get rid of all of them, since it would eliminate everything that, by not meeting the intelligibility requirements set by Wolff’s ontology, proves itself incompatible with a scientific explanation of the natural world.2 The programme of reforming first philosophy, as outlined by Leibniz and fully endorsed by Wolff,3 aimed, in the first place, to complete an operation of ontological cleansing. The conceptual tool to be used in this attempt was the principle of sufficient reason. 1.

Existence and possibility

As we shall presently see, fictitious entities are characterized by Wolff as things that cannot exist. Indeed, a typical feature of modern rationalism is the conviction that, in order to determine what does exist, one needs to determine, first, what can exist. That is, it is necessary to state some existence conditions. Indeed, if we consider the structure of 2

At the very outset of the preface to his treatise on teleology, for instance, Wolff writes that a primary aim of his general cosmology is to provide sound grounds for eliminating all of the fictitious imaginations (“alle erdichtete Einbildungen”) that are prejudicial to science (Wolff [1724b], Preface, unpag.). Wolff also praises his own philosophy as helpful in “exterminating the abortions of imagination” (De differentia notionum metaphysicarum et mathematicarum, § 1, in Wolff [1741], p. 386). 3 See G.W. Leibniz, “De primae philosophiae emendatione, et de notione substantiae”, Acta Eruditorum, 1694 (see the text in Leibniz [1875–90], vol. IV, pp. 468–70); Wolff [1730], § 64n. Cf. Carboncini [1991], pp. 75, 132, 137.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

67

Wolff’s system, we can see that ontology, as the “science of being in general”,4 precedes psychology, natural theology, and physics, as sciences of specific kinds of beings. Before philosophical disciplines can deal with the existence of specific entities, material or immaterial, it is the ontologist’s task to state the formal requirements that any given entity must satisfy in order to be able to exist. This explains why logical modalities are among the first concepts to be characterized in Wolff’s Ontology: the impossible is that which involves a contradiction—that is, that which contains mutually incompatible properties or contradicts a true proposition—while the possible is that which is free from contradictions.5 Possibility is thus defined solely in terms of internal consistency, without reference to existence. After stating the proper way of understanding possibility, Wolff explains why he does not approve of any of the alternative definitions commonly received by philosophers. His rejection concerns especially the definition of the possible as “what can be”: in spite of its seeming clarity, this definition does not provide anything but the mere “grammatical explanation” of the word ‘possible’.6 Such an explanation is not a proper definition because the modal concept that had to be clarified is surreptitiously reintroduced in the defining phrase by the modal verb “posse”. As Wolff puts it, we associate only one and the same confused concept with both phrases, “esse possibile” and “posse esse”, for the defining phrase does not, in fact, list the features through which one can distinguish whether something is possible or not.7 Besides, owing to the bad habit, countenanced by the scholastic vocabulary, of treating the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to exist’ as synonymous, this “spurious” and “deceptive” definition can easily lead one to conflate the possibility of a thing itself (possibilitas rei) and the possibility of the existence of that thing (possibilitas existendi, or possibilitas rei existentiae).8 At first glance, this warning seems to be mere quibbling, given that Wolff actually regards the possibility of existing as following from the very notion of the possible, for he maintains that “What is impossible 4

Wolff [1996], § 73; Wolff [1730], § 1: “Ontologia seu Philosophia prima est scientia entis in genere, seu quatenus ens est”. 5 Ibid., §§ 79, 85. Cf. Wolff [1719], § 12. 6 “Qui enim dicit, id esse possibile, quod esse potest, is nonnisi vocis explicationem grammaticam tradit” (Wolff [1730], § 99). 7 Ibid., § 99n. 8 Ibid.

68

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

cannot exist”, and that, conversely, “What is possible can exist”.9 These statements make sense, in my view, only if we stick to Wolff’s own definitions and resist the temptation of translating them abruptly into our first-order formal language. Wolff is obviously not affirming the triviality that if it is possible that there is something that has certain properties, then it is possible that there is such a thing. Rather, his point is that if certain concepts are all logically consistent with each other, then it is possible that there exists a thing having all the properties expressed by those concepts. The core of Wolff’s modal ontology is, thus, the harmonical correspondence between the logical realm of the consistent combinations of concepts and the metaphysical realm of the possible existents that intantiate these combinations of properties. In this sense, logical (conceptual) impossibility and possibility imply, respectively, the impossibility or possibility of existing. Regarding impossibility, Wolff’s argument is that if an impossible object were to exist, it would make two contradictory propositions true, which is against the principle of contradiction.10 Regarding possibility, he argues that if the concept of a thing is consistent, then the concept contains no sufficient reason for existence to be repugnant to that thing.11 Wolff further claims that saying that the possible can exist amounts to saying that the existence of the possible is possible, i.e., noncontradictory, which is evident if only we consider that the concept of any possible object does not involve any “repugnance” towards existence; indeed, every possible entity can be conceived as existing without any contradiction arising through such conception.12 Why, then, is it advisable not to simply equate the possible with what can exist? First, Wolff’s point is that here we are dealing with two distinct, although related, concepts: the concept of possibile and the concept of being, ens. The possibility of existing, also expressed as “nonrepugnance towards existence” (that is, compatibility with existence), is taken as the essential feature of being: “Being is called that which can exist, and thus that to which existence is not repugnant”.13 Conversely, the term ‘non-being’ applies to “that which cannot exist, and thus to that 9

Ibid., §§ 132–3. Ibid., § 132n. 11 Ibid., § 133. 12 Ibid., § 133n. 13 “[Entis definitio.] Ens dicitur, quod existere potest, consequenter cui existentia non repugnat” (Ibid., § 134). Cf. Honnefelder [1990], pp. 341–8. 10

Dividing Fiction from Reality

69

to which existence is repugnant”.14 Wolff further clarifies that, “The notion of being in general does not involve existence at all, but only a nonrepugnance towards existing or, what is the same, the possibility of existing”.15 One way of putting this point would be to say that the concept of the possible and the concept of being have the same extension while having different intensions. Moreover, the same relation seems to hold between the concept of the impossible and the concept of non-being as well. Wolff states, on the one hand, that what is possible is a being.16 On the other hand, he expressly denies that possibile and ens can be treated as synonymous terms. His reasons for maintaining a semantic distinction between these two terms are clarified as follows: For the notion of being superadds (superaddit) to the notion of the possible the potency, namely the possibility of existing. Indeed, it superadds it necessarily, since the latter follows (fluat) from the notion of the possible, so that once the possibility of a thing is posited, its possibility of existing is posited as well. Hence, ‘possible’ and ‘being’ are not at all synonymous.17

In light of this passage, it seems that the relationship holding between possibility tout court and possibility of existing may be cashed out by saying that the latter is supervenient on the former. The possibility of existing adds something to mere logical possibility, from which it does, however, necessarily follow. The same relation seems to hold between the concept of the impossible and the concept of non-being. Second, Wolff warns us against confusing logical possibility with the possibility of existing because this very confusion has led even some acute scholastic philosophers to define the possible as “that for which there is some cause that is sufficient to produce it”.18 Hence, Wolff’s main concern is that mentioning existence in the definition of the possible may undermine the purely logical understanding of modalities and 14

“[Non entis definitio.] Non Ens dicitur, quod existere nequit, consequenter cui existentia repugnat” (Wolff [1730], § 137). 15 Ibid., § 134n. 16 Ibid., § 135. 17 Ibid., § 135n. 18 Some scholastics, writes Wolff, “negarunt, possibile esse, cui ad actum deducendo nullius causae vires suppetunt. Acutiores quidam inter scholasticos hanc consequentiam pro ipsa definitione amplexi possibile definiverunt per id, cui producendo causa aliqua suppetit” (Ibid., § 99n).

70

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

lead to a causal construal, according to which the possibility of a thing depends on the existence of its cause(s), so that something is possible if, and only if, there actually exists some entity that has the power to produce it. Such a view of modalities is deemed extremely dangerous by Wolff, as it can be appealed to by those who would reduce the set of the possible things to the set of the things that are part of the actual world. Briefly, this causal definition of possibility paves the way for Spinozism. To avoid any equivocity, Wolff distinguishes two kinds of possibility: intrinsic and extrinsic. He takes as intrinsically possible all that, “considered in itself, does not contain any contradiction”, while the extrinsically possible, also called “possible of this world”, is that which “has a determinate cause in the actual world (in mundo adspectabili), that is, what is able to exist in it”.19 Wolff maintains, furthermore, that something is extrinsically possible if, and only if, it existed, it exists, or it will exist.20 Hence, extrinsic possibility implies actuality at some time. The presence in the world of the efficient cause of a given being is, thus, a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of that being. The result is that, if we consider only the actual world, modalities collapse into each other: the domain of what exists coincides with the domain of what must exist at one time or another, as well as with the domain of what can exist in this world. As my reconstruction aims to highlight, Wolff’s answer to the question of what exists is that there exists all that fits into the causal connections characterizing the actual world and its proper nature. Nothing else exists or can (naturally) exist in this world. 2.

Fake entities

Wolff’s ontology treats the distinction between actualized possibilia and eternally unactualized possibilia as posterior to the more fundamental distinctions between possibilia and impossibilia, as well as between beings and non-beings. Both the existents and the possibles that never 19

Wolff [1731], § 111: “Extrinsece possibilia dicuntur quoque Possibilia huius mundi, quia cetera ipsis opposita existere nequeunt in hoc mundo, adeoque extrinsece impossibilia sunt”. Cf. Arndt [1989]. 20 That existence at some time is a necessary condition for extrinsic possibility is stated in Wolff [1731], § 112: “In mundo extrinsece possibile non est, nisi quod vel extitit, vel actu praesens est, vel olim existet”. Indeed, the concept of extrinsic possibility had already been introduced in Wolff [1730], § 175n, with relation to the concept of potential being.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

71

come to exist fall under the concept of ens. Only impossible objects, such as rectilinear biangles or iron made of silver, are excluded from the set of beings and labelled as ‘non-beings’. But is the set of non-beings really complementary to the set of beings? The question arises because, after characterizing non-being as the opposite of being, Wolff introduces a third ontological category, featuring objects that seem to lie, so to speak, halfway between beings and non-beings. These are fictive, or fictitious, beings, characterized by a sharp contrast between their apparent possibility and the actual impossibility of their existence: “That to which we assume existence is not repugnant, although it is actually repugnant to it, is called a ‘fictitious being’ (ens fictum)”.21 Fictitious beings are fake entities; they have “only the appearance of possibility”.22 It seems, then, that what distinguishes a fictitious being from a non-being (that is, from plain impossibilia, such as square circles and the like) is merely the fact that the former, contrary to the latter, is the object of a false belief concerning its possibility of existing.23 Indeed Wolff writes that we take a fictitious being to be possible because we are not aware of the contradiction involved in its concept. If, however, we were able to analyse the concept of a given fictitious being, we would discover a hidden contradiction, such that we could no longer deem it possible, nor would we hesitate to classify it among non-beings. Notice, further, that Wolff labels the concept we have of a given fictitious being as a “deceptive notion”, that is, as a composition of simpler concepts that are inconsistent with each other, and that cannot, therefore, constitute a genuine concept.24 Wolff clearly draws on Leibniz’s explanation of the (apparent) conceivability of impossible objects.25 Allow me to illustrate how this explanation works. Our language 21

Wolff [1730], § 140. Wolff [1719], § 16. 23 This is straightforwardly stated Ibid., § 16: “Wenn wir also das unmögliche vor mögliche halten und es davor ansehen, daß es seyn kan; so nennen wir es gleichfalls ein Ding, aber aus Irrthum, weil es in Ansehung unserer einen Schein der Möglichkeit hat”. 24 “Sumimus ideo eidem [sc. enti ficto] non repugnare existentiam, quod idem pro possibili habeamus, non advertentes contradictionem in notione ejus deceptrice latentem” (Wolff [1730], § 140n). Cf. Wolff [1728], § 38n: “[...] idea deceptrix proprie loquendo nulla est idea, sed talis tantummodo apparet”. 25 See Ibid., § 135. In the annotation to this paragraph, Wolff gives Leibniz’s famous example of an inconsistent complex notion (that of the fastest movement of a wheel) and mentions his source: Leibniz’s “Meditationes de cognitione, veritate, 22

72

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

allows us to join, for instance, the word ‘circle’ and the word ‘square’, both of which express proper concepts, in such a way that the resulting compound, ‘square circle’, is semantically empty, since there is nothing (no concept of an entity, no real essence) to be conceived under the words ‘square circle’. There is no square circle in the world, nor in the realm of ideas, nor in our mind: all there is is the phrase ‘square circle’, which we can utter and write and think. The doctrine of deceptive notions is, so to speak, the epistemological counterpart of the ontological doctrine of impossible objects: of course we can think of a non-being, but what our thought actually grasps is merely a string of words. Now, if the same doctrine applies to fictitious beings as well, it is difficult to see how these pseudo-beings can differ from square circles and the like. All of this seems to suggest that fictitious beings should not be regarded as forming an ontological category of their own, but rather as outright nonbeings that we happen to mistake for beings due to our lack of insight. To illustrate what sort of objects his theory refers to, Wolff lists some paradigmatic examples of fictitious beings. Interestingly, his list differs from the typical scholastic catalogue of entia ficta, to the extent that it features not only folkloric or mythological animals (chimeras, mermaids, etc.),26 but also scientific myths, or what we could view as some sort of failed posits, that is, hypothetical entities introduced to explain some natural phenomena, but later eliminated or forgotten, along with the theory that postulated their existence. As a fictitious being of this kind, Wolff mentions the “soul of the Earth” (anima telluris), held by Kepler to be responsible for weather changes and meteoric phenomena. If we seek further examples, Wolff suggests that we might simply take a look at scholastic physics.27 However, the choice of examples issued from science and philosophy not only serves to illustrate the general concept of ens fictum; rather, it also orients the reader’s understanding of the function of this concept in Wolff’s metaphysics. In my view, the category of fictitious beings is put forward by Wolff not as a mere classification device, but also as a

et ideis”, published in the Acta Eruditorum in November 1684 (see the text in Leibniz [1923–], series VI, vol. 4A, pp. 585–92). See Favaretti Camposampiero [2009], pp. 156–7. 26 See Ashworth [1977]. 27 Wolff [1730], § 140n. Cf. Wolff [1728], § 38n.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

73

polemic weapon to be used against non-mechanistic physical theories.28 What was at stake, however, was not a rearguard battle against scholastic or renaissance physics, as the examples above might suggest. Since 1710 at least, Wolff had been involved in fighting at Leibniz’s side against what appeared to both of them as a Newtonian attempt to restore the old mirage of attractive forces.29 As is well known, the big issue concerned the existence and nature of the force of gravity. Both Leibniz and Wolff saw the increasing appeal of Newtonian gravity in the scientific community as an unsettling reintroduction of the so-called occult qualities that had flourished in pre-mechanist physics, before they were justly banished by Descartes, Bacon, and Boyle.30 Far from opposing the champion of rationalism to the champions of experimental philosophy, Wolff viewed all of them as fighting on the same side, as they both argued against old and new occultist tendencies.31 He basically took himself to be defending the rationality gained by Cartesian mechanism (despite its many limitations) against the chimeras that were once again threatening scientific progress. Wolff’s move consists in ranging attractive forces and the like in the category of fictitious beings. This implies that such entities are to be eliminated from science not simply because they fail to exist, but, more fundamentally, because they cannot exist. Now, if Wolff’s move is not plain rhetoric, we may wonder what the argument supporting his claim might be. Why should we treat attractive forces as impossible fictions, radically incompatible with existence? The same question can be raised with respect to the creatures of our imagination: Why not range all those fabulous animals (chimeras, winged horses, etc.) among the possibilia that never exist? As I noted above, the Ontology’s paragraph on fictitious beings seems to trace their impossibility of existing back to a logical impossibility. According to this reading, Wolff would be claiming that the concepts of both attractive forces and chimeras contain a hidden contradic28

A somewhat similar point is made, with respect to Leibniz’s use of the label ‘occult quality’ (which I will discuss later), by Schaffer [1985], pp. 135–9. I think, however, that Schaffer tends to overemphasize the political–rhetorical function of Leibniz’s terminology. 29 See note 58 below. 30 Cf. Hesse [1978]. 31 See the vivid historical picture sketched in Wolff [1750], § 375n. On Boyle, cf. Wolff [1731], § 508n. On Clarke’s and Newton’s reactions to the charge of reintroducing occult qualities, see Vailati [1997], pp. 182–92.

74

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

tion, as do such concepts as “iron made of silver”. This reading provides, of course, a straightforward answer to the questions above. However, such answer is hardly convincing: unless the presence of a contradiction is proved in some way, any appeal to it becomes questionable. In my opinion, however, this reading is not faithful to Wolff’s ultimate views on the subject, even if it seems to fit well with the passage from the Ontology. As we will presently see, some of Wolff’s subsequent works suggest a fairly different picture of fictitious beings—a more refined picture, if I dare say. 3.

Hybrid structures

Let us consider, first, the case of chimeric animals.32 (Note that I will be using the word ‘chimera’, although Wolff does not use it, to refer generally to such imaginary hybrids as Wolff’s favourite example: a human torso joined to an ox’s head with a horse’s feet.) One of the characteristic features of chimeras is that—contrary to outright impossible objects like the rectilinear biangle, and also to less “concrete” objects like attractive forces—we experience no difficulty in imagining them. Indeed, we can form a mental representation of a chimera, as well as a “material” representation of it, like a painting or a sculpture.33 In the Ontology, Wolff mentions this feature of fictitious beings as one of the factors responsible for their false appearance of possibility.34 His conviction is, of course, that imaginability provides a very unreliable, or even harmful, criterion for possibility.35 However, the fact that (at least some) fictitious beings are imaginable, while outright impossible objects are not, stands in need of explanation. Given that a cognitive faculty—imagination—is involved, this issue is addressed not in the Ontology, but in the Empirical Psychology. 32

An earlier exposition of some of the following ideas, along with references to scholastic and modern sources, is given in Favaretti Camposampiero [2011b]. For a different reading of Wolff’s theory of fictitious beings, see Capozzi [2006]. 33 Cf. Wolff [1732], § 148. 34 Cf. Wolff [1730], § 140n: “Quoniam enim imaginationis vi combinari quaedam possunt, ideo ea sibi invicem minime repugnare nobis videntur, etsi fieri haud quaquam possit, ut extra eam istiusmodi quid existat”. 35 Cf. Wolff [1732], § 147n: “Videmus itaque, quam parum sit fidendum imaginationi, et quam caute sit procedendum, ne nobis ab eadem imponi patiamur.”

Dividing Fiction from Reality

75

Here, fictitious beings are viewed as the products of the faculty of feigning (facultas fingendi), a specialized sub-faculty of imagination, that functions by assembling mental representations so as to make up images of previously unseen objects.36 To put it briefly, Wolff’s solution to the puzzle of imaginability consists in distinguishing the external surface of an ens fictum from its internal structure. It is only the external surface of things that is represented by our imagination and manipulated by the facultas fingendi; and since the surface of a chimera contains no impossibility, chimeras are imaginable. On the contrary, impossible geometrical objects have no possible surface that could be represented: the essential structure of geometrical objects is their shape, so any inconsistency affecting the former would also make the latter impossible. This is why no image can be produced of rectilinear biangles and the like. This is not the only clarification proffered by a psychological point of view, that is, by viewing fictitious beings as objects represented by a specific kind of mental images. In Empirical Psychology, Wolff claims that a mental image (phantasma) represents a fictitious being if that image has been produced by putting together (images of) things that “are mutually repugnant to each other, or cannot be joined together in the same subject by the force of nature (naturae vi)”.37 The novelty, here, is the second disjunct. Its presence is not without consequence, for it apparently implies that the concept of ens fictum now has a wider extension than it had according to the previous, ontological definition. Absolute impossibility is no longer a necessary condition for being classified among fictitious beings. According to the new definition, the object of a mental representation is a fictitious being not only if it is composed of absolutely incompatible parts, but also if nature, understood as the totality of the forces acting in the world, is not able to produce it. Thus, among fictitious beings, we can find both things that cannot exist because of an intrinsic impossibility and things that cannot exist because they are just extrinsically impossible. In the latter case, the imagined being “lies outside the class of natural things (ex classe rerum naturalium exulat)”, since “there are no natural causes that could produce such a being from the existing matter”.38 If this is the case, than it would not be absolutely impossible for a chimera to exist. It would be impossible for 36

Cf. Ibid., § 144: “Facultas phantasmatum divisione ac compositione producendi phantasma rei sensu nunquam perceptae dicitur Facultas fingendi.” 37 Ibid., § 146. 38 Ibid., § 148n.

76

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

it to exist naturally, but God could bring a chimera into existence through a miracle.39 The attribution to chimeras of a possible supernatural existence is not, however, the only consequence of the new definition. Even granting that chimeras could exist by miracle in our actual world, we may still wonder whether they could exist (naturally) in any different possible worlds. At first glance, it seems that they could, if they are only extrinsically impossible. As hinted at above, in Wolff’s systematization of Leibnizian modal theory, any extrinsic impossibility is world-relative, since it is equated to the non-existence of sufficient efficient causes.40 An extrinsically impossible being is impossible only with respect to the series of interconnected things that constitute the actual world, that is, only insofar as this whole series does not contain any causes capable of producing that being. In the Empirical Psychology, Wolff explicitly holds that the impossibility of fictitious beings can be world-relative: a fictitious being is such that existence is “repugnant” to it, “if not absolutely, at least in relation to the actual world (in relatione ad mundum praesentem)”.41 Consequently, necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to the set of fictitious beings are now specified by means of a disjunction. We are allowed to classify an imaginable object among fictitious beings if, and only if, we have established that it “does involve a contradiction, either absolutely or relative to the actual series of things (in ordine ad praesentem seriem rerum)”.42 Quite visibly, the second disjunct poses a problem. If chimeras are not impossible in themselves, but only relative to the actual world—as Leibniz would say, if they are incompossible with what exists—then they can hardly be distinguished from merely possible entities. Both ficta and mere possibilia remain eternally unactualized; both are impossible-in-this-world. If no further impossibility is involved, why should ficta not be genuine beings, while possibilia are?

39

“Trunco humano jungimus caput cervinum, pedesque equinos: ecquis vero demonstret, vel in se repugnare, ut truncus humanus continuus sit capiti cervino et pedibus equinis, vel tale quid minimum vi naturae existere non posse, etsi in se non impossibile per miraculum ut existat minime repugnet?” (Ibid., § 146n). 40 On the concept of sufficient efficient cause, see Wolff [1730], §§ 897–9. 41 Wolff [1732], § 146. 42 Ibid., § 146n.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

77

Remember, however, that according to the definition given in the Ontology, a necessary condition for something to be a fictitious being is that we mistakenly ascribe to it the possibility of existing. Now, if a fictum’s impossibility can be either absolute or relative to the actual world, so is the possibility we ascribe to it. That is, the afore-mentioned definition of fictitious beings can be read as a general characterization allowing the following specifications. A fictitious being is either such that we assume that existence is not absolutely repugnant to it, although in fact it is, or such that we assume that existence is not repugnant to it in the actual world, although in fact it is. In this way, the repugnantia referred to in the Ontology is construed as a generic concept that can be further specified as either absolute or world-relative. This reading has the advantage of making the Ontology’s definition consistent with the doctrine stated in Empirical Psychology. Moreover, it provides a clear-cut distinction between ficta and mere possibilia. Suppose that there are chimeras in other possible worlds. We shall say, then, that chimeras are in themselves possible and that they become fictitious beings only if we falsely believe that they are also possible-in-this-world, that is, only if we credit them with the possibility of existing in the actual world. Under this construal, the definition above has the obvious consequence that any merely possible entity can always degenerate into a fictitious being, simply if it is taken to be possible-in-this-world. Although this consequence may be not too hard to swallow, I would argue that it shows that there must be something more to be said on the distinction between chimeras and possible nonexistents. We should consider, indeed, that the impossibility at stake in the chimeras’ case does not concern primarily single individuals, but is generalized to the kind as a whole. That is, it does not only prevent a particular chimeric specimen from existing, but it rules out, in general, the existence of any specimen of that kind. This is true of absolutely impossible chimeras, as well as of world-relatively impossible ones. Let’s suppose, for instance, that the hybrid of man, ox, and horse, turned out to be impossible only relative to the actual world. This would mean, according to Wolff’s doctrine of relative modalities, that there exist no natural causes with the power to generate a hybrid of man, ox, and horse, although such a hybrid is not logically impossible. Consider, by contrast, the case of nonexistent individual specimens belonging to a kind that happens to be instantiated in this world. Their non-existence is also due

78

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

to a causal deficiency: had my dog’s parents never met, my dog would have remained a merely possible individual, incompossible with the actual connections of things. But while in this latter case, the lack of causes is solely historical (our world does not generally lack natural causes capable of generating dogs), Wolff maintains that, in the case of impossible kinds, the relevant lack of causes is a structural fact. Indeed, the core of Wolff’s theory of the entia ficta lies in the claim that the “repugnancy” that prevents chimeric hybrids from existing is properly a structural inconsistency. What natural causes cannot produce is the very structure of a chimera, made up of the partial structures of different animals. The aforementioned concept of an inner structure is helpful, hence, not only to solve the puzzle of the chimeras’ imaginability. It also helps to dispel the apparent proximity of chimeric entities to mere possibilia by clarifying the modal status of the former. Let’s imagine a stag’s head joined to human body; as we know, no repugnancy is involved in imagining the external surface of a stag-headed man. But let’s suppose that we take the imagined being to be not just an empty surface, but a sort of living organism, endowed—as real animals are—with an internal structure that determines all of its motions and activity. We want the imagined head to have the internal structure that naturally belongs to stag heads, and the imagined body to have the same structure as a prototypical human body. What we are forging is, then, a fictitious being; for the structure of a stag’s head cannot fit together with the structure of a human body.43 Yet, once again, is this an absolute or a relative impossibility? Wolff’s answer is that we cannot tell, at least until science provides us with deeper insight into the internal structures of living bodies: If the internal structure of the stag and the human body were known enough from anatomy and every reason lied open in both, then it could perhaps be shown why it is repugnant that a stag’s head adhere to the trunk of human body. Or, if we grant that it is not repugnant simpliciter that a living human body be endowed with a stag’s head, then it could, nevertheless, be shown that in the nature of things there are no causes productive of such a being, if only the series of natural causes were sufficiently known to us.44 43

“Enimvero si tacite superaddimus, caput cervinum structuram habere debere internam, qualem in natura rerum habet, et similiter trunco corporis humani eam tribuimus structuram internam, quam nostrum habet; illae structurae internae naturae vi coëxistere nequeunt in eodem subjecto” (Ibid., § 148n). 44 Ibid.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

79

The questions of whether a chimera is impossible and whether this is so absolutely or relative to the actual world, are questions that empirical science alone, and not a priori reasoning, can answer. It is fairly clear, however, that in neither case are we faced with a logical impossibility. Although Wolff’s modal theory makes no explicit distinction between logical and metaphysical modalities, his reflections on fictitious beings seem to point to a distinction of this sort. Indeed, should the structural incompatibility between a stag’s head and a human body turn out to hold in all possible worlds, then it would be quite reasonable to deem it a metaphysical impossibility. On the other hand, the lack of natural causes that characterize what is impossible in relation to the actual world amounts clearly to a natural impossibility (which is narrower than the metaphysical, for Wolff holds that different possible worlds could have different natures and different systems of natural laws).45 4.

Absurdity and fiction

If the above reconstruction is sound, Wolff was to some extent aware that the non-existence of chimeric entities has little to do with logical impossibility. What the ontologist should be able to detect, in order to rule out chimeras from the world, is not, in fact, a formal contradiction hidden within the concept of such entities. Instead, it is something like a false component that blocks the working of the bodily machine to which it is joined. Hence, to eliminate fictive entities such as chimeras, we cannot resort to the principle of contradiction alone. Now, what about the other sorts of fictitious beings, such as attractive forces and occult qualities? Where does their impossibility stem from? Let’s begin with the somewhat better-defined question of whether any contradiction would arise by positing the existence of such entities. As hinted before, Wolff regards as impossible, i.e., as implying a contradiction, not only all that would contain incompatible features—that is, that which contradicts itself, such as iron wood46—but also that which contradicts a true proposition. (If I were to give an up-to-date formulation of this latter claim, I would propose the following: for every thinka45

See the definition of physical, viz. natural, necessity in Wolff [1731], § 109. On the possibility of alternative laws of nature, see Favaretti Camposampiero [2011a] and [forthcoming]. 46 Wolff [1730], §§ 79n, 83n. Cf. Wolff [1719], § 12.

80

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

ble object o, o is impossible if, were o to exist, this would make a contradiction true, by making true a proposition that is contradictory to a true proposition). The example adduced by Wolff to illustrate this second kind of impossibility and contradictoriness is the rectilinear biangle; the construction of this geometrical figure would contradict the axiom that, given two distinct points, there is only one straight line passing through both of them.47 In my view, it can be argued that Wolff was willing to ascribe a similar status to fictitious beings whose existence is postulated by wrong physical theories. At least some passages suggest, indeed, that we have a priori reasons for rejecting such entities, just as we have a priori reasons for rejecting rectilinear biangles: both conflict with some undeniable truth. Regarding the former entities, however, the true proposition that their existence would contradict is not an axiom of geometry, but the principle of sufficient reason. In a passage from his so-called Remarks on German Metaphysics, Wolff deals with the question of whether scientists may have recourse to fictions. Warning that not every fictional element is to be discarded as an utter absurdity and a mistake, he grants that some fictions are useful to science, and especially to the “art of discovery”, insofar as they allow our imagination to grasp what our intellect and reason have difficulty conceiving. He further urges the reader not to confuse these heuristic fictions with a different type of fictions, which are called “absurd”.48 In Wolff’s German terminology, this is a quasi-technical term. Its meaning is clarified in another work as follows: “What is called ‘absurd’ (ungereimet) is that which contradicts an evident truth”, and especially that which contradicts the principle of sufficient reason.49 In this sense, the tenets of classical atomism, for instance, are absurd, for they describe matter as though it were formed by tiny indivisible grains, separated by empty spaces. Wolff claims that such atoms of matter, as well as the empty spaces between them, are nothing but “fictitious beings, which 47

Wolff [1730], §§ 79n, 81n, 87. “Man muß sich aber in Acht nehmen, daß man nicht alles erdichtete für ungereimt hält, und für irrig ausgiebet: Denn die Fictiones oder Erdichtungen haben ihren grossen Nutzen in Wissenschafften, und insonderheit der Erfindungs-Kunst. Sie machen der Imagination oder Einbildungs-Krafft begreifflich, was durch Verstand und Vernunfft schweer zu erreichen ist, und im Erfinden leichte, ja möglich, was sonst nocht anders, als durch Umwege, oder wohl gar nicht heraus zu bringen wäre. Es ist aber freylich ein Unterschied zwischen solchen Fictionibus und andern, die ungereimet heissen” (Wolff [1724a], § 26). 49 Wolff [1723], § 6. 48

Dividing Fiction from Reality

81

subsist barely in the imagination, whereas they are contrary to reason, which subsists by the principle of sufficient reason”.50 What is absurd is everything that, although it is not in itself contradictory, could not exist without violating the principle of sufficient reason. How, then, is this principle to be understood? And why should the existence of entities such as attractive forces be incompatible with it?51 Wolff states the principle of sufficient reason in the following terms: “Nothing is without a sufficient reason why it is rather than is not”.52 According to this first formulation, Wolff’s principle is introduced as an ontological principle. Nevertheless, the concept of sufficient reason, which underpins the principle, is characterized in epistemological terms: the sufficient reason is “that from which it is understood (intelligitur) why something is”.53 This characterization allows a further statement of the principle, which is proposed as a mere clarification of the former. Indeed, the full passage reads: “Nothing is without a sufficient reason why it is rather than is not; that is, if something is posited to be, then something must be posited as well, from which it is understood why that thing is rather than is not”.54 Wolff clearly expects us to take the second formulation as equivalent to the first one. What this restatement makes explicit is simply the epistemological import of the principle of sufficient reason, as it affirms the intelligibility of all that there is—of all that exists as well as all that can exist. If something is such that no sufficient reason can be given for it—that is, if something is in principle inexplicable and unintelligible55—then not only does it fail to exist, but it is not even possible. Should the attractive forces turn out to conflict with the principle of sufficient reason because they don’t satisfy its requirement of intelligibility, then we ought to conclude, in line with Wolff’s assumptions, that they cannot exist in the actual world or in any other possible world. Indeed, 50

Ibid. A stimulating discussion of Leibniz’s own position on these issues is provided by Rutherford [1992]. 52 Wolff [1730], § 70. 53 Ibid., § 56. 54 Ibid., § 70. I have heavily modified the translation of this passage given by Look [2011], p. 210. 55 That something is intelligible and explicable insofar as it has a sufficient reason is clearly stated in Wolff [1719], § 77: “Denn so lange eine Sache einen Grund hat, warum sie ist, kan man erkennen, wie sie seyn kan, das ist, man kan sie begreiffen, und indem man es andern sagt, verständlich erklären”. 51

82

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

as we will see, Wolff does not deem a world in which such mysterious forces are free to act as a possible world. 5.

Nature and explanation

To generically designate those fictitious beings that are introduced by natural philosophy, Wolff revives the traditional expression ‘occult qualities’. The way he redefines this expression has, however, only a loose link with its original meaning. As recent scholarship has shown, in medieval and early-modern Peripatetic terminology the attribution of occultness to a quality did not carry in itself any pejorative connotation, for it merely expressed the epistemic status of certain qualities: the status of not being manifest.56 This overall meaning allowed, however, a twofold usage of the term ‘occult’. In a first sense, the term was used to refer to those qualities that are not manifest to the senses. This primal understanding of the epistemic distinction between occult and manifest in terms of accessibility to sense perception was, however, soon joined— and, eventually, superseded—by a different construal of the same distinction in terms of intelligibility, that is, accessibility to intellectual comprehension and explanation. The sophisticated rhetoric deployed by Leibniz in his letters to Clarke drew largely on this second usage of ‘occult’, in the sense of ‘unintelligible’,57 and established it as standard, at least among German philosophers. However, Wolff’s contribution to this terminological shift, although thus far neglected, was also decisive. His pronounced aversion to occult qualities was aroused, of course, by his involvement in Leibniz’s anti-Newtonian polemics;58 nonetheless, the 56

See Keith Hutchison’s [1982] groundbreaking article. Further classical studies on the subject include: Hutchison [1983]; Millen [1985]; Henry [1986]. 57 An insightful discussion of this point is in Brown [2007]. 58 Leibniz’s letters to Wolff contain many hints regarding how to counter Newtonian arguments by discrediting occult qualities. See especially Leibniz to Wolff, 23 December 1709: to John Keill’s defence of vacuum, Wolff should reply that the hypothesis of gravity as a primitive attribute of matter conflicts with the metaphysical principle “quod nihil sine ratione sive causa fiat [...]. Hoc principio sublato, reducentur qualitates occultae eaeque perpetuae et necessariae occultationis, et omnis sublata erit causas quaerendi necessitas” (Leibniz and Wolff [1860], p. 113). Wolff followed indeed Leibniz’s suggestion in his “Responsio ad epistolam Viri Clarissimi Johannis Keill”: see Wolff [1755], Section 1, pp. 41–4. Noteworthy is also Leibniz’s addition to a preliminary draft of Wolff’s review of Johann

Dividing Fiction from Reality

83

grounds for this aversion were deeply rooted in his naturalist world view. In his General Cosmology, Wolff characterizes an occult quality as a quality “that lacks a sufficient reason why it inheres (insit), or at least can inhere (inesse possit), in the subject”.59 This characterization of occult qualities as infringing upon the principle of sufficient reason is, of course, reminiscent of Leibniz’s attempt to clarify the notion of occult quality by juxtaposing it with the notion of miracle. According to Leibniz, a miracle is every phenomenon for which no explanation can be drawn from the nature of created things. We have an instance of a miracle, in the rigorous sense of the word, whenever an action is performed such that it surpasses the forces of creatures.60. So “the attraction of bodies, properly so called, is a miraculous thing, since it cannot be explained by the nature of bodies (par leur nature)”.61 In this sense, attraction at a distance is “supernatural”,62 for if such an effect were to take place, it could not be explained other than by postulating a miraculous intervention of God in the world or by ascribing to the bodies themselves an occult quality, a power that could not be derived from their own nature. Therefore, we could say that, in Leibniz’s eyes, recourse to occult qualities is the inevitable outcome of a desperate attempt to naturalize irreducibly supernatural phenomena, such as attraction at a distance, by adducing as their cause not God’s power, but a force immanent in the creatures themselves: I call a miracle any event which can only occur through the power of the Creator, its reason not lying in the nature of created things; and when nevertheless one would attribute it to the qualities or powers of created things, then I call this quality a scholastic occult quality (une qualité occulte à la scholastique); that is one that it is impossible to render clear (manifeste),

Freind’s Praelectiones chymicae (1710): see Leibniz and Wolff [1860], pp. 120–1. This addition was then included by Wolff in the final draft of his review published in the Acta Eruditorum, September 1710, pp. 412–6. Cf. Carboncini [2005], p. 27. 59 Wolff [1731], § 189. 60 See Leibniz to Conti, 6 December 1715, in Leibniz and Clarke [1957], p. 41; Eng. transl. in Leibniz and Clarke [1956], p. 184. 61 Leibniz’s Third Letter to Clarke, in Leibniz and Clarke [1957], p. 57; Eng. transl., p. 30. 62 Leibniz’s Fourth Letter to Clarke, in Leibniz and Clarke [1957], p. 99; Eng. transl., p. 43.

84

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero such as a primitive heaviness; for the occult qualities which are not chimerical are those whose cause we do not know but do not exclude.63

Leibniz takes the occult qualities of the Schoolmen to be chimerical insofar as their naturalization is ruled out from the outset. Namely, it is impossible to account for them by giving a reason grounded in the nature of bodies. And it is impossible on principle, not just because of our epistemic limitations: scholastic occult qualities are essentially nonnaturalizable; hence, they cannot be introduced as part of a naturalistic explanation of phenomena. Now, let’s consider again Wolff’s characterization of occult qualities as lacking a sufficient reason of its inherence in things. By comparison with Leibniz, it seems that Wolff omits any mention of a key concept, that is, the proper nature of created things.64 However, mention of it is made soon after: So, for example, gravity is an occult quality, if it is conceived as a primitive force, or as a force impressed by God on matter, a force for which no reason can be given a priori from the natures of things. Even the motive force is such, if it is taken to be a primitive force impressed by God on matter in the first creation of things.65

Hence, if forces or powers of this kind existed, they could not be natural, according to Wolff’s clarification of the concept of natural by means of the concept of reason. Whereas scholastic lexica explained the term ‘natural’ simply by saying that it means “according to nature” (secundum naturam), Wolff is proud to supply a more distinct explanation.66 For a power (or a property, or a modification, etc.) to be natural, or according to nature, means that it is such that the reason of it could in principle be deduced from the proper nature of the being to which it belongs.67 63

Leibniz to Conti, 9 April 1716, in Leibniz and Clarke [1957], p. 64; Eng. transl., pp. 187–188. 64 Wolff characterized the nature of a being as the “internal principle of the actions and passions” of that being; accordingly, the nature of a body will be the sum of the forces (active and inertial) and powers (of acting, as well as of being acted upon) that give reason for all changes of that body (Wolff [1731], § 145). 65 Ibid., § 189n. 66 The source mentioned by Wolff is Goclenius [1613], p. 744. 67 Wolff states both a general and a more specific characterization: “Naturale in genere dicitur, cujus ratio in essentia et natura entis continetur. In mundo autem

Dividing Fiction from Reality

85

Interestingly, the accusation of introducing occult qualities is raised by Wolff against any attempt to adduce God’s will as the reason that explains the features and behaviour of things. We should remember that, especially in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, the most prominent threat to a naturalist worldview was represented by voluntarist theology. Voluntarism makes the very essences of things, and not only their existence, depend on divine decrees, such that no room is left for further explanation regarding why things are as they are. Wolff’s defence of naturalism consists in maintaining a sharp distinction between actuality, which certainly depends on God’s will, and possibility, for which God’s will is actually irrelevant. According to Wolff, the natural sciences only address possibility, since they are not concerned with individual things, which alone are actual, but with general entities, which are merely possible.68 That is why scientific theories are not allowed to appeal to God’s will as an explanatory principle. If they do, they forge fictitious entities and occult qualities: “If in sciences something is assumed that admittedly has no other reason (Grund) but the will of God, then said thing is something fictitious (etwas erdichtetes) and an occult quality (eine verborgene Eigenschaft), which is by its nature unintelligible (unbegreiflich)”.69 Occult qualities are thus, in principle, inexplicable.70 This is not, however, the only reason for discarding them from scientific theories. Their second failure is that they are not really explanatory—that is, by introducing them, no real progress is made in explaining phenomena. This line of criticism is developed by Wolff in the section of his Logic devoted to his theory of concepts. Wolff tries to dispel the belief in occult qualities by uncovering its psychological origin in our tendency to trace every effect we may observe back to some alleged cause. When considering, for instance, magnetic attraction, Wolff is careful to set the phenomenon itself apart from any hypothesis that has been forged to explain it. He is not willing to deny the former or its empirical evidence, adspectabili materiali Naturale appellatur, cujus ratio in essentia et natura corporum continetur” (Wolff [1731], § 509). 68 Cf. Wolff [1719], § 991. I think this claim about the scope of natural sciences should not be viewed as a clue to Wolff’s disregarding existence. More plausibly, it originates from Wolff’s appreciation of the fact that natural laws are expressed by means of universally quantified sentences. 69 Ibid., § 992. 70 Cf. Wolff’s “Responsio ad imputationes Johannis Freindii” (1711), in Wolff [1755], Section 1, pp. 56–63, esp. 61–2.

86

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

for, as a “natural effect”, it is something we can certainly represent in our mind: “We have a notion of this attraction, insofar as it is a phenomenon, that is, a natural effect (effectus naturae)”.71 We know the effect, yet we ignore its cause. Some tension inevitably arises from this epistemic situation, for our reason convinces us that there must be some cause. Then, in an attempt to fill the gap in our representation of the causal chain, “by way of anticipation”, we introduce a term, such as ‘attractive force’, which is meant to designate that still-unknown cause. Instead of being content with that, however, we tend to assign some representational content to the word ‘attractive force’, by regarding this force “as an entity” (per modum entitatis) that dwells in the magnet—an entity that should bring about the motion of the iron towards the magnet. Through this process, we eventually have two distinct beings, but only one notion. In fact, we did nothing but “transfer to the cause” the notion of the effect—that is, the notion acquired by observing the phenomenon of attraction. The result is that we think we have a genuine notion of the attractive force, but this is only a “deceptive notion”, a psychological illusion brought about by our having a term which is meant to designate this alleged entity and its alleged causal powers.72 Of course, this attempt to eliminate attractive forces by treating them as empty words and deceptive notions may sound rather hasty. Wolff himself must have felt some unease, for in the following paragraph he grants that one can have a genuine notion of the cause of a phenomenon, even if this cause is totally unknown, provided only that she refrains from “transferring” the notion of the effect to the notion of the cause. There is a safe way of conceiving the unknown cause of a given effect without forging anything impossible: this way consists of representing that cause as a being from which this effect can follow. Thus, one can legitimately claim to possess a (genuine) notion of the magnet’s attractive force, insofar as she conceives it as the (otherwise unknown) being that makes iron approach and adhere to the magnet. The difference from the previous case is that, in the present case, one does not take her notion of the effect to constitute the notion of the cause. At any rate, not even this genuine notion, insofar as it contains nothing further than the representation of the phenomenon itself, can be used to explain magnetic attraction. Wolff’s contention is that explanations of this sort are circular. Hence, they fail to explain anything: to say that the at71 72

Wolff [1728], § 136n. Ibid.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

87

tractive force is the cause of magnetic attraction just amounts to saying “that iron moves towards the magnet and adheres to it because it moves towards the magnet and adheres to it”,73 which obviously infringes upon the principle that “the same cannot be explained by the same”.74 But once the actual identity of the two notions is unveiled, Wolff feels entitled to discard one of them as not genuine. If one believes he has a notion of the cause when all he can actually conceive is the effect itself, then the former notion is, once again, deceptive. Hence, any appeal to unknown causes to explain natural phenomena makes the (otherwise genuine) notion of the cause “degenerate” into a deceptive notion.75 Wolff’s strategy does not aim to deny the phenomena of magnetic and gravitational attraction, nor to deny that there is some force causing them. He points, rather, to the intrinsic vacuity of our representations of such forces, which we actually know—let me put it in Russellian terms—only by description, as being the cause of magnetism, or of gravity, etc. The error Wolff denounces consists in granting our notions of these forces with an explanatory power that they cannot have, since all we know about them is nothing further than the very effects that they should explain. Clearly enough, in rejecting attractive forces as pseudoexplanatory, Wolff is guided by his commitment to a specific pattern of scientific explanation: the mechanistic model, especially in its Cartesian version. Despite his early rejection of the Cartesian philosophical system, Wolff’s initial admiration for Descartes’ epistemological project was still intact in the 1730s. In Ontology, Descartes is credited with being the first to give “a distinct explanation” of magnetic attraction, as well as with showing that scholastic philosophers had no notion at all of the attractive force they introduced as the cause of that phenomenon.76 In Wolff’s eyes, there is one crucial difference between the Cartesian explanation and the scholastic pseudo-explanation, and it lies precisely in this: the former is “distinct” and therefore intelligible. Descartes, writes 73

Ibid., § 137n. Ibid., § 137 (“cum idem per idem explicari non possit”). 75 Ibid. The force of gravity is dealt with in the same manner: “Similiter si quis gravitatem concipit per vim, qua corpus fertur versus centrum terrae; is utique habet ejus notionem. Enimvero rationem redditurus, cur corpora versus centrum ferantur, si affirmet, id fieri propter gravitatem, et hanc ejus causam alleget; is dicit, ea ferri versus centrum Terrae, quia versus terrae centrum feruntur, adeoque denuo nugatur” (Ibid., § 137n). 76 Wolff [1730], § 63n. 74

88

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

Wolff, “rejected the occult qualities of the scholastics, such as the attractive force of the magnet, because it would determine the magnetic phenomena in a way inexplicable in itself”.77 For those occult qualities, Descartes “substituted manifest causes, such as the atmosphere of magnetic effluvia, because in that way, magnetic phenomena are explained in an intelligible manner, that is, because in that way sufficient reasons are given for what there is”.78 The shift from ‘distinct’ to ‘intelligible’ is not unjustified, for the Cartesian principle of clarity and distinctness is construed by Wolff as expressing, in a less perspicuous formulation, the same requirement of intelligibility that is expressed, in its accomplished form, by Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason.79 6.

Unintelligible causation

Both the Cartesian and the more refined Leibnizian epistemological principles are praised by Wolff for leading to a purified ontology by ruling out all entities that do not conform to some standard of intelligibility. Epistemology is, thus, entrusted with the task of setting the standards for ontological respectability. This conforms, of course, to a rationalistic assumption: nothing exists or happens that one could not (in principle) explain intelligibly. The assumption is not, however, merely dogmatic, for it is based on a clear picture of how the world would be if some unexplainable states of affairs were to take place in it. Wolff ascribes to Descartes the straightforward project of “eliminating from philosophy the occult qualities, which are not explainable in an intelligible manner”.80 He further claims that, in doing so, Descartes showed that he was aware, although perhaps confusedly, of the differ77

Ibid., § 321n. Elsewhere, however, the acknowledgement of Descartes’ merit is counterbalanced by a criticism of his inclination to feign hypotheses. Cf. Wolff [1755], Section 3, p. 143: “Etsi autem hodie plerique a confusis notionibus in Philosophia naturali abhorreant, nec occultas scholae qualitates, sympathias et antipathias, vires attractrices aliaque hujus generis complura luxuriantis imaginationis monstra probent; exemplo tamen Cartesii in fingendi licentiam prolapsi hypotheses ad arbitrium exsculpunt et scientiae progressui obicem ponunt.” 78 Wolff [1730], § 321n. Note that, terminologically, Wolff still moulds his distinction into the ancient opposition between ‘occult’ and ‘manifest’. 79 Cf. Ibid. 80 Ibid., § 71n.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

89

ence between causes and reasons.81 In my view, this is a crucial point for understanding the ontological disqualification of occult qualities. Wolff warns us that the principle of sufficient reason cannot be reduced to the scholastic axiom that nothing is without a cause. In virtue of this adage, scholastic physics was far from allowing the existence of uncaused effects; even in the case of magnetic attraction, for instance, it was granted that this phenomenon must have its cause. Wolff, however, points out that this endorsement of the causality principle did not prevent scholastics from admitting the existence of effects that have no sufficient reason. Indeed, “since they did not deem it necessary to explain magnetic attraction by this attractive force in an intelligible manner, they persuaded themselves that it [sc. magnetic attraction] could certainly subsist without any sufficient reason”.82 Bare causes are not enough to meet the requirement of intelligibility expressed by the principle of sufficient reason; by positing an unintelligible causal link, no sufficient reason is given of the effect that had to be explained. I think the main interest in Wolff’s somewhat partisan reconstruction is that it depicts the opposition between scholastic and Cartesian physics as an epistemological conflict with an ontological fallout. Wolff characterizes the scholastic front of the conflict as reliant on an epistemology that does not exclude all unintelligible causal links (namely, links that cannot be reduced to the model of mechanical interaction among bodies). This epistemology, therefore, finds it legitimate to introduce ad hoc entities playing the role of causes, even if the causal action those entities are supposed to exert cannot be specified other than through the notion of the resulting effect. On the other hand, the Cartesian front is viewed as supporting the claim that the ontology of physics should allow only what fits into causal links that can be described in a non-circular fashion and in purely mechanical terms. In a further passage, Wolff writes that the Cartesian rejection of occult qualities testifies to Descartes’ awareness of the difference “between determination considered in itself and sufficient reason”.83 Clearly enough, this distinction overlaps with the previously stated distinction

240–8.

81

A differently oriented reading of this claim is given by Carraud [2002], pp.

82

Wolff [1730], § 71n. Ibid., § 321n.

83

90

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

between cause and reason.84 Of course, Wolff’s primary aim in separating reasons from causes, as well as sufficient reasons from determinations, is to develop the conceptual framework he needs to cope with the treacherous issues related to free will. As is well known, the most persistent charge against Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason is that it is incompatible with free will. In order to rule out this alleged incompatibility, Wolff points out that the availability of sufficient reasons within a series of things does not affect the modal status of the things themselves. Consider two causally related things, A and B, and let A be the “determinant” as well as the sufficient reason for B. Although these two functions of the former thing always occur jointly—that is, nothing is a full determinant that is not, at the same time, a sufficient reason85—they are nevertheless conceptually distinct. Indeed, “A is the sufficient reason for B, not to the extent that it [sc. B] exists, since in this respect A is the determinant (determinans) of B, but to the extent that through A, it can be understood why B is rather than is not”.86 Hence, it is the presence of a determinant that makes something necessary (i.e., either absolutely or hypothetically necessary, as the case may be), while all that a sufficient reason does is make it possible “to explain in an intelligible manner why something is”.87 Perhaps we would expect that, at this point, Wolff would maintain that there are some events (namely people’s free choice) for which some reason can indeed be given, although they are not strictly determined by any other previous event. Quite on the contrary, Wolff is far from suggesting such a non-deterministic account of free will. The point he is trying to make is that no necessity follows from there being a sufficient reason. His argument consists in removing “by means of a fiction” the

84

Indeed, a few lines below, we read: “Leibnitio attendenti ad differentiam, quae inter explicationes phaenomenorum naturalium scholasticas et Cartesianas intercedit, affulsit notio rationis sufficientis in abstracto, ut intelligeret rationem sufficientem esse aliquid amplius quam causam” (Ibid.). Note that here Wolff clearly traces the origin of the concept of sufficient reason back to the debate on scientific explanation. 85 Cf. Ibid., § 116 (“Determinantia sunt ratio sufficiens determinati”) and § 117n (“Complexus nimirum omnium eorum, quae in determinationem alicujus influunt, rationem sufficientem constituit”). 86 Ibid., § 321. 87 Ibid.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

91

sufficient reason from the determinants.88 It consists, namely, in imagining a world in which the conceptual distinction between determinants and reasons is, in fact, an actual separation. Wolff argues that if we imagine that an event lacks any sufficient reason, no change is thereby made in the necessity of the event itself. The purpose of this “fiction” is, thus, to bolster the thesis that affirms the modal innocence of the principle of sufficient reason. What is relevant to our present concerns, however, is that the same fiction portrays the world as it would be if fictive entities such as attractive forces were to exist. Indeed, Wolff is adamant in holding that the world represented by this fiction is the very world inhabited by the occult qualities that many scholastic as well as Newtonian physicists vainly introduce in order to explain the natural phenomena of the actual world. The fiction at stake is just the “rough fiction” of the fabulous world, “the most absurd among fables”.89 Wolff explicitly draws on the folktale of Schlaraffenland, the Land of Cockaigne, which presents a fantastic world where all that is needed for something to become real is that someone wants this to happen. According to Wolff, this “silly fable”, which is traditionally intended to make people laugh, deserves, in fact, a philosopher’s careful attention, since it highlights, by way of contrast, “the force and efficacy of the principle of sufficient reason”.90 The hallmark of the fabulous world is that the principle of sufficient reason has no absolute power in it. Under philosophical scrutiny, the Land of Cockaigne reveals how it is fabricated. It arises in our imagination when the sufficient reason for what happens is removed and replaced with human will. In such a world, it is possible for things to happen for no other reason than that we want them to happen. Wolff reports part of the traditional description: Should you fancy a cherry, then a tree will appear at your command, laden with ripe cherries, which will themselves throw out their stones and fly directly into your mouth.91 The centrality of this theme in Wolff’s ontological doctrine has already been convincingly argued.92 What still calls for attention, in my view, is Wolff’s insistence on the causal integrity of the fabulous world. 88

“[...] per fictionem [ratio sufficiens] a determinantibus removeatur” (Ibid.,

§ 321n).

89

Ibid., § 77n. Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 See Carboncini [1991], esp. pp. 85–9. 90

92

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

In spite of the possible absence of any sufficient reason, the events described by the folk tale do not lack their causes: [...] once the principle of sufficient reason is removed, the true world turns into the fabulous world, where there are, of course, causes for the things that exist, but by those causes, it cannot be explained in an intelligible manner why, if they are posited, then other things are posited. Even in the fabulous world, in which man’s will stands in for the reason for what happens, a determination takes place, for [the things that happen] are determined by man’s will. This determination, however, occurs without a sufficient reason, since from man’s will things follow such that it cannot be understood how they follow from that.93

Events in fiction are just as determined and causally linked to each other as they are in the real world. The difference is that, in the fabulous world, it is often the case that no intelligible reason can be given for why something brings about something else. This incomprehensibility of at least some of its cause–effect sequences is, thus, a distinctive feature of the fabulous world, affecting humanly directed events as well as purely “physical” ones. In the passages we just quoted, Wolff is concerned with physical effects that are inexplicably brought about by human volition. It is clear, however, that all causal chains in the fabulous world, whether or not they depend on a volition, are deemed to be possibly unintelligible. That is why, immediately after the last quoted passage, Wolff goes on praising Descartes’ rejection of occult qualities. Such qualities would actually enjoy an inexplicable causal efficacy, just as human wishes do in the Land of Cockaigne. Hence, the nexus rerum, namely the order that makes the “true world” different from the partially chaotic worlds of fairytales,94 does not consist in mere causal connections. Indeed, if we observe our world’s natural phenomena, we can see that the determining reasons never happen to be separated from the sufficient reasons: the causes determining an event “contain”, indeed, the sufficient reason for what is determined.95 Nevertheless, Wolff deems it a serious mistake to identify determining reasons with the sufficient reasons, “since it could be as93

Wolff [1730], § 321n. “Chaos dicitur moles rudis et indigesta, hoc est, in qua coëxistentia juxta principium rationis sufficientis non sunt ordinata, consequenter nec ullae juxta idem continuo sese excipiunt mutationes” (Wolff [1737], § 401). 95 Wolff [1730], § 321n. 94

Dividing Fiction from Reality

93

sumed that determination would take place even where the sufficient reason was feigned to be banished”.96 What results from such makebelieve is, of course, the fabulous world, where “the sufficient reason is detached (divellitur) from the determinant”: In the fabulous world there are causes of things, that is, beings exist that have forces sufficient to determine the actuality of another being that is not [i.e., that does not yet exist], but sufficient reasons are lacking, insofar as it is not possible to understand a priori how these beings would determine the actuality of what is not.97

This systematic violation of the principle of sufficient reason has detrimental consequences for the logic and epistemology of fictitious entities, for it entails that no universal proposition about the fabulous world will be true, and that even singular propositions will at most be true “for an instant”.98 Hence, were the actual world a fabulous world—were entities such as attractive forces existing things—then no science would ultimately be possible.99 Conclusion In the first section of this paper, I suggested that Wolff’s notion of existence is deeply tied to his most basic notion of nexus. The necessary condition for something to be able to exist is that it be connected to a possible series of things; and the necessary condition for something to actually exist is that it be connected to the actual series of things. Essentially, the serial connections anything must fit into are presented by Wolff as causal chains. However, our survey of his doctrine of fictitious beings has led to the conclusion that causality is not, in itself, sufficient to characterize the relevant connections that structure both the actual and every possible world. On the contrary, causal connections must further, and primarily, qualify as intelligible in order to have ontological import. 96

Ibid. Ibid. 98 Ibid., § 499. A less sketchy account of this point would require an exposition of Wolff’s doctrine of transcendental or metaphysical truth, which I cannot even attempt here. See again Carboncini [1991]. 99 Wolff [1730], §§ 500–1. 97

94

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

We may perhaps stigmatize as outer rationalism Wolff’s refusal to assume entities that would fail to satisfy his standards of intelligibility. What I think we should not do, however, is to take Wolff’s confidence in the rational structure of the world to be a source of ontological prodigality. In light of his efforts to detect grounds for dividing the possible from the impossible, and the real from the fictitious, Wolff’s ontology turns out to be far more parsimonious than many have supposed. References Arndt H.W. [1989], “Zu Christian Wolffs Theorie Möglicher Welten”, Il cannocchiale, 2–3, pp. 175–91. Ashworth E.J. [1977], “Chimeras and Imaginary Objects: A Study in the Post-Medieval Theory of Signification”, Vivarium, 15, pp. 57–79. Brown G. [2007], “«Is the Logic in London Different from the Logic in Hannover?» Some Methodological Issues in Leibniz’s Dispute with the Newtonians over the Cause of Gravity”, in P. Phemister and S. Brown (eds.), Leibniz and the English-Speaking World, Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 145–62. Capozzi M. [2006], “Biangoli rettilinei e centauri: l’ontologia di Wolff e Meinong”, in R.M. Calcaterra (ed.), Le ragioni del conoscere e dell’agire. Scritti in onore di Rosaria Egidi, F. Angeli, Milano, pp. 44–56. Carboncini S. [1991], Transzendentale Wahrheit und Traum. Christian Wolffs Antwort auf die Herausforderung durch den Cartesianischen Zweifel, Frommann–Holzboog, Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt. Carboncini S. [2005], “Nuovi aspetti del rapporto tra Christian Wolff e Leibniz. Il caso della Monadologie”, in L. Cataldi Madonna (ed.), Macht und Bescheidenheit der Vernunft. Beiträge zur Philosophie Christian Wolffs, Olms, Hildesheim, pp. 11–45. Carraud V. [2002], Causa sive ratio. La raison de la cause, de Suarez à Leibniz, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Favaretti Camposampiero M. [2009], Conoscenza simbolica. Pensiero e linguaggio in Christian Wolff e nella prima età moderna, Olms, Hildesheim. Favaretti Camposampiero M. [2011a] “What Follows from the Contingency of Natural Laws? Christian Wolff’s Reaction to a Leibnizian

Dividing Fiction from Reality

95

Argument”, in H. Breger et al. (eds.), IX. Internationaler LeibnizKongress. Natur und Subjekt, Hannover, pp. 341–50. Favaretti Camposampiero M. [2011b], “Wolfius in fabula. L’ontologia dei ficta”, in F. Fabbianelli et al. (eds.), Zwischen Grundsätzen und Gegenständen. Untersuchungen zur Ontologie Christian Wolffs, Olms, Hildesheim, pp. 51–63. Favaretti Camposampiero M. [forthcoming], “Leggi di natura e mondi possibili: Leibniz, Wolff e Bilfinger”. Goclenius R. [1613], Lexicon philosophicum, quo tanquam clave philosophiae fores aperiuntur, Francofurti; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1980. Henry J. [1986], “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory”, History of Science, 24, pp. 335–81. Hesse M.B. [1978], “Action at a Distance”, in E. McMullin, The Concept of Matter in Modern Philosophy, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, pp. 119–37. Honnefelder L. [1990], Scientia transcendens. Die formale Bestimmung der Seiendheit und Realität in der Metaphysik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, Meiner, Hamburg. Hutchison K. [1982], “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?”, Isis, 73, pp. 233–53. Hutchison K. [1983], “Supernaturalism and the Mechanical Philosophy”, History of Science, 21, pp. 297–333. Leibniz G.W. [1875–90], Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. by C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols., Weidmann, Berlin; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1965. Leibniz G.W. [1923–], Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Akademie Verlag, Berlin. Leibniz G.W., Clarke S. [1956], The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Optiks, ed. by H.G. Alexander, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Leibniz G.W., Clarke S. [1957], Correspondance Leibniz-Clarke présentée d’après les manuscrits originaux des bibliothèques de Hanovre et de Londres, ed. by A. Robinet, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Leibniz G.W., Wolff C. [1860], Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz und Christian Wolff, ed. by C.I. Gerhardt, Halle; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1963.

96

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero

Look B.C. [2011], “Grounding the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Leibnizian Rationalism and the Humean Challenge”, in C. Fraenkel et al. (eds.), The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Innovation, Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 201–19. Loux M.J. [1998], Metaphysics. A Contemporary Introduction, Routledge, London. Millen R. [1985], “The Manifestation of Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution”, in M.J. Osler and P.L. Farber (eds.), Religion, Science, and Worldview. Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 185–216. Rutherford D.P. [1992], “Leibniz’s Principle of Intelligibility”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 9, pp. 35–49. Schaffer S. [1985], “Occultism and Reason”, in A.J. Holland (ed.), Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, pp. 117–43. Vailati E. [1997], Leibniz and Clarke. A Study of Their Correspondence, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wolff C. [1719], Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt [=Deutsche Metaphysik], Halle; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1983. Wolff C. [1723], Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Würckungen der Natur, Halle; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1981. Wolff C. [1724a], Anmerckungen über die vernünfftigen Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, Franckfurt am Mayn; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1983. Wolff C. [1724b], Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dinge, den Liebhabern der Wahrheit mitgetheilet, Halle; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1980. Wolff C. [1728], Philosophia rationalis sive Logica, methodo scientifica pertractata, 3 vols., Francofurti et Lipsiae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1983. Wolff C. [1730], Philosophia prima, sive Ontologia, methodo scientifica pertractata, Francofurti et Lipsiae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1962. Wolff C. [1731], Cosmologia generalis, methodo scientifica pertractata, Francofurti et Lipsiae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1964. Wolff C. [1732], Psychologia empirica, methodo scientifica pertractata, Francofurti et Lipsiae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1968.

Dividing Fiction from Reality

97

Wolff C. [1737], Theologia naturalis, methodo scientifica pertractata. Pars Posterior, Francofurti et Lipsiae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1980. Wolff C. [1741], Horae subsecivae Marburgenses. Anni 1731. Trimestre aestivum, Francofurti et Lipsiae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1983. Wolff C. [1750], Philosophia moralis sive Ethica, methodo scientifica pertractata. Pars prima, Halae Magdburgicae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1970. Wolff C. [1755], Meletemata mathematico-philosophica cum erudito orbe literarum commercio communicata, Halae Magdeburgicae; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim, 1974. Wolff C. [1996], Discursus praeliminaris de philosophia in genere. Einleitende Abhandlung über Philosophie im allgemeinen. Historischkritische Ausgabe, ed. by G. Gawlick and L. Kreimendahl, Fromman– Holzboog, Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt.

“Nature Is the Realm of the Incomprehensible” (E. Husserl, 1920): Existence and Nature, with a Phenomenological Tale Matteo Giannasi They say that fire and water, and earth and air, all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art, and that as to the bodies which come next in order— earth, and sun, and moon, and stars,— they have been created by means of these absolutely inanimate existences. The elements are severally moved by chance and some inherent force according to certain affinities among them—of hot with cold, or of dry with moist, or of soft with hard, and according to all the other accidental admixtures of opposites which have been formed by necessity. After this fashion and in this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only.

– Plato, Laws, 889, b 1–c 6. 1.

A widespread attitude

Naturalism is a widespread attitude nowadays, both within philosophy and without it. It is a mainstream position in analytic philosophy and it is widely accepted or at least not openly rejected by quite some phenomenologists, hermeneutic philosophers and thinkers along the lines of Criti-

100

Matteo Giannasi

cal Theory. Naturalism is also—perhaps obviously—a dominant attitude in the sciences, so dominant that its spreading might even be identified with the expansion of the sciences themselves and their breaking ground in new fields. Finally, naturalism is attested in contemporary common sense—influenced as it is by millennia of philosophy and centuries of sciences. Naturalism is not just a position one can expect to find, in all its nuances, in philosophical debates. It is a broadly accepted framework in cognitive science, psychiatry, psychology, in larger and larger areas of the social sciences, in common sense and medical practice and in ethics. It is even spreading to legal practice and jurisprudence, where received views regarding subjectivity, agency and responsibility are being replaced or transformed by recent philosophical debates and to a much larger extent by neurobiological discoveries and models.1 Naturalism is therefore not only a purely theoretical position, but rather an attitude that can be considered to have very relevant ethical, social and political implications, as Plato already seems to have noticed.2 In the present paper, I will first try to point out some interesting aspects of naturalism’s relation with the concept of nature itself. I will then try to illustrate some features of the concept of nature, that make it an incredibly central notion in the history of philosophy and of intellectual research; I will then indicate an unsettling aspect of naturalism, and I will discuss Husserl’s theoretical proposal about it. 2.

Naturalism and natural sciences

Naturalism is not only a very complex attitude, but also a thesis, a sort of conviction, or deep-rooted feeling, if you prefer: a belief in the truth of the proposition that everything—at bottom, at least—is natural, that nature is the ontological background of all (real) entities.3 This formulation is little more than trivial, but it acquires a particular philosophical pregnancy in some interpretations of what the word ‘natural’ can be taken to mean. ‘Nature’ and ‘natural’ are both ordinary expressions and philo1

See the debate on ethic and juridical aspects of neurobiological models of agency in Geyer [2004], and in Singer [2003]. See also Roth [2003] and Roth [2004]. 2 See below. 3 See Husserl [1911], p. 13.

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

101

sophical terms of art, which have been used in very different ways in different periods; ‘naturalism’ can be taken to mean very different things in different periods or texts. Not all naturalistic philosophers embrace a specific definition of nature and the natural, or propose any analysis of those concepts at all; some defer the question of what should count as natural to the natural sciences, such as (typically) physics,4 but also biology and neuroscience. But of course naturalism cannot be taken to coincide with the simple idea that all things are such as science will discover them to be.5 The question of what is natural and what is nature has met with widespread indifference for quite some decades, despite the spreading of naturalism to larger and larger areas of culture and philosophy. These questions seem all too naïve and indeed do not seem to deserve any philosophical attention: for decades, naturalistic philosophers and physicalists in particular have been writing that by ‘physical’ and ‘natural’ one can mean, respectively, whatever physical or natural science will end up talking about, a view that does not commit philosophers to a specific forecast as to what will turn out to be the core aspects of reality as described in future science. I frankly find that a somewhat facile attitude, and I think that perhaps one should look more carefully into the definiens/definiendum relation among the notions of nature and natural science. One could wonder what it is about the natural sciences that makes them so explicative and fruitful, with respect to other sciences, and whether it is a pure verbal coincidence that the sciences called ‘natural’ do in fact have more explicative power than many other sciences, so much that some natural scientists and naturalistic philosophers even question the legitimacy of referring to social sciences as ‘sciences’ at all. That could indeed be a way of looking at it: naturalistic philosophers can be totally noncommittal with respect to what natural science will end up talking about, they just are very aware of the superiority of those sciences over other sciences and other belief systems (religions, philosophies). Or perhaps they do not even venture into the future and rather try to develop a philosophy which takes into account what natural sciences are saying about the world now. Both attitudes are legitimate, of course, but the question remains: can we rest content with the idea that natural sci4

See Kim [1998], Kim [2005]. As the notion of science includes the idea of knowing (scire) and knowing is factive, the position that all things are as science will discover them to be is indeed quite trivial. 5

102

Matteo Giannasi

ence is successful and that philosophy should take its findings seriously, or should we perhaps ask ourselves whether there is something nature that may contribute to explain why natural sciences are so successful?6 And that their being all ‘natural’ sciences, their focusing on what they take to be ‘natural’ properties of objects may in fact have something to do with their success and intellectual fecundity? It could actually be maintained—but this is not the subject of the present article—that what is so special about natural sciences is precisely their reference to certain types regularities, which are taken to be natural; that naturalism is the conviction that those regularities are the only relevant ones; that, ideally, at least, only theories that do not recur to nonnatural properties are scientifically admissible. This is, notoriously, Husserl’s own position, according to which it is not what modern society calls ‘natural’ science that determines the meaning of ‘natural’ and the difference between natural and non-natural entities, but it is rather the difference between natural and non-natural entities and the fact that certain sciences only focus on natural entities, that makes those sciences natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften); and, furthermore, for Husserl, it is the fact that a certain attitude only considers natural science to be real science and natural-science explanation to be real explanation that makes that attitude naturalistic. What nature and natural properties are, for Husserl, is not just what natural science tells us about the world, but rather a set of interconnected and nomologically closed features of reality, that science has begun to investigate from Galilei’s and Descartes’ scientific revolution. 3.

Nature as an obvious notion

This article is not mainly about naturalism per se, but rather about its relation with the very concept of nature, its underlying ontological assumptions or intuitions and its interpretation in phenomenological thought. The next paragraphs will therefore be devoted to the discussion of some aspects of the concept of nature itself. 6

Of course there has been an enormous debate about the success of natural sciences, mainly focusing on methodological and logical differences from other sciences; I am asking whether there is something about nature and natural properties that can contribute to explain why their investigation has been so successful.

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

103

It can be legitimately claimed that the issue of what should count as natural or as nature may not necessarily be made to rest on ontological or metaphysical assumptions, and that science teaches us most of what we know about what we should take ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ to mean. But perhaps we should not rest content with naturalism not paying particular attention to the concept of nature and merely trying to accommodate all prima facie non-natural properties in a naturalistic framework— just like much of philosophy of mind does not really focus on mental properties proper, but rather on the possibility of accommodating them (whatever their mental character) in a naturalistic ontology, without paying too high a price. If we find naturalism so fascinating and nature such a strong and irresistible concept—and I believe that this claim can be denied by hardly anyone—perhaps we should ask ourselves why. It is not just that by chance the sciences that happened to be deemed ‘natural’ were successful and that this coincidence boosted the appeal of naturalism; it could very well be that something about the concept of nature makes it a very appealing notion and perhaps even a powerful intellectual tool, and that its cognitive potential fuelled some of the most fruitful scientific intuitions that made natural science one of the most successful forms of science ever—Husserl also shared this opinion. It is interesting for me to notice that the concept of nature is one of the most familiar and apparently transparent ones we use—so familiar and apparently transparent that no one within or without philosophy seems to me to ever question it; we all seem to take for granted that there is something like nature, natural things, natural laws, natural phenomena, as opposed to at least prima facie different kinds of things, laws and phenomena, or maybe that natural entities are all there really is; but we never think that we could come across a person or a culture without any idea about what the word ‘nature’ means at all. Of course every one— and especially philosophers—has their reservations about the legitimacy of some applications of the concept of nature in some specific context, or about the relation between natural and non natural things, but that is not the point. The point is that the concept of nature very often seems to be interpreted as being as transparent and culturally ubiquitous as the concepts of season or pregnancy, concepts it would be extremely odd not to find in all cultural contexts.

104 4.

Matteo Giannasi Doubts about an obvious concept

The concept of nature—as opposed (for example) to artifice, convention, norm, culture, the supernatural or other—can be found in contemporary juridical, medical, scientific, political, religious and philosophical contexts (to mention but a few) as an immediately understandable notion, as something familiar, identifiable, something we are all acquainted with and we can rely on. But what does the word ‘nature’ mean? What is the content of the concept of nature? Is it such an obvious notion—as the concepts of water and fire, wolf and dear, day and night are—so obvious that we might even expect it to be expressed by a corresponding word in every language we come across? The concept of nature is perhaps one of the most charming in the history of human cultures: so charming that it spread to languages, belief systems and institutions very far away, in space and time, from those in which it originated and first flourished; so charming that it takes some effort to even ask the question whether there are or at least have been languages, belief systems and institutions that did not envisage its use, and not to interpret its possible absence as a lack. Nevertheless, it certainly is not a concept one can find in all contexts that have not been influenced by a certain cultural tradition. This seems to be an odd statement: are we not obviously surrounded by nature? Are we not obviously part of it, at least in some sense? Is nature not before the eyes of humans of all times and cultures, as stars, clouds and trees are? I believe the answer to all these questions should be negative. The concept of nature is in fact very peculiar, it has a remarkable and even curious history and pedigree—and perhaps a suspicious political aftertaste. It is my opinion that the transparency of the concept of nature and even the very existence of nature have been taken for granted, or at least gone unquestioned, for too long in ontological and metaphysical debates, despite evidence from linguistic and philological studies pointing to an origin of that concept in a specific cultural context.7 7

The assumption of an obvious ubiquity of the concept of nature might be one of the reasons for classifying certain belief systems (religions, philosophies) as ‘naturalistic’, despite there being no evidence at all of a concept of nature or even an equivalent expression in their underlying cultures. That must depend on the fact that, for some, worshipping certain objects we now consider part of nature (e.g. the sun, the sky etc.) qualifies as being naturalistic, without any further caution, in a

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible” 5.

105

A very sketchy story

Showing that a now widespread concept originated in a specific place and time should not be taken to discredit that concept—most big things started small and local. But there is, in my opinion, something that the very absence of an equivalent word for nature, or of a concept or idea of nature, in many contexts, should teach us: namely, that nature does not obviously exist, that its concept is not a trivial notion, that what it purports to refer to does not lie before our eyes. If there are many belief systems in which the concept of nature does or did not occur at all, one might venture to conjecture that its occurrence of in a certain cultural context may condition the whole conceptual frameworks we can expect to find operating in that context. I shall therefore mention a few contexts in which the concept of nature and a corresponding word are or were not to be found, and try to draw some possible conjectures about them. The English word ‘nature’ derives from old French nature, which, of course derives from Latin natura. All modern Germanic languages contain a corresponding word for the concept of nature, as all Romance languages do. So far so good, but the interesting thing is that in all Germanic languages, and not only in English, the corresponding word for ‘nature’ is always borrowed from Latin natura: English ‘nature’, German ‘Natur’, Dutch ‘natuur’, Danish ‘natur’, Icelandic ‘Náttùra’, Swedish ‘natur’ etc. That is already surprising, if you think that, although nearly the half of English expressions derives from Italic languages, which can explain such a derivation, that is certainly not true of German and of Scandinavian languages. This seems to point at some kind of translation difficulty and to a lack of an equivalent to the expression natura in those languages, as if not just the word but the very concept had been missing in the worldviews of the Germanic peoples inhabiting northern Europe and coming across this Latin or Romance expression. Besides, the cultural impact of Latin culture on Germanic languages is surely immense, but when the populations speaking ancient Germanic languages came in contact with Latin culture, they found equivalents to translate many other concepts—some of them quite abstract or even

reading that tends to polarize differences and classify belief systems according to the partition natural/spiritual. In these contexts the use of the word ‘naturalism’ may sound residual and slightly patronising.

106

Matteo Giannasi

philosophical—but they did not find a good corresponding expression for the Latin word natura, and just adopted it.8 The Latin natura did not originally mean ‘nature’, but rather birth (from the verb nascor: natura, by birth) and was a somewhat rare synonym of ingenium (inborn quality). The shift, or rather its semantic transformation, took place when the Roman worldview met Greek philosophy: Roman intellectuals looked for an equivalent expression for phusis. The Greek word phusis is the etymologic and conceptual ancestor of our current notion of nature. The Latin word natura inherited the semantics and even the grammar of the Greek phusis, with its possible variations and combinations as ‘nature’, ‘natural’, ‘the nature of…’, ‘by nature’, ‘against nature’ and so forth. By the time it was borrowed from Germanic languages, the Latin word natura had already morphed into a grammatical and semantic counterpart of the Greek ‘phusis’.9 The very concept of nature probably entered Roman culture through its re-elaboration of Greek philosophy in Lucretius, Cicero and others. It was not there before, and the word that expressed it had a completely different meaning before. If we look at some modern non-IndoEuropean languages that encountered Greek culture at some late point, we find similar phenomena: expressions now corresponding to ‘nature’, which appeared or were radically adapted after the populations speaking those languages came across Greek culture or a culture influenced by it (Roman culture, Christian culture, Islamic culture etc.). Something similar counts indeed for the Hebrew expression teva, which, to my knowledge, first appeared with its modern meaning in Samuel ibn Tibbon’s translation of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, originally 8

Notable attempts to find an equivalent can be found in the Abrogans and, even before, in Ulfila’s Gothic translation of the Bible (from Greek), but none of them established a tradition for the word we are interested in. The same counts for the Anglo-Saxon expressions gecund, lund and gebyrd, that were replaced by nature. 9 And remember Lucretius’ predicament in De rerum natura, I 136–139: “I know how hard it is in Latin verse/to tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks/chiefly because our pauper-speech must find/strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing” (“Nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta/difficile inlustrare latinis versibus esse, multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum/propter aegestatem linguae et rerum novitatem”). A. Pellicier [1966] and C. Lévi [1996] both insist on the radical semantic transformation of the word because of Greek influence and can be taken to highlight its gaining an attention and relevance it did not have before.

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

107

written in Arabic, that is in the late 12th century, and in a text heavily influenced by the Islamic reception of Aristotelian philosophy. Teva is used, in the Hebrew version, to translate the Arabic word tabi’a, which is one of the two Arabic words meaning ‘nature’ today; the other one is fitra. Not surprisingly, also tabi’a is an expression introduced into Arabic to translate the Greek word phusis, just like the Latin natura— whereas fitra refers to inborn qualities (fitra retained a much more relevant role until today). The etymologies of teva and tabi’a both evoke the act of coining something or impressing a certain shape or form upon it, but their meaning rests on that of the Greek expression phusis, from which teva, tabi’a, natura etc. semantically derive and on whose sense they all depend. 6.

Nature is here to stay

What is remarkable is not just that many languages did not have corresponding expressions for ‘nature’ until they met Greek culture, or that they basically lacked the very idea of nature—which does not appear in the whole Hebrew Bible, as such, just to make an example—but especially the fact that all these cultures assimilated this foreign concept and adopted it ever since. Of course this fact is also due to the incalculable influence of Greek philosophy on ancient and early medieval culture as a whole, but if we look at this fact from a very far perspective, i.e. with contemporary eyes, we find out that most other major Greek philosophical concepts have lost most of their influence on science and even on ordinary thought and language, retreating to academic philosophical debates and rhetoric forms of speech—think of essence, substance, accident, soul, being—whereas ‘nature’ remained a very influential notion both within and without philosophy, in all those cultures up until now, so much that it still occurs in constitutions, scientific publications, pharmaceutical products and political programmes. Phusis/nature is a sort of magical word, or concept, that was able to defeat, in the long run, all its antonyms, coming to occupy a more and more central role in modern and contemporary worldviews. And it should start to appear, now, that its charm does not rest on its being a universally widespread concept, one that can be found in every place at any time. On the contrary, most, if not all belief systems in which it can be found today—and they are so many that one could doubt that there are any in which it does not play a

108

Matteo Giannasi

role—ultimately derived it from one and the same source: Greek philosophy, a cultural wave that has lost its scientific and political hegemony a long time ago; so, once more, the charm and authority of nature, as a concept, cannot solely derive from its philosophical provenance, since most of its mates have lost all their glory long ago. So there must be something special about the concept of nature, something “substance”, “essence” and “soul” do not have, since they only retained a small place in contemporary linguistic practices. While many antonyms of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ lost much of their credibility or centrality in contemporary culture (the supernatural, the normative, the spiritual), or proved very hard to understand and investigate (the specifically human, the conventional, the artificial), nature became a field of endless and fruitful scientific discoveries that slowly started to threaten the legitimacy and cultural relevance of all other domains, until now. 7.

Not an archaic notion

The word phusis (from a PIE root *bhu) is not an archaic expression. Etymologically speaking, it is related to the idea of becoming (Latin fieri), being (English ‘to be’), growth and vegetation (Greek phuton). It never appears in Iliad and it only appears once (the first occurrence ever) in Odyssey (X, 302–3), with a botanical or perhaps magic/religious connotation, with reference to the inner part of a plant known to the gods, that Hermes shows Odysseus as an antidote against Circe’s powerful drug. The Greek text is “hos ara phonesas pore pharmakon Argeiphontes ek gaies erusas, kai moi phusin autou edeixe”. Samuel Butler translates it thus: “As he spoke he pulled the herb out of the ground and showed me what it was like” (emphasis added).10 The concept of nature does not play a significant role in archaic Greek thought, which pivots on completely different notions, such as necessity, destiny, fate, to mention but a few. The emergence of nature as a key notion in Greek culture took indeed a long time and intellectual elaboration. So it cannot even be said that the concept of nature belongs to one of the most ancient layers of Greek culture.11 Naturalism is very 10

See Naddaf [2005], pp. 11–37. And, let me add, for sure it does not stem from some kind of proto-IndoEuropean substrate, as there is no trace of semantic counterparts of the word phusis in Vedic, Avestic, Proto-Germanic etc. 11

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

109

often criticized and sometimes even advocated as a naïve attitude or theory, as a sort of rough (or robust) starting point for thought and practice, one at which an individual or a collective subject takes immediate experience of reality at face value, without questioning it. In some philosophical traditions it is even considered a consequence of a certain lack of critical thinking or laziness. At this point, it should start to appear that the idea that nature is a naïve and inborn concept and that naturalism is a primitive or primordial position may be itself the consequence of a lack of critical thinking, i.e. a lack of awareness of the complexity and sophistication of the very concept, resting on its familiarity and apparent obviousness for those who inherited it and did not have to elaborate it or translate it. Quite the contrary: the concept of nature emerged and gained intellectual credit quite slowly, after the end of so called Greek archaic culture and within one of the most creative seasons of Greek though usually referred to as “PreSocratic philosophy”, with its first philosophical occurrence being in Heraclitus’ texts, where it may be taken to mean something like a thing’s process of growing into what it is. Besides, as it is very far from probable that the writings of socalled early naturalistic philosophers had peri phuseos as title (if any), and therefore that the very word phusis had already arisen to cultural prominence in the 6th century—though it is known that Aristotle refers to most pre-Socratic thinkers with the word phusiologoi.12 8.

Clarifying the concept of nature

It would be interesting to talk about the use of expressions such as phusei, kata phusin, he phusis + gen, phusikos/e/on etc. and see how they functioned in non-philosophical discourse at different times in Greek history, but it is perhaps better to focus on some key aspects of the idea or concept of nature, and of assumptions associated with it. Aristotle himself gives us strong insight into what the word phusis evoked in an educated Greek of the 4th century, before proposing his own definition: ‘Nature’ means (1) the genesis of growing things [...]. (2) That immanent part of a growing thing, from which its growth first proceeds. (3) The source 12

Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 8, 989 b 30.

110

Matteo Giannasi from which the primary movement in each natural object [ton phusei onton] is present in it in virtue of its own essence [...]. (4) ‘Nature’ means the primary material of which any natural object [ti ton phusei onton] consists or out of which it is made [...]. (5) ‘Nature’ means the essence of natural objects [he phusis legetai he ton phusei onton ousia] [...]. (6) By an extension of meaning from this sense of ‘nature’ every essence in general has come to be called a ‘nature’, because the nature of a thing is one kind of essence.13

It is interesting to note that the expression ‘natural objects’, or ‘entities that are by nature’(phusei onta) occurs in the definiens of the 3rd, 4th and 5th meaning clarification, which might give the impression of circularity, whereas, quite clearly, as it is typical in Metaphysics, 5, Aristotle is not trying to introduce this notion from scratch, but rather to clarify its different uses in ordinary and even more in philosophical discourse, against the background of informal assumptions he regards as acceptable and shared by his hearers, in this case assumptions regarding the difference between artefacts and general features of entities that are brought about by non-artificial processes—entities that a Greek of the 4th century would not have felt any puzzlement to deem ‘natural’ or ‘by nature’ (phusei). So, by ‘nature’ Aristotle refers to something in certain sorts of entities, but of course the interesting question becomes what features those entities have in common, since in his final remarks he recapitulates: From what has been said, then, it is plain that nature in the primary and strict sense is the essence of things which have in themselves, as such, a source of movement; for the matter is called the nature because it is qualified to receive this, and processes of becoming and growing are called nature because they are movements proceeding from this.14

As ‘by nature’ or ‘natural’, Aristotle then classifies entities which have in themselves a source of movement; but then he adds: “And nature in this sense is the source of the movement of natural objects, being present in them somehow, either potentially or in complete reality”,15 which seems to me to make clear, once more, that Aristotle does not really have a problem with not eliminating reference to phusei onta in his definition of phusis, and that nature must be somehow taken for granted in his opinion. 13

Aristotle, Metaphysics 5, 4, 1014 b 16–ff. Aristotle, Metaphysics 5, 4, 1015 a, 13–17. 15 Aristotle, Metaphysics 5, 4, 1015 a, 17–19. 14

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

111

Let me pause once again to make a point, in order for my remarks not to be misleading. The theme of the current rhapsodic excursus is not to underline that Aristotle acknowledges the existence of what we, today, call ‘nature’ or ‘natural things’, and that he takes it for granted that such things exist; and it is not even to point out that belief systems and cultures that were not influenced by Greek language and culture did not acknowledge the existence of such entities; and, finally, it is not even to underline the fact that Aristotle does not provide a demonstration of the existence of such entities (what would become later a demonstration of the existence of the world). It is quite clear that Aristotle must acknowledge the existence of turtles, frogs, lions and sparrows, i.e. of entities our language use, at least by and large, would still classify as ‘natural’—what philosophical argument or cultural nurture would be needed for that? And it is clear that some kind of collective reference to what a Greek of the 4th century would have called phusis does in fact occur in the Vedas, in the Avesta, and in some very ancient books of the Bible that certainly predate Greek influences—not to mention cultures even further away in space and time. The point is that in those contexts those entities are not referred to and therefore classified by a similar notion—a notion that refers to a somewhat spontaneous nomologic self-organization and self-regulation of reality, as an ontological background of all particular processes and phenomena. For Aristotle, and for most of his contemporary Greeks, nature ex16 ists, i.e. there is a nomologic framework in which all particular processes are embedded, a framework granting order and balance, continuously restoring itself, the conditions of its preservation and those of the preservation of entities populating it—with particular reference to animated beings. For Aristotle, nature is life, i.e. spontaneous selforganized and balanced self-reproduction, populated by entities each having its own nature (the nature of that entity), i.e. inborn abilities and dispositions granting it the power to resist in its environment and reproduce itself. Nature for Aristotle provides each being with a certain nature and with certain tools (organa) to survive and reproduce itself, each having its function by nature (kata phusin).17 Operating in suitable manners, 16

For the thesis that nature obviously exists, see Physics 2, 1, 193 a, 3–4. Nature “is not niggardly, like the smith that fashions the Delphian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use” (Aristotle, Politics I, 2, 1252 b 1– 3). 17

112

Matteo Giannasi

for those tools, is not necessarily the effect of a learning process, but it is most of the time something spontaneous, inborn, natural. When organs are dysfunctional or operate in ways which do not correspond to the kind of standard contribution they are supposed to give, they are said to be operating against nature (para phusin). So: nature, the nature of, by nature, natural, against nature. The idea of a spontaneous all-embracing order, consisting in harmony, measure, balance and life and permeating all living entities and even inanimate ones underlines the grammar and semantics of all these variations, which are not to be found outside cultures influenced by Greek thought. 9.

Heraclitus’ dangerous idea

Associated with nature and the cluster of its grammatical variations, we find a variety of features. The word ‘nature’, for us as for ancient Greeks, is very dense, evoking a whole spectrum of associations, beliefs, assumptions and judgements of value. Some of them are still quite obvious connotations of the word ‘nature’, others hide under its surface: regularity, measure, cyclic repetition, stability, continuity, indifference to individual destinies, spontaneity, balance, inexhaustibility, innocence, constant renewal, self-regulation and of course beauty. These associations are quite loose and different epochs and cultures or scientific contexts have privileged some aspects over others. The purpose of the present paper is certainly not to recall the major transformations of the concept of nature from Greek philosophy till contemporary science and culture, but it is highly remarkable, for me, that such a peculiar concept was never really questioned and that it was rather reformulated countless times by philosophers with totally different approaches, thereby indirectly acknowledging its indispensability,18 as if it were obvious, as Aristotle said, that nature exists, and that any philosophical framework should give it a place. The idea of a spontaneous order can be radicalized and brought to the extreme of thinking that all order must be at bottom spontaneous, that all life, harmony, balance and complexity must rest on some kind of underlying nomologic humus and not be the effect of a project or of in18

Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy, Spinoza, Rousseau, De Sade, Kant, German Idealists, Darwin, Husserl, Physicalism, different forms of naturalism.

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

113

telligent design. This facet of the concept of nature, analysed by poets and philosophers in the 6th and 5th centuries, is very clearly seen by Plato,19 who considers it particularly unsettling and even politically dangerous,20 as well as by Aristotle, in his further discussion of the ideas of phusiologoi. The idea of a totally spontaneous order, emerging as a form of self-organization without a master-plan and predating all intelligent design is perceived by Plato as impious and even atheistic in principle.21 Plato, especially in Laws, maintains that philosophy should resist the temptation to consider design posterior to spontaneous order, and that, instead, it is vital for the moral and political order of the city, that its citizens believe order to derive from intelligent design, otherwise laws, conventions and principles, which are kinds of conventional entities, would fall under the category of secondary and derived beings and be totally devoid of truth and authenticity. Aristotle claims something similar, when he maintains, in Metaphysics, 1, 3, that it was somehow indecent or anyway unwarranted to assume that goodness and beauty derive from spontaneity and chance, and that therefore it must be maintained that the world order depends on a form of intelligence and reason, desired by material objects.22 In both cases, nature is understood as order, but Plato and Aristotle try to resist 19

“They say that the greatest and fairest things are the work of nature and chance, the lesser of art, which, receiving from nature the greater and primeval creations, moulds and fashions all those lesser works which are generally termed artificial” (Plato, Laws, 10, 889 a, 4–8). 20 “What a dreadful picture, Stranger, have you given, and how great is the injury which is thus inflicted on young men to the ruin both of states and families!” (Plato, Laws, 10, 890 b, 1–2). A strong theological concern with the concept of nature is to be found in Ghazali’s doctrine of causality as well. 21 That is one of the main themes of Laws, 10, in which Plato discusses the idea of spontaneous order with reference to lack of faith in the Gods and to the question of the foundations of a city’s constitution. 22 “For it is not likey either that fire or earth or any such element should be the reason why things manifest goodness and beauty both in their being and in their coming to be, or that those thinkers should have supposed it was; nor again could it be right to entrust so great a matter to spontaneity and chance. When one man said, then, that reason was present—as in animals, so throughout nature—as the cause of order and of all arrangement, he seemed like a sober man in contrast with the random talk of his predecessors. We know that Anaxagoras certainly adopted these views…” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 3, 984 b, 12–19).

114

Matteo Giannasi

the idea of nature’s being self-sufficient as a form of impiousness or even intellectual intoxication. In this sense, one could say, they are indeed metaphysical thinkers, and they initiate a tradition of distinction or even opposition between physical (natural) and metaphysical features of reality, an opposition in which, once more, the antonym of nature has succumbed in the long run, whereas the discipline studying nature has become a paradigm example of a successful science and has been taken as an example by all kinds of scientists to develop a successful study of reality as a whole.23 The idea of studying nature’s own nomologic structure and to derive all real order and apparent design from that structure has become so successful that the so-called moral sciences are still busy trying to adopt it—and that can be seen very well by looking at the transformation of psychology in the 19th, 20th and early 21st century, with a stronger and stronger relation with physiology, biology, genetics and neurology, the rise of cognitive science, and the many attempts to give sociology and even economics new biological foundations. 10.

Husserl and naturalism as a social threat

The tension between the charming idea of a universe brought about by spontaneous and unintended processes and the fear that such a worldview would be ethically and politically dangerous, can be found in Husserl too, although in a completely different framework. Husserl’s phenomenology claims to be a pure description of the general forms of experience and a rejection of any prejudice, tradition and assumption regarding it. It is therefore even more surprising to see that he uses the concept of nature without any critical reserve, as if it were obvious that nature exists as a domain of experience in its own right. So talking about phenomenological descriptions of nature can be instructive also as a way of understanding how heavily its purported pure descriptions are influenced by philosophical traditions and conceptual habits. Naturalism is perhaps the main intellectual target of Husserl’s phenomenology, the thesis against which he deploys his strongest energies and rhetoric weapons. Naturalism and its corollaries are stigmatized by him as “blindness”, “prejudice”, “superstition” and “fanaticism”, whereas nature appears as a solid and fundamental domain of experience. 23

Consider the subtitle of Hume [1739] and of course the title of Quetelet’s [1835] talk of “social physics”, revisited by Comte.

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

115

In particular, nature is often evoked by Husserl as a completely bare substrate of experience, one devoid of axiological properties and governed by exact laws that are nevertheless “incomprehensible”. Nature is, indeed, for him “the realm of incomprehensibility”, i.e. of phenomena governed by laws that have nothing to do with norms and motivations, that cannot be considered correct or incorrect, right or wrong, rational or irrational. Nature is, reality’s merely being what it is and functioning as it does. Husserl’s thought presents, therefore, interesting aspects: a very radical concept of nature as a meaning-less substrate of reality and a violent rejection of naturalism, as the assumption that all things are natural, and that all processes must be interpreted as deriving from natural laws. Husserl identifies naturalism with the thesis that everything is natural or can be reduced to natural processes, interpreted as a nomologically closed system. Naturalism, more specifically, is the thesis that all truths should be explained or clarified in terms of natural laws, e.g. physical laws, chemical laws, physiological laws etc. That of course leads to the very well known problem of Psychologism, which is but a kind of naturalism, namely the thesis that the truths of mathematics and logic should be interpreted as statements about the psychological dispositions of human beings, ultimately resting on their physiology. So the statement that two contradictory propositions cannot be both true is interpreted by naturalists as expressing the purported psychological truth that no human being, or rather no “normal” human being, can consciously entertain contradictory thoughts without feeling some kind of distress, the statement that (m+n)=(n+m) expresses another disposition of (“normal”) human beings, and so on and so forth. Husserl considers naturalism to lead to absurd consequences and to rest on prejudice, but, what is more important, he claims that its attitude generalizes: if all truths are truths about natural regularities, then it means that also moral laws, ethical principles and practical norms express mere generalizations about the behaviour or the attitudes of “normal” human beings. I.e., the practical norm that ceteris paribus, an agent should prefer 1€ for sure to receiving 0.50 € if a tossed coin lands heads and nothing if tails becomes a generalization about the attitudes of human beings (in a certain society); the principle that a sentence from which contradictory propositions can be deduced cannot be accepted as an axiom becomes the purported fact that humans or rather scientists feel that way. The principle that a person is not be held accountable for things she did not contribute in any way to bring about becomes again a psychological generalization about human

116

Matteo Giannasi

beings or rather certain human beings (think of scapegoats). Husserl believes that naturalism has conquered contemporary culture and that it threatens to destroy the modern project of rational self-realization of humanity, embodied by modern science, and that equating moral laws, ethical principles and practical norms to physiologically based generalizations about human behaviour is literally unbearable and leads to a breakdown in culture and society and to the collapse of European culture. 11.

Naturalization as reification

Naturalism, in Husserl’s opinion, gained credit and expanded to the moral and abstract sciences because of the very vigour of natural sciences and the strength of the very idea of nature as a nomologically closed system, combined with the scientific weakness of all traditional (e.g. rationalistic) interpretations of rationality and normativity. Despite the weakness of its traditional alternatives, though, it makes the fatal mistake of “reifying consciousness”, i.e. identifying or coupling conscious mental processes, which are motivated by reasons, with physical and physiological processes, which are governed by “incomprehensible” laws. For Husserl, nature is by necessity the ultimate substrate of experience, a substrate in which all real processes are to be accommodated, but the fundamental difference between natural and mental (or sometimes “conscious”) processes and their results is precisely the unquestionability of the former and the being subject to evaluation of the latter.24 In this sense, conscious and cultural life are “comprehensible”, because they are governed not just by physical or physiological laws, that of course can be rationally explained by natural science, but rather by reasons, which function as motivations and are subject to rational scrutiny.25 A reason can be a good or a bad reason, whereas a natural cause cannot be a good or bad natural cause. To use an example from nowadays, choosing to receive 1€ for sure instead of 1.2€ if a tossed coin lands heads and 0.2€ if it lands tails is a motivated act, namely by the assessment of the higher expected value of the preferred action.26 A reason 24

Husserl [1920/24], p. 107. Husserl [1920/24], p. 109. 26 Of course Rational Decision Theory was not available to Husserl as a formally sophisticated discipline, but he inherited from Brentano the project of a 25

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

117

is a motivation, something a conscious being can and should scrutinize as to its relevance, rational cogency, reliability etc.; it is something that can be understood by other conscious beings, regardless of their biological make-up. 27 Husserl does not reject the idea that all sciences— including psychology and the social sciences—must contain explanatory laws,28 and be able to make predictions about the future, and he does not accept the dichotomy of descriptive/explanatory with respect to the distinction between natural and moral sciences. But he insists that the kind of explanatory laws elaborated by psychology and the social sciences should not be physiological, biological or anyway factual, i.e. they should not contain mere generalizations about the way humans de facto feel and act, but rather rational evaluations, i.e. principles about what it would be appropriate, correct, right, convenient, to do for a rational being given certain circumstances. Therefore a practical maxim does not just offer us an inductive generalization about human behaviour, or an explanation of why a certain person de facto prefers 1€ for sure to 0.5 if heads, nothing if tails, or a rule to predict the future behaviour of “normal” human beings given certain circumstances. It rather offers us a principle that helps us understand the person’s behaviour, to share its motivation, and to predict that other persons, as rational beings, will (or should) also, ceteris paribus, behave in the same way, because that is, in a certain sense, simply is the best thing to do. According to Husserl, practical maxims, moral laws, ethical principles, logical rules etc. all share the same feature of being able to function as motivations and to be evaluated, appreciated, rejected, acknowledged as correct, shared, learned, forgotten, misunderstood etc. The conscious life of individuals and communities is governed, for him, by this kind of motivational laws and variables and is therefore structurally open to criticism, improvement, renovation. We can now better understand the sense in which he considers naturalism and the naturalization formalisation of ethics and practical philosophy, and had a concrete interest in probability theory—therefore these examples, that may be more familiar to the reader than Husserl’s own few. 27 Husserl constantly rejects anthropologism as a form of naturalism, claiming for example that if angels and demons played dice without taking into account the rules of probability calculus, they would be as irrational as humans in their place, i.e. that rational assessment has nothing to do with biological or neurological aspects of human conscious life. See Husserl [1917], p. 313. 28 Husserl [1925], §§ 1–4.

118

Matteo Giannasi

of conscious life in particular as cultural catastrophes: if conscious life is just a “Begleittatsache” (an accompanying fact) of neural processes ultimately governed by physical laws, then there is nothing to understand about human choices, values and institutions, nothing a rational being could respect, abide by or revolt against, since they are just accidents of mere things and thingly processes. Humans are then not viewed as persons (Personen) anymore, but rather as things functioning in certain ways.29 Actually, for Husserl, humans run the risk of starting to consider themselves as biological machines governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and to lose all their trust in their hard-fought institutional, cultural and scientific achievements, and that is precisely the crisis he writes and talks about since 1911, but especially in his essays and lectures from the 1920ies until his death. 12.

Natural attitude and naturalistic attitude

Notoriously, one of Husserl’s key concepts is the notion of natural attitude (natürliche Einstellung), which consists in a very complex and multi-layered set of assumptions and dispositions regarding the correlation between experience, truth and rationality. The natural attitude is the ground of any possible scientific investigation, because all investigations must presuppose a correlation between experience, reason and truth—if they did not assume that correlation to obtain, scientists would not bother observing, reasoning, experimenting, discussing etc. So the natural attitude is presupposed by all science, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, logic etc. In a deeper sense, Husserl thinks that even logic rests on assumptions about the correlation between meaning, experience and time.30 On the other hand, nature is, for him, the system of all real phenomena, in which all entities must find a place and with whose laws all other laws must be compatible; so also human beings, their mental lives, their interaction in space and time, their cultures etc. must somehow have a side or aspect that can be investigated in purely naturalistic 29

See Husserl [1922], p. 190. E.g. that one and the same proposition can be understood as being the same by the same person at different times or by different persons, or that two contradictory propositions cannot be both validated by experience: see Husserl [1929]. 30

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

119

terms, .e.g. mental processes as processes taking place in humans, who are at least also organisms in space and time, must find correspondences in neural processes and physiological processes in general, governed by biochemical laws and ultimately by physical laws. So culture, values, mental life and so on must also be parts of nature and be governed also by physical laws: human life is contained in nature. When we take this stance, which is perfectly legitimate, within certain limits, we embrace a naturalistic attitude (natural Einstellung, naturalistische Einstellung) and we do not see human beings around us anymore, neither do we consider ourselves persons, i.e. beings oriented by motivations, but rather things. On the other hand, this very concept of nature and the whole system of natural sciences and philosophy producing this picture of reality in which human beings are contained in nature, is itself a rational product, the outcome of a long process of investigation, rational collaboration, logical refinement, mutual correction, public criticism etc. The very picture of a naturalistic scenario rests on a completely different attitude, the personal attitude, in which one experiences oneself as a person and one’s mental life as oriented by motivations and norms, and experiences other human beings as partners, whose motivations can be shared in communication. That is also the attitude of scientists, according to Husserl, when they collaborate in a laboratory, when they draw on each other’s discoveries and accept each other’s objections. Humans are contained in nature as a fundamentally meaning-less and in-comprehensible scenario, but their being contained in nature is part of a complex theoretical belief system, ultimately resting on the assumption of humans’ being rational partners whose values, norms, principles can be justified, shared, improved and criticized. That is Husserl’s fundamental idea about the relation between natural and social sciences and about the prominence of philosophical analysis with respect to experimental methods and inductive generalizations, in epistemological and moral matters. Conclusions The concept of nature is not a natural concept (if any is) or the concept of a natural kind. It is rather a sophisticated notion elaborated in a specific cultural and philosophical tradition, that slowly gained the centre of the cultural and scientific stage, patiently eliminating its antagonists and challengers, until recent times. At the bottom of that concept lies the in-

120

Matteo Giannasi

tuition that reality is a somehow self-regulating and spontaneously regular system, that permits the proliferation of life without necessarily depending on intelligent design. This feature of the concept of nature makes it particularly stimulating for science and has indeed provided natural sciences with some of their best intuitions, but it has been always perceived as having a dark or threatening side, so threatening that already in Greek times the idea of nature not being the fruit of intelligent design has been rejected by Plato as blasphemous and leading to anarchy and by Aristotle as pure nonsense and politically inacceptable (Aristotle’s Politics rests on the assumption that nature designs everything, even human beings for a single purpose—men to lead, women to obey, slaves to serve etc.). The concept of nature has crossed millennia and spread to cultures which are very far away in space and time from that in which it was first coined, and it sounds perfectly obvious to the speakers of the languages that have adopted it a long time ago, unlike many other Greek concepts that sound odd or outdated, like essence, substance etc. Nature should be taken as a serious notion and an intellectual achievement and accepted or criticized as such, instead of being considered an obvious and innocent idea common to all human beings. Therefore naturalism is everything but a naïve position. Husserl inherits a modern concept of nature, from physics, evolutionary biology and experimental psychology and, not unlike Plato and Aristotle, he fears that this notion, combined with a total rejection of alternative methods and concepts in philosophy and moral sciences, poses a serious threat for modern culture. He acknowledges that nature is—at bottom—a closed nomologic system in which no intelligence or meaning can be assumed to play a role, and that human life both individual and social, is part of such a system; on the other hand, he points out that natural science, including the picture of humanity just mentioned, rests on the assumption that conscious life is not governed by mere factual laws, but rather by motivations open to criticism and improvement and that such an assumption is inevitable. We now know that Husserl’s proposal to revolutionize science and European culture has fundamentally failed, that the phenomenological method was all but mere description, that consciousness is not so open to self-scrutiny as Husserl thought it to be, and finally that naturalism is now stronger than ever. But the problem of understanding normative and motivational aspects of life and finding them a place in a naturalistic framework is far from being solved.

“Nature is the Realm of the Incomprehensible”

121

References Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. by. W.D. Ross, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1924. Aristotle, Physics, ed. by W.D. Ross, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1936. Aristotle, Politics, transl. by E. Barker, rev. ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995. Geyer C. [2004], Hirnforschung und Willensfreiheit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. Hume D. [1739], A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978. Husserl E. [1911], “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”, in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), ed. by H. Sepp and T. Nenon, Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1986, pp. 3–62. Husserl E. [1920/24], Einleitung in die Ethik, ed. by H. Peucker, Kluwer, Dordrecht et al., 2004. Husserl E. [1917], Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Vorlesungen 1917/18 mit ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung 1910/11, ed. by U. Panzer, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1995. Husserl E. [1922], Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. by M. Biemel, Nijhoff, Den Haag, 1952. Husserl E. [1925], Phenomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. by W. Biemel, Nijhoff, Den Haag, 1962. Husserl E. [1929], Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der Logischen Vernunft. Mit ergänzenden Texten, ed. by P. Janssen, Nijhoff, Den Haag, 1974. Husserl E. [1927], Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen Sommersemester (1927), ed. by M. Weiler, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2000. Kim J. [1998], Mind in a Physical World, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA). Kim J. [2005], Physicalism. Or Something Near Enough, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Lévi C. [1996], “Philosopher à Rome”, in C. Lévi, Le concept de nature à Rome: la physique, Rue d’Ulm, Paris. Naddaf G. [2005], The Greek Concept of Nature, SUNY Press, Albany. Pellicier A. [1966], Natura. Etude sémantique et historique du mot latin, PUF, Paris. Plato, Laws, transl. by B. Jowett, 1871.

122

Matteo Giannasi

Quetelet A. [1835], Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale, Paris/Bruxelles. Roth G. [2003], Aus Sicht des Gehirns, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. Roth G. [2004], “Worüber dürfen Hirnforscher reden—und in welcher Weise?”, in Geyer [2004], pp. 66–85. Singer W. [2003], Ein neues Menschenbild? Gespräche über Hirnforschung, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M.