Tag: Hypostatization

Tychism, Synechism

Pierce invented quite a lot of exotic terminology. “Tychism” (from Greek tyche or chance) is his name for the claim that there is real indetermination in the world. On a philosophical level, Pierce defends the irreducibility of chance. He did some of the early work in probability theory. Moreover, he seems to want to explain cosmological order as an emergent product of evolution from primordial indetermination. He valorizes evolution, and believes in historical Progress.

“Synechism” (Greek “with-having”) seems to be an even more comprehensive scheme, of which Tychism is said to be a part. It asserts not only the irreducible reality but the primacy of continuity over discreteness everywhere. This is related to his relational logic, in which all distinction in what is said is analyzed as part of the verb. Pierce very reasonably understands a grammatical subject as a hypostatization of second-order relations. Synechism draws on the mathematical theory of the continuum and, according to Pierce, on the Aristotelian notion of potentiality.

Synechism was supposed to be the basis of a new Scientific Metaphysics that would be a posteriori rather than a priori. This was apparently a major influence on Whitehead’s process metaphysics, which proposed to replace traditional “Aristotelian substance” with process.

I worry about radical indeterminism, though I don’t think that is what either Pierce or Whitehead intended. I don’t find an emphasis on continuity to be very helpful in matters of historical interpretation, where it is really the differences that matter. Historical Progress sometimes happens locally, but cannot be counted upon.

I like where he is going with the priority of the verb and the deflationary view of nouns, though I would give the place of honor to adverbial expressions. But from what I can tell, Pierce seems to have a pretty linear view of time, including historical time. Pierce and Whitehead both seem to have a rather thin — basically factual — view of actuality. Their evolutionary quasi-teleology is tied up with linear time and a future factual state of affairs.

Causes: Real, Heuristic?

The neoplatonic and scholastic traditions tended to treat causes as hypostatized real metaphysical principles, either inferred or simply given. Modern science in its more sophisticated statements has generally treated causes in a more heuristic way, as useful for the explanation of lawful regularity in phenomena.

I read the “causes” or “reasons why” in Aristotle as a sort of hermeneutic tools for understanding. This would encompass the kind of explanations employed by modern science, as well as much else that is helpful for understanding things in ordinary life, and for realizing our potential as animals involved with meaning and values.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics treats causes in Book V, in the context of “things said in many ways”. I will here quote the short first chapter, which introduces causes indirectly through the related concept of arché (governing principle, beginning, or as Sachs translates it, “source”):

“Source means that part of a thing from which one might first move, as of a line or a road there is a source in one direction, and another one from the opposite direction; and it means that from which each thing might best come into being, as in the case of learning, sometimes one ought to begin not from what is first and the source of the thing, but from which one might learn most easily; or it means that constituent from which something first comes into being, such as the keel of a ship or the foundation of a house, and in animals some say it is the heart, others the brain, and others whatever they happen to believe is of this sort; or it means that which is not a constituent, from which something first comes into being, and from which its motion and change naturally first begin, as a child from its father and mother, or a fight from insults; or it means that by whose choice a thing is moved or what changes changes, in the sense in which the ruling offices of cities as well as oligarchies, monarchies, and tyrannies are called sources, as are the arts, and among these the master crafts most of all. Also, that from which a thing is first known is called the source of the thing, such as the hypotheses of demonstrations.”

“Causes [aitiai] are meant in just as many ways, since all causes are sources. And what is common to all sources is to be the first thing from which something is or comes to be or is known; of these, some are present within while others are outside. For this reason nature is a source, as are elements, thinking, choice, thinghood, and that for the sake of which; for the good and the beautiful are sources of both the knowledge and the motion of many things” (Sachs translation, pp. 77-78).

What is emphasized in the notion of “source”, which Aristotle uses to provide insight into that of “cause”, is what is ultimately — or at least relatively ultimately — behind something, not that which is immediately behind it. By contrast, what I have been calling the “modern” (common-sense, not properly scientific) sense of “cause” is supposed to “operate” in an at least relatively immediate and direct (proximate) way.