Meaning and the Problem of Universals,
A Kant-Friesian Approach
One of the most durable and intractable issues in the history
of philosophy has been the problem of universals. Closely
related to this, and a major subject of debate in 20th century philosophy,
has been the problem of the nature of the meaning.
The problem of universals goes back to Plato and Aristotle. The
matter at issue is that, on the one hand, the objects of experience
are individual, particular, and concrete, while, on the other hand,
the objects of thought, or most of the kinds of things that we know
even about individuals, are general and abstract, i.e. universals.
Thus, a house may be red, but there are many other red things, so
redness is a general property, a universal. Redness can also
be conceived in the abstract, separate from any particular thing,
but it cannot exist in experience except as a property of some particular
thing and it cannot even be imagined except with some other
minimal properties, e.g. extension. Abstraction is especially conspicuous
in mathematics, where numbers, geometrical shapes, and equations
are studied in complete separation from experience. The question
that may be asked, then, is how it is that general properties or
abstract objects are related to the world, how they exist in or
in relation to individual objects, and how it is that we know them
when experience only seems to reveal individual things.
Plato's answer to this was that universals exist in a separate
reality as special objects, distinct in kind, from the things of
experience. This is Plato's famous theory of "Forms."
Plato himself used the terms idéa and eîdos in Greek,
which could mean the "look" of a thing, its form, or the
kind or sort of a thing [Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English
Lexicon, Oxford, 1889, 1964, pp. 226 & 375]. Since Aristotle
used the term eîdos to mean something else and consistently
used idéa to refer to Plato's theory, in the history of philosophy
we usually see references to Plato's "theory of Ideas."
Although Aristotle said that Socrates had never separated the Forms
from the objects of experience, which is probably true, some of
Socrates's language suggests the direction of Plato's theory. Thus,
in the Euthyphro,
Socrates, in asking for a definition of piety, says
that he does not want to know about individual pious things, but
about the "idea itself," so that he may "look upon
it" and, using it "as a model [parádeigma],"
judge "that any action of yours or another's that is of that
kind is pious, and if it is not that it is not" [6e, G.M.A.
Grube trans., Hackett, 1986]. Plato concludes that what we "look
upon" as a model, and is not an object of experience, is some
other kind of real object, which has an existence elsewhere. That
"elsewhere" is the "World of Forms," to which
we have only had access, as the Myth of Chariot in the Phaedrus
says, before birth, and which we are now only remembering. Later,
the Neoplatonists
decided that we have access now, immediately and intuitively, to
the Forms, but while this produces a rather different kind of theory,
both epistemologically and metaphysically, it still posits universals
as objects at a higher level of reality than the objects of experience
(which partake of matter and evil).
Plato himself realized, as recounted in the Parmenides,
that there were some problems and obscurities with his theory. Some
of these could be dismissed as misunderstandings; others were more
serious. Most important, however, was the nature of the connection
between the objects of experience and the Forms. Individual objects
"participate" in the Forms and derive their character,
even, Plato says in the
Republic, their existence, from the Forms, but it is
never clear how this is supposed to work if the World of Forms is
entirely separate from the world of experience that we have here.
In the Timaeus, Plato has a Creator God, the "Demiurge,"
fashioning the world in the image of the Forms, but this cannot
explain the on-going coming-into-being of subsequent objects that
will "participate" themselves. Plato's own metaphorical
language in describing the relationship, that empirical objects
are "shadows" of the Forms, probably suggested the Neoplatonic
solution that such objects are attenuated emanations of Being, like
dim rays of sunlight at some distance from the source.
Whether we take Plato's theory or the Neoplatonic version, there
is no doubt that Plato's kind of theory about universals is one
of Realism: Universals have real existence,
just as much so, if not more so, than the individual objects of
experience.
Aristotle also had a Realistic theory of universals, but he tried
to avoid the problems with Plato's theory by not separating
the universals, as objects, from the objects of experience. He "immanentized"
the Forms. This meant, of course, that there still were Forms;
it was just a matter of where they existed. So Aristotle even used
one of Plato's terms, eîdos, to mean the universal object
within a particular object. This word is more familiar to us in
its Latin translation: species. In modern discussion, however,
it is usually just called the "form" of the object. The
Aristotelian "form" of an object, however, is not just
what an object "looks" like. An individual object as
an individual object is particular, not universal. The "form"
of the object will be the complex of all its abstract features and
properties. If the object looks red or looks round or looks ugly,
then those features, as abstractions, belong to the "form."
The individuality of the object cannot be due to any of
those abstractions, which are universals, and so must be due to
something else. To Aristotle that was the "matter" of
the object. "Matter" confers individuality, "form"
universality. Since everything that we can identify about
an object, the kind of thing it is, what it is doing, where it is,
etc., involves abstract properties, the "form" represents
the actuality of an object. By contrast, the "matter"
represents the potential or possibility of an object to have
other properties.
These uses of "form" and "matter" are now rather
different from what is familiar to us. Aristotelian "matter"
is not something that we can see, so it is not what we usually mean
by matter today. Similarly, Aristotelian "form" is not
some superficial appearance of a fundamentally material object:
It is the true actuality and existence of the object. This
becomes clear when we note Aristotle's term for "actuality,"
which was enérgeia, what has become the modern word "energy."
Similarly, the term for "potential" is familiar: dýnamis,
which can also mean "power" and "strength."
The continuing dualism of Aristotle's theory emerges when we ask
how the "forms" of things are known. An individual object
Aristotle called a "primary substance" (where the Greek
word for substance, ousía, might better be translated "essence"
or "being"). The abstract "form" of an object,
the universal in it, Aristotle called "secondary substance."
So if what we see are individual things, the primary substances,
how do we get to the universals? Aristotle postulated a certain
mental function, "abstraction," by which the universal
is comprehended or thought in the particular. This is the equivalent
of understanding what is perceived, which means that we get
to the meaning of the perception. The "form" of
the thing becomes its meaning, its concept, in the mind. For Plato,
in effect, the meaning of the world was only outside of it.
While the Aristotelian "form" of an object is its substance
(the "substantial form") and its essence, not all abstract
properties belong to the essence. The "essence" is what
makes the thing what it is. Properties that are not essential
to the thing are accidental, e.g. the color or the material
of a chair. Thus the contrast between "substance and accident"
or "essence and accident." Accidents, however, are also
universals. A contrast may also be drawn between substance and "attribute."
In this distinction, all properties, whether essential or
accidental, belong to the substance, the thing that "stands
under" (sub-stantia in Latin, hypo-keímenon,
"lie under," in Greek) all the properties and, presumably,
holds then together. Since the properties of the essence are thought
together through the concepts produced by abstraction, the "substance"
represents the principle of unity that connects them.
Concepts, or predicates, are always universals, which means that
no individual can be defined, as an individual, by concepts.
"Socrates," as the name of an individual, although bringing
to mind many properties, is not a property; and no matter how many
properties we specify, "snub-nosed," "ugly,"
"clever," "condemned," etc., they conceivably
could apply to some other individual. From that we have a principle,
still echoed by Kant, that "[primary] substance is that which
is always subject, never predicate." On the other hand, a theory
that eliminates the equivalent of Aristotelian "matter,"
like that of Leibniz, must require that individuals as such imply
a unique, perhaps infinite, number of properties. Leibniz's principle
of the "identity of indiscernibles" thus postulates that
individuals which cannot be distinguished from each other, i.e.
have all the same discernible properties, must be the same individual.
One result of Aristotle's theory was a powerful explanation for
natural growth. The "form" of a thing is not just what
it looks like, it is the "final cause," the purpose of
the thing, the "entelechy," the "end within,"
which is one of the causes of natural growth and change.
Before the modern discovery of DNA, this was pretty much the only
theory there was to account for the growth of living things
from seeds or embryos into full grown forms. Nevertheless, it introduces
some difficulties into Aristotle's theory: If the "form"
is accessible to understanding by abstraction, then this cannot
be the same "form" as the one that contains the
adult oak tree in the acorn, since no one unfamiliar with oak trees
can look at an acorn and see the full form of the tree. But if the
entelechy cannot be perceived and abstracted, then it exists in
the object in a way different from the external "form."
But Aristotle's metaphysics makes no provision, any more than quantum
mechanics, for a "hidden" internal "form." Neoplatonism
took care of that by making the internal "form" transcendent,
as in Plato, but this is then a fatal compromise with Aristotle's
prima facie empiricism and with his move to "immanentize"
Plato's Forms.
This brings us to a fundamental conflict in Aristotle's theory,
which highlights its drawbacks in relation to Plato's theory. If
Aristotle is going to be an empiricist, thinking that knowledge
comes from experience, this puts him on a slippery slope to positivism
or, more precisely, "judicial positivism": that
the actual is good (or, as Hegel
puts it, "the Real is Rational"). The continuing virtue
of Plato's theory of Forms is that the Forms can be profoundly different
from the objects of experience. The Forms are perfect, and the world
falls far short of them. This seems to account for important characteristics
of reality, that true justice is rarely to be found, and that mathematicians
describe the strangest things that have no obvious relation to experience.
Aristotle's theory can accommodate this, but only by positing "forms"
that are inaccessible to perception and abstraction, which would
contradict any original notion in Aristotelian epistemology that
knowledge comes from experience. Again, Neoplatonism takes care
of this, but only at the cost of an intuitionism that is non-empirical,
indeed, mystical, in the extreme, where we certainly do have access
to "forms," or the Forms, apart from experience. But if
Neoplatonism were correct, then it would be possible for someone
to look at an acorn and, unfamiliar with the species, see what the
full grown oak would look like. This does not seem to happen on
any credible testimony.
One significant consequence of Aristotle's point of view was, indeed,
a belittlement of mathematics. Without mathematical Realism, we
do not have the modern notion that real science is mathematical
and that mathematics reveals the fundamental characteristics of
nature. Mathematics cannot be thought of as "abstracted"
from experience in any ordinary way. If it is not, then mathematics
is just internally constructed, out of contact with reality. This
seems to be Aristotle's view, a rejection of Pythagorean and Platonic
mathematical Realism. Mathematics is no more than a "device
for calculation." Thus, although Aristotle is usually thought
of as being more "scientific" than Plato, he rejects Plato's
geometrical view of the elements
for the sake of a completely Presocratic sort of theory of opposites.
He is overall nowhere near as interested in mathematics as Plato.
Aristotle's approach became accepted, all through the Middle Ages,
and it wasn't until the revival of Pythagorean-Platonic ideas about
mathematics, in people like Kepler and Galileo, that modern science
got going.
The Neoplatonic combination of Plato and Aristotle dominated thought
in Late Antiquity
and the early
Middle Ages. Then, beginning in Islâm and moving into Western
Europe, we have a revival of a stricter Aristotelianism, culminating
in the massive Summas of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).
It may not be a coincidence that this involved the rejection of
the mystical elements in Neoplatonism, since Christianity was institutionally
far more unfriendly to mysticism, with its promise of direct communication
with God, than were Islâm or Judaism. What was rare or unheard of
in Islâm or Judaism, mystics being condemned or even executed for
heresy, was a fairly regular occurrence in Western Christianity.
However, a stricter empiricism again creates the difficulty that
the apparent "form" of an object cannot provide knowledge
of an end (an entelechy) that is only implicit in the present
object, and so hidden to present knowledge.
Curiously, the reaction to this was not immediately a new Platonism
or Neoplatonism, but a more extreme empiricism: The Nominalists
overcame the Aristotelian difficulty by rejecting Realism altogether.
Universals were just "names," nomina, even just
"puffs of air." The greatest exponent of this approach
was the Englishman William of Ockham (1295-1349). To the
Nominalists, the individuality of the objects of experience simply
meant that only individuality exists in reality. The abolition
of a real abstract structure to the world had a number of consequences
for someone like Ockham. The omnipotence of God became absolute
and unlimited, unrestricted by the mere abstractions of logic, so
that God could even make contradictions real, which was inconceivable
to Aristotelians or Platonists. Similarly, no things had natures
(essences) that made them intrinsically either good or evil. Not
even God was intrinsically good or evil: The Good would just
be whatever God wills it to be, something else inconceivable to
Aristotelians or Platonists -- but actually rather Islâmic in tone,
since no human notion about the nature or essence of God can impose
a limit on the Will of God.
Although the debate between the Realists and the Nominalists became
the greatest controversy of Mediaeval philosophy, another classic
expression of Nominalism is to be found in the British Empiricists,
from John Locke (1632-1704) to George Berkeley (1685-1753)
and David Hume (1711-1776). Locke started the approach by
simply defining an "idea" as being an image. Since
images are undoubtedly individual and concrete, this stacks the
deck for Nominalism. Nevertheless, Locke wished to preserve something
like a common sense meaning of "abstraction," which he
thought of as taking some characteristic of a particular idea and
using it in a general way: "the mind makes the
particular ideas received from particular objects to become general."
Thus, Locke cannot find any difference between the idea "horse"
and the idea "Bucephalus" but "in leaving out something
that is peculiar to each individual, and retaining so much of those
particular complex ideas of several particular existences as they
are found to agree in" [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
Book II, Chapter XI, §9, & Book III, Chapter III, §9]. Locke
even wants to preserve a distinction between "nominal essence,"
the nature of things that we know about, and "real essence,"
the real nature of things, which we cannot know about given the
limitations of human knowledge [Book III, Chapter VI, §§7-18]. How
this distinction could be maintained on any kind of empiricism is
mysterious. Real essences and the compromise on abstract ideas were
swept away by Berkeley and Hume, who quite consistently and forthrightly
argued that there was no such thing as "abstract ideas."
Hume said:
Let any man try to conceive a triangle in general, which is neither
Isoceles nor Scalenum, nor has any particular length
or proportion of sides; and he will soon perceive the absurdity
of all the scholastic notions with regard to abstraction and general
ideas. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section
XII, Part I]
Of course, it is quite easy to conceive a triangle in general,
which is neither isoceles nor scalene -- Hume has done so himself.
Hume's argument only works if he really means imagine rather
than conceive. Hume even said:
No priestly dogmas, invented on purpose to tame and subdue
the rebellious reason of mankind, ever shocked common sense more
than the doctrine of the infinite divisibility of extension, with
its consequences; as they are pompously displayed by all geometricians
and metaphysicians, with a kind of triumph and exultation. [ibid.,
Part II]
Since infinite divisibility is rather important in geometry, and
one of the "consequences ... pompously displayed" is calculus,
"geometricians" (like Isaac Newton) would probably be
offended to be lumped together with metaphysicians. Hume's only
recourse is that there are "general terms" to which multiple
concrete "ideas" are attached. This however, fails the
Socratic test for the "model" that would enable us to
judge unfamiliar objects; and while the "family resemblances"
of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) can be appealed to by Nominalists
for such judgments, the imprecision implied by such a test is wholly
contradicted by the practice of mathematics, while that in which
a "resemblance" would consist must be, indeed, some abstract
feature or collection of such features. But Hume allows for no
abstract features, much less the recognition of them.
How far this silliness can go is evident in recent analytic philosophy,
which fancies itself in direct succession from Hume. The consequences
of the project of reducing the world to objects and words is evident
in the following statement by the logician Benson Mates [Elementary
Logic, Oxford, 1972, boldface added]:
Another matter deserving explanation is our decision to take
sentences as the objects with which logic deals. To some
ears it sounds odd to say that sentences are true or false, and
throughout the history of the subject there have been proposals
to talk instead about statements, propositions, thoughts,
or judgments. As described by their advocates, however, these
latter items appear on sober consideration to share a rather serious
drawback, which, to put it in the most severe manner, is this:
they do not exist.
Even if they did, there are number of considerations that would
justify our operating with sentences anyway. A sentence, at least
in its written form, is an object having a shape accessible to
sensory perception, or, at worst, it is a set of such objects.
Thus
It is raining
and
Es regnet,
though they may indeed be synonymous, are nonetheless
a pair of easily distinguishable sentences. And in general we
find that as long as we are dealing with sentences many of the
properties in which the logician is interested are ascertainable
by simple inspection. Only reasonably good eyesight, as contrasted
with metaphysical acuity, is required to decide whether a sentence
is simple or complex, affirmative or negative, or whether one
sentence contains another as a part. [pp. 10-11]
Reasonably good eyesight, however, is not enough to tell that "It
is raining" and "Es regnet" are synonymous.
That circumstance is evidently not noticed by Mates. What is needed
is not eyesight, but understanding, which is nothing so esoteric
as "metaphysical acuity," but instead a very simple and
very common kind of thought. The "advocates" of
the existence of thoughts are pretty much everyone
who uses ordinary language, which probably includes Mates himself.
Given Mates's own example, it is very hard to deny that meaning
is different from both words and objects. Mates, however, can indulge
in a particularly Nominalist theory of meaning, which we see in
his discussion of Set Theory:
Each set is uniquely determined by its members; in other works,
sets having the same members are identical. [ibid., p.
33]
However, the sets "the present [1999] King of France"
and "the present [1999] King of England" both have the
same members, namely none, which makes them identical
with the Empty Set ("Nothing"). They are therefore in
no way "uniquely determined" by their members, if we allow
that their meaning, even if not their membership, is different.
Thus, an "extensional" theory of meaning, which sees reference
to objects as the content of meaning, must either ignore "non-existent
objects" or must attribute a reality to non-existent objects
greater than that allowed by common sense. Equally serious is the
problem of how we would know what all the members of a non-empty
set are, without omniscience, in order to be able to use
the name of the set in its "uniquely determined" way.
If all we know are certain members of the set, i.e. the dogs
we actually know about from personal experience, then we are using
the name of a subset, not the real set, of dogs.
At the beginning of 20th century logic was a much more Realistic
theory of meaning and universals, that of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925).
For Frege, "subject" terms referred to individuals, while
"predicates," i.e. abstract properties, referred to "concepts."
"Concepts," then, exist as objects. In the subject we
have meaning as "sense," which is very different from
reference. Thus, in his classic example, the "morning star"
and the "evening star" have the same reference,
namely the planet Venus, but they have different senses,
namely "Venus as seen in the morning" and "Venus
as seen in the evening." A crude extensionalism cannot account
for this. On the other hand, Frege was no metaphysician; and we
have no theory to account for the nature or existence of concepts
as objects, let alone to what Frege said was the reference of sentences,
namely the "True" and the "False." A philosopher
looking for the metaphysics of "concepts" has little to
go on beyond Aristotle and Aquinas. Frege's theory of senses, however,
recently clarified by Jerrold
Katz, does preclude Nominalist (and all naturalistic
theories, like Wittgenstein's theory of meaning as "usage")
theories that only want to stick to words and individual objects.
The possibility occurs, then, that universals may occur, not in
words, and also not in any kind of objects (individuals or Frege's
concepts), but in the internal mechanisms of sense. This would be
a "middle way" between Realism and Nominalism that has
been called Conceptualism. This notion seems to go all the
way back to Peter Abelard (1079-1142). The drawback of conceptualism,
however, would be that universals would not be knowledge,
since the structures of meaning would correspond to nothing of
the kind in the world: Universals would have to be the
"pragmatic" way that we conceive or organize individuals,
avoiding the silliness of a Nominalism like Mates's, but there can
be no real differences in the objects that our conceptions
are reflecting. Conceptualism is devoid of anything like Frege's
"concepts" (or Aristotle's "forms") as abstract
objects.
Metaphysically, Conceptualism is therefore no different from Nominalism.
It is a psychologistic theory, i.e. it attributes structures
that we see in reality to structures imposed by the human psyche.
Indeed, some structures in the world are imposed by the human
psyche. There is nothing natural about a coffee pot, which is an
artifact of human conception and human purposes. A Platonic Form
or Aristotelian substance that is the objective existence of the
abstract and universal coffee pot would seem to be the reductio
ad absurdum of their theories as much as the "reasonably
good eyesight" is of Mates's. The conventionality of
such concepts provides a powerful argument for Conceptualism, as
it would also for Nominalism.
If Conceptualism were merely the argument that there is not always
an objective structure to correspond to the difference between essence
and accident, this would be quite true. However, it seems to be
the case that there is an objective structure corresponding
to some essences, since there are natural kinds of
things (dogs, feldspars, stars, flowers, etc.) whose identity owes
nothing to human convention or purposes. Furthermore, since all
attributes (properties) are universals, whether essential or accidental,
this argument would be beside the point. Even conventional concepts
are based on real characteristics. A coffee pot must hold coffee,
and its ability to do so owes nothing to convention but everything
to the nature of the materials and even the nature of space. Those
cannot be altered, much as many would like to, simply by making
some change in the conventions of our conception.
If a Conceptualist allows even a moment when real differences are
recognized, then, however conventional the rest of the constructions,
a fundamental element of Realism has been accepted into the theory.
Thus, however conventional a fundamental unit of measure may be,
this does not make all fundamental units somehow the same. A meter
really is more than three times as long as a foot, which
means they are commensurable, i.e. each can be converted
into the other. Commensurability and conversion are only possible
because of the independent, objective, and real natures of each.
For a true Conceptualism or Nominalism, incommensurability,
both of measure and of meaning, must be possible, which is why we
find that Nominialists and deconstructionists are eager to leap
on W.V.O. Quine's (1908- ) arguments for the "indeterminacy
of translation." The problem of the metaphysics of universals
thus overlaps the epistemological issues and theories examined in
"Foundationalism
and Hermeneutics". A consistent Conceptualism is going
to result in the same skepticism that we see in Hume or the same
nihilism that we see played out in deconstruction, all because of
the same denial of real universals and meaning which that has objective
reference. Quine, like the deconstructionist Rorty, offers a muddled
Pragmatism that obscures the non-responsiveness and question-begging
nature of his thought.
Immanuel Kant
can be said to be a Conceptualist because of the manner in which
the mind's activity of synthesis puts the concepts of reason into
phenomenal objects in the first place. This is definitely a Conceptualist
move. However, Kant's theory does not end up being a Conceptualist
theory, or any kind of psychologistic theory, if Kant is to be taken
seriously when he says that it is a theory of "empirical
realism." This is commonly misunderstood. Thus Jerrold
Katz says: "Kant's Copernican revolution...makes the existence
of objects in the world depend on our cognitive faculties"
[Realistic Rationalism, MIT, 1998, p. 7]. This is flatly
contradict by Kant himself:
Either the object alone must make the representation possible,
or the representation alone must make the object possible....
In the latter case, representation in itself does not produce
its object in so far as existence is concerned, for we
are not here speaking of its causality by means of will. [Kant's
emphasis, Critique of Pure Reason A92, Norman Kemp Smith
translation, St. Martin's Press, 1965, p. 125]
 If
the existence of objects were produced by representation alone,
this is what Kant called "intellectual intuition." Only
God would have intellectual intuition. Our actual ability to produce
the existence of objects is not by means of representation alone,
but by means of will, otherwise the existence of objects is "given"
to us. Instead, Kant's theory is that the character of objects
is in part determined by the nature of representation. Since this
is also the very thing we see in contemporary physics, in
Quantum Mechanics, it becomes very hard to reject Kant as some
anti-realist without also a somewhat wishful-thinking rejection
of this characteristic of physics.
To be thinking, as often happens, that things-in-themselves in
Kant are what are "really" real is to contradict the meaning
of "transcendental idealism," which is that transcendent
objects are only "ideal," i.e. subjective. Schopenhauer,
although leaving out most of the subtlety of Kant's theory, clarifies
the metaphysics by ruling out any order of transcendent objects,
whose possibility always seems to be hovering in the background
for Kant, confusing his realism. Kant, however, is correct in that
we inevitably try and conceive of transcendent, which means
unconditioned, objects. This generates "dialectical
illusion," antinomies
of reason. Kant thought that some antinomies could be resolved as
"postulates of practical reason" (God, freedom, and immortality);
but the arguments for the postulates are not very strong (except
for freedom), and discarding them helps guard against the temptation
of critics to interpret Kant in terms of a kind of Cartesian "transcendental
realism" (i.e. real objects are "out there," but
it is not clear how or that we know them). If phenomenal objects,
as individuals, are real, then the abstract structure (fallibly)
conceived by us within them is also real. Empirical realism for
phenomenal objects means that an initial Kantian Conceputalism turn
into a Realism for universals.
Kant's theory, indeed, is not the kind of
realism that we see in Descartes, or that was evidently desired
by Einstein, where objects exist as such entirely independent of
subjects. Instead, phenomenal objects presuppose the subject, and
we cannot say whether their properties are "really" objective
or "really" subjective -- as examined in "Ontological
Undecidability." This is how Kant's theory can be both
a form of Conceptualism and a form of Realism
at the same time [ note
on chart]. Thus, if the mind conceives abstract properties, abstract
properties will be in objects, because objects are just the
other side of the structures found in the mind. But
it would be equally true to say that the structures in the mind
are just the other side of those in the objects. The Aristotelian
function of "abstraction," by which universal forms are
taken from objects into the mind, in these terms is less mysterious:
Phenomenal objects are already in the mind, so the
purely mental operation does not reach out into transcendent (Cartesian)
reality to fetch the essences. [note]
While Kant's empirical realism allows for an Aristotelian Realism
of universals, it also means that we do not have to accept
Aristotle's theory substantial forms and of essence and accident.
There are conventional concepts. Not all concepts therefore
correspond to real essences. To think that they do is what
Karl Popper called "essentialism" -- a good label
for such an error, though the term is now widely used by "post-modern"
nihilists to condemn any doctrine of essences or natural
kinds. But there are natural kinds and real essences.
Real essences, however, must be due to something; they are
not just self-generating. A clue may be found in the modern theory
of DNA that has replaced the entelchy of Aristotelian "form."
DNA governs the growth and development of organisms through the
causal laws of nature. The natural kinds of plants and animals
are thus the result of causal necessity. All essences, whether
real or conventional, are the result of some form of necessity.
The fixity and unchangeability of Plato's original Forms,
"immanentized" by Aristotle, are artifacts of a form of
necessity itself, the necessity of the perfect aspect, of
time which has occurred (the past or the present perfect
tenses, the opposite of Aristotle's own "future contingency").
The various modes of necessity are discussed in "A
New Kant-Friesian System of Metaphysics" and the nature
of the perfect aspect in a note
to that essay. Purely conventional concepts rely on the fact
of their use, which is a function of perfect necessity, for the
fixity of their own conceptual essences. The entelechy of a coffee
pot is owing entirely to human purposes, and to no causal necessity,
but it is functionally parallel, in human understanding, to natural
kinds created by causal laws of nature.
If we distinguish between substance and attribute and identify
some attributes as essential, this will mean, not that there
is a hidden, underlying substance unifying the essence, but that
such a notion of substance can be replaced by the forms of necessity,
whether causal for natural kinds or purposive for purely human conceptions.
This means that the ghostly skeletons of the Platonic Forms, brought
down to earth by Aristotle, and uncomfortably inhabiting the transient
individuals that we perceive, can be eliminated. The abstract features
we conceive in individual objects are not different in kind from
the objects, which are themselves artifacts of necessity (logical,
a priore, perfect, and causal), but the living skeleton
of the objects, in a phenomenal world where necessity and contingency
are the structure of everything.
The fixity of our own concepts collapses all the necessities of
reality into the fact of conventional usage, which Plato and Aristotle
projected out into the world, even into the transcendent; but it
is now possible to correct this. It is not the Concept out among
objects, as Frege put it, but mental concepts do refer to
some abstract structure grounded in some form of necessity. By the
same token we can identify the ground of the "True" and
the "False," which Frege saw as the reference of sentences,
since the same necessities that unify real or conventional essences
also unify predications in sentences. Kant's doctrine of the "primacy
of judgment," indeed, subordinates the unity of concepts to
the unity of propositions, which enables us to say that even analytic
truths are of different kinds, depending on the necessity that
unifies the properties in the concepts. "All placental mammals
give live birth" is thus analytic of the concept "placental
mammal," which is a natural kind based in causal necessity,
while "All Hobbits are short" is analytic of the concept
"Hobbit," which is a fictional artifact of J.R.R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings and so dependent on the mere fact of the
convention adopted by the imagination of Tolkien.
 The
modes of necessity are interrelated with the modes of contingency,
so that perfect necessity is contingent in relation to a priore
necessity, a priore necessity is contingent in relation to
logical necessity, and logical necessity is contingent in relation
to an "ur-contingency" that would transcend non-contradiction.
Each mode of contingency, in turn, represents the possibility
of something different from what we see in each subsequent mode
of necessity. The very possibility that, in time, we can open the
window or make some other alteration in reality is a case where
we deal with the contingency of present time and our ability to
bring about some new possibility. What this adds up to for universals
is that as forms of necessity they represent the rules and guideposts
that limit and direct possibility: Universals represent all
real possibilities. Thus, what Plato would have called the Form
of the Bed, really just means that beds are possible. What
would have seemed like a reductio ad absurdum of Plato's
theory, that if there is the Form of the Bed, there must also be
the Form of the Television also (which is thus not an artifact and
an invented object at all, but something that the inventor has just
"remembered"), now must mean that the universal represents
the possibility of the television, which is a possibility
based on various necessities of physics (conditioned necessities)
and facts (perfect necessities) of history.
Where the power of possibility comes from is a factor unaddressed
by Plato. In Aristotle it is represented by matter, which
is power and potential; but then matter is so intrinsically amorphous,
merely the passive recipient of actualizing "form," that
the Neoplatonists identified it with Not-Being (and evil) -- quite
apt when Prime Matter, or pure potential, is not actual at all and
so in fact doesn't exist -- and both Aristotle and the Neoplatonists
eliminated any material component to God (or the One). Rather awkwardly,
this left Aristotle's God literally "powerless": He
is already perfectly actual, which means that He cannot
do anything that He is not already doing. This could be argued theologically,
that it would be an insult to God's foreknowledge and wisdom if
anything has been left undone that He is going to have to
take care of in the future, but at the same time it does seem like
an insult to His Omnipotence that He cannot just decide to
do something new.
The failure of Aristotle's theory is that necessity and possibility
are interrelated, actualization does not "use up" possibility,
and that what is truly actual, phenomenal objects in the world,
consists of contingent individuals and not the necessary universals
of the "form." In Spinoza's metaphysics, individuals as
natura naturata ("nature natured") are the visible
products of coming-into-being, but the creativity of Spinoza's God
is limited by a determinism that makes every event a complete product
of necessity, with no contingency, and so no radical
possibility, at all.
Combining necessity and possibility means that actual individuals
are always the result of both, always necessary in some ways and
contingent in others. Universals exist precisely where possibilities
exist: In the future, in one sense, in the imperfect
aspect, in another. There is also now a physical meaning for
this. The sum of all possibilities before a particular event
actualizes one of them, is the square of the   wave
function in quantum
mechanics. The possibilities summed in the wave function are
limited by the laws of physics, but not completely limited. There
are various possible and probable events. It is the act of observation
that "collapses" the wave function and produces definite
states of the system. As discussed in "Kantian
Quantum Mechanics," this is like nothing so much in physics
or philosophy as the act of synthesis that produces consciousness
in Kant. For the purpose here, however, it need give us no more
than a dimension to reality where the individuality and contingency
of phenomenal objects does not yet exist, but possibility and necessity
do. That makes it simultaneously Plato's World of Forms and Aristotle's
Prime Matter, the place of universals as real possibilities with
the power of coming into existence.
The theory of universals also gives us the theory of meaning,
since meaning consists of abstract properties, so that meaning is
also an artifact of the forms of necessity, both the meaning of
words and the meaning of things -- of life and the world.
The complete theory thus has required some distinctive elements
of Kant-Friesian doctrine, including Kantian empirical realism and
transcendental idealism, restated as ontological
undecidability, and a Friesian theory of the modes
of necessity. Deeper issues of meaning, both for the ultimate
significance of matters of value and for religious questions, concern
other aspects of Friesian metaphysics
and epistemology.
Metaphysics
History of Philosophy
Home Page
The "Axiomatics of Universals" chart is similar
to many devised by Leonard Nelson.
Other
premises and conclusions might be used to differentiate Realism,
Nominalism, Conceptualism, and the Kant-Friesian theory from each
other, but the given propositions are sufficient for the task.
A likely objection from Aristotelians (cf. Jonathan Jacobs &
John Zeis, "Form and Cognition: How to Go Out of Your Mind,"
The Monist, vol. 80, no. 4, October, 1997, pp. 539-557)
to the characterization of Realism as "Universals exist only
objectively" would be that universals, or Aristotelian "forms,"
also exist intentionally, and so subjectively, in
the mind, after abstraction from individual objects. Fair enough.
This is indeed on the right track, as liberal use is made here
of much the same notion of intentionality.
However, Aristotelians cannot mean "subjectively" in
the same way. The external form is fundamental to them, and
it is then instantiated into the mind through abstraction (from
perception), or through the mysterious "formal causation"
of Jacobs and Zeis, by which the "form" of the object
is causally conveyed into the mind. However, a causal theory
must be a scientific theory, and Jacobs and Zeis have neglected
to mention what part of science employs "formal causation."
Actually, it is none. Causation can only be a specific kind
of causation, specified by a particular scientific theory. The causal
principle of Hume or Kant is simply the form of a law of
nature. Aristotelian causation, whether formal or efficient or otherwise,
is a theory proposed in the absence of a modern scientific
understanding of the laws of nature. The billiard balls of the classical
Empiricists are a function of the mechanics of velocity and mass,
17th century physics, while atom bombs are a function of Relativity
and other aspects of 20th century physics. "Formal causation"
thus requires a formal physical theory, of which there is no such
thing. Aristotelians may well be so busy noting the inadequacies
of the Aristotelian theory of "efficient causation" that
they fail to notice that modern causation in physics is not
the Aristotelian theory.
In fact, Aristotelians are transcendental realists, cannot avoid
the Cartesian paradoxes, and cannot accept that their intentional,
subjective forms exist on the same ontological level as the "forms"
in the objects. Thus, the characterization of Realism as "Universals
exist only objectively" means that subjectivity is only epiphenomenal,
ontologically subordinate to objectivity. It is the denial
of Kantian transcendental idealism and of the equivalent ontological
undecidability. For Realists, real existence, ontologically
independent existence, is external, which is the kind of real existence
that universals have for them.
Barry Smith
Return to text
Reviews
To Conceputalists like Ayn
Rand (who explicitly rejected Aristotle's Realism) and her recent
supporters, Kant represents merely another brand of scepticism.
Thus, a recent issue of the Institute
for Objectivist Studies newsletter, the "Navigator"
[Volume 2 Number 6, February 1999], included an interview with Stephen
Hicks, a Ph.D. from Indiana University and now professor of philosophy
at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois (and sometime collaborator
with the Institute's President, David Kelley), about various philosophers,
including Kant.
To Hicks, Kant has a "skeptical argument" that "leads
him to reject the real world... ...[O]ur cognitive operations are
by their very natures precluded from putting us in contact with
reality" [p. 8]. Kant is thus judged against a standard of
transcendental realism, and his doctrine of empirical realism, which
is in no way sceptical, is ignored. Hicks also claims that Kant
rejects a correspondence theory of truth. That is not true, since
Kant retains a realistic sense of the relationship between knowledge
and its objects. (A coherence theory of truth, Hick's "internal
consistency," must wait for Hegel.) It is just that the objects
are not transcendently real and absolutely outside the subject as
Hicks requires. Even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument,
that Kant's transcendental idealism is a form of scepticism, Hicks
must also overlook the transcendent basis that Kant gives to morality
and the "postulates of practical reason." As noted above,
this is the kind of thing that appears to compromise Kant's empirical
realism and leads to the kind of misinterpretations under consideration.
However, Hicks cannot both ignore the transcendent basis of morality
and allow it to compromise the realism of phenomenal objects.
With a Kantian alternative rejected, people like Rand, Hicks, and
Kelley are left with a Conceptualism that logically reduces to Nominalism
and a kind of metaphysical realism that will generate all the usual
Cartesian paradoxes. This is better than the rampant nihilism of
the modern academy, but it does not represent progress in philosophy.
Return to text
Leonard Nelson's
axiomatic diagrams are usually of a similar logical form. One much
like the diagram on universals above may be
seen in "The
Foundations of Value, Part II, Epistemological Issues: Justification
(quid juris) and Non-Intuitive Immediate Knowledge."
 The
one at right gives a basic logical form for such diagrams.
From four possible premises there are four possible conclusions.
Three of the premises are actually true, and three of the conclusions
actually false. The key is the single false premise, which usually
embodies some traditional philosophical preconception that is false
(a "false disjunction," Nelson says). The three false
conclusions are then usually the traditional philosophical alternatives,
as in Intuitionism (Mysticism, to Nelson), Speculative
Constructivism (Logical Dogmatism, to Nelson), and
Empiricism in epistemology, or Realism, Conceptualism,
and Nominalism in metaphysics. The Kantian Critical
conclusion, reached in Kant or in Friesian theory, is then the contradiction
of the key traditional premise. At right, this is given both as
a conjunction of the three true premises and as the logically equivalent
denial of the original false premise. Each conclusion, indeed,
is contradicted by the premise that it does not use. The Critical
conclusion in epistemology is the Friesian theory of non-intuitive
immediate knowledge, while in metaphysics it is Kantian transcendental
idealism or ontological
undecidability.
An example of one of Nelson's diagrams is below left. This is from
Nelson's great Critique of Practical Reason [Kritik der
praktishen Vernunft, 1917].  A
translation of that book was commissioned by the Leonard Nelson
Foundation in 1957. This should have followed the publication of
Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy [1949] and the System
of Ethics [1956] at Yale University Press, but evidently there
had not been sufficient interest in the others, and the book was
never published. The Foundation, however, made the manuscript translation
available later in photocopied (and bound) form.
The logical structure of this diagram is now familiar (the negations
are just distributed with one difference). What it deals with is
the notion that moral obligation is the result of someone's will.
This would be either my will or another's will. The
pious often believe it is their obligation to do God's will. Politicians,
the police, and judges often believe it is the obligation of citizens
to do what they are told. On the other hand, others (Nietzscheans,
Randites) think it
is their obligation to do their own will (Existentialist "authenticity,"
or moralistic egoism),
or that they have no obligation at all (moral
aestheticism and egoistic
aestheticism). The descriptions of these outcomes, "Authoritarianism,"
"Egoism," and "Nihilism," are
not Nelson's terms but are suitable for the fallacies involved.
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