Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXI, No. 2, September 2005

Replies

DAVID WIGGMS

Birkbeck College

Reply to Meixner Uwe Meixner suggests that this alpha (on line three) considered as a letter type is the same letter type as that alpha (on line five) considered as a letter type; but this alpha (on line three) considered as a letter token is not the same as that alpha (on line five) considered as a letter token. This alpha, or that alpha, can be legitimately considered under the aspect either of type or of token. The identity of this alpha or of that alpha “is relative to the way in which [these entities] are ontologically interpreted.” There is no licence, how- ever, or so Meixner must say, for the enemy of sortal relativism to rush to the conclusion that Meixner thinks it is legitimate to interpret the entity in both ways at once. Similarly then, can we not make the following claim?-: Theseus’ ship considered as a ship-instrument is the same as that working ship considered as a ship-instrument; but Theseus’ ship considered as a ship- bulk is not the same as that working ship considered as a ship-bulk-rather it is the same ship-bulk as that reconstructed ship-bulk lying in a nearby court- yard. On Meixner’s view, the working ship and the ship reconstruction “can be interpreted in two ways: as ship-instrument or as ship-bulk”. He then offers a similar solution to Geach’s Tib-Tibbles problem; but, unless I am mistaken, this does not raise new issues.

Meixner is not supporting the claim that identity is itself sortal-relative, nor is he casting suspicion on Leibniz’s Law. But, according to Meixner’s view, entities lend themselves to different interpretations and it is a mistake to suppose that one interpretation will always upstage or discredit another. Here is conceptualism of a daring I should never myself have conceived. But, now it is on offer and visibly absolute and inhospitable to relative identity, why do I not embrace it?

I must record my reservations and reluctances, and explain why I persist in deprecating all talk of interpreting or reinterpreting objects. First a small point about syntax and then a larger point or two.

Rather than adopt Meixner’s DEF, I think I still prefer to say that, in a sentence such as “x is the same donkey as y”, the words “same” and “donkey”

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stand in an autonomous grammatical construction with one another, predicat- ing of n and y the restriction to donkeys of the Leibnizian relation of identity. (See pp. 15-17.)

Here is something more important. How well does one understand Meix- ner’s “this alpha considered as a letter type” (say) or “Theseus’ ship consid- ered as a ship-bulk”? Here, as almost always (see p. 49), I am eager to take phrases like “considered as.. .”-in so far as I understand them-not as form- ing an essential part of the subject expression but either as occurring in con- struction with the verb or else as something somehow added in apposition with the noun or noun-phrase that is deployed in the subject-expression, i.e., in apposition with “alpha” or “Theseus’ ship”. But let us try taking them as Meixner does. In that case, are we meant to be able to make self-sufficient sense of the demonstrative “this” as it occurs in “this considered as a letter- type” or “this considered as a letter-token”, and independently of the “consid- ered as . . . .” ? Either we are or we aren’t meant to be able to do this.

If we aren’t meant to be able to read “this” as occurring autonomously, then the whole complex locution apparently reduces benignly enough to “this letter-type” or “this letter-token”. So, predictably enough, I shall then say that, since no letter-token is a letter-type, these demonstrative phrases serve to pick out different things. Of course you can refer to the letter-type alpha by pointing to a letter-token which you have put onto the page. Such “ d e f d ostension” must be among the best ways of securing reference to the type. But d e f d ostension precisely makes the point that you can refer to one thing by putting on display another thing.

Suppose then-with the “either” option-that we can make sense of the “this” independently of the “considered as.. .”. Still, given the essential incompleteness (“substantive hungriness”) of the demonstratives of “this” and “that”, we cannot help but ask “this what?’ If the answer then is “this alpha”, then that raises the question: what then is an alpha? Do you mean the type or the token? And then rnutatis rnutandis, we shall have the same outcome with the subject “Theseus’ ship”: who was Theseus? What sort of a thing is a ship? Are we not back were we started under the benign spell of Aristotle’s what is it? question, distinguishing types and tokens in the alpha case, and refining our individuative principles in confrontation with Hobbes’ puzzle?

Before I reach the second reservation about Meixner’s proposal, a word more about “interpreting objects”. Kant’s idealist (see p. 168) sees the contri- bution of the mind as giving the form of the intuition of the thing-in-itself. Sortalism by contrast, being more eager than its rivals to abandon the thing- in-itself, sees matters differently. The contribution of mind (mind informed by ideas arrived at in prior experience and ever participating in processes of back and forth with empirical reality) is not only to have prepared itself to find in experience any f or any g that presents itself, but to determine what

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kind of thing shall be looked for or lighted on or singled out from the great haystack that is Reality. In interpreting reality in one way or another way, we find (if they are there to be found where we are looking) this kind of object or that kind of object. In the sense of “interpret” that is relevant here, objects are not themselves proper items to be subject to interpretation. In all their vari- ety, they are themselves found in the process of interpreting the experience of reality. Objects are found already possessed of their determinate nature. Coming to us as they do from the process of interpretation, they do not invite yet more interpretation.

Here is my second reservation. Meixner’s form of conceptualism depends on a point made by Arnold, his sophisticated relativist: namely that “it is legitimate to take this alpha as a letter-token and legitimate to take this alpha as a letter-type’’ does not imply “it is legitimate to take alpha as a letter-token and to take it as a letter-type”. As a thesis about legitimacy in general, this is evidently correct. But where truth is the thing at issue-in the special case where alethic legitimacy is at issue-how can one help but expect the impli- cation to hold? Meixner also asks “who would dare to assert that the world tells us without any room for variation how we should sortally interpret all the objects in it?’ To this my reply is that the world itself tells us nothing; yet there is no limit to that which we can learn from the investigations that we direct at the world, or direct at our own practices as directed at the world. There is simply no need to starve our sortal conceptions or pronounce in advance about their limitations. Nor need we force upon those investigations the idea that only one thing is there to be found at any one address in the said haystack that is Reality, or force upon such interpretations the idea that everything that is to be found at the address is a particular-and one and the same particular.

Reply to Lowe

Jonathan Lowe focuses his critique upon the question of that which “distin- guishes each thing from any other thing”-that which “underlies each thing’s uniqueness as the particular thing that it is”. Even supposing that sortalism defended as I defend it in the form of conceptualist realism escapes other chal- lenges, and supposing that these are all flawed in ways I have recapitulated in the Prtcis (see section 9), is not my position wide open to challenge by vir- tue of the special and exclusive emphasis it places on the role of the subject of experience in the individuation of this or that particular thing as this thing or that thing? Can I really think that this particular thing owes its “thisness” to the attentions of the mind that picks it out? One might sum up the issue between Lowe and me in a complaint to the effect that actual and possible singlings out by human persons make a strange foundation for the identities of empirical particulars.

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I am extremely grateful for the opportunity that Lowe’s critique furnishes for me to explain myself better on this point.

I begin by saying that I have no objection to saying that Mars individu- ates (Mars}, or that (Mars} owes its identity to Mars. I might myself prefer to say that (Mars} could not lack Mars (that is how I speak at pp. 120-25) or that the identity of Mars determines the identity of {Mars}. For I have wanted to pair the term “individuate” with “single out” and “track”--connoting acts by conscious subject. But I do not own the word “individuate”. I do not at all object to the very idea of a theory of “identity-determination” or (in Lowe’s terms) of individuation. Nor can I prevent the theory from reaching a conclu- sion that certain basic things individuate themselves (in Lowe’s sense, though, not mine). The chief burden of my negative remarks about thisnesses and haecceities was this: either these are fashioned in a way that is dependent already on the identity of a thing, or else they have to be fashioned in a way that leaves them open to multiple instantiation. In the second case, however, it is hard to see how they can solve the problem Lowe is pursuing.

The odd thing is that Lowe seems to agree with me about haecceity. (“[Such things] may generate more difficulties than they supposedly solve”). How then shall we focus the discussion? Well let me see how many of the matters at issue I can absorb into points that Lowe and I can agree upon.

First, any sane position must acknowledge that, when we happen on a thing in experience, the thing is what it is, falls under the sortal concept it falls under, and is the particular object it is, entirely independently of our happening upon it. Conceptualist realism, motivated as it is by the argu- ments given in sections 3 and 4 above, only has the name it has because it emphasizes the indispensable role in individuation (my sense) of predicates that stand for sortuf concepts and emphasizes also the role that ideas or con- ceptions of these concepts play in our mental acts of singling out, of track- ing and of individuation (my sense). But even the very earliest of individu- ative acts took place, as Simone Weil puts it, “dans un univers d6ji rang6” (except in so far as our ancestors n d e d to insert into that universe certain kinds of artefacts). See the epigraph at p. 139. So much is not in controversy.

Secondly, if I have ever denied (or even seemed to deny) that there is a metaphysical question about what makes a thing the thing it is, then I have erred. For there are things whose identities do manifestly derive from some- thing else. (There are sets, for instance, about which I say the same as Lowe says. See pp. 118-19.) It must be worth saying that are also things whose identities are basic and derive from nothing else. That is all right by me, even if I am suspiciously unsure how much Lowe seeks to commit us to in the idea of “simple substances”. (On a related point, see above Section 8, paragraph two.) In this second or basic case, I should venture to say that such

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identities have no foundation at all. But I cannot object if you prefer to say that an object whose identity is non-derivative is the foundation of its own identity. You can also say if you want to, that the very being of Julius Caesar whereby he is what he is resides in his essence. What seems unclear though-and here I cannot be sure if Lowe agrees or disagrees-is whether there is any specification of that unique essence which will genuinely dis- pense with the concept identical with Caesar.

Thirdly, characterizing the non-derivative identity of each self-individuat- ing thing (in Lowe’s sense) in this way, what else is to be said? Well I say that here we have something primitive, as primitive as the identity relation itself. We do understand it, and there is of course a philosophical duty to say how we do that. Obviously we do not understand it by having learned an axiom or a definition or by anything simply theoretical. I hope that the Prk- cis, which was written afresh out of S&SR even as Lowe was writing his critique, will show how we learn about the identity of things by doing, and show how our picking out of things and our determination of identities can- not help but draw on one and the same fund of practical knowledge. The regress of explanations that Lowe suspects he may have found in what he takes to be the sortalist anti-haecceitist account of these things-its “explana- tion” of what makes this or that the thing it is-entirely depends on his reluctance to accept that such matters really are primitive, and only leave over the question of how we arrive at our practical cognizance of them.

Reply to Bakhurst

David Bakhurst’s account of Chapter Seven of Sameness and Substance Renewed has a sweep of imagination and an insight that call not only for gratitude but for admiration. It traces real connections which I doubt I could have traced for myself, and it confronts me with real questions I did not expect-questions fit for times in which we see (for those who have it) wealth beyond measure, ecological waste beyond imagination and a political process which has almost surrendered to the managerial consciousness all autonomous power to perceive either reality or possibility. Meanwhile, the new managerial conception of human capacities, despite the doubtful prove- nance of its jejune and childish ideas of human motivation, has gained com- pelling power with a speed and thoroughness that would have surprised the author of Sameness and Substance. In so far as our times still leave any place for philosophical criticism, however, this calls for much more patience than I could have mustered at the time of writing my anti-constructionist tirade of 1980. Here, if there is one, is the excuse for the analytical relentlessness (fur- ther prolonged in a recent exchange with Sydney Shoemaker in The Monist, 2004-5) that marks the chapter Bakhurst is concerned with. Only if one can

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get these things right, I believe, can one effectively criticize pernicious con- structionist ideas of the human condition and its prospects.

Person is not a natural kind concept but, in so far as it is individuative (in my sense or Lowe’s sense), it needs the determinacy and depth of that which backs our use of the concept. If we say, as I do, that this determinacy and depth is sustained by the concept human being, should we draw the con- clusion that everything we are concerned with here has the scientific tractabil- ity of the biological?

In response to this question, Bakhurst invites us to draw back and think harder. He and I each think that there is more to being a human being than being an organism. He draws attention to the explanatory autonomy of the rational and to the depths of our rational nature that are tapped into by phi- losophical interests that he and I have in common, namely interests in inter- pretation, in the cumulative power of culture, and in that broad conception of human nature common to Hume and to Aristotle, which embraces not only our capacities to assimilate culture but our achievement, such as it still is, of Bildung. Towards the close, he mentions with approval the idea that person- hood is an attribute that human animals gradually acquire “in the form of conceptual capacities and moral sensibilities which makes them, as McDow- ell puts it, ‘at home in the space of reasons”’.

Finding so much here to agree with, I shall confine this response to one doubt. Is the idea of personhood as something acquired a good summation of all the concerns that Bakhurst enumerates, or a good place-holder for the things that we owe specially in this field to Bakhurst. (See p. 185, note 3.) Reading his proposal quite literally, I am troubled to think that one might find oneself saying that A was more of a person aged 32 than he was at 20, or that B was more of a person than C was and meaning it quite literally. Once we started saying that sort of thing and taking it as seriously confm- ing Bakhurst’s proposal, we should need to take more seriously than we now do the fact that we sometimes say “D is a real Mensch” whereas (we say) “E is scarcely human”-ways of talking we do not think of as committing us to think of human beinghood as something acquired or committing us to exempt E from all reproof for his callousness or brutality. Is it not better to conceive of a human person as a creature with a natural capacity, which may or may not be realized, for reason, morality, Bildung.. .and better to say that these achievements fulfil the potentialities of human beinghood I person- hood? Adapting a dictum of Woodger’s I have quoted before (see S&SR p. 64), would it not be better to say that the child is the primordium of the moral / rational being but not of the future person, because the child already is that person?

How else then should we draw back from the conclusion that everything we are concerned with in the individuation of persons has the scientific trac-

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tability of the biological? Well, here let us ask: how biological is the idea of a human being? Or else, how broadly ought the biological to be conceived? And, in the present state of science, how tractable is the (broadly) biological? How adequate will present day scientific conceptions of this field prove to have been to the questions that biologists will soon find themselves asking or to the questions they already find us putting to them about human beings? What a shame that the only great philosopher with any full mastery of the biological science of his time lived almost 2400 years ago. Let us not hasten to allow or concede too readily that a true biological scientist will simply and permissively assent to the conceptual propriety or scientific fruitfulness of the reductive fixations of so much of present day biological science-ar see nothing off key in the “thought experiments” (most of them gratuitous gifts to constructionism) once proposed so lightly in 20* century philosophy of mind.

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