"Many philosophers right through to today have worried about the concept of thing; we can enumerate all the properties of a thing, they have thought, but how should we understand the thing that has the properties? One popular answer to this says that no separate thing has the properties, because things are bundles of properties, nothing more. In one version of this theory, a thing is a bundle of universals; in a different version—less fraught with difficulties—it is a bundle of property-instances."
-Jonathan Bennett ("What Events Are", 2002)
Part 1: Objects as social constructs - the core idea
- I will refer to this view as “bundle theory.”
- Properties exist objectively.
- Properties are the only things that exist.
- Objects reduce to their properties.
- We can eliminate from our ontology that which reduces to something more fundamental.
- Therefore, we can eliminate objects from our ontology.
- Therefore, there is a real sense in which objects do not exist. Objects do not exist above and beyond the properties they denote.
- However, there is a real sense in which objects do exist: the properties objects denote are real (with the exception of fictional objects, which do not denote real properties or real combinations of properties).
- Bundle theory is similar to mereological nihilism in that tables, chairs, and buildings do not exist in and of themselves. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/
- However, bundle theory conserves the common sense idea that tables, chairs, and buildings are real, because the properties denoted by those words are real. Mereological nihilism doesn't have access to real properties.
- Another difference is that bundle theory would not say simples exist, unless we understand simples to be properties.
- So bundle theory has the best of both worlds: the simplicity of mereological nihilism and the dissolving of object-based puzzles by eliminating objects, and yet there is a very real sense in which tables, chairs, and buildings do exist.
- I’m not sure whether this view is heading towards trope theory. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tropes/
- Are these bundles of universals or property-instances? I'm not sure, but in any case I don't see the need to use the word 'trope' when the distinction between 'property' and 'universal' is right there. If I wanted to talk about abstract particulars I would just use 'property' and if I wanted to talk about abstract universals I would use 'universal.' But on bundle theory properties are not always abstract.
- What it means to exist is to be a real property. Real properties are those properties we cannot dispense with due to our “bumping” into them through observation, empirical investigation, or a priori apprehension.
- So we discover what properties exist by 1) A priori methods like logic and conceptual grasping (by our linguistic, semantic faculties), and by 2) A posteriori methods of empirical observation and scientific experiment.
- For example, I understand the difference between wanting cake or ice cream and wanting cake and ice cream. I see that ‘or’ and ‘and’ are two different concepts. So these are two different properties, the property of disjunction versus the property of conjunction. I am committed to these properties not due to science, but due to the a priori conceptual grasping of ‘and’ versus ‘or.’
- Contrast that with the property of being ductile. This is a property of materials to be stretched out without breaking. Copper is highly ductile, making it suitable for fashioning into wire. This is a property that cannot be grasped purely by semantic ability; one must observe the behavior of materials.
- Objects are social constructs, semi-arbitrary carve-outs of properties.
- When a spider crawls on my guitar, it doesn’t perceive the guitar as a guitar. Guitars are meaningful to us by what they represent. And when a spider crawls into a box, it probably makes no distinction between the box and the floor the box rests on. But we do make this distinction. We grow up and learn what the objects are by our parents and community. Canons and traditions form around those objects that are meaningful to us and we operate within those traditions. Birds, cats, lizards, and what have you, do not carve out properties in the way we do because they have different interests and different faculties. So what’s a piano or a bookcase or a dollar bill to us is just some random object to other creatures.
- Properties just so happen to concatenate and coalesce and form limited boundaries of shape and size, making it effortless for us (those of us who have the faculty of sight) to perceive those boundaries and name those distinct patches of properties. In fact we must do this, as otherwise we would not be able to tell apart, or understand, or communicate among ourselves one relevant bundle of properties from another.
- It is presumably exactly sight’s ability to give us access to the properties of the world, thereby helping us navigate it and survive, that explains how we evolved it. Of course, because our survival is a highly specific goal that comes with highly specific tasks and interests, we will find certain bundles of properties of greater or lesser interest to us and we will label those bundles accordingly.
Part 2: Testing the theory
- Does the number 2 exist? Yes, in the sense that there is the property of being prime and being even (and being one less than three, two less than four, and so on), and 2 is the set of those properties. Those properties exist; we bump into them.
- Usually, we discover properties through empirical methods of observation and science. But mathematical properties are discovered through reason itself (perhaps some mathematical properties are understood through the aid of empirical observation, such as counting objects for children).
- Does Pegasus exist? To answer that we have to look at the properties of Pegasus and ask ourselves if those properties exist. Do the combination of properties that make up a horse exist? Yes, which is why we have the word 'horse.' Do the combination of properties that make up wings exist? Yes, which is why we have the word 'wing.' Do winged horses exist? No, there is no empirical evidence for that object that includes both the properties that go into being a horse (or something that looks just like a horse but is technically a different animal) as well as the property of having wings.
- Fictional objects are impossible combinations of possible properties (e.g., David Hume's 'golden mountain'; or 'winged horse') or combinations of properties that include one or more impossible properties (e.g., Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Unicorns, God).
- Golden mountains and winged horses are logically possible, which is why we can imagine them. But they are physically impossible.
- Some properties are contingent (they come into being and go out of being) and some properties are necessary (they do not come into being or go out of being).
- For example, the combination of properties that make up a table comes into being and can go out of being. Tables are contingent objects.
- The combination of properties that make up the number 2 do not come into being and cannot go out of being. The number 2 is a necessary object.
- Do words exist? Yes, in the sense that the properties of words exist. Words are references to objects ('mountain' refers to mountains and 'lake' refers to lakes). Even more abstract words like 'or' refer to properties, in this case the property of disjunction. Words themselves are objects. There are spoken and written words, and each kind has its own properties. The written word 'mountain' has the property of containing eight letters, having a certain etymology, etc., while the spoken equivalent has two syllables, certain vowel sounds, etc.
- (You might want to say the written word 'mountain' has two syllables, but if you put your knowledge of how the word sounds aside we can imagine 'mountain' sounding like the word 'main,' with silent letters in the middle. The symbols alone do not tell us the syllables. It's tricky to separate in our minds written words from their verbal equivalents!)
- Do shapes exist? Yes, the properties that make up a shape exist. The property of having four angles exists, as we find squares and rectangles having that property.
- Do letters exist? Yes, letters are shapes.
- Do drawings of shapes and letters exist? Yes, drawings of shapes and letters exist. Without these drawings, we wouldn't know what shapes and letters looked like. The letters on this screen are drawings. Visual properties, therefore, are only knowable by those who have the faculty of sight. (I'm sure folks blind from birth can have an image of squareness by feeling a square object. But this image is, I'm assuming, not visual, but more tactile, like the "image" you have of what soft fabric feels like.)
- Do sentences exist? Yes, the properties that 'sentence' refers to are real. These are properties pertaining to words and syntax.
- Do propositions exist? I have read a little bit of the work by Josh Rasmussen in this area (See his book Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth). But I'm not super familiar with this literature (or for that matter the literature surrounding any of these ideas).
- I take propositions to be those things that take on truth values. So is being true or being false a real property? Are there true and false things? I don't see how I could avoid being committed to the property of being true. It's true that 2 + 2 = 4. It's true that I exist.
There are all sorts of things that we take to be true. Being true is perhaps a strange property, because it's abstract and non-empirical. But if it's not a real property, then it's very mysterious to me how it is we bump into it.
However, a proposition contains more than just the property of being true or false. Propositions are true or false in light of their content. This quickly gets into some very tricky discussions surrounding the correspondence theory of truth.
Let's take the proposition "Bellerophon, riding Pegasus, defeated the Chimera." This sentence contains identifiable properties pertaining to words and syntax. But does the proposition expressed by the sentence contain real properties?
There are fictional objects here. Does affirming the existence of the proposition affirm the existence of the fictional objects?
One reason to think yes is because propositions, like all other objects, are sets of properties. So to say the proposition exists is to say the properties it contains are real. But then propositions that contain fictional objects couldn't be real.
However, it doesn't seem to me propositions commit one to fictional properties, because propositions don't really contain those properties. Rather, propositions contain words (? - propositions are abstract, but words are concrete, so it can't be quite right to say propositions contain words...) that refer to fictional objects, and propositions contain certain logical, spatial, temporal, etc. relations to describe the relationship between objects.
Whether the proposition is true depends on whether there are facts (states of affairs) that match the description of the objects and relations contained in the proposition.
So let's take the proposition as expressed by the sentence: "Mars revolves around the Sun."
This proposition contains properties pertaining to aboutness. This proposition is about Mars and about the Sun.
This proposition contains properties pertaining to the relationship of revolving around. Does empirical observation validate the property of one thing revolving around another? Yes, so this property exists.
Next, the proposition contains the property of being true. The fact that Mars does indeed revolve around the Sun makes true the proposition.
It seems like this proposition is a bundle of properties that are all real. So it seems like this proposition exists. Importantly, this proposition names Mars and the Sun but is only about them. A proposition about Mars is not the same thing as Mars. So propositions can be about fictional objects and still exist.
Science and philosophy are about discovering the existing true propositions of the world.
Do thoughts exist? To answer this we must ask what it means for something to be a thought. From there we get the properties of thoughts, and then we can ask whether those properties are real according to either empirical investigation or a priori apprehension.
The properties associated with thoughts include, among others: qualia (feeling; experience; first-person imagery), propositional / linguistic properties, and aboutness.
These properties are real, and indeed are self-evidently real. So yes, thoughts exist (or really, the properties denoted by 'thought' exist). Introspective observation gives us direct a priori access to these properties.
Do fictional objects exist? Think of these properties: Being a man. Being a wizard. Having the name 'Harry Potter.' Defeated Voldemort. Is there anything that has these properties? Yes, Harry Potter. So, these properties are real.
But of course this combination of properties is not real. So what's going on here?
What's going on is that there are thoughts about these properties, and these thoughts are real.
Imagination allows us to generate thoughts about impossible properties, or thoughts about impossible combinations of properties.
(Boredom can supply the impetus for why we do this... I also think this happens to us automatically. From an evolutionary standpoint, being able to imagine future scenarios is incredibly powerful, as it allows us to avoid taking undue risks. The ability to consciously deceive or speak ironically also requires imagination and gives us survival advantages. But the same power that allows us to imagine counterfactual scenarios also causes counterfactual characters and stories to pop into our minds.)
Okay, so then how do we tell whether a given set of properties are real, or whether we simply have thoughts about them that are real?
The answer is that it depends on where thoughts about the properties come from. Can we trace the thoughts about the properties to an author's mind, or do we need to posit the properties themselves to explain thoughts about them?
In the case of Harry Potter, we can trace thoughts about Harry Potter to an author's mind.
For Harry Potter's properties to be real, certain events would have to have occurred in the real world. Real parents would have had to have given birth to Harry Potter. Hogwarts would had to have been constructed. But those events never took place.
Likewise, with Pegasus, we would expect there to be an evolutionary history of winged horses, for there to be fossils, photographs, DNA evidence, and whatnot. But we don't have any of that. So our thoughts about these properties cannot be coming from what they would need to be coming from in order for the properties to be real. We can conclude then that these properties (or combination of properties) are from someone's imagination.
It doesn't seem like this applies to numbers or shapes; we can't trace them to an author's imagination (can we?), so calling numbers 'useful fictions' is not accurate.
Do abstract and concrete objects exist? The real question is whether abstract vs concrete properties exist. I'm not sure.
We think of the number 2 as being an abstract object. But on the view in question we must look first to properties, not objects. The properties of being prime or divisible by 2 without a remainder seem abstract. These properties do not exist in space or time; they are immaterial, and they exist necessarily. If that's all that abstract means, then 2 is abstract.
But we typically think something is abstract if it plays no causal role. But the properties of being prime, even, one less than three, etc., do cause thoughts about them to exist. How else could I think about the number 2 besides the properties of 2 causing me to think about those properties?
But then do the properties of Harry Potter cause me to think about the properties of Harry Potter? That can't be, because those properties don't exist. It's the stories and sentences about the non-existent properties of Harry Potter that cause us to think about those properties.
We can trace the properties of Harry Potter to the imagination, but we cannot trace the properties of 2 to the imagination in the same way.
So are impossible properties abstract, like the property of being a wizard? These properties, being not real, cannot be caused by anything or have any causal influence on anything. There is nothing that can bring about being a wizard, and being a wizard cannot bring anything about.
So yes, these are abstract. But how can thoughts about wizards be about wizards? How is it that the imagination can do this? How can something be about a non-real thing?
This is where abstraction comes into play. Abstraction is the act of generating thoughts about isolated properties or groups of properties without any particulars in mind.
We can abstract out from particular humans the idea of being a human. We can abstract out from particular desires the abstract notion of desire. We can abstract out from particular instances of fire to the idea of fire. We can abstract out from particular projectile events the idea of shooting.
We can then combine, using imagination, these abstractions to create a further abstraction: A human who has the desire to shoot fire and does so.
We call this ability to trump the laws of nature by your desire, combined with your imagination, 'magic.'
Magic is not real because we cannot trump the laws of nature with desire plus imagination.
A wizard is a human (or other race) with the power of magic.
So we have properties versus thoughts about properties. Thoughts about real properties are caused by the properties, and thoughts about fictional properties are caused by abstraction.
Abstraction depends on first having thoughts about real properties. So fictional objects depend on real ones.
This idea of dependence is like David Hume's idea that ideas (less vivid, more abstract thoughts) are grounded in impressions (vivid thoughts). We have impressions of real properties, like the properties of being human, of fire, etc. We can combine these vivid thoughts to form a less vivid thought of a wizard.
Is the number 2 a concrete object? No, in the sense that the properties of 2 are immaterial properties. But yes in the sense that the properties of 2 cause thoughts about them.
Is Harry Potter a concrete object? No, because the non-real properties of Harry Potter cannot cause thoughts about those properties. Rather, the real properties of the thoughts (and sentences) about Harry Potter cause thoughts about Harry Potter. The properties of Harry Potter would be concrete (standing in causal relations) if they were real.
Do immaterial and material objects exist? The real question is whether immaterial and material properties exist. Mental properties and mathematical properties are immaterial, and yet they exist, so yes both immaterial and material (third-person) properties exist. So bundle theory commits you to aspect dualism; both first-person and third-person properties are real and one does not reduce to the other.
Do persons exist? Yes, people exist. The essential properties that make up a person are first-person properties pertaining to conscious experience and the first-person perspective.
The puzzle of existence is the question of how do you get contingent properties; or, why are there some properties rather than no properties? If these properties don't need to exist, then why do they? This leads to the contingency argument from God's existence; we need necessary properties to ground contingent ones, and God, as the argument will go, is the best candidate for the foundation of necessary properties that explain contingent properties.
The hard problem of consciousness is the question of how do we get mental properties? How could mental properties emerge from non-mental properties? Or how could minds be made out of mindless particles? But if mental properties do not emerge from non-mental properties, and are instead fundamental to reality, then this suggests the existence of a fundamental layer of consciousness. Again, this is suggestive of an argument for God's existence.
Part 3: The Ship of Theseus
Recall the following options:
Option 1: S1 = S2, S1 =/= S3.
Option 2: S1 = S3, but S1 =/= S2.
Option 3: S1 = S2 and S1 = S3 (therefore, S2 = S3).
Option 4: S1 =/= S2 and S1 =/= S3.
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