James Miller, Words and Other Linguistic Entities

Miller, James (forthcoming). Words and Other Linguistic Entities. Oxford University Press.

 

Abstract: 

 

Linguistic entities play a major part in almost all elements of our lives. Despite this, relatively little work exists in philosophy that considers what such entities are. In the work that does focus specifically on the metaphysics of words, the dominant view is type-realism, which posits that words are abstract types, instantiated by concrete tokens. This book argues, however, that type-realism faces a range of problems and that positing abstract types cannot help us to explain a range of ordinary everyday linguistic phenomena. In its place, this book argues in favour of a novel version of nominalism about words, holding that ordinary claims about words are in fact claims about collections of word-tokens only. Through combining nominalism with a trope-bundle metaphysics, this book proposes a 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics of words, in which word-tokens are analysed as bundles of particular properties, which cluster in repeatable and predictable ways due to the acting of various homeostatic mechanisms. This view is then extended to other linguistic entities, such as morphemes, phonemes, sentences, and languages. The result is a unified metaphysics of linguistic entities, which is argued to be both consistent with linguistic theorising and highly explanatory. Words and Other Linguistic Entities outlines how this 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics can provide new insights into a range of linguistic phenomena, including linguistic mistakes, linguistic change, and the nature of offensive language, and can help illuminate ongoing debates over the subject matter of linguistics and the evolution of language.

 

I gasped when I read this. Bundle theory mentioned!

Traceability in property reference in a bundle theory of propositions

Josh Rasmussen gives a kind of bundle theory (in terms of arrangements) of propositions. ("About Aboutness", Metaphysica)

 

Inspired by this I write the following, but I won't attribute any of the following, and any mistakes it contains, to Rasmussen's view.

 

Property: A direct, indirect, or modal experience. By 'modal experience' I mean something a person would experience if they were situated in the right context. 

 

Concept: A concept is a reference to a property. So, concepts reference direct, indirect, or modal experiences.

 

Word: A word is a combination of sounds, symbols, or both, and refers to a concept or bundle of concepts. By transitivity, words refer to properties or bundles of properties.

 

The words 'fire' and 'feu', while different words, both refer to the same concept(s) (or close enough), and thus are bundling the same properties.

 

Proposition: A combination of concepts that designates, by predication, what is being referred, and thus can be true or false.

 

Sentence: A sequence of words governed by grammatical rules that references a proposition.

 

The sentences 'Fire is hot' and 'Le feu est chaud', while different sentences, refer to the same proposition (or close enough).

 

Truth: Reference to non-fictional properties.

 

Falsity: Reference to fictional properties. 

 

Problem: You can take a single word like 'unicorn', which refers to fictional properties, and yet this singular word cannot be true or false. But if falsity just is reference to fictional properties, and 'unicorn' references fictional properties, then 'unicorn' is false.

 

This is where predication comes in: Only by designating what is being referred to can you evaluate whether something is true or false. While 'unicorn' refers to fictional properties, we don't know what is being said about unicorns. If you say:

 

    Unicorns are everywhere.

 

This is false. But if you say:

 

    There are no unicorns.

 

This is true.

 

So referring to false properties isn't enough to reach falsity; to reach falsity you need to make an existential claim, which means attributing non-fiction to fictional properties, or attributing fiction to non-fictional properties. But abstract objects like propositions don't make claims; people make claims. So how do I capture the claim-like nature of propositions?

 

Maybe attribution is enough – attributing fiction to non-fictional properties, or vice versa? Or maybe propositions have a representational aspect, and false propositions contain misrepresentation?

 

But that's beside the point here. The above definitions are rough and need revisiting, but the task at hand is to focus on the concept of fiction.

 

Fictional properties: Properties (or bundles) that can be traced to an act of imagination.

 

Non-fictional properties: Properties (or bundles) that cannot be traced to an act of imagination.

 

Problem: Someone could, by luck, or by educated prediction, use their imagination to combine properties and stumble upon a true proposition that nonetheless traces back to an act of imagination. And despite these properties being non-fictional, they can be traced to an act of imagination. Is this a fictional proposition, or non-fictional?

 

The answer is that it is non-fictional, requiring the fix: 

 

Fictional properties*: Properties (or bundles) that can only be traced to an act of imagination.

 

Examples: Golden mountains, unicorns, wizards.

 

Note: If 'unicorn' itself is something like: horse + horn + magic + rarity, or something roughly like this, then the properties of horse, horn, etc., are not fictional. What's fictional is the bundle of the properties. Same with gold + mountain: two non-fictional properties that together make a fictional bundle. Even magic probably can be reduced to real properties, with the bundle being fictional. If all acts of imagination depend on experience, then all fictional properties are ultimately fictional bundles of non-fictional properties.

 

Non-fictional properties*: Properties (or bundles) that cannot be traced in all cases to an act of imagination.

 

'In all cases' applies to modal cases: If everyone only ever imagines wormholes, but wormholes end up being real, wormholes are still non-fictional because it's not in all cases that wormholes can be traced to acts of imagination; if someone were in the right situation, they would experience wormholes (even if only indirectly through scientific instruments), and in this case the wormhole properties could not be traced to an act of imagination, but must be traced to experience.

 

(Also, it's almost certainly the case that what is being imagined is not quite what is real; imagination is never perfectly successful. But imagination can still be successful enough in a broad sense to enable this traceability objection.)

 

And that's what we're getting at with falsity versus truth: Can the proposition only ever be traced to acts of imagination even given modal cases (falsity), or can the proposition be traced to experience, at least modally (truth)?

 

The modality can be restricted. It might be that wormholes are impossible in our universe, but possible in a different universe. To say wormholes are fictions is to say that an omniscient observer restricted to our universe would not experience wormholes (though they would experience our thoughts and stories about wormholes).

 

But maybe there's a simpler strategy: If properties are experiences (including modal), then fictions are non-experienced bundles of properties traced to acts of imagination. "Fictional property" becomes an oxymoron, with only bundles being fictions. While ‘magical’ sounds like a fictional property, again magic could be reduced to a fictional bundle of real properties (of agency, power, etc.)

Inseparable subjectivity - Part 4: Response to inseparable subjectivity

Part 1: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-1-bundle.html

 

Part 2: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-2.html

 

Part 3: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/11/inseparable-subjectivity-part-3.html

Part 4: Response to inseparable subjectivity

So there are two objections, one about the legitimacy of the distinction between Person(2a) and Person(2b) and one about the causal role of Person(2a). We can describe each objection like so:

Objection 1: Inseparable subjectivity

In Part 3 I said:

“Imagine the feeling of being judged. It's a sharp pain, which makes it vivid and easy to imagine. Is it possible to separate the feeling of being judged from the subjectivity? No. The experience is necessarily experiential. There is no pain floating around out there without a person to feel it. Pain is by its essence felt. Likewise, there is no subjectivity floating around out there without other properties characterizing that experience. Subjectivity is by its essence a particular kind of experience. So for a painful feeling, like being judged, you can't have the pain without the subjectivity, and you can't have the subjectivity without the pain. The subjectivity is replete and inseparable.

 

But if a person per se is identical to their subjective properties . . . then any criticism or praise directed to the ugly or admirable aspects of the subjective property are directed to the person per se . . . 

 

If this is right, and if our choices come with a subjective property (the quale of making a choice), then we are our choices, just as we are our pains and pleasures and any other subjective property. If by ‘person’ we mean a collection of subjective properties that all have the same subjectivity in common, then our experiences (including experiences of making choices) are straightforwardly part of us.

 

Far from eliminating free will, this might provide the very resources to build an account of how free will works! Namely, that . . . because a*) our choices are caused by our phenomenal choice, and because b) wherever there is phenomenology there is personhood, therefore c*) our choices are caused by our personhood (i.e., by us). So d) the goodness or badness of the consequences of our choices reflects the goodness or badness of the phenomenal choice that caused them, which just is to reflect the goodness or the badness of the personhood that caused them.”

Objection 2: Pure subjectivity plays a causal role in choices

We first must distinguish between the pure subject as an abstraction versus the subject as a concrete first-person property. Abstract properties are not causal. So it’s trivially true that the abstract self does not play a causal role. But when it comes to praising and blaming persons, we are praising and blaming real, concrete persons, not abstractions. We praise and blame you, not the concept of you. Because persons are concrete and causal, we must, as Objection 1 gets at, treat “pure subjectivity” as concrete and causal (more precisely, there is no such thing as personhood qua “pure subjectivity”; all personhood is concrete). As mentioned in the previous post:

 

“If I have stressful experiences, and those stressful first-person properties cause my body to produce stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, then the ‘pure subjectivity’ of being on the receiving end of experience actually does play a role in causal relationships. Plus, presumably pure experiences cause me to remember having those experiences. So pure subjectivity causes memory. Furthermore, memories reveal patterns that affect future actions. By remembering the pain of touching a hot stove, I avoid touching hot stoves in the future. So by causing memories, not only does pure subjectivity play a causal role, but a causal role with respect to our actions.”

 

“Pure subjectivity” here really refers to concrete first-person properties that are passive in the sense of not being those first-person properties that directly correspond to the making of choices. If the badness of Y reflects the badness of the cause of Y, and if these passive first-person properties play an indirect causal role in bad actions, then the badness of these bad actions caused in part by these passive first-person properties reflects to that degree the badness of these properties, and thus reflects to that degree the badness of the personhood corresponding to these properties. So even “passive” subjectivity is blameworthy and praiseworthy, and thus the personhood that corresponds to this subjectivity is not only praised or blamed, but praised or blamed in a direct, immediate way. That is, because you are your experiences, the goodness and badness of the consequences of your experiences—experiences that are directly or indirectly involved in your making choices with good or bad consequences—directly reflect the goodness or badness of you.

Reply: Insofar ‘you’ picks out something abstract

Can essential properties be abstract? Not only yes, but this must be the case, because identifying essential properties requires abstraction. What gives rise to essential and non-essential properties in the first place is the act of bundling – bundling properties under labels. There’s a bundle of properties referred to by the word ‘mountain’, a different bundle of properties referred to by the word ‘lake’, and so on, for every word. Essential properties are those properties that make or break your inclusion within a label. Where a mountain is located is non-essential; you can have mountains in Colorado, Mexico, Mars; your location won’t get you kicked out of the mountain club. But your size will: too small and you will be called a hill. When does a mountain become a hill? No one knows and it doesn’t really matter. Words are vague. What matters is how people react to what you say. If you point to an average-sized mountain and say, “That’s the biggest hill I’ve ever seen!”, you will be promptly corrected that it’s an average-sized mountain. Conversely, if you point at a hill and call it a tiny mountain, you will be corrected that it’s a hill. A similar conversation could take place about rivers versus creeks, and so on. Often, with a bit of thought, we can abstract out one or more of the make-or-break properties of an object. If something does not produce heat, then whatever it is, we will not consider it to be a lit bonfire, lit furnace, or any lit object. So producing heat is an essential property of lit objects.

So could my essential property be abstract? If everyday objects have abstract essential properties—and indeed if the very notion of an essential property depends on abstracting out the properties that explain why an object falls under a particular label—then I don’t see why not.

When I experience pain, the subjective property identical to me is present. When I experience happiness, the subjective property identical to me is also present. But my pain and my happiness are not the same thing, despite the shared subjectivity. So it cannot be that both properties are identical to me, as then they would be identical to each other, and what could be more certain than that pain and happiness are different? So ‘me’ must pick out a subjective property that my pain and happiness share. To understand the difference between pain and happiness, while acknowledging what they have in common – me – I have no choice but to abstract out the shared property and consider it in the same way I would consider the abstract property producing heat shared by bonfires and furnaces.

But do ‘I’ and ‘me’ in fact pick out such an abstract property? If I were strapped to a device and tortured, day and night, for years and years, my existence would be perfectly, and unfortunately, real to me. Even if no one knew I was there, I would know. Even if I lost the ability to form memories, the “first” moment of pain, repeated again and again, would still be undeniable. Even if I made no choices, even if my pain caused no effects, other than perhaps the morally irrelevant effects of releasing stress hormones in my body, I would still be there, there in the pain. So I cannot deny that there is a sense of the concept of me that does not depend on a) Anyone else’s existence or awareness of me, b) On me making choices, or c) On me having any memories. A person can inspect their own moments of pain and abstract out what unites them. A person can observe the stark contrast between the moments of pain and moments of happiness and see that the same thing unites both. I am not my happiness; I experience happiness. I am not my choices; I experience my choices. I am not my pain; I experience pain. Of course Ben’s pain is essentially felt by Ben, just as this bonfire is essentially producing heat. And just as this bonfire is not equivalent to producing heat, neither is Ben’s pain equivalent to felt by Ben. Just as producing heat is what unites lit objects, felt by Ben is what unites Ben’s experiences. ‘I’ picks out this felt by me property. It sounds like a circular definition: <Ben> is <felt by Ben>. This is exactly what I expect, because my essential self is a phenomenal thing, and phenomenal things can only be defined circularly, because words can only gesture to phenomenal objects. It’s more accurate to say <Ben> is <feeler> (or: <experiencer>) where <feeler> picks out a particular feeler that we label <Ben>. So <Ben> is <feeler> is really the tautology <This feeler> is <this feeler>, and <Ben’s pain> is <felt by Ben> means <Pain felt by this feeler> is <felt by this feeler>. So the essential self is the first-person felt property abstracted out from the entire phenomenal property.

If the essential self is an abstract, non-causal property, then it immediately follows that the self does not stand in causal relations, and so the essential self cannot be attributed to be the cause of anything, even if the non-essential self is the cause of many things. But a) Surely these phenomenal properties are caused to exist (they don’t exist necessarily) and b) Surely these phenomenal properties cause (if we grant mental causation) some things, like choices, or at least bodily processes (like crying, panic attacks, or inducing stress hormones).

Sure, just as there are things that cause bonfires and furnaces. That doesn’t change the fact that producing heat is one of the essential properties of lit bonfires and lit furnaces. This particular heat from this particular bonfire is causal – it causes the surrounding air to heat up. And this particular heat was caused by chemical properties giving rise to combustion, and so on. Likewise, this particular subjective property—a bundle of properties surrounding the state of being sad—causes the body to produce tears. And this particular subjectivity was caused by a  particular brain in such and such state, and so on. Just as this particular heat is inseparable from the other properties of the bonfire, this particular subjectivity is inseparable from other properties of the phenomenal property. To get one property, or bundle of properties, you need the other. To get the particular heat from the bonfire, you need the particular wood, and so on. To get the particular subjectivity, you need the particular feelings of sadness, and so on.

So the inseparability between particular essential and particular non-essential properties is nothing new, a feature of all objects. When identifying the property that is essential of an object, that requires abstracting out the property the lack of which precludes your inclusion under the label being considered. When the label being considered is <(lit) bonfire>, I see that lacking producing heat precludes your inclusion under the label. While producing heat considered in the abstract is an abstract property, that doesn’t mean the heat of this bonfire right here is abstract. Particular heat is concrete, being both caused by various other properties and causing changes in properties outside itself. This concrete, particular heat is inseparable from other concrete particular properties whose existence are co-dependent with the heat.

When the label being considered is a pronoun like ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, and so on, I find myself abstracting out the property of subjectivity – of having a particular, unique, first-person experience. If something possesses a particular subjectivity that we can only gesture toward with the word ‘me’, then that thing is me. If something lacks that particular subjectivity, then that thing is not me.

While this might sound like the contradiction of a “universal particular”, the word ‘particular’ here picks out specificity, just as other abstracted properties refer to something more or less specific. The issue is distinguishing between my subjectivity, which all my phenomenal properties share (and thus is multiply instantiated), and subjectivity in general, which all persons share.

While a specific subjectivity considered in the abstract (i.e. divorced from other phenomenal properties) is an abstract property, that doesn’t mean this particular subjectivity right here is abstract. Particular subjectivity is concrete, being both caused by various other properties and causing changes in properties outside itself (allowing for mental causation). This concrete, particular subjectivity is inseparable from other concrete particular properties whose existence are co-dependent with the subjectivity.

So bundling seems to work differently for ordinary objects versus persons. Different objects can share essential properties. But different persons cannot share essential properties. Only different phenomenal properties that share the same subjectivity can share essential properties.

Reply 2: Insofar ‘you’ picks out something concrete

You might reject the idea that essential properties for particular objects can be abstract. Sure, in general, an object cannot lack producing heat and still be a lit bonfire. But when it comes to this bonfire right here, it’s not enough for this bonfire to produce just any heat, and certainly it can’t be producing the heat of some other object. To be included under the reference this bonfire right here, you must produce this heat. In other words, we have universal, abstract essential properties for abstract objects, and particular, concrete essential properties for concrete objects.

So if I am convinced that my essential self cannot be something abstract, but must be concrete, then I cannot accept that my essential properties are abstract. If it’s true that wherever you find my phenomenal properties, you find me, then it’s true that wherever you find my phenomenal properties pertaining to emotions, pains, joys, sights, rememberings, making choices, and so on, you find me. Because subjectivity is inseparable from other phenomenal properties, and because I am my subjectivity, it follows that I am my phenomenal properties. So I am my happiness, my pain, and so on. This runs into the objection that happiness and pain cannot be the same, but set that aside for now. My essential self must not be abstract, as that would mean my essential self does not stand in causal relations. But surely I was caused to exist, and surely I cause other things to exist (unless we want to parse out meanings of ‘I’ and suggest that ‘I’ is being used to mean one thing in one context and another thing in another context).

Even still, I don’t see how this rescues moral responsibility. The collection of first-person properties that a person has is incidental to factors beyond their control. It’s painfully obvious to me that someone who wins the lottery at 18 years old and spends that money improving themselves and removing sources of stress in their lives will turn out much differently than that same person who doesn’t have access to those privileges and is forced into miserable conditions for years on end. The psychology of the two persons is radically different, and the activities they in fact spend their time on are radically different. So it’s not morally interesting that a person would have one set of phenomenal properties versus another, when we can so easily imagine that set radically changing by a few simple changes to the person’s circumstances that they could not have controlled for.

I will return to this topic of personhood at a later point. I think the bottom line for me for now is that:

 

1. Pronouns are ambiguous, and I see different bundles of properties picked out by words like ‘you’. The illustration of the sleepwalker shows this. ‘You’ can refer to: You(1a): The private experiences of others about you; You(1b): Your public properties that cause others to have experiences of you (and causes you to have experiences of your public properties); You(2a): Your subjectivity that unites all your phenomenal properties; You(2b): The properties that distinguish one of your phenomenal properties from another (assuming subjectivity is in fact separable).

2. There are other distinctions we could make: You as in your body; You as in the location of your visual field; You as in some combination of above meanings.

3. There’s an unmistakable sense of self that remains even when you remove 1a and 1b. Because the properties of 2b cannot be identical to each other (happiness cannot be the same thing as pain), and yet you are identical to yourself, you cannot be 2b either. So that leaves 2a as the essential self. When I engage in the abstraction process for identifying that property the lack of which precludes something’s being referenced by the word ‘me’ (the same abstraction process for identifying essential properties for any object), 2a comes out as the essential property of me. The torture device illustration shows this.

4. But I’m not sure about the exact relationship between concreteness and abstractness, between those and causality, between essential properties and concreteness, or what abstraction really is and how to tell when it is occurring. Countless other questions are left open, like the nature of mental causation, the nature of causation more broadly, the nature of properties, existence, and facts more broadly, the relationship between properties and time and thus the relationship between mental properties and time, how personhood survives through time, how personhood relates to eternalism versus presentism theories of time, and how this Bundle Theory of the Self and properties relates to substance dualism, neutral monism, or other monisms (versions of physicalism or versions of idealism), or to property dualism and arguments for and against property dualism (or arguments that property dualism entails this or that view about substances). Thus far I've basically assumed a substance nihilist position. There are objections to bundle theory / substance nihilism more broadly that have yet to be addressed as well. There are many alternative views of the self, that the essential self is a non-physical substance, that it is a physical substance, that it is a brain, that it is an animal or organism, that it is a partition of God's necessary mind, that it is a weakly emergent thing via a panpsychist interpretation, that there is no concrete self at all via an epiphenomenalist interpretation, and probably a dozen other views besides.

Inseparable subjectivity - Part 3: Inseparable subjectivity

Part 1: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-1-bundle.html

Part 2: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-2.html

Part 4: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/12/inseparable-subjectivity-part-4.html

Part 3: Inseparable subjectivity
 

In Part 2 I said the following:
 

“Person(2a) = The pure subjectivity (of a particular person) by which all first-person properties (of that particular person) are unified.

E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie all have something in common: the fact that these experiences are happening to you. There is a youness, a subjectivity, that these experiences have in common.

Person(2b) = The other properties of first-person properties that accompany the pure subjectivity by which all first-person properties are unified.
 
E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie have differences between them. That which distinguishes one experience from the other—the pain of venom in your veins versus the pain of the initial shock of cold water versus the happiness of the taste of melted chocolate—these differences show that these experiences cannot be the same, despite having a sameness to them, specifically the same subjectivity.

You(2a) is the ‘you’ referred to in the following sentence: You do not choose to be what you are. You do not choose to have the intelligence, rationality, or knowledge that you have. So you do not choose for your decision-making process to be what it is. So you do not choose for your choices to come out as they do. The badness (or goodness) of your choices reflects the badness (or goodness) of your inputs, but not the badness (or goodness) of you.
 
But you(2b) is the 'you' referred to in the following sentence: The choices you made were good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy. I.e. the causal properties accompanying the pure subjectivity of first-person properties had good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy effects.”

Two thoughts:

One, even if we allow a distinction between Person(2a) and Person(2b), it’s not clear that 2a is as non-causal as I claimed. If I have stressful experiences, and those stressful first-person properties cause my body to produce stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, then the “pure subjectivity” of being on the receiving end of experience actually does play a role in causal relationships. Plus, presumably pure experiences cause me to remember having those experiences. So pure subjectivity causes memory. Furthermore, memories reveal patterns that affect future actions. By remembering the pain of touching a hot stove, I avoid touching hot stoves in the future. So by causing memories, not only does pure subjectivity play a causal role, but a causal role with respect to our actions.

Two, it’s not clear that the distinction between 2a and 2b makes sense. If I treat subjectivity as a consistent property that survives through time (to explain how a person survives through time), then it sounds like I’m sneaking in the idea of a mental substance, of a subjectivity that exists independently from everything else and is subject to qualia. That’s a problem for bundle theory, which says that there are no substances, only properties. If instead I say that wherever there is a subjective property, there is personhood, and paint this picture that there is no stable, persistent, substantial, mysterious self – and that instead there is a succession of subjective properties and a directly observable, unmysterious self – then it seems like I must consider subjectivity not something separate from the subjective properties. If your subjective properties are you, then your subjective properties involved in your choices and feelings are you. So the pure subjectivity of 2a cannot be separated from the other properties, 2b, that accompany 2a. 

By abstracting out my subjectivity in common with all my subjective properties, I am beholding my subjective property not as something particular and concrete, but universal and abstract. But persons are concrete, not abstract! The self is as particular and concrete as it gets. So to avoid the mistake of talking about the concept of myself when I should be talking about myself, I must avoid abstracting out subjectivity.

It seems that I have been assuming that the subjectivity of a property can be separated from ugly (or admirable) aspects of that property. For example, if someone makes the conscious, unconstrained decision to kill someone out of spite, there’s a subjectivity to that choice. But this subjectivity is replete throughout the property such that the entire property is subjective. We cannot separate the subjectivity from the rest of the property. So the ugliness of the subjectivity just is the ugliness of the entire subjective property, and thus the person.

Imagine the feeling of being judged. It's a sharp pain, which makes it vivid and easy to imagine. Is it possible to separate the feeling of being judged from the subjectivity? No. The experience is necessarily experiential. There is no pain floating around out there without a person to feel it. Pain is by its essence felt. Likewise, there is no subjectivity floating around out there without other properties characterizing that experience. Subjectivity is by its essence a particular kind of experience. So for a painful feeling, like being judged, you can't have the pain without the subjectivity, and you can't have the subjectivity without the pain. The subjectivity is replete and inseparable.
 
But if a person per se is identical to their subjective properties (the person per se of the moment is identical to the subjective property of that moment), then any criticism or praise directed to the ugly or admirable aspects of the subjective property are directed to the person per se (at the moment of that property).
 
If this is right, and if our choices come with a subjective property (the quale of making a choice), then we are our choices, just as we are our pains and pleasures and any other subjective property. If by ‘person’ we mean a collection of subjective properties that all have the same subjectivity in common, then our experiences (including experiences of making choices) are straightforwardly part of us.
 
Far from eliminating free will, this might provide the very resources to build an account of how free will works! Namely, that because a) our choices accompany phenomenal choice, and because b) wherever there is phenomenology there is personhood, therefore c) to criticize or praise a choice just is to criticize or praise the phenomenology, which just is to criticize or praise the person with that personhood.

 

Or put another way, because a*) our choices are caused by our phenomenal choice, and because b) wherever there is phenomenology there is personhood, therefore c*) our choices are caused by our personhood (i.e., by us). So d) the goodness or badness of the consequences of our choices reflects the goodness or badness of the phenomenal choice that caused them, which just is to reflect the goodness or the badness of the personhood that caused them.

Inseparable subjectivity – Part 2: Critical vs moral blame

Part 1: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-1-bundle.html

 

Part 3: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/11/inseparable-subjectivity-part-3.html 

 

Part 4: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/12/inseparable-subjectivity-part-4.html

 

Part 2: Critical vs moral blame

Now that we have some idea of what ‘person’ refers to, we can make progress on what it means to blame a person. For a recap:

Person(1) = Public person = Your public person is that thing that generates within others certain experiences, such as visual experiences of a certain shape or auditory experiences of a certain sound (like the sound of your voice).
 
Person(2) = Private person = Your private self is any subjective / experiential / first-person / phenomenological property that carries a particular youness to it.

Because this is a phenomenal definition, it’s no surprise that it would be circular – i.e. you = those subjective properties that correspond to… you. The circularity is benign because phenomenal definitions must gesture toward a phenomenology. Compare: red = the red color, another phenomenal definition that is circular in a benign way, gesturing toward the phenomenology of seeing redness. Just as ‘red’ gestures toward the red experience you have, ‘you’ gestures toward the youness of any experience you have.

You can make further distinctions like where ‘you’ refers to the total experiences you caused others or the total experiences you’ve had. For now, these two key distinctions are enough.

I’ve made a distinction between moral versus critical blame, which basically means blaming Person(2) versus blaming Person(1), respectively. That is, to blame a person critically is to criticize the quality of their public properties. To blame a person morally is to criticize the quality of their phenomenal properties.

There’s two other distinctions of blame at work: Blame as cause and blame as blameworthy / blameless cause (or creditworthy / creditless), i.e., whether you are the cause in a way that reflects the quality of you. X can fail to be the cause of Y, explaining why the quality of Y says nothing about the quality of X. For example, I fail to be the cause of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal (so I claim), and so the badness of this disaster says nothing about the badness of me. Or, X can succeed in being the cause of Y, but in such a way that the quality of Y says nothing about the quality of X. For example, a baby succeeds in being the cause of accidentally knocking over a vase and breaking it. The badness of breaking the vase says nothing about the badness of the baby.

But that’s too quick. The badness of breaking the vase does say something about the badness of the baby: the baby can cause bad experiences in others by breaking their vases. So Baby(1) is extrinsically bad. But the badness of breaking the vase says nothing about the badness of the baby’s phenomenal properties, as the baby’s phenomenal properties had nothing to do with causing the vase to break. So Baby(2) is blameless with respect to breaking the vase.

But even if the baby’s phenomenal properties did have something to do with causing the vase to break, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Baby(2) is bad. If the baby grows up and is now a teenager, and the teenager chooses to break the vase, and thus the teenager has a phenomenal property of making a choice, and if we allow for mental causation, then the teenager’s phenomenal properties do cause the vase to break. So doesn’t that mean that the badness of breaking the vase says something about the badness of Teenager(2)? Yes and no.

If we allow for mental causation, then Person(2) is embedded within Person(1), because “that thing that generates within others certain experiences” includes those phenomenal properties, like those involved in making choices, that cause one’s actions which then generate experiences within others. So if the badness of Y reflects the badness of what causes Y, then the badness of bad experiences reflects the badness of that which caused those bad experiences. And so both public and private properties of personhood can be extrinsically bad.

But we can imagine Pereboom-style manipulation cases where a person is manipulated into having properties, public or private, which cause those bad experiences within others. But whose fault is it that these badness-causing properties obtain? The fault lies with the source of the manipulation. But our deterministic (or random) inputs, like our genetics, social influences, and so on, all together comprise such a manipulator. We do not choose to be what we are. We do not choose to have the intelligence, rationality, or knowledge that we have. So we do not choose for our decision-making process to be what it is. So we do not choose for our choices to come out as they do. The badness of our choices reflects the badness of our inputs, but not the badness of us. The badness of our choices does reflect the badness of us as choosers within such and such contexts (e.g., reflects our stupidity, irrationality, ignorance, etc.), but not the badness of us as experiencers, as pure subjects (i.e., as experiencers we did not choose to be stupid or irrational or ignorant, but we experience our stupidity, irrationality, ignorance, etc.).

Our first-person properties come from somewhere. They do not come, ultimately, from us, i.e., our first-person properties do not ultimately come from other first-person properties of ours. They come ultimately from sources outside of us.

What this comes to is that at bottom, the most fundamental self-property is the property of pure subjectivity, a property that is divorced from any choices made. This first-person property is not involved in the making of any choices, and so its quality cannot be fairly criticized.

To capture the distinction between those first-person properties that can be fairly criticized and those that cannot be fairly criticized, we must split Person(2) in two:

Person(2a) = The pure subjectivity (of a particular person) by which all first-person properties (of that particular person) are unified.

 

E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie all have something in common: the fact that these experiences are happening to you. There is a youness, a subjectivity, that these experiences have in common.

Person(2b) = The other properties of first-person properties that accompany the pure subjectivity by which all first-person properties are unified.

 

E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie have differences between them. That which distinguishes one experience from the other—the pain of venom in your veins versus the pain of the initial shock of cold water versus the happiness of the taste of melted chocolate—these differences show that these experiences cannot be the same, despite having a sameness to them, specifically the same subjectivity.

 

You(2a) is the ‘you’ referred to in the following sentence: You do not choose to be what you are. You do not choose to have the intelligence, rationality, or knowledge that you have. So you do not choose for your decision-making process to be what it is. So you do not choose for your choices to come out as they do. The badness (or goodness) of your choices reflects the badness (or goodness) of your inputs, but not the badness (or goodness) of you.

 

But you(2b) is the 'you' referred to in the following sentence: The choices you made were good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy. I.e. the causal properties accompanying the pure subjectivity of first-person properties had good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy effects.

 

On good vs praiseworthy choices: Good choices include those choices that are good by accident, good in a way that doesn't reflect good qualities of Person(1) and Person(2b). Actions are praiseworthy when they do reflect good qualities of Person(1) and Person(2b). The difference is that a Person(1,2b) with good qualities will regularly make good choices, while a person who makes good choices by accident will only rarely make good choices. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for bad and critique-worthy (aka blameworthy) choices. None of this speaks to the goodness or badness of Person(2a), who, as a pure subject, is merely along for the ride – only experiencing and never causing anything.

 

On Person(1): You can distinguish between those first-person properties other people have about you. We can label this Person(1a). These are strictly private properties. Then there are those public properties that cause others to have the properties referred to by Person(1a). We can label this Person(1b). These are strictly public properties. If we allow for mental causation, and if we allow a distinction between Person(2a) and Person(2b), then the first-person properties of (2b) can cause the third-person properties of (1b) which then cause the first-person properties of (1a). In other words, your choices (and other internal states that lead to choices, like beliefs and memories) cause your actions (like writing) which cause others to have the experiences of you that they do (like reading your writing).

Inseparable subjectivity – Part 1: Bundle theory of personhood

Part 2: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-2.html
 

Part 3: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/11/inseparable-subjectivity-part-3.html

 

Part 4: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/12/inseparable-subjectivity-part-4.html

 

A cool objection to my free will skepticism.

Part 1: Bundle theory of personhood

* The self is real, self-evident, and certain – just as first-person properties are real, self-evident, and certain. So there is a self – the self is not an illusion. We are not eliminating the self but reducing it to first-person properties. Always, anywhere, and only where there are first-person properties, there is personhood. To say "I am" is just to say "Here are some first-person properties" – it is not to say "Here is a mental substance."

 

* Definition of personhood:

 

Take Alice and Bob. 

 

* Person(1) = Public person = Alice's public person is that thing that generates within Bob certain experiences, such as visual experiences of a certain shape or auditory experiences of a certain sound (like the sound of Alice's voice).

 

* Person(2) = Private person = A subjective / experiential / first-person / phenomenological property.

 

That is, a singular subjective property or a single bundle of subjective properties closely related by time, event, cause, or something else.

 

E.g. Alice burns herself on accident when pulling cookies out of the oven by pulling at too steep an angle, causing the top of her forearm to touch the inner ceiling of her oven. You have a bundle of first-person properties here: The pain of the burn, the right-forearm-i-ness of the pain, the smell of the cookies, the weight of the oven door, the soothing feeling of aloe vera gel on the burn. When we speak of these experiences of Alice, we speak of Alice qua Person(2).

 

* Person(3) = Total private person = The collective phenomenological properties of Alice, i.e., all the experiences Alice has over her lifetime, or has had over her lifetime thus far.

 

* Person(4) = Total public person = The collective phenomenological properties of people other than Alice who've had experiences of Alice's public person.

 

* Person(5) = Total person = The combined sets of Person(3) and Person(4). 

 

* Your accidental properties are things you have or are associated with, but are not identical to you. Your essential properties are you.

 

* Because your accidental properties (like the sound of your voice) are responsible for the experiences generated within me (like the experience of hearing your voice), these properties are essential with respect to you qua person(1) but accidental with respect to you qua person(2). So what counts as accidental / essential depends on which definition of 'person' we are working with. It's contextual.

 

* This explains why it often feels like our accidental properties are identical to us. When folks talk about us, they are talking about that thing that generates within me xyz experiences. That is you qua public person, and in that context properties that would be accidental to you qua private person are essential.

 

To give a concrete example, let's say group G talks about person P. Group G says that P can sing well. What they mean is that when P sings, certain good feelings are produced within them. But linguistically this comes out as (if they were to speak to P): "You are a good singer." If we were to take 'are' as one of identity, then: You = good singer. Personhood solved! Who is P as a person? Why, P is good singer! And so we can see how people in general can and often do attach their sense of self-worth to their public self rather than to their private self—the public self is the self that is, unsurprisingly, accessible to the public and thus the cause of one's praise, fame, hirability, employment, good reputation, money, career, and survival. If it's my public self upon which my survival hangs, and if xyz properties are essential to that public self, then xyz properties are essential to me in a highly relevant sense, i.e. the sense of survival.

 

* (This also explains a deep-seated loneliness that we all feel. When I'm talking about you, I'm really talking about me!—about my experiences of what I take to be you. And vice versa: When you talk about me, you're really talking about your experiences of this thing that you have labeled under my name, but from my point of view that thing isn't me at all but something accidental to me. We never get to access each other's true selves, only our public selves.) 

 

But it's obvious that these xyz properties are not at all essential to the sense of Person(2). It's also obvious that from my perspective, who I am essentially is not what other people see but what I see directly within me. But again, it's contextual. Someone who thinks personhood is more context- / social- / narrative-based would be more inclined to think of Person(4) as what it really means to be a person at the end of the day – you are the experiences you cause others.

 

But because our own experiences of ourselves are so certain and undeniable, surely we'd want to include those, arriving at Person(5) as a more full sense of what it means to be a person. You are the experiences you have and the experiences you cause others. Because public properties = essential with respect to the public person and private properties = essential with respect to the private person, whether certain properties of yours are essential to you is a matter of context.

 

* However, clearly, if no one else existed but me, I would not only still exist, but exist with certainty! Because my own subjective properties are still certainly there. So it makes sense to favor Person(2) as the true self. Person(3) includes experiences of my past and future—experiences I am not currently having—and so is not relevant to the me in the present. Perhaps therefore we ought to build into Person(2) this sense of the present person, while Person(3) covers the whole person, past, present and future.

07 Sep 2025 - Objectivity vs Subjectivity

Daily Thoughts: Sharon Rawlette shares this quote from RM Hare in her book The Feeling of Value, pg 9:

"I really think the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' have introduced nothing but confusion into moral philosophy; that they have never been given a clear meaning, and have frustrated all serious discussion of the subject."

Rawlette goes on to make a distinction between mind-dependence and judgment-dependence. She says (pgs 14,15):

Quote:

I don't myself use the term 'mind-independence' because, given what I take to be the most plausible form of realism—a theory based on the intrinsic value and disvalue of certain forms of phenomenology—to define moral realism as a claim about the "mind-independence" of moral facts would be misleading. On my view, moral facts are not mind-independent. They are quite dependent on whether people are in the mental states of pleasure or pain. And indeed, most mainstream realist views do take moral facts to be at least in part dependent on facts about pleasure and pain. However, on my view and on these other realist views, facts about the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain . . . are judgment-independent.

End quote.

Thoughts, which aim to clarify the situation: 

* We have experiences and we have judgments.

 
* For example, Bob has an experience of a certain image in Bob's mind. Bob judges this image to be a memory: Bob remembers having pancakes for breakfast today. Bob's experience cannot be "wrong"; it's just data. It's the judgment that can be wrong: the image in Bob's mind is a memory of him eating pancakes for breakfast, but it was yesterday, not today! Bob misremembered. Bob's interpretation of his experience is wrong.

 
* So we have experience facts and judgment facts—facts about what experiences have taken place, who had them, what caused them, etc., and facts about what judgments have taken place, who made them, what caused them, etc.

 
* Experience facts are phenomenal facts / qualia facts. E.g. the experience of tasting food that is too salty.

 
* Judgment facts are not phenomenal facts, though maybe there is always a quale / qualia that accompanies a judgment. And so for every judgment fact, there is a corresponding phenomenal fact or facts (the mental experience of making the judgment or having the judgment form in your mind).

 
* Some true propositions are made true by experience facts (experience-dependent truths) and some true propositions are made true by judgment facts (judgment-dependent truths).

 
* I guess both of these are subjective facts? And so 'subjective fact' is vague over experience-dependent truth and judgment-dependent truth.

 
* Some true propositions are made true by facts that do not depend on either experience or judgment. These are objective truths.

 
* Facts are states of affairs.

 
* States of affairs have an objectivity to them. So subjective facts are in some sense objective by virtue of being facts.

 
* That sense is this: There are objective facts about subjective facts. For any subjective fact, there is the state of affairs that includes the subjective fact. So for every subjective fact, there is an objective fact about that fact.

 
* This is why there can be mind-dependent truths, which sound subjective, that are objectively (judgment-independently) true.

 
* E.g. "Bob liked the movie." This is mind-dependently true (which is the same as saying experience-dependently true) as it depends on Bob's mind (i.e. Bob's experience), but it's judgment-independently true because people can be mistaken about this claim. E.g. Alice believes Bob liked the movie because Bob told her he did, but little does Alice know that Bob was lying. So Alice's judgment that "Bob liked the movie" is mistaken.

 
* (So are judgments the same as beliefs?)

 
* "This food is too salty." Is this a statement made true by an experience (experience-dependent claim) or is it made true by a judgment (judgment-dependent claim), or both?

 
* Bob has a certain experience (the experience fact) which causes Bob to form the belief that the food is 'too salty' (the judgment fact).

 
* Bob shares his food with Alice. She does not have the too salty experience and thus does not form the judgment that the food is too salty. So the judgment "This food is too salty" is true or false depending on the experience fact that grounds the judgment (i.e. the judgment is explained by the experience).

 
* But doesn't that mean the truth of "This food is too salty" is not exactly judgment-dependent, but experience-dependent? Because it's not the judgment that makes the claim true or false, but the experience behind the judgment. (You could say that if the judgment is sincere, then the judgment just is a report of the experience, so a proposition being made true by a judgment or experience is the same kind of proposition. So judgment-dependent truths and experience-dependent truths are the same, both made true by the experience. What would an example be of a proposition whose truth is judgment-dependent and yet not experience-dependent? That is, a statement that is made true by the belief or judgment itself, but not an experience? I can't think of any. Even the judgment "I am in pain" is a report of an experience, and it's the experience of pain, not the judgment, that makes it true that I am in pain.)

 
* If that's right, then we have experience-based truths (propositions made true by experience facts), which are subjective truths, and objective truths (propositions made true by non-experience facts).

 
* But where does that leave a proposition like "I liked the song"?

 
* On the one hand, it's a subjective fact because its truth depends on who you ask – on whose experience you are referring to. But on the other hand, if someone says "No you didn't!", then they have said something false about my experience (assuming I really did like the song). It's true that I liked the song regardless of what someone else says.

 
* I guess it depends on the referent: The statement "This song sounds great!" is true or false depending on who you ask (on whose experience you are referring to). There's no fixed referent. But "This song sounds great to Ben" is true or false depending on Ben's experience. Ben's experience is the fixed referent. So while "This song sounds great" is subjective (true or false depending on someone's experience), "This song sounds great to Ben" is objective (true or false regardless of anyone's experience, with exception to Ben's experience).

 
* So "This song sounds great" has no definite truth value, because its truth value depends on someone's experience, and so you need a referent (a person's experience) to determine the truth value.

 
* "This song sounds great to Ben" has a definite truth value, because it depends on Ben's experience, and so you have your referent.

 
* But that means both of these statements have their truth dependent on experience facts. So both are subjective. The difference is that the first has no definite truth value while the second does, which is why people can have mistaken judgments about the second.

 
* So does that mean the better distinction than 'objective vs subjective' is between propositions with definite vs indefinite truth values? Because "This song sounds great to Ben" has a definite truth value, a person can be wrong when making this claim. But "This song sounds great" has no definite truth value, so you cannot be wrong when making this claim until you clarify: to whom the song sounds good.

 
* (But there are still propositions whose truth does not depend on anyone's experience.)

 
* This is not necessarily to say that "This song sounds great" is a gappy sentence, i.e. a genuine proposition that is neither true nor false (because its truth is indefinite, lacking the referent needed to make it definite). Rather, "This song sounds great" is too vague to express a proposition until made precise.

 
Maybe we need to first answer the question of what it means to be mistaken?

 
* Correspondence / representational theory of truth: Propositional beliefs are sentences. Sentences represent propositions. Propositions represent facts. Representation is transitive, so sentences represent facts. Propositions, and thus sentences, are made out of properties bound together by grammatical rules which set out the exact properties and how they relate within a sentence.

 
* This means you have "inner" properties and "outer" properties. When there is an inner/outer property match, you have truth, and when there is a mismatch, a misrepresentation, then you have falsity.

 
* E.g. a map of the US has inner properties representing the outer properties of the US territory. If the map shows that there is a pond somewhere and you go there and the pond has since dried up, then the inner properties do not match the outer properties and the map is now misrepresenting the area.

 
* In some cases misrepresentation occurs at a higher level of representation. E.g. let's say a picture is taken of a mountain. By coincidence, the photo contains an optical illusion that causes humans to, at least initially, form a false belief about the area the photo is taken of. The representation of the mountain by the photo is fairly accurate (though only capturing a tiny portion of the whole thing), but because of the optical illusion our belief, an interpretation of what we are seeing, is not accurate.

 
* So the order of representation is:

 
* Mountain -> Photo -> Visual data -> Belief (judgment). The visual data is corrupted by the optical illusion, leading to a false belief (until the illusion is recognized and the belief corrected).

 
* So when I say "The moon is smaller than the sun", that should be an objective statement, i.e. a statement whose truth does not depend on anyone's experience. But if truth just is a match between inner and outer properties, and if the inner properties are the properties of my belief (and the outer properties are the properties of the moon and sun), then all truth claims depend on inner properties of beliefs. And all beliefs depend on consciousness, and thus experience, and so really all claims are experience-dependent in some sense.

 
* So I started off saying that all propositions are objective because propositions are made true by facts and the very notion of 'fact' is objective, and now I'm saying that all propositions are subjective because all propositions involve inner properties which are experience-dependent.

 
* Maybe all beliefs have inner properties which are experience-dependent, but the propositions represented by the beliefs have inner properties which are not experience-dependent. This is why propositions are discovered, and why we have necessary propositions which exist (okay, it's debatable whether propositions exist; substitute this with a paraphrase from your favored nominal theory if applicable) independently of any consciousness whatsoever. Beliefs represent the proposition, so propositions ground our beliefs.

 
* So the order of representation is:

 
* Beliefs (Sentences) -> Propositions -> Facts.

 
* Properties can play a dual-role; for example, the properties of propositions are inner with respect to facts (because they represent facts), but are outer with respect to beliefs (because beliefs represent propositions).

 
* This could relate to how fictions work: The claim "Sauron reunited with the One Ring" is false with respect to the outer properties of the Lord of the Rings canon, and the stories within the Lord of the Rings canon are false with respect to the outer properties of real life. (And the claim "Sauron reunited with the One Ring" could be true with respect to the outer properties of a fan fiction, which in turn are false with respect to the outer properties of the main canon.)

 
* An objective proposition is supposed to be a proposition made true by a non-experience fact, and a subjective proposition is made true by an experience fact. But being "made true" means there is a match between representation and represented, between inner and outer properties.

 
* So the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity was supposed to be what makes each claim true. But really what makes each claim true is property matching.

 
* So "The moon is smaller than the sun" is true because the inner properties of the proposition (as represented by the sentence) represent, i.e. match, the properties of the moon and sun and the relational properties between the two.

 
* "Ben liked the song" is true because the inner properties of the proposition match the properties of the fact, which happens to be an experience fact. If Ben did not like the song, then there would be a property mismatch and the statement would be false.

 
* "The song is great" – by itself this is too vague to express a proper proposition.

 
* Precisfy(1): "This song sounds great to Ben" – made true or false by an experience fact.

 
* Precisify(2): "The song sounds great to many people" – made true or false by a collection of experience facts.

 
* Precisify(3): "The song is 1) Not extremely short, like one second; 2) Not extremely long, like one thousand hours; 3) Takes advantage of music theory in a number of ways; 4) The song 'comes from the soul' of the composer, meaning that it expresses emotions and feelings that come from a place of deep feeling and imagination; 5) The song achieves a balance between simplicity and complexity – not so complex so as to alienate the audience but not so simple so as to be uninteresting; 6) Is original and not too similar to any song already composed, providing novelty, entertainment, excitement, and a kind of 'horizon-expanding' effect on those who hear it, showing a musical space hitherto unexplored, inspiring future musicians to further explore that space; 7) Contains virtuosity on the part of the performers; 8) Is recorded in high-fidelity by sophisticated equipment in an acoustically appropriate environment; 9) Is well-mastered and produced, ensuring perfect rhythm for the whole song and balanced volume for each track; 10) Contains mathematical, puzzle-like symmetries and patterns that appeal to the human brain in the form of motifs, phrases, novelty, variation, repetition, melody, harmony, etc.; 11) Contains a story-like structure of rising and falling, and climax and resolution, and it is because of these features of the song that explain why it sounds great to many people."

 
* Some of these, maybe all of them, are non-experience facts about the song itself. So in some combination of these senses, "The song is great" is not only meaningful (and thus a genuine proposition), but true without an experience fact making it true.

 
* But you might argue that what counts as "not too short", "not too long", "a story-like structure", etc., depends on how people experience the song. A song being "too short" just is a song producing the "Huh? That's it?" feeling when someone listens to it.

 
* But on the other hand, it seems objective to me whether a song has a story-like structure to it, and you can't fit that structure in a one second song. (And even if you could, it would not be a substantial story.) It's not a coincidence or an unexplained fact that a very short song produces the "Huh?" feeling it does. There's something true about the song itself (in combination with truths about our brains and psychology) that explains that experience. And so music has some objectivity to it. By denying that objectivity, you fail to fully explain why it is that songs have the effects they do on us.

 

Question 1: Are experiences representational? Surely we would at least say visual experiences are representational; my visual experience of a tree represents the tree. So my visual experience of the tree contains inner properties that can match or fail to match the tree. But then that means my experiences (at least visual ones) can be inaccurate.

 

Answer 1: Even if there is visual representation, it's still important to distinguish which representation is inaccurate: the visual representation itself or my interpretation of the visual data.

 

Let's say I see a photo of a Lego figure next to a human. The Lego figure is massive compared to the human. I interpret this visual experience as meaning there is a very large Lego figure next to a normal human. But really, the Lego figure is actually a normal Lego figure set very close to the camera lens, and the human is far away, and the background is neutralized so that context clues don't immediately give away what's happening. In this case it might be tempting to say that my visual image of a large Lego figure next to a human was inaccurate. But actually the visual image is a perfectly accurate representation of a Lego figure set very close to the camera, etc. It was my interpretation of the image that was inaccurate.

 

Answer 2: This reminds me of Kant's concept of noumenal vs phenomenal. A tree has noumenal properties, and my visual experience of the tree has phenomenal properties. There's no reason to think, says Kant, that there is any match at all between the two. We can be confident, even certain, in the phenomenal properties, but we can have no confidence that there is any match at all between the inner properties of the phenomenal data and the outer, noumenal properties.

 

I suppose I'm just not that skeptical. I suspect that what's happening is that we recognize that a tree has many, many properties that we can't see, and so our visual image fails to capture the tree in its totality. So the hidden properties are the "noumenal" properties. But even if that's true, it could still be that a tree truly has the shape, color, texture, etc., that it has as represented by our visual experience. It helps that we have multiple ways of perceiving the tree; we can touch the tree and "see" its shape that way, and the "touch shape" and the "sight shape" match each other, increasing our confidence that the tree really has that shape, texture, etc. Plus, other people report seeing and feeling the same thing we do, so we know it's not just a hallucination, but something real and external to us that affects others in the exact same way.

 

Just because our first person data fails to represent the entirety of an object (because we lack total data, not because the data we have is inaccurate), that doesn't mean it fails to represent some of the object. But again, that would be a misrepresentation at the level of interpretation, not experience. If I see a tree and conclude that that's all there is to the tree, then that's a false conclusion.

 

So my guess is that our first person data is always an accurate representation of something, and it's our interpretation that goes wrong.

 

Even if I hallucinate and see a pink rabbit dashing by, that first person data is not representing an actual pink rabbit dashing by. Rather, that first person data is coming from within my brain, representing a certain brain state, and my brain presents that experience to me as if it is genuine visual data when it's not. This is why the statement "I saw a pink rabbit!" is false but the statement "I hallucinated a pink rabbit!" is true. The inner pink rabbit properties of the experience do not match any outer pink rabbit properties, because there is no pink rabbit. But the inner properties of the proposition "I hallucinated a pink rabbit!" match the outer phenomenal properties of the hallucination.

 

Answer 3: Representations cannot misrepresent themselves. So in the case of representations themselves, such as first person data / qualia, there is a phenomenal / noumenal collapse; the phenomenon and the noumenon are one and the same. The phenomenal properties of qualia and the noumenal properties of qualia are identical. Or put another way, when you have properties that aren't in a representing / represented relationship, then there is no representation – no inner or outer properties, only properties.

 

This is why our experiences, our first person data, cannot be wrong. But our interpretations of that data involve representation, which entails a separation between inner and outer properties, allowing for a mismatch.

 

Question 2: The properties of a representation need not match the properties of what is represented, and indeed this cannot be the case. A mountain is large and heavy, while a photo of a mountain is small and light. A pipe can be smoked, while a painting of a pipe cannot be. Kansas is roughly 82,000 square miles; a map of Kansas is not. So how are the properties of a representation supposed to match the properties of what's being represented?

 

Answer: There need not be total property matching between representation and represented to have an accurate representation, and indeed there cannot be. The property 'representing' and the property 'being represented' are two different properties, so it's always trivially necessary that representing objects and represented objects are different. But 'representation' itself just is a concept about property matching.

 

While a painting of a pipe cannot be smoked, a painting of a pipe can create within us a visual image of something brown, curvy, etc., the same visual image that a pipe creates within us. A hallucination of a pink rabbit represents a pink rabbit in the sense that both hallucinating a pink rabbit and seeing an actual pink rabbit produce within us an experience of seeing a pink rabbit. So you have partial representation, and this partial representation explains why it is that a person who hallucinates a pink rabbit might incorrectly conclude that they really saw a pink rabbit. But the experience does not represent an actual pink rabbit anymore than an experience of imagining a unicorn represents a real unicorn. Instead, both represent something going on in the brain (or, in the case of identity theory, both are identical to a particular brain state caused by something other than an actual pink rabbit or unicorn).

 

Question 3: What about self-justifying beliefs / self-fulfilling prophecies? Example: Medical reports say that if I believe I will get better, then I am more likely to get better. So my belief that I will get better might make it true that I do get better. So this would be an example of a judgment-dependent truth; the judgment that I will get better makes it true that I will.

 

Stress can worsen your health. So illness can create a feedback loop: The illness causes you emotional stress, which worsens the illness, which causes more stress. Being convinced that you will get better lessens stress. If the stress caused by worrying is the tipping point for recovery, and believing you will get better prevents your stress from reaching that tipping point, thus allowing you to recover, then it seems as though believing you will get better truly did cause the absence of stress and thus caused your recovery. Assuming that future contingents can be meaningful and true (which may not be the case), and assuming that your recovery is a future contingent (which may not be the case, as it could be necessary), then "I will get better" in this case is a future contingent made true by the judgment itself, and thus is a judgment-dependent, but not experience-dependent, truth.

 

I doubt that future contingents can be meaningful, I doubt that they can be true, and I suspect that everything is necessary, so I doubt their possibility.

 

Second set of thoughts:

 

* What does it mean for something to be objectively versus subjectively true?

 

* What does it mean for something to be true?

 

* First, what does it mean for something to exist? It seems that any attempt to define existence leads to circularity:

 

Exist(1): To exist is to be (exist as) the value of a bound variable;

 

Exist(2): To exist is to instantiate (exist with) at least one property;

 

Exist(3): To exist is to be a property. 

 

And so on.

 

When a concept is phenomenally defined, trying to define it leads to circularity / tautology:

 

Red: A red color.

 

Pain: A painful feeling. 

 

What is that which is intrinsically good? Happiness. And what is happiness? That which is intrinsically good.

 

The reason we run into circular or tautologous definitions for phenomenal concepts like red and happiness is because these concepts cannot be defined semantically, but only phenomenally. So we can only gesture to the real definition, which is a phenomenal definition.

 

So one theory is that the reason why attempts to define 'exist' leads to circularity / tautology is because 'exist' must be, like red and happiness, phenomenally defined.

 

(Another theory is that 'exist' is a basic concept that cannot be analyzed. There's probably other competing theories, including one which says 'exist' can be reduced and need not result in circularity.)

 

What is the best way to gesture toward phenomenal definitions?

 

Red is an experience, a visual experience of a particular color that is different from other colors. There is an intrinsic redness to this experience.

 

Happiness is an experience, an experience with certain qualities to it: it is desirable for its own sake, it motivates us to pursue it, it has a worthiness to it, it makes life worth living, a complete lack of it would make life not worth living (at least, in the absence of any pains, no more worth living than not). There is an intrinsic happiness or goodness to this experience.

 

For something to exist is for it to have a certain kind of "ontological positivity to it", as opposed to not existing, which lacks that positivity. There is a somethingness to that which exists, and there is a nothingness to that which does not.

 

But how to capture this notion of positivity? Certainly our experiences have a self-evident somethingness to them. And a lack of experience lacks this somethingness.

 

So to exist is to be an experience, to be that which grounds / causes / explains experience, or to be that which is disposed to be an experience or disposed to ground / cause / explain an experience.

 

The undeniable positivity to experience transfers to that which grounds / causes / explains the experience. So that which causes experiences, either dispositionally or in practice, inherits that positivity.

 

So for a property to exist is for that property to be an experiential property, to ground / cause / explain experiential properties, or to be disposed to ground / cause / explain experiential properties.

 

Even if there were no experiencers in our universe, the stars and planets would still exist because 'star' and 'planet' denote bundles of properties disposed to ground / cause / explain experiential properties, which certainly exist and could not exist without those prior properties.

 

So for God to exist is for God to be an experiential property, to ground / cause / explain our experiential properties, or to be disposed to ground / cause / explain any experiential properties under possible circumstances. For God to fail to exist is for God to not be an experienced property, to fail to ground / cause / explain our experiential properties, and to fail to be disposed to ground / cause / explain any experiential properties under possible circumstances.

 

In short, to exist is to be a first-person property or to be a third-person property. To put in oversimplified terms, to exist is to be an experience or to be that which causes an experience. This is a circular definition because 'exist' must be phenomenally defined, just as definitions for red and intrinsic good are circular because they too must be phenomenally defined.

 

Note: The word 'red' can refer to phenomenal red – the first-person experience of redness – but it can also refer to non-phenomenal red – the third-person properties responsible for causing phenomenal redness. So if I say "That car is red", it may be vague whether I am making a phenomenal claim: "I am having a red-car experience right now" or a non-phenomenal claim: "There are non-phenomenal red-car properties out there disposed to generate phenomenal red-car properties." Plausibly, both claims entail each other, so there is no need, in our everyday language, to disambiguate the claim. Indeed, this is how existence works: To say there exists a red car is to say the same thing as "That car is red". To say of anything that it exists just is to comment on its status as an experience and/or its status as that which generates experiences.

 

* Propositions can be true or false.

 

* Non-problematic sentences (complete, grammatical, not too vague) refer to propositions. E.g. "Snow is white" and "La neige est blanche" are two different sentences that refer to the same proposition.

 

* Things that express (refer to? represent?) propositions, like sentences, take on the truth value of their corresponding proposition.

 

* Propositions are arrangements of properties (See: Josh Rasmussen, "About Aboutness", Metaphysica). ('Arrangement' being synonymous with 'combination' and 'bundle' as far as I can see.)

 

* For every property, and every combination of properties, there is a proposition (or propositions) about that property or combination of properties.

 

* This is because properties can be referred to and propositions are arrangements of references to properties. (Hmm... so propositions are bundles of references to properties, and not of the properties themselves. Of course propositions have properties of their own, like properties of reference.)

 

* Because propositions have properties of their own, every proposition has a proposition about it. E.g. "The proposition 'The moon is smaller than the sun' is true." Here is a proposition about the truth of another proposition.

 

* Propositions refer to facts (facts are states of affairs, and states of affairs are bundles of properties). So all propositions have a referring property, with the properties referred to taking on an additional referred property.

 

* A proposition is true when it refers to real properties, i.e. properties that are experienced, explain experiences, or dispositionally explain experiences. (Put another way: properties that are experienced, explain experiences in practice, or explain experiences in theory.)

 

* Does Sauron exist? Sauron is a fictional character, and as such is made up of a fictional bundle of properties. That means either one or more of the properties of Sauron are fictional (e.g. being magical) and/or the bundle of real properties of Sauron is itself fictional (e.g. being a golden mountain). Fictional properties themselves are fictional bundles of real properties (so the fictional property of being magical can be analyzed in terms of real properties combined in a non-real way). We can trace this fictional bundle of properties to the imagination of an author, JRR Tolkien. We experience reading sentences and thinking thoughts about the fictional bundle that is Sauron. Those experiences are explained by the real properties of the writings of JRR Tolkien, which are in turn explained by the real properties of the events of imagination of Tolkien. The real properties of Sauron do not explain our experiences of Sauron, because there are no such properties and there are no such experiences.

 

* We can use our imagination to abstract out properties and combine them in novel ways, allowing us to invent fictions. We can write sentences that refer to these fictional properties.

 

* When it comes to propositions about fictions like: "Sauron was defeated", these are true in one sense and false in another. They are true in the sense that they refer to the fictional properties of the events of the main canon. They are false in the sense that they don't refer to any real properties.

 

* While it's true that in some sense a mismatch between inner and outer properties means falsity – a mismatch between repraesentans (that which does the representing) and repraesentandum (that which is represented) – perhaps more fundamentally, in the case of representation, it's the representation failing to "refer" to real properties that drives that falsity. What makes something true is not property matching, but property reference.

 

I can't really make sense of this notion of inner and outer properties, because it's undeniable that the properties of a proposition are different from the properties of what the proposition is about. In the case of a photo of a mountain, the photo doesn't refer to the mountain but represents it. The concept of accurate representation may not make sense if it's always interpretations of representation that are true or false. Even if we allow for accurate vs inaccurate representation, the difference between a photo being an accurate representation of a mountain and a sentence about the mountain being true is that the photo has no words, and truth is a linguistic notion, and that's because language involves words which refer to properties, and so truth is fundamentally about property reference. When representation is linguistic, as in "He did not accurately represent my views", then you have a failed property reference, which is a falsehood.

 

* Objective properties are properties that do not depend on a subject. They are non-phenomenal, non-mental, non-experiential properties.

 

* Subjective properties are properties that do depend on a subject. They are phenomenal, mental, experiential properties.

 

* When a proposition accurately refers to a particular bundle of objective and/or subjective properties, then that proposition is true. Otherwise, the proposition is false.

 

* Adapted from Rasmussen's theory of aboutness: A proposition is about a bundle of properties when it refers to a bundle of unique properties. So if something fails to refer to unique properties, it's too vague to be a proposition.

 

* When someone says "Bach's music is objectively good!", the subjectivist can take this as false because this proposition is trying and failing to refer to properties about Bach's music that are independent of experience that make Bach's music good. But, so can the subjectivist say, such properties are not possible. Because goodness is itself phenomenal, any talk of good music, good movies, good art, good games, good anything (including good behavior and good actions) will itself be phenomenal. So all good-related properties are experience-dependent.

 

* The realist can say that while it's true that whether an experience is good or bad depends on the experiential property, it's nonetheless true that the experiential property has the quality it does; i.e., that it is in fact good or bad. So even if goodness and badness is subjective in the sense of being experience-dependent, it's objective in the sense that it's true that there are good and bad experiential properties.

 

* This means axiological realism is true. People can be wrong or right about value facts, facts about goodness and badness. For example, if I experience a pain and say "This pain is intrinsically bad", that's true, and its denial is false. If someone says "Ben's pain is not intrinsically bad", then this proposition is about unique properties – the properties of my pain – but refers to properties that don't exist (Ben's pain minus intrinsic badness).

 

* Hmm... this sounds like I'm saying that if a proposition fails to refer, then it's too vague to be a proposition, and yet if a proposition fails to refer, then it's false. Which is it? 

 

* One option: Trying and Failing: In the case of "Ben's pain gyres and gimbles", this is too vague and meaningless to be a proposition, and so is not true or false. But "Ben's pain is not intrinsically bad" is trying and failing to refer to Ben's pain and its relationship to intrinsic badness. It's the trying to refer and failing to refer that makes something false. The vague proposition fails to try to refer to anything (perhaps successfully referring to 'Ben's pain', but failing to try to refer to anything by 'gyres and gimbles', giving an overall failed attempt of reference, as there must be enough semantic content to all referring terms for there to be an attempt at reference).

 

* Option two: Matching: For every property or bundle of properties there are true propositions about those properties. They are made true by the fact that they successfully refer to real properties and real relationships about those properties. Our sentences are true when they match one of these true propositions in meaning. So "Ben's pain is not intrinsically bad" fails to match any proposition made true by referring to real properties, and thus is false. Our sentences are vague when they fail to match a true proposition by lacking meaning. So a sentence is false when it's meaningful enough to match a true proposition, but doesn't. A sentence is not true when it is either false or too vague to even potentially match a true proposition. True propositions are precise enough to refer to real, unique properties, and so cannot be vague.

 

* These options may be compatible with one another.

 

* If we allow for axiological realism, then other forms of realism might get their foot in the door. If there are truths about intrinsic goodness and badness such that people can be mistaken about them, then it seems to follow that there are truths about extrinsic goodness and badness such that people can be mistaken about them. "Bach's music is extrinsically good" is a true statement, and so is "The happiness caused by Bach's music is intrinsically good."

 

* Similar true statements can be made about aesthetics, gustatory goods, and morality. If there are truths about intrinsic goods, then there are truths about extrinsic goods. And if there are truths about extrinsic goods, then there are truths about the extrinsic goodness of actions, goals, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, habits, and so on. If "You should not kill for fun" means "Killing for fun is extrinsically bad" and/or "Killing for fun fails to bring about the most good compared to other actions available to you" then "You should not kill for fun" is true. And so a kind of moral realism is true.