Context

The better we can interpret a context, the better we can understand the significance of things within it. In deliberation, the more grasp we have of the relevant context, the more it becomes possible to reach definite determinations.

An Aristotelian sensitivity to the distinctness and complexity of each situation in no way compromises an ethical ideal of universality like Kant promoted — quite the opposite. It is what enables us to apply that ideal well in each case.

In the world, differences in context also sometimes get used as a pretext for false distinctions that negate ethical universality, or are simply self-serving. But if we truly respect ethical universality, this will be of great help in seeing those cases for what they are.

Context provides a kind of anchor for modality, which plays a very great role in the intelligibility of things. Conversely, modality gives context a greater definiteness. Context is also perhaps the most fundamental concept for historiography.

Several Aristotelian concepts are concerned with context. Potentiality captures most of the aspects related to modality, but contingent fact and circumstance as such are associated with Aristotelian “material causes”, and operating means to ends are treated as “efficient causes”. The interpretation of context complements the classic questions of what and why.

From a Brandomian point of view, practical implications of context will be especially important in normative pragmatics, but context also affects determinations of meaning in inferential semantics.

“What” by Inferential Semantics

Brandom’s inferential semantics can be seen as providing a general framework for answering “what is…” questions. Semantics is about meaning — especially of concrete things said — and inferential semantics is about understanding meaning as a kind of practical doing involved with reasons. Looked at this way, a meaning reflects an inferential role, or role in real-world reasoning. Such roles always have two sides — conditions for appropriate use, and consequences of using this rather than that. Brandom identifies conceptual content with such inferential roles, and focuses on a contrast between these and simple definition, but I want to emphasize instead that all simple definition should be understood as a kind of summary of what implicitly distinguishes a particular inferential role from others.

The kind of meaning of interest here is in principle shareable rather than subjective, private, or psychological. Meaning is social and essentially involved with communication, but it is not a matter of empirical fact. Rather than explaining communication in terms of empirical facts, we should ultimately explain what we call empirical facts in terms of well-founded shareable meaning. The more we are able to explicitly spell out conditions of use and consequences of things that are said, the more substantive content we can share with others.

The “what is…” questions classically asked by Plato and Aristotle have an open-ended character because they are concerned with what something means for a reasoning being in general, which is an open-ended context. To have meaning for a reasoning being is to make a difference in the way the being reasons in life. In this way, Plato and Aristotle also were deeply concerned with the inferential roles of things, and practiced a kind of inferential semantics. This is ultimately inseparable from questions of goodness of reasoning. Here, too, inferential semantics depends on normative pragmatics.

“Why” by Normative Pragmatics

Brandom’s normative pragmatics can be seen as providing a general framework for answering “why” questions. Pragmatics is initially about the practical use of language, and normative pragmatics is about good use, which for Brandom especially means good inferential use. Thus, normative pragmatics ends up being broadly concerned with good informal reasoning in life, i.e., with the quality of our ethical and other judgments.

In my view, this concern with the goodness of reasons and judgments also ends up emphasizing the ethical dimensions of judgment in general. There is really no such thing as “value free” judgment. Even what is called mathematical “intuition” is really an acquired practical skill having to do with judgment of what next step is contextually appropriate.

Classically, “why” asks for reasons, or about the goodness of reasons. Taken far enough, this leads to questions about ends.

Aristotle, too, typically framed inquiries in terms of what is well “said of” something. This is a kind of analysis of language use, with a normative or ethical intent, that ends up being inseparable from questions of what is right and what is true. This general approach is actually a form of what Brandom would call normative pragmatics. Brandom would tell us that semantics — or the investigation of meaning — depends on this sort of inquiry. My ascription of a fundamentally semantic orientation to Aristotle carries a similar implication.

Abstract and Concrete

In contrast to later traditional “metaphysics”, Aristotle recommended we start with the concrete, but then aim to dialectically rise to higher understanding, which is still of the concrete. In any inquiry, we should begin with the things closer to us, but as Wittgenstein said in a different context, we should ultimately aim to kick away the ladder upon which we climbed.

What Aristotle would have us eventually kick away is by no means the concrete itself, but only our preliminary understanding of it as a subject of immediate, simple reference. Beginnings are tentative, not certain. We reach more solid, richer understanding through development.

Aristotle’s discussion of “primary” substance in Categories has often been turned into a claim that individuals are ontologically more primary than form. This is to misunderstand what Categories is talking about. Aristotle explicitly says Categories will be about “things said without combination” [emphasis added], i.e., about what is expressed by kinds of apparently atomic sayings that are used in larger sayings.

The initial definition of substance in the strict or “primary” sense — which he will eventually kick away in the Metaphysics — is of a thing (said) “which is neither said of something underlying nor in something underlying”. (Aristotle often deliberately leaves it open whether he is talking about a referencing word or a referenced thing — or says one and implies the other — because in both cases, the primary concern is the inferential meaning of the reference.)

This initial definition is a negative one that suffices to distinguish substance from the other categories. By implication, it refers to something that is said simply of something, in the way that a proper name is. As examples, he gives (namings of) an individual human, or an individual horse.

“Socrates” would be said simply of Socrates, and would thus “be” — or refer to — a primary substance in this sense. The naming of Socrates is an apparently simple reference to what we might call an object. As Brandom has noted, this picks out a distinctive semantic and inferential role that applies only to references to singular things.

Aristotle then says that more universal namings or named things like “human” and “horse” are also “substances” — i.e., can also refer to singular objects — in a secondary sense, as in “that horse”. Then substance in general is further distinguished, by saying it is something A such that when something else B is said of it, both the naming and the “what-it-is” of B are said of the primary or secondary substance A. (See also Form; Things in Themselves; Definition.)

If a horse as such “is” a mammal of a certain description, then that horse must be a mammal of that description. If a mammal as such “is” warm-blooded, then that horse “is” warm-blooded.

These are neither factual nor ontological claims, but consequences of a rule of interpretation telling us what it means to say these kinds of things. Whether or not something is a substance in this sense is surely a key distinction, for it determines the validity or invalidity of a large class of inferences.

Based on the classification of A as an object reference and B as something said of A, we can make valid inferences about A from B.

When something else C is said of the non-substance B, by contrast, we still have a “naming” of B, but the “what-it-is” or substantive meaning of C does not apply to B itself, but only modifies it, because B is not an object reference. Applying the substantive meaning of C to B — i.e., making inferences about B from the meaning of C — would be invalid in this case.

Just because, say, warm-blooded as such “is” a quality, there is no valid inference that mammals “are” qualities, or that that horse “is” a quality. The concern here is with validity of a certain kind of inference and interpretation, not ontology (or epistemology, either).

In the Metaphysics, the initial referential notion of substance as something underlying is explicitly superseded through a far more elaborate development of “what it was to have been” a thing that emphasizes form, and ultimately actuality and potentiality. The appearance of what might be mistaken for a sort of referential foundationalism is removed. (See also Aristotelian Dialectic.)

I also think he wanted to suggest that practically, a kind of preliminary grasp of some actuality has to come first in understanding. Actuality is always concrete and particular, and said to be more primary. But potentiality too plays an irreducible role, in underwriting the relative persistence of something as the “same” something through change, which motivated the earlier talk about something underlying. The persistence of relatively stable identities of things depends on their counterfactual potentiality, which can only be apprehended in an inferential way. (See also Aristotelian Demonstration.)

It does make sense to say that things like actuality and substance inhere more in the individual than in the species, but that is due to the meanings of actuality and substance, not to an ontological status.

Syllogism

Aristotle invented logic as a discipline, and in Prior Analytics developed a detailed theory of so-called syllogisms to codify deductive reasoning, which also marks the beginning of formalization in logic. Although there actually were interesting developments in the European middle ages with the theory of so-called supposition as a kind of semi-formal semantics, Kant famously said Aristotle had said all there was to say about logic, and this went undisputed until the time of Boole and De Morgan in the mid-19th century. Boole himself said he was only extending Aristotle’s theory.

The fundamental principle of syllogistic reasoning is best understood as a kind of function composition. Aristotle himself did not have the concept of a mathematical function, which we owe mainly to Leibniz, but he clearly used a concept of composition of things we can recognize as function-like. In the late 19th century, Frege pointed out that the logical meaning of grammatical predication in ordinary language can be considered as a kind of function application.

Aristotle’s syllogisms were expressed in natural language, but in order to focus attention on their form, he often substituted letters for concrete terms. The fundamental pattern is

(quantifier A) op B
(quantifier B) op C
Therefore, A op C

where each instance of “quantifier” is either “some” or “all”; each instance of “op” is either what Aristotle called “combination” or “separation”, conventionally represented in natural language by “is” or “is not”; and each letter is a type aka “universal” aka higher-order term. (In the middle ages and later, individuals were treated as a kind of singleton types with implicit universal quantification, so it is common to see examples like “Socrates is a human”, but Aristotle’s own concrete examples never included references to individuals.) Not all combinations of substitutions correspond to valid inferences, but Prior Analytics systematically described all the valid ones.

In traditional interpretations, Aristotle’s use of conventionalized natural language representations sometimes led to analyses of the “op” emphasizing grammatical relations between subjects and predicates. However, Aristotle did not concern himself with grammar, but with the more substantive meaning of (possibly negated) “said of” relations, which actually codify normative material inferences. His logic is thus a fascinating hybrid, in which each canonical proposition represents a normative judgment of a material-inferential relation between types, and then the representations are formally composed together.

The conclusion B of the first material inference, which is also the premise of the second, was traditionally called the “middle term”, the role of which in reasoning through its licensing of composition lies behind all of Hegel’s talk about mediation. The 20th century saw the development of category theory, which explains all mathematical reasoning and formal logic in terms of the composition of “morphisms” or “arrows” corresponding to primitive function- or inference-like things. Aside from many applications in computer science and physics, category theory has also been used to analyze grammar. The historical relation of Aristotle to the Greek grammarians goes in the same direction — Aristotle influenced the grammarians, not the other way around. (See also Searching for a Middle Term; Aristotelian Demonstration; Demonstrative “Science”?)

Aristotelian Causes

I’ve explained each of the four classic Aristotelian “causes” as playing what Brandom would call an expressive role, helping to explain other meaning, and pointed out how different this is from standard modern notions of what I’ve been calling univocal causality. An Aristotelian cause (aitia) is much more like a nonexclusive reason than it is like anything expressed by mechanical metaphors.

There is another very important modern way of thinking about these matters, inspired by Hume’s critique of realism about causes in the modern sense. Hume pointed out that modern-style talk about cause and effect involves a kind of inferential extrapolation from observed regular patterns of succession. Implicitly influenced by this, much work in the sciences relies directly on statistical correlations observed in data from controlled experiments. What particular causes are said to be at work then becomes a matter of optional statistical inference, subject to possible debate.

Then, too, from the side of subject matter, in fields concerned with complex dynamical systems that can only be modeled in a very tentative way — like ecology, economics, and medicine — it has come to be widely recognized that many causes combine to produce the results we see.

Both the statistical approach and what I’m gesturing at as a “complex systems” approach to causality avoid reliance on mechanical metaphors. Neither of these perspectives rules out underdetermination or overdetermination, or the simultaneous presence of both.

Aristotelian “causality” is simultaneously underdetermining and overdetermining. That is to say, in advance it leaves room for varying outcomes, but in hindsight it provides multiple rationales for a given outcome. Its purpose is to provide not certain prediction, but intelligibility and reasonableness.

In principle, nothing would stop us from combining this with statistical or complex-systems views, but these are still very different approaches. The statistical approach is quantitative and relies on counting minimally interpreted facts, where the Aristotelian approach is qualitative and puts the whole emphasis on rational interpretation. The complex-systems view relativizes causes in the modern event-based sense, without making them like any of the Aristotelian ones, none of which corresponds to an event. It is also not interpretive in the sense developed here.

One might consider mathematical-physical law as a kind of formal cause. Statistics and things like dynamic models could be taken as modern, quantitatively oriented descriptions of what I have called material tendencies. (See also Secondary Causes; Form; Aristotelian Matter; Efficient Cause; Ends; Natural Ends; Aristotelian Identity; Aristotelian Demonstration.)

Natural Ends

Early modern science sought to banish consideration of ends from the empirical world, in favor of purely mathematical and factual description. Kant recovered a heuristic use of teleology, especially in biology (see Kant’s Recovery of Ends), and numerous more recent biological researchers have followed suit.

It is relatively easy to see that any kind of desire (say on the part of an animal) is a desire for something that is usually more general than a concrete object that satisfies the desire. More broadly, living things can also plausibly be said to have indwelling tendencies of nutrition and reproduction.

The case of inorganic nature is a bit more challenging for us to understand this way, but where modern science sees abstract mathematical-physical laws in operation, the effect of which may be modified by various circumstances, Aristotle saw concrete material tendencies for things to develop in certain ways, subject to similar modifications. At a certain level of abstraction, observable material tendencies can be viewed as “moving” things in a way broadly analogous to desire. The heavy object “wants” to fall. This just refers back to the observed fact that heavy objects have a tendency to fall, when not impeded by something else. At a level of common-sense interpretation of experience, this does not lead to any false conclusions.

There is no reason why the mathematical-law description and the material-tendency description cannot coexist. The predictive power of mathematically formulated laws makes them invaluable for engineering applications. But for ordinary life, what we are usually interested in are qualitative distinctions that have practical significance.

Thus, in addition to rational ends, there seem to be three kinds or degrees of natural ends or endlike things: ends of desire; primitive vital ends; and endlike tendencies associated with Aristotelian matter of various kinds and descriptions. (See also Ends; Aristotelian Matter.)

Aristotelian Equality

Aristotle explains justice as a kind of proportionality, or equality of relations between people and similar objects of concern. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Magna Moralia virtually identifies justice with equality between people, but then disappointingly goes on to say that since, e.g., there is no equality between father and son or master and servant, the concept of a justice between them does not apply. Aristotle himself was careful to point out that empirically existing distinctions between people in the positions of masters and servants do not necessarily reflect inherent ones between people, and this ought to be generalized. Surviving texts do not explicitly put the same caveat on, e.g., existing inequalities between the sexes, but it seems to me the same logic should apply.

It also seems to me that equality of relations between people and similar objects of concern actually implies effective equality between people. A generalized equality between people would have been a highly controversial assertion in Aristotle’s time, and it seems to me he should be commended for implying it, rather than criticized for failing to make it explicit. It is in this spirit that I consider the Kantian emphasis on ethical univerality a welcome addition, complementing rather than conflicting with Aristotle’s highly cultivated sensitivity to the nuances of particular situations.

Theory and Practice

Unlike Plato, Aristotle did not make theoretical knowledge an ethical criterion, although he played a great role in the development of many fields of inquiry. Nonetheless, he placed intellectual “virtue” alongside friendship or love as an essential component of the highest ethical development.

I previously suggested there is an indirect way in which any inquiry can help make us better deliberators. Knowledge can of course help, but only if it is relevant to the question at hand. But the ethical value of inquiry lies more in a kind of theoretical practice than in the particular knowledge that may result. Intellectual virtue, I want to say, has to do especially with practices of free and well-rounded interpretation.

Aristotelian Virtue

Aristotelian ethics is not just about cultivating virtue as a kind of good character. Although he does emphasize it a lot, ultimately character is just a means and a potentiality for actualization of the real goal of that part of living well that is under our power. The actualization itself comes from good practice (praxis), grounded in sound, well-rounded deliberation and choice. Aristotle also says the very best life is that of the philosopher. Not only is philosophy valuable in itself, but it also helps us deliberate.

The best deliberation and choice is supported by intellectual virtues, a concern for justice, and a spirit of friendship or love, but it would not even get off the ground without progress in the classic “moral” virtues, which are all said to pertain to our emotions or passions, and to how we are affected by pleasure and pain. Aristotle characterizes each of these emotional virtues as a kind of mean, or balanced emotional state.

Thus, courage is presented as a mean between rashness and cowardice. Temperance is a mean between self-indulgence and insensibility. Interestingly, justice and prudence are also included among emotional virtues, and subjected to a similar analysis. Other emotional virtues are presented as following the same pattern. Unlike the Stoics, neither Plato nor Aristotle advocated suppressing the emotions.