Introduction: Objects and Their Individuation (1)

It's generally thought that an object must have at least one criterion of identity. It's also said that a criterion of identity must come along with a principle of unity. An object must also have some kind of temporal longevity if it is to be deemed an object in the first place.

How can an object have temporal longevity?

It does so because it has a principle of unity. That principle tells us that certain properties of the object unify it and they do so because they also tell us what aspects of the object must remain in order for that object to remain as that very same object over time. The unity of the object is what makes it the thing it is over time.

It was traditionally thought that the object’s essence determined what we class as a criterion of identity. However, just as we had choices as to what could be criteria of identity, so we have choices as to what constitutes the essence of a single object. One set of essential properties may work for one group of individuals or one set of situations, and another set may work for another group of individuals or set of situations. Why assume that there's the real essence of an object and no more? Perhaps it depends on the ‘modes of presentation’ of that object. And each different mode of presentation will determine its own essence. Under the mode of presentation that is physics, an object may have an essence specified in terms of its molecular and atomic structure. This would be a constitutional or inherent essence. Under the mode of presentation of, say, people who relate to - or use - the object under scrutiny, the essence may be specified in terms of that object’s role/purpose or its relation to the scrutiniser/s.

Many people will have different ways of individuating the very same object. It may depend on how that object is seen - both literally and metaphorically. It may depend on our particular relation or lack thereof to that object. It may also depend on the cognitive baggage that we bring to the object under scrutiny. People with different beliefs and different sets of knowledge will individuate the very same object in different ways. We could have a God’s-eye view of the object; though wouldn’t that view involve an infinite conjunction of the properties and the relations that belong to the object? Alternatively, perhaps a God’s-eye view of the object would entail an infinite disjunction instead. An infinite set of possible characterisations or individuations of the object. In that case, mortal individuators couldn't use infinite conjunctions or disjunctions. Mere mortals couldn't even comprehend them. A God’s eye view of the object at hand would only be of use to the person with God’s eye – viz., God himself.

John Pollock on Percepts and Description

John Pollock writes:

“When I see an object and make a judgement about it, I do not usually think of that object under a description – not even a description like ‘the object I am seeing’…my visual experience involves what we might call a ‘percept’ of an object…” [1986]

If the above is true, then how does Pollock know that he's seeing an object? How has he distinguished it from its surrounding objects or even from the extended spatial mass in front of him?

The object forces the judgement, as it were; though judgements aren't entirely constituted by the object. That is, there would be no a posteriori judgements about the object if there had been no a priori judgements which have offered up the object as an individualised particular.

Pollock continues by saying that

“[p]ercepts are not descriptions, so this is an example of a nondescriptive mental representation. A percept can only represent an object while that object is being perceived.”

It depends on how strong we take Pollock’s phrase “under a description” to be. Is he referring to a vocal or even sub-vocal description of the object? If so, vocal or sub-vocal descriptions may not be needed in order to have some form of description of the object. The concepts he applies may be instantaneous or even a priori.

In order to have a percept of an object that object needs to have been individuated in some way. Indeed by saying that a percept is "of an object", Pollock has implied that such individuation has already been carried out. How can a percept be of an object unless the subject has distinguished it from that object's surrounding landscape?

The same problem can be seen with his use of the term “representation”. Isn’t it the case that representations are representations of something? Aren’t they about something? Perhaps percepts, in Pollock’s book, aren't of - or about -anything. That would be fair enough; although he also uses the words “non-descriptive representation”. And surely representations represent individuated objects. A percept, on the other hand, could be deemed not to be of - or about – anything.

In that case, imagine facing a white wall with one’s eyes wide open. Whilst facing - rather than looking at - the wall, a person may be thinking about things that aren't at all related to the white wall in front of him. However, the white wall would still be part of his overall mental state at that time. However, he wouldn't be having thoughts about the white wall. Perhaps we can say that he's not even looking at it; even though sensory data from the white wall are entering his consciousness. In that case, part of the overall mental state (which includes thoughts which aren't about the white wall) would still include the white wall. We can say that the white wall is an accompaniment to his cognitive activities at that time. Perhaps this is what a percept is. That is, he would have a white wall percept without him knowing that it's a white wall percept and without that percept being about - or of - the white wall. The white wall percept wouldn't even be an image of the white wall; for the same reasons given about representations not being intentionally directed.

If percepts are as I've described them, then one may be able to give descriptions of one’s percepts; though as soon as one did so, they would no longer be percepts. In fact, a genuine percept may not even be remembered in order to describe it.

Remember the white wall percept: if his thoughts were elsewhere, he couldn’t give an after-the-fact description of the white-wall percept because that percept wouldn't have even entered his memory. How could it be in his memory if at the time he was thinking about things which had no relation to the white wall in front of him? And, of course, Pollock doesn't want his percepts to be descriptive anyway. Percepts are non-cognitive, on my reading of Pollock’s term.

I agree with one thing that Pollock says vis-à-vis percepts: they only occur in the presence of the objects that cause them. There is just a causal non-epistemic and non-cognitive relation to the white wall. Indeed, by saying that percepts only occur in the presence of the objects which cause them, Pollock appears to concede the point that they're are non-cognitive backgrounds to thoughts which are about or of things other than themselves. That is, Pollock acknowledges the causal relations that are required for percepts.

Representations or images, on the other hand, don't need direct causal contact with the objects the representations or images are about; though, of course, their causal ancestry can be traced.

Reference

Pollock, John. (1986) 'Epistemic Norms'.

What Can Be Shown, But Not Said

Philosopher A:

“Moral properties can’t be studied as neurons or protons are studied.
There are no microscopes for such things.
You can't trace them in a cloud-chamber.
They aren’t open to dissection.
And to claim that moral positions “expresses only feelings”
Is to shovel dirt on something both perfect and necessary.
Such socio-pickings at the moral body rob it of meaning.
Morality crucified by psycho-fact, number-crunching survey
And the dirty data which raids its own land.

You can’t - you mustn’t! - bring it down to nature’s low state.
It is a check on that very thing.
Something beyond it and, at times, inscrutable.
To naturalise is to rob a precious thing of value.

“Grubby little positivist!
Don’t you know that science’s realm is minute
Compared to the realms outside space and time?
So take your clinical hands off these things! -
Things which exist in abstract - though real - worlds.
All you have is a mere hotchpotch of facts.

“I can take you to these worlds.
But, firstly, take off your white coat.
Lift up that guard you call ‘science’- that prison of the soul.
The wall you place between yourself and the transcendent.
These other worlds don’t need you; or any of your kind.
You must grasp - and soon - the “hard fact” that you need them.
Your soul is a sham-soul.
A soul drowned in the mud of brutish fact.
One so stuffed with data - so blocked with evidence - that it chokes on what it thinks worthy.

“To repeat: you demand evidence for the truths which don’t display themselves under a microscope,
Or when tested for reality.
Experiments serve only to muddy the water
Between you and a clear-water reflection.
That vision of the untestable, unquantifiable, immutable.
“Keep your hands off this singular sphere!
You can't see its transcendent reality.
You haven’t the soul to do so.
So don't press-gang yet more storm-troopers for positivism;
To fight their colonial war against the transcendent.
Please keep your white coat within your white laboratory.
Let your dark mind look - with its microscopic eye - at those slabs of matter,
All sprawled out (corpse-like) on your clinical, white table.”

Philosopher B:

“You ask me - and my ‘kind’ - to step inside.
To show - not say – these possibles of worlds impossible to us.
The only requirement? A self-deluding metaphysics, like your own.
Such would help me leap that chasm between worldly fact and purer truth.
You imply they’re waiting for me – even me! - on the right side of the divide.

“Does this strange world somehow surround you?
Or is it within you?
Can you dip into it (whatever it is, wherever it is) whenever you feel like it,
Like a boy plunging into his own biscuit tin?
Who gave you the keys denied to men like me?
Who let you into the realm of abstract being, supra-natural properties,
And truths shown, but not said?
Shown only to those with a faith like your own.
“The things of which I must only speak, should be said clearly.
But the insubstantial things of which you speak
Can only be shown, not said…

Or so your preacher-teacher said -
That man you so adore.
That genius from Vienna.”

Chomsky’s Sortal: [Human]

Noam Chomsky once wrote that it is part of the

“human essence to be capable of learning only the languages whose syntactic rules satisfy the constraints of certain linguistic universals”. [1986]

 

It can be said that this could only be a stipulated "essence", which comes via the sortal concept [human]. It's not the essence of, say, an individual human (as an individualised particular) that he must be capable of learning a specific delineated language. In possible world terms, Tony Blair, for example, might have suffered from brain abnormalities which precluded him from being capable of learning the said type of language. Similarly, if Tony Blair as a baby had been captured by aliens and dropped onto an uninhabited planet (even if he had the correct brain functions required for learning language L), he still wouldn't have been capable of learning that language if the required stimulations weren't present (e.g., other L-speaking humans, etc.).

We could ask here if a possible language-less Tony Blair might still have been a human being according to Chomsky’s stipulations. However, according to another stipulational definition, Tony Blair might still have been a human in that same possible scenario. It depends on how strong we take Chomsky’s modal term “capable” ( as in “human essence to be capable of learning...”) to be.

Take the letters “H” and “L” as standing for “is human” and “is a user of specified language L”. So Tony Blair (if at another possible world, W, at time t) might have come across the required stimulations that engendered the use of language L. However, this conclusion still relies on Chomsky’s stipulation of the sortal [human] and his further stipulation that the language-use of L is the essence of humanhood.

Of course we need to accept such a stipulational definition of the sortal [human] in order to make sense of humans at other possible worlds. And even if we accept Tony Blair via the sortal [human] at other possible worlds, the possible entities would still not be Blair qua Blair at these worlds. It's essential that Blair - via the sortal [human] - is capable of learning language L, or even Blair qua individualised particular (to use Leibniz's term) that he's capable of learning language L. If Blair had existed at another possible world only via the sortal [human], it wouldn't actually be Blair at that other possible world because what makes Blair, Blair, is the individualising of him as a particular.

Perhaps Blair has (or has had) Lewisian “counterparts” at other possible worlds; though, again, only via the sortal [human] or via the sortal [person] (or via any other lower-order sortal). Blair via Chomsky’s sortal [human] at another possible world would be an entity of some kind: a human, who might have - or has - learned language L... and that’s it. Period. (If, of course, the sole criterion of Chomsky’s sortal [human] is that it must be capable of learning language L.) Blair qua human or qua person wouldn't necessarily have the same shape, size, beliefs or dispositions as Blair at our actual world. So what right have we to say that Blair qua Blair exists at other possible worlds? We could accept, for now, a “counterpart”; though that counterpart wouldn't share with Blair what makes Blair an individualised particular. In that case, possible Blairs could only share the sortal [human] and the quasi-sortal [language-user-of-L] with actual Blair, according to Chomsky’s stipulations (which are very thin). We could apply more criteria of identity to the sortal [human]; but that wouldn't allow the multiple instantiations (as it were) of Blair qua Blair at other possible worlds. And if possible Blairs aren't Blairs who've been individualised as being Blair, then there could be no genuine possible Blairs at other possible worlds.

The sortal [human] could also be stipulated to include the individualising micro-sortals [tool user] and [entity with two legs]. Blair shares these conceptual requirements with all other humans on earth. So Blair as an individualised particular couldn't have possible world duplicates; though he could have, as said, Lewisian counterparts. What makes Blair, Blair, is that he's taken qua Blair (i.e., taken as an individualised particular). And part of the individuating conditions of Blair qua Blair at another planet (not another possible world!) is the fact that he was brought up on an uninhabited planet where the required stimulations needed for learning language L weren't there. And, of course, if there were a possible world that's also the exact duplicate of Blair’s world (i.e., ours), and Blair’s planet (ours), and a world that also duplicated both Blair’s our-world conditions and Blair himself, then such a world wouldn't work as a possible world as they are generally understood. If worlds are “ways things could be or could have been” (Lewis, 1973), then this duplicate possible world W is a duplicate of the actual world. Therefore it wouldn’t be an example of “how things could be or of how things could have been”. This world W would be identical to our world, and therefore actual Blair’s essence couldn't be found by investigating (or stipulating) a possible Blair at world W. One of the main points of possible worlds, therefore, disintegrates. This is the only way I can think of where we could find actual Blair’s essence – by investigating or stipulating other possible worlds which aren't duplicates, rather than investigating Blair’s essence qua Blair (as an individualised particular). We couldn't find actual-Blair’s essence via the sortal [human] or the sortal [person]. These sortal essences don’t provide us with the essence of actual Blair qua actual Blair.

Perhaps, again, Blair doesn't even have non-identical counterparts at other possible worlds. After all, what if a particular counterpart, c¹, shares humanhood with actual Blair? c¹ would also share humanhood with every other human on earth. Similarly, if c¹ shares personhood instead with actual Blair, then he must also share personhood with every other person on earth. And the same is true of lower-level sortals such as [two-leggedness] or [those who believe in God]. c¹ would share these thinner sortals with billions (though not all) persons on earth, and indeed at other possible worlds. Though when we come to c¹ sharing properties with actual Blair that he doesn't also share with numerous other people on earth (or even with just one single person), then c¹ would also need to live at world W with its duplicate conditions. And, as said, such duplications wouldn't serve the explanatory and modal purposes that possible worlds are supposed to play in defining and determining essences across possible worlds: i.e., what actual-Blair must share with all possible-Blairs is what constitutes his essence.

References

Chomsky, Noam. (1986) Knowledge of Language.
Lewis, David. (1968) 'Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic'.
-- (1973) 'Possible Worlds', from Counterfactuals.

Being-Empty. Being-Alone

Ask for nothing from life, save life alone.

That's the bare minimum, surely.

It may be the ground on which all other desires can flower.

Being itself must come first.

What is this being-in-itself? Being-alone?

Being erased of content?

Is it more than a vanishing point in the distance?

Can we hold it, let alone grasp it?

If the mind rubs out its own baggage,

Won’t desire remain in an otherwise desert Zenscape?

That desire to expunge the self, Zen-like.

Or the Cartesian desire to keep to the Cogito alone.

The desire to cut out the meat of the empirical self.

Only a mind already throttled by Reason and Education

Would want to rid itself of Reason and Education.

Rid itself of its graduate’s robes.

It's only the Intellect itself – the proud Intellect – which puts on a hair shirt

And whips itself into nothingness.

But when the endpoint of no-return is reached

How does the mystical/Cartesian self-annihilator

Stop himself from following the markers back to ego and contingency?

Won’t its treasures and temptations forever call him back?

If thought is truly dead, or if all presuppositions are thrown out,

How does the mystic/philosopher know he's in the Otherworld

Away from the world of logic, sex and dog shit?

Wouldn’t he need an experimental water chamber

In which he can float, without eyes, ears and all the rest

Blocked from all things sensory?

A mystic in a water chamber, like Plato in his cave,

May say no to sensory distractions and temptations.

But wouldn’t the flood of memory drown him still?

Foucault says, Be Cruel!

"BE CRUEL! IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBIDWE WILL CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR NOTHING, WE WILL DEMAND NOTHING, WE WILL SEIZE, WE WILL OCCUPY..."
- - Parisian graffiti, May 1968 (as quoted in The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller).

Foucault says, Be Cruel! (a prose poem) 

Foucault said, Be cruel! 

Too far? Too much? There’s a positive side to this brutal command. It’s extreme, sure; though it shows us how far we could go. And just how little we’ve gone.

Cruelty calls you from afar. Can you hear it? It tells us how far we'd need to go before we can even dream cruelty. Let alone be cruel and live the Marquis’ perfect life.

Be mad for just one day… One hour! One bare minute! Live outside Reason’s prison. Live off sense and decency’s edge.

As Nietzsche said: Be free of the conscience which bites you.
Act before you think too hard or for too long. Or act with no thought at all!

Disregard the other – every other. Fuck all who dare trespass the depths of your otherwise feeble self. Make the world in your own image. Cease being the other’s image. Stop the killing-thoughts of those for whom you care too much. Stop them shaping the pliable clay that is your self.

To affect total control - total self-control; you must cease to care too much… Or cease to care at all. Break the links which connect you to stronger selves.

You could be happy in your cruelty. You could enclose yourself within your own bounded mind. Yet your self is now as small as some minds.

Come tomorrow, your self will be as wide as your mind is now.

So why not be cruel? Cruel for one intoxicating day? For one naked minute?

Look, Bad Conscience no longer watches you! But if it does, bite it back! Regain what it stole from your fragile self. That fucking thing tried its pious best to destroy you. To annihilate the self within. To turn you feeble and meek.

To turn you into a slave to morality.

When young and trusting of the adult, you listened to your proxy - Bad Conscience. Saw it as the pure grown-up within.
It demanded obedience. It expected respect - just as every fucked-up grown-up you dared disobey demanded so much from you. The adults who tried to take control of the show that was your own life. But with acts of insurrection, no doubt, you showed them a quicker brain and a stronger will.
Your rude self never gave up the fight for some freedom. Never stopped wanting to be free of the diktats spat out by goody-good folk. They tried to take control of your little life when you lived in your little world. But now your conscience is still your master. Bite it back. Be free! Be cruel!

**************************************

*) This prose-poem was inspired by The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller. The biography was published in 1993.

Nietzsche Dreams On

Atop a mountain of mist and mystery (in the old style)
The lone philosopher stared into the sky.
Out of the mist came a Wagnerian dream…

Mythical beasts are slain and empires arise.
The shedding of blood, the bloodshed, anoints the dream.
Many die in umpteen wills to power.
But don’t let this concern you.
You are beyond the scummy multitude
Which dreams it own petty dreams.
Nothing more than rungs up the ladder to power.

This club-footed bag of nerves was called Nietzsche.
He sublimated well his sad state with words so masculine
They still take weak and inferior souls by storm.
Zit-faced students baptise themselves into paperback-Nietzsche
And find it a better option than terrace rucks or Iraq.
Yes, just like the teens who leaf through Judge Dread
To find a world in which they can stand proud.