Tag: Saying

Anaphora and Prosentences

This will conclude an examination of Brandom’s early programmatic work “Assertion and Conceptual Roles”. At one point he pithily comments that he is developing an account of saying that does not depend on a prior account of naming. Once again, at a broad level I think that is also something that Aristotle does. Saying viewed this way is more oriented toward valuation than toward representation.

I would suggest that naming is a kind of shorthand for a description or classification that is sufficient to pick something out from other things in the applicable context. What a name cannot be counted on to do is to unambiguously specify an essence or an adequate definition. The very first topic raised in Aristotle’s Categories — which was traditionally placed first in the order of instruction — is “things said in many ways”.

The young Brandom says, “Our strategy now is to use the conditionals we have constructed to develop precise representations of the conceptual contents sentences acquire in virtue of playing a material inferential role in some justificatory system. The most sophisticated use of the notion of a conceptual role has been made by Sellars, who in Science and Metaphysics and elsewhere develops a theory of meaning couched in terms of dot-quoted expressions, where such dot-quotation of an expression results in a term referring to the conceptual (inferential-justificatory) role of that expression” (p. 34).

Every concept worth its salt carries its justification with it. We don’t properly understand an expression if we are unable to justify its use. As Aristotle says, the mark of knowing something is the ability to explain why it is the case. I would maintain that there isn’t any knowing “never you mind how”. The latter is rather the mark of what Plato calls mere opinion.

“According to the present view, it is the defining task of a logic or logical construction that it make possible the explicit codification in a conceptual role of what is implicit in the inferential and justificatory employment of an expression…. [C]onceptual roles in Frege’s and Sellars’ sense can be expressed, using the conditionals of our formal logic not only as the means of expression of roles, but also as providing the model according to which we understand such roles.”

On this view, ordinary if-then reasoning turns out to be a kind of key to understanding meaning. But considerable care is required in working out the details. The conditional that codifies material inferences has different detailed behavior than the common one based on a truth table, and that is a good thing, because the truth table one has significant defects.

“The key to this line of thought is the observation that the only sentences whose roles we understand explicitly are the conditionals. We understand them because we constructed them, stipulating their introduction conditions, and deriving the consequences of such introduction (the validity of detachment)” (ibid).

If-then conditionals allow us to explicitly express the reasons and dependencies that implicitly guide judgment and thought.

“We propose to generalize this clear case, and conceive the mastery of the use of an expression which one must exhibit in order to properly be said to understand it (‘grasp’ its conceptual role) as consisting of two parts, knowing when one is entitled to apply the expression, and knowing what the appropriate consequences of such application are (what justifies using the expression, and what inferences one licenses by so doing). Applying the expression is thus assimilated to performing an inference from the circumstances of appropriate application of the expression to the consequences of its application” (ibid).

But “applying the expression” is just what assertion is. By these lights, every asserting is an inferring.

“On this model, suggested by the later Carnap’s use of partial reduction forms, the conceptual role of any expression is the pair of its circumstances of appropriate application and the consequences of such application, that is, of its (individually) sufficient conditions and of its (jointly) necessary conditions. The application of that expression is to be thought of as an inference from the former to the latter. Assertion thus becomes a limiting case of inference” (p. 35).

It is inference that grounds assertion, not the reverse. Only through inference can anyone understand the significance of an assertion.

“More must be said, however, about the ramifications of taking conditionals to be the models for the conceptual roles of basic sentences, insasmuch as our strategy has been to construct a conditional as stating explicitly (as a license) what is implicit in an inference from its antecedent to its consequent, and then to assimilate the content of basic statements to the model of these constructed conditional statements” (ibid).

“In general, one might think that it was incoherent or circular to define the contents of the categorical sentences of an idiom in terms of the contents of hypothetical sentences of that idiom…. Our construction avoids this worry, since we define conditionals in terms of the contents of basic sentences only in the sense in which those contents are implicit in the informal inferential practices which are the use of the basic sentences.” (pp. 35-36).

Kant already questioned the primitiveness of categorical judgments. My take is that they constitute a form of shorthand for what are really reasonings or interpretations.

“Nor is there anything peculiar about taking a sub-class of sentences as the paradigms to which all others are assimilated in a theory of meaning. Frege, for instance, treats all sentences as implicit identity statements (involving names of the True or the False)…. Thus Frege constructs a theory of meaning based on terms explicated with the logical device of identity, where we base our account on sentences explicated by means of the logical device of conditionals” (p. 36).

Brandom has a complex relation to Frege, championing some of his early work and questioning some of his later work.

“We attempt to give a direct account of saying and what is said which does not appeal to naming and what is named” (ibid).

“This is the essential difference between conceptual role semantics inspired by the sort of concerns articulated by the later Wittgenstein, and referential semantics inspired by Frege” (ibid).

“As Dummett points out, the later Frege broke from previous logicians in treating logic not as the study of inference, but of a special kind of truth…. This view seems to have been motivated by his presentation of logic as an axiomatic system, where some truths are stipulated and other truths are derived from them by a minimum of purely formal inferential principles. The philosophical critique in terms of linguistic practice of the distinction between meaning-constitutive stipulated truths and empirically discovered truths, together with Gentzen’s achievement of parity of formal power between proof-theoretic methods of studying consequence relations and the truth-oriented methods epitomized by matrix interpretations … require us to reassess the relations of explanatory priority between the notions of inference and truth” (p. 36).

Brandom makes a good case for seeing the early Frege as a proto-inferentialist concerned with the formalization of material inference. The later Frege propounded an original and rather strange notion of truth and truth-values as foundational. He held that truth is a (unique) object referred to by all true statements, rather than a property.

“One of Frege’s achievements is his formulation of the principle of semantic explanation, according to which the appropriateness of a form of inference is to be accounted for by showing that it never leads from true premises to conclusions which are not true. The usual way in which to exploit this principle is to begin with an account of truth (typically in representational or referential terms) and partition a space of abstractly possible inferences and forms of inference into those which are appropriate and those which are not appropriate according to the semantic principle, as Frege does in the Begriffschrift. Our approach in effect reverses this order of explanation, beginning analysis with a set of appropriate inferences and explaining semantic interpretants, including truth-values, in terms of them” (pp. 36-37).

The idea of this “principle of explanation” is that sound reasoning from true premises cannot yield a false conclusion. This is not a fact, but a definition that also has characteristics of a Kantian imperative. It is up to us to make it true.

He considers possible objections to the idea of treating hypothetical judgments as more originary than categorical judgments. This should not be taken to apply at the level of truths. In a similar vein, he also says that what our words mean does not determine what we believe.

“Just as it is implausible to take what is possible as determining what is actual, so it is implausible to take the totality of conditional truths as determining the totality of unconditional truths. Indeed, the possession by a formal system of this semantic property would be a strong reason to take its conditional as not a reasonable rendering of the English hypothetical construction ‘if … then’. Embarrassingly enough, the standard truth-functional (mis-named ‘material’) conditional which Frege employs has just this property, namely that if the truth-values of all of the conditionals of the language are settled, then the truth-values of all the sentences of the language are settled. This is proven in Appendix II” (p. 37).

This surprising proof really turns things around. I suppose this result is related to the concerns about “logical omniscience” in classical logic. It is not reasonable to suppose that if a human knows A, then she necessarily knows all the consequences of A. But this is independent of the question of whether we really know anything unconditionally (I tend to think not). There is a also question whether we are properly said to “know” abstract tautologies like A = A, without necessarily knowing what A is (I am inclined to use some other word than knowledge for these cases).

“Our genuine conditional, introduced as codifying a set of non-formal inferences, will not have this undesirable property…. We avoid that result by taking the principle that appropriate inference should never lead from true premises to conclusions which are not true as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for appropriateness of inference. The truth-functional conditional results from taking the principle to provide sufficient conditions as well” (ibid).

Again, this falls within the tradition of alternative, “better” definitions of implication.

“Taking Frege’s semantic explanatory principle as a necessary condition on an account of inferential relations settles that the primary semantic notion will be whatever it is that is preserved by appropriate inferences. Frege calls this ‘truth’, but abstractly there are other properties which could also play this role (e.g., justificatory responsibility) and there are good reasons to expect an adequate semantic theory to account as well for the preservation of ‘relevance’ of some kind by appropriate inferences. This primary semantic notion, however, pertains only to the use of a sentence as a free-standing assertive utterance. A full notion of sentential content must specify as well the role a sentence has as a component in other, compound, sentences, paradigmatically in conditionals. It cannot be determined a priori that these two roles coincide. If with Frege we take the first semantic property to be a truth-value either possessed or not by any sentence, then the assumption that the second or componential notion coincides with the first results in classic two-valued truth-functional logic” (p. 38).

It is noteworthy that even the later Frege’s concern in this context was with “whatever it is that is preserved by appropriate inferences”.

He has previously used the term “designatedness”, which names that “whatever it is that inference preserves” that plays a role in multi-valued logics broadly analogous to that played by truth in two-valued logics.

“[M]any-valued semantics requires the assignment to each sentence of two different sorts of semantic interpretant: a designatedness value indicating possession or lack by a sentence used as a free-standing utterance of the property which appropriate inference must preserve, and a multivalue codifying the contribution the sentence makes to the designatedness value of compound sentences containing it, according to the principle … Two sentences have the same multivalue if and only if they are intersubstitutable salva designatedness value in every sort of compound sentence” (p. 39).

He relates the current development to technical work on the algebraic interpretation of logics.

“A matrix is characteristic for a logic if it verifies just the theorems of that logic. Lindenbaum showed that every logic has a characteristic matrix, namely the one gotten by taking the set of multivalues to be classes of inferentially equivalent sentences, and the designated multivalues to be the theorems of the logic in question” (ibid).

“We are now in a position to notice that a repertoire, together with the partial ordering induced on the sentences of a repertoire by the conditionals contained in its formally expanded consequence extension constitute such a Lindenbaum matrix” (ibid).

The conditional as Brandom has defined it provably meets Frege’s criterion of inference preservation. Brandom has extended algebraic logic to include patterns of material inference.

“Theorem 1 above shows that modus ponens preserves designatedness, that is membership in the extended repertoire. Or, to put the same point another way, that result shows that our constructed conditional satisfies Frege’s semantic explanatory principle when membership in a repertoire is taken as the prime semantic notion, and social practice determines an antecedent class of appropriate material inferences. The formally extended repertoire thus is, in a precise sense, the characteristic semantic matrix not for a logic or a set of formal inferences, but for a set of material inferences” (p. 40).

“There are three specific points which should be made concerning this interpretation. First, what is captured by semantic matrices is taken to be a matter of formal inferences first, and logical truths verified by the matrix only second, although this is not how such matrices are usually thought of. Second, we generalize the notion of a characteristic matrix for a set of formal inferences to apply to material inferences as well. Finally, notice that in addition to the structure of material inference codified in each repertoire-matrix we can in fact identify a logic with regard to the whole idiom, insofar as some complicated conditionals will appear in all repertoires. We have not constructed a characteristic matrix for this logic by ordering the sentences of the language according to repertoire-designated conditionals. In some ways it is accordingly more appropriate to say that each repertoire expresses a single matrix valuation characteristic of a set of material inferences, and that the whole idiom comprising all admissible repertoires is characteristic of the formal or logical inferences involving the conditional we used to make explicit the materially appropriate inferences” (ibid).

“In this way, then, we can exploit Frege’s semantic explanatory principle and the truth-oriented matrix semantics it inspired as theoretical auxiliaries useful in the formal analysis of a socially specified set of appropriate inferences” (ibid).

“Seeing logic in the way I have been recommending, however, as a formal tool for the explicit expression of inferential roles, obviates the need for appealing to prior notions of truth or truth-value. We have interpreted Frege’s truth-values as they figure in his semantic principle first as the designatedness values of multivalued logic, and then moving from concern with the codification of formal inference to concern with the codification of material inference, interpreted as expressing membership in a repertoire. Recalling the social practical origins of these repertoires, it would be appropriate to call the two circumstances of membership and non-membership in a particular repertoire assertibility values with respect to that repertoire. We have given a much more precise sense to this term than semantic theorists who advocate the primacy of assertibility over truth typically manage to do, however” (pp. 40-41).

“We represent the matrix valuation on the language induced by a formally expanded repertoire by associating with each sentence its repertoire-relative conceptual role, consisting of inferential circumstances and consequences of assertion. It is clear that this is an adequate representation in that this set of roles, together with the repertoire generating them, determines the partial order of the language by the conditional which is the Lindenbaum matrix. These conceptual roles are thus taken as multivalues, with repertoire membership identified as designatedness with respect to the semantic principle. The multivalues must, of course, determine compounding behavior according to our motivation…. It is … a criterion of adequacy of this representation that sentences with the same conceptual role, that is, multivalue, should be intersubstitutable in conditionals preserving both designatedness values and multivalues” (p. 41).

So far he has focused on a notion of the conditional that is a primitive “arrow” rather than something defined by a truth table. He briefly considers how to define other connectives that work off of the designatedness that plays a truth-like role in multi-valued logics, but again affirms the special importance of conditionals.

” ‘Truth-functional’ connectives can now be introduced using designatedness values as the extensions of sentences…. We would like to be able to semantically interpret all forms of sentence compounding by means of functions taking conceptual roles, or sets of them, into conceptual roles, as we can do for conditionals…. Our use of the conditional as both the model of and a tool for the expression of conceptual roles embodies the belief that the contribution a sentence makes to the roles of conditional it is a component in suffices to determine its role in other compounds” (p. 42).

He quotes Frege saying that the kernel of the problem of judgment splits into that of truth and that of what he calls “a thought”, which refers to some declarative content. Given Frege’s unitary view of “truth”, this thought-content identified with saying and conceptual roles has to be responsible for all differentiation.

“By a thought, Frege makes clear, is intended what is referred to in English by that-p clauses. We have identified these judged contents as conceptual roles. In what follows, we try to exhibit a representative variety of uses of such that-p clauses in terms of conceptual roles” (p. 43).

Finally we come to prosentences.

“Our starting point is the prosentential theory of truth of Grover, Camp, and Belnap. That account can best be sketched as the product of three different lines of thought: i) the redundancy theory of Ramsey and others, which says that the conceptual content of ‘it is true that-p‘ is always just the same as that of p…. ii) an account of truth in terms of infinite conjunctions and disjunctions…. [T]he best succinct statement of this view is in Putnam’s Meaning and the Moral Sciences…. ‘If we had a meta-language with infinite conjunctions and infinite disjunctions (countable infinite) we wouldn’t need “true”!…. [F]or example, we could say … “He said ‘P1‘ & P1” (ibid).

“iii) Finally, and this is what is distinctive to the view under discussion, it is observed that pronouns serve two sorts of purposes. In their lazy use, … they may simply be replaced by their antecedents (salva conceptual role). In their quantificational use, as in ‘Each positive number is such that if it is even, adding it to 1 yields an odd number’, the semantic role of the pronoun is determined by a set of admissible substituends (in turn determined by the pronomial antecedent)” (p. 44).

“Thus ‘Everything he said is true’ is construed as a quantificational prosentence, which picks up from its anaphoric antecedent a set of admissible substituends (things that he said), and is semantically equivalent to their conjunction” (ibid).

“The authors of the prosentential theory are concerned that ‘is true’ be taken to be a fragment of a prosentence, not a predicate which characterizes sentence-nominalization…. The authors are worried that if the first part of a sentence of the form ‘X is true’ is taken to be a referring sentential nominalization that, first, ‘is true’ will inevitably be taken to be a predicate, and second, the anaphoric prosentential reference of the whole sentence will be passed over in favor of the view that the nominalization does all the referring that gets done, and would vitiate the view” (p. 45).

“In fact this is a situation in which we can have our cake and eat it too. We consider ‘X is true’ as composed of a sentence nominalization X which refers to sentences, and a prosentence-forming operator ‘is true’.” (ibid).

“Our construction of conceptual roles in terms of conditionals of course presents natural criteria of adequacy for translation functions between repertoires contained in a single idiom, or which are members of different idioms” (p. 51).

“We show now how those semantic facts about the idiom can be expressed explicitly as the content of claims made within that idiom. We use the logical vocabulary of conditionals and repertoire attributions we have already constructed to define a further bit of expressive machinery, that-clauses, which will thus have a logical function in making explicit semantic features implicit in the idiom” (p. 53).

“[T]he account of conceptual roles is novel in being entirely non-representational. In the formal idiom we develop, it is not a necessary feature of a saying that-p that the sentence involved represent some state of affairs. Of course sentences used to say things may also be representations, and this fact might be crucial for the understanding of the use of language in empirical inquiry. But our model is broader, and we may hope that it can find application in the explication of other forms of discourse (e.g., literary and political discourse) where the representational paradigm is less apt than it perhaps is for scientific idioms” (p. 55).

“Perhaps the most important feature of our account is the crucial place given to logic, as providing the formal means by which an idiom can come to express explicitly crucial semantic facts which are implicit in the system of justificatory practices which are the use of a language. We argued that the function thus assigned to logic as a formal auxiliary in a theory of meaning is that which Frege originally envisioned and pursued. Our own development looked at he codification of inferential practices in conditionals in some detail, and somewhat less closely at the codification of repertoires in prosentences containing ‘is true’ and in propositional attitudes, and at the codification of roles in ‘that’-clauses. The basic claim here is that logic must not be restricted to the analysis of the meanings sentences acquire in virtue of the formal inferences they are subject to, as is the usual procedure). Logic should not be viewed as an autonomous discipline in this way, but as a tool for the analysis of material inference, and for making explicit the roles played by sentences in systems of material inferential practice. Using logical devices so interpreted, we were able to specify not only what role a performance needs to play in a system of social practices in order to be a saying (asserting, professing, claiming, etc.) that-p, but also to show what it is about that system of practices in virtue of which the content of such a saying can be that someone else has said (asserted, etc.) something. Indeed the only sort of ‘aboutness’ we ever employ is the reference of one bit of discourse to another (anaphoric reference if performance or sentence tokens are at issue, and mediated by conceptual roles otherwise)” (pp. 55-56).

When Aristotle discusses saying something about something, implicitly that second something is also something said. This phrase refers to that phrase. The kind of reference that is most relevant in all this is what I think of as constitutive cross-reference, or as Brandom calls it, back-reference or anaphora. Less adequately, it has been called “self” reference, but if we examine this closely, it does not involve a unitary self or a pure undifferentiated reflexivity, but rather parts referring to other parts.

Conceptual content emerges out of a sea of cross-reference. A constitutive molecular cross-reference of Fregean declarative “thoughts” or “content” or Aristotelian “sayings” precedes sedimentation into molar subjects and objects.

Epilogue to this series: Anaphora and Reason Relations

Word?

“Language and thinking about things are so bound together that it is an abstraction to conceive of the system of truths as a pregiven system of possibilities of being for which the signifying subject selects corresponding signs. A word is not a sign that one selects, nor is it a sign that one makes or gives to another; it is not an existent thing that one picks up and gives an ideality of meaning in order to make another being visible through it. This is mistaken on both counts. Rather, the ideality of the meaning lies in the word itself. It is meaningful already. But this does not imply, on the other hand, that the word precedes all experience and simply advenes to an experience in an external way, by subjecting itself to it” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 416-417).

Language is not a voluntaristic manipulation. It has “being” of its own that is closely related to thought — a kind of thickness or “substantiality”. But I am doubtful that this applies to individual words in speech. We find one kind of metaphorical substantiality in discourse, and another in poetry, but I don’t think either of these comes from individual words. Language as meaningful consists of “sayings”, not mere names or representational tokens. Aristotle principally focuses on such sayings, and gives preferential treatment to what is well said. Such implicitly normative sayings are what is studied in the pragmatics of language, to which Habermas and Brandom explicitly draw our attention.

“If Greek philosophy does not want to admit this relationship between word and thing, speech and thought, the reason no doubt is that thought had to protect itself against the intimate relationship between word and thing in which the speaker lives. The dominion of this ‘most speakable of all languages’ (Nietzsche) over thought was so great that the chief concern of philosophy was to free itself from it. Thus from early on, the Greek philosophers fought against the ‘onoma‘ as the source of the seduction and confusion of thought, and instead embraced the ideality that is constantly created in language. This was already true when Parmenides conceived the truth of the thing from the logos, and certainly after the Platonic turn to ‘discourse,’ followed by Aristotle’s orienting the forms of being to the forms of assertion (schemata tes kategorias)” (p. 417).

Especially the beginning above seems quite disappointing, coming from one who has quite a few interesting things to say about Plato and Aristotle. He seems to be claiming that the Greek philosophers assumed that language is completely transparent. I find entirely the opposite at least in the case of Aristotle, who discusses many complexities in language use. Language for Aristotle is not at all a transparent medium, but rather something very tangible in which we live, make our way, and find our sustenance. Transparency of language is especially a modern prejudice. Reading it back into the Greeks comes only on the questionable authority of Heidegger. Gadamer seems to accept Heidegger’s claims that Plato and Aristotle base everything on a notion of presence (which really was a central concept for Husserl). I think this reading puts way too much of Husserl into Plato and Aristotle.

“There is, however, an idea that is not Greek which does more justice to the being of language, and so prevented the forgetfulness of language in Western thought from being complete. This is the Christian idea of incarnation. Incarnation is obviously not embodiment. Neither the idea of the soul nor of God that is connected with embodiment corresponds to the Christian idea of incarnation” (p. 418).

This distinction is certainly correct. Alain de Libera has emphasized the unrecognized role of Trinitarian theology and christology in shaping apparently secular modern Western notions of subjectivity and personhood.

“The uniqueness of the redemptive event introduces the essence of history into Western thought, brings the phenomenon of language out of its immersion in the ideality of meaning, and offers it to philosophical reflection. For, in contrast to the Greek logos, the word is pure event (verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum)” (ibid).

The last part about Incarnation as pure event might be plausible in itself. The Latin phrase means “the word is properly said personally only”. The “personally” here might indicate the performative mode of speech that Habermas discusses. But to stress a pure event is precisely to stress the accidental over the essential. And to claim an utterly unique event is a sectarian move. Live and let live, I say. Moreover, it is not at all clear what Incarnation specifically has to do with recognizing the being of language.

Simple Thoughts About Being

It has been over three years since I preliminarily sketched what I want to positively say about being and beings (see also Ethical Being; Back to Ethical Being). Since then, further work on Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel has provided many additional resources for addressing various aspects of this question.

Kant stresses the ethical notion of respect for others, meaning other humans. I advocate respect for all beings, including animals and even inanimate objects that cannot share with us in a full mutuality of recognition, as a fundamental guiding attitude. For example, we respect objects by practicing benevolent stewardship and avoiding any form of wanton destructiveness. As I understand this generalized respect, it rules out the ascetic, world-denying attitude that Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness, which abases itself and everything else before an infinite God. It also rules out the negative attitude toward anything that is not Dasein that is promoted by the Heideggerian ontic/ontological distinction.

As to what being is in the most general sense, I think Aristotle has the right idea in starting out from the ways in which the transitive verb “is” is said (see Things Said; “Said of”). This becomes an investigation into the proprieties of saying, asserting, or claiming — or, as Aristotle might put it, what it is that makes anything said to be well said. This kind of normative saying broaches the distinction between essence and appearance.

It ultimately turns out that the distinction between essence and appearance can only be sustained within some given context. The very “same” thing that is nonessential in one context can be essential in another, and vice versa.

Being primarily expresses the “what” of things. I broadly agree with Dietrich of Freiberg that essence says all there is to say about being and beings. A human being is the same as a human.

The essence of things is not fixed in advance; rather, it is emergent. (See also What and Why; What We Mean by Meaning.)

What things are can only be a matter of what Kant and Hegel call reflective judgment. There is no external authority to which we could finally appeal. (See Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; The Scope of Reflective Judgment in Hegel.)

As Kant might remind us, existence is not a predicate. Etymologically from the Greek, to exist is to be able to be picked out or distinguished from other things in some context. A mathematical proof of something’s “existence” means that if certain things are true in a given context, it is then possible to pick out a distinct something within the context, and we then say that that something “exists”.

Finally, I agree that poetry, music, and other arts can tell us something qualitative about being that we do not get any other way than through the appreciation of beauty. (See also Adverbial Otherness.)

Toward a First Cause

Book Kappa (XI) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics briefly reviews material from books Beta (III), Gamma (IV), and Epsilon (VI) about the aims of the ultimate inquiry into first things that is still to be pursued. It also incorporates a brief review of his discussions in Physics books II, III, and V about what motion and change are. Both parts of the presentation here add more explicit hints that we will be looking for something that is both separate and unmoved. These hints are the book’s main interest.

Perhaps surprisingly given its review of content from the Physics, Metaphysics Kappa makes no reference to the detailed argument in Physics book VIII that there is a first unmoved mover of all things, or to the related background about unmoved things in Physics book VII. The beginning of Physics book VIII refers back to “our course on physics”, which is ambiguous, but could imply that it was written later, and possibly after Metaphysics Kappa, which would explain why book VIII’s argument about the first mover is not mentioned here.

“But neither ought one to set down the kind of knowledge being sought as concerning the causes spoken of in the writings about nature, since it is not about that for the sake of which (for this sort of cause is the good, and this belongs among actions and things that are in motion, and it moves things first — for that is the sort of thing an end is — but a thing that first moves them is not present among immovable things). And in general, there is an impasse whether the knowledge now being sought is about perceptible independent things at all, or not, but about other things. For if it is about others, it would be about either the forms or the mathematical things, but it is apparent that there are no forms…. But neither is the knowledge being sought about mathematical things, nor is it a knowledge of perceptible independent things, since they are destructible” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., pp. 205-206).

This passage is interesting in a couple of ways. The knowledge being sought in the inquiry to be conducted is now more definitely said to be not about perceptible independent things, not about mathematical things, and not about Platonic forms.

He also points out that what he calls physics is concerned primarily with what he calls sources of motion and change. It does not address questions about the good or that-for-the-sake-of which, except in an incidental way. But in Parts of Animals book I, he clearly says that in the overall scheme of things, the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which are more primary than sources of motion. The implication here in Metaphysics Kappa is that the inquiry being prepared for will address them in their own right.

“Also, ought one to set down anything besides the particular thing or not, and is the knowledge being sought about particulars?” (ch. 2, p. 207).

For Aristotle, no universal is an independent thing. The knowledge being sought does seem to be about particulars.

“And there is besides an impasse, that all knowledge is of universals and of the suchness of things, but thinghood does not belong to universal” (p. 208).

Knowledge, however, is concerned with universals. This was the major impasse remaining at the end of book Zeta (VII).

“Now since the knowledge that belongs to the philosopher concerns being as being universally and not in relation to a part, … if it is meant in accordance with something common, it would be subject to one knowledge. It seems to be meant in the way that has been spoken of, in just the way that medical and healthy are meant” (ch. 3, p. 209).

He refers back to the discussion of how the saying of being in the other categories points back to the saying of substance-essence-thinghood.

“Since all being is meant in accordance with something that is one and common, even though it is meant in a number of ways, … such things are capable of being subject to one knowledge” (p. 211).

This enables us to say that there is after all one knowledge that can be said to be of being as such. It will address the proper saying of substance-essence-thinghood directly, and the proper saying of being in the other categories in a derivative way.

“And since the mathematician uses common notions in a particular way, it would also belong to the primary sort of philosophy to study the things that govern these” (ch. 4, p. 211).

He seems to assert in passing that first philosophy includes what we would call the foundations of mathematics. Elsewhere he mentions that the first principles of mathematics are similarly supposed to be applicable to all things. But mathematics does not address what things in general are in their own right.

“And it is the same way also with the knowledge about nature as with mathematics, for physics studies the attributes and sources of beings insofar as they are in motion and not insofar as they are, (but we have said that the primary sort of knowledge is about these things to the extent that the things underlying them are beings, but not insofar as they are anything else). For this reason one must set down both this sort of knowledge and the mathematical sort as parts of wisdom” (pp. 211-212).

Neither mathematics nor what Aristotle calls physics addresses substance-essence-thinghood, or what things are in their own right. It is left to first philosophy to do this, as well as to inquire into the ultimate principles that underlie mathematics and physics.

Just as in book Gamma (IV), Aristotle’s claim that there is after all a knowledge that applies to all being as such, and that the philosopher is the one who has it, is immediately followed by a somewhat lengthy expression of outrage against those who claim a right to contradict themselves, or deny that there is any such thing as contradiction. Just as in book Gamma, the concerns he expresses are about dialogue, the understanding of meaning, and the possibility of sound reasoning.

This makes perfect sense when we recall that Aristotle has consistently treated being in a transitive way, as always being this or being that; and as intimately involved with saying, especially the saying of what things properly are in their own right. He has at the same time treated saying as meaningful saying, intimately involved with reasoning. So we should not be surprised when it turns out that the knowledge that applies to all being as such has to do with fundamental principles and presuppositions of reasoning and the understanding of meaning.

“Now those who are going to participate in a discussion with each other must in some way understand what they say…. It is necessary then for each of the words to be intelligible and to mean something, and not many things but only one, but if it does mean more than one thing, it is necessary to make clear to which of these one is applying the word. So the one who says ‘this is and is not’ denies that which he says, and so he denies that the word means what it means, which is impossible” (ch. 5, p. 212).

Then he again expresses outrage at what he takes to be Protagoras’ claim that truth is entirely subjective. If this were the case, there would be no being as Aristotle understands it. Being “in its own right” is discursively communicable intelligibility.

“Something closely resembling these things being discussed is what was said by Protagoras, for he said that a human being is the measure of all things, meaning nothing else than that what seems so to each person is solidly so” (ch. 6, p. 213).

“And since it is necessary for each sort of knowledge to know in some way what something is, … one must not let it go unnoticed in what way the one who studies nature needs to define it and how he needs to get hold of the articulation of the thinghood of things” (ch. 7, p. 217).

The inquiry to be pursued here is implicitly presupposed by physical inquiries. To the extent that one of these two, taken in itself, governs the other, taken in itself, the inquiry to be pursued here is more primary than physics (or mathematics).

“Now the study of nature is about things having a source of motion within themselves, while mathematics is contemplative and concerns something that remains the same, but is not separate. Therefore, about the sort of being that is separate and motionless, there is another sort of knowledge that is different from both of these, if there is any such independent thing — I mean something separate and motionless — which is just what we shall try to show. And if there is any such nature among beings, that would be where the divine also is, and this would be the primary and most governing source of things. It is clear, then, that there are three classes of contemplative knowledge: physics, mathematics, and theology” (ibid).

What he calls nature is a source of motion within something “as itself” (all other sources of motion he calls potentialities).

Now he explicitly mentions that he intends to show that there is a kind of being that is both separate and motionless, as he understands these two terms. He says that if there is such a thing, it will be “where the divine is”, and it will be “the primary and most governing source of things”. First philosophy will therefore be alternately characterized as theology.

He returns to the impasse about knowledge in first philosophy. “One might be at an impasse whether the knowledge of being as being ought to be set down as universal or not” (p. 218). Knowledge is supposed to be concerned with universals, but we are seeking an independent thing, and no logical universal is an independent thing.

In the earlier suggestion of a solution to this impasse, he re-interpreted the many ways in which being is said for the different categories, re-describing them as multiple derivative meanings pointing to one primary meaning. This seemed to eliminate the need to refer to a universal that abstracts over the ways being is said for the different categories.

Now he complements this by introducing a new way of speaking universally, which does not depend on abstraction. Instead, universality can be achieved by referring to a concrete thing or things that is or are concretely the cause or causes of all things, and that therefore is or are prior to all the rest.

“So if natural independent things are primary among beings, then also physics would be the primary sort of knowledge; but if there is another nature and independent thing that is separate and motionless, it is necessary that the knowledge of it be other than and prior to physics, and universal by being prior” (ibid).

Everything that Aristotle calls independent, he also calls separate. Also equivalent to these is calling something a this. As noted earlier, the challenge is to find something that is independent and separate and a this, but that is also unmoved in his sense. The impasse about universality will be conclusively resolved by finding something that is universal not in the sense of being abstract, but rather, as he says, universal in the sense of being “prior” to all other things, because it is a cause for all of them.

“And that, of what is so incidentally, there are not causes and sources of the same sort as there are of what is so in its own right, is clear, for then everything would be by necessity” (ch. 8, p. 219).

As he said in book Zeta (VII), the contingency of incidental being must have contingent, incidental causes. Now he relates this more specifically to a consideration of that-for-the-sake-of-which.

“That which is for the sake of something is present in things that happen by nature or as a result of thinking, but it is fortune when any of these happen incidentally, for just as being is in one way in its own right and in another way incidental, so also with cause. And fortune is an incidental cause in the things that are by choice, among those that happen for the sake of something, for which reason fortune and thinking concern the same things, since there is no choice apart from thinking…. And since nothing incidental takes precedence over things in their own right, neither then do incidental causes, so if fortune or chance is a cause of the heavens, intelligence and nature have a prior responsibility” (pp. 219-220).

There is such a thing as fortune or things happening by chance, but “intelligence and nature have a prior responsibility”, just as what things are in their own right takes precedence over things that are the case incidentally.

“Something is in one way only as at-work, in another way as in potency, and in another way both in potency and at-work, and again in one way as a being, in another as a so-much, in other ways in the rest of the categories; and there is no motion apart from things, since something changes always according to the categories of being, and there is nothing common to these which is not within a single category” (ch. 9, p. 220).

Every change is understood by Aristotle as a change with respect to one of the categories. What is common to these is not an abstraction, but the single concrete sense for one category (substance-essence-thinghood), from which the senses for the other categories are derived.

Here he mentions being in the sense of potentiality and actuality, before he mentions being in the senses of the categories. Next, he summarizes the Physics‘ account of motion. “Motion” is the (incomplete) actualization of a potentiality, where actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment would be its complete actualization.

“So the being-at-work-staying-itself [entelechy, identified by Aristotle with actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment] of what is in potency, whenever it is at-work as a being-at-work-staying-itself, not as itself but as movable, is motion” (p. 221).

“And the reason for motion’s seeming to be indefinite is that it is not possible to place it as a potency or as a being-at-work of beings, for neither is what is capable of being so-much necessarily in motion, nor what is actively so-much; and motion seems to be a certain sort of being-at-work, but incomplete, and the reason is that the potency of which it is the [complete] being-at-work is itself incomplete. And for this reason it is hard to grasp what it is, for it is necessary to place it either as a deprivation or as a potency or as an unqualified being-at-work, but none of these seems admissible; so what remains is what has been said, both that it is a being-at-work and that it is the sort of being-at-work that has been described, which is difficult to bring into focus but capable of being” (p. 222).

Motion is an incomplete actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment. This is a rather subtle thought, the grasping of which requires that we first understand that-for-the-sake-of-which, actuality, and potentiality. (Motion in the modern sense, on the other hand, has no teleological significance. It is entirely reducible to measurable quantities. It it not that one of these is “right” and the other “wrong” — they are two different concepts, grounded in different kinds of explanation.)

“And it is clear that motion is in the movable thing, for it is the being-at-work-staying-itself of this by the action of the thing capable of causing motion. And the being-at-work of the thing capable of causing motion is not different, since it is necessary that it be the being-at-work-staying-itself of both; for a thing is capable of causing motion by its potency and is in motion by being-at-work, but it is capable of being-at-work upon the thing moved, so that the being-at-work of both alike is one, just as the interval from one to two and from two to one is the same, and the uphill and downhill road, though the being of them is not one, and similarly also in the case of the thing causing motion and the thing moved” (ibid).

Motion for Aristotle is always said to be in the thing moved, not in the mover. The potentialities of mover and moved with respect to any motion are said to be one.

“Now it is not possible for the infinite to be something separate…. Also, how could the infinite admit of being something in its own right, if number and magnitude, of which the infinite is an attribute, do not?…. And it is clear that it is not possible for there to be an infinite actively…. [T]hat there is no infinite among perceptible things is clear…. [N]or could there be a number that is separate and infinite, since a number or that which has a number is countable…. In general it is impossible for there to be an infinite body and a place for bodies” (ch. 10, pp. 222-224).

As he argues in greater detail in the Physics, there is no “separate” or “actual” infinite.

“[T]here is something that is moved primarily on account of itself, and this is what is moved in its own right. And this is the same way also with the thing that causes motion, for it does so either incidentally, or on account of a part, or in its own right” (ch. 11, p. 225).

There is something that is a mover in its own right.

“But the forms and the attributes…, such as knowledge and heat, are motionless; it is not heat that is a motion but the process of heating. Change that is not incidental is not present in all things but in contraries and what is between the and in contradictories, and belief in this comes from considering examples” (ibid).

For Aristotle, it is only composite things (i.e., those he understands as formed from material) that are subject to motion and change. In his sense, for instance, a composite thing may undergo a process of becoming warmer, and that would be a kind of motion of the thing. But heat itself is not a composite thing. (That heat itself does not move would be true even under the modern interpretation of it as the amount of molecular motion within a material.)

“A thing that changes does so either from one underlying thing to another, or from what is not a subject to what is not another subject, or from what is not a subject to that subject (and by ‘subject’ I mean what is declared affirmatively), so that there must be three kinds of change, since that from what is not one subject to what is not another subject is not a change, for they are neither contraries nor is there a contradiction, because there is no opposition between them” (ibid).

“And since every motion is a change, and the kinds of change mentioned are three, but those that result from coming-into-being or destruction are not motions, and these are the changes between contradictories, it is necessary that change from one subject to another be the only sort of change that is motion” (p. 226).

A “subject” here is just some thing that underlies something else that has the character of an attribute. I would infer that the change from one subject to another that is spoken of here is a reference to the way that something that is potentially X becomes actually X by the action of something else that is already actually X, as the parent of a child and the Platonic “model” of an artifact were said to be.

“So if the ways of attributing being are divided into thinghood, quality, place, acting or being acted upon, relation, and quantity, there are necessarily three kinds of motion, with respect to the of-what-sort, the how-much, and the place. There is no motion with respect to thinghood, because nothing is contrary to an independent thing, nor of relation …, nor is there a motion of acting and being acted upon, nor of moving and being moved, because there is not a motion of a motion or a coming into being of coming into being, or generally a change of a change…. For every motion is a change from one thing to another, and this is also with coming into being and destruction, except that these are changes into one sort of opposites, while motion is a change into another sort” (ch. 12, pp. 226-227).

The modern concept of acceleration is not a “change of a change”, but a change in a rate of change. Surprisingly, he does not seem to mention change with respect to place, or locomotion, here.

“Also, it would go to infinity if there were to be a change of a change and a coming into being of coming into being…. And since of infinite things there is no first one, there would not be a first becoming, and therefore no next one either, and then nothing would either come into being or be moved or change” (pp. 227-228).

Here as elsewhere, Aristotle is anxious to avoid any form of infinite regress. Showing that there is a separate, unmoved, everlasting thing that moves others is what will enable him to do that. That will be the main task of book Lambda (XII).

Next in this series: Pure Entelechy

One, Many, Same, Different

Book Iota (X) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics extends the discussion in book Delta (V) of things said in many ways, going into detail on what makes things one, many, the same, or different. These are extremely important matters for any sound reasoning, though somewhat technical in nature. It also contains Aristotle’s sharp critique of the saying of Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things”.

“[T]here are four senses in which something is said to be one primarily and in its own right, rather than incidentally” (ch.1, p. 185).

As to the first, “oneness belongs to what is continuous, either simply or, especially, by nature, and not by contact or a binding cord (and of these that is more so one and is more primary of which the motion is more indivisible and simple)” (ibid).

Continuity in a material is the lowest degree of something being one in its own right. That which is materially united by contact or by any artificial means would not be one in its own right.

As to the second, “[oneness] belongs still more to what is whole and has some form and look, especially if something is of that sort by nature and not by force, as those things are that are so by means of glue or bolts or being tied with a cord, but rather has in itself that which is responsible for its being continuous. And something is of this sort if its motion is one and indivisible in place and time; and so it is clear that, if something that has a source of motion that moves it in the primary kind of the primary class of motions (by which I mean a circular type of change of place), this is one magnitude in the primary sense” (ibid).

Being a whole is a higher degree of unity than being materially continuous. The association of circular motion with a strong unity is relevant to the upcoming argument in book Lambda (XII) about the first cause.

“So some things are one in this way, insofar as they are continuous or whole, but others are one because the articulation of them is one, and of this sort are those things of which the thinking is one, and this in turn is of this sort if it is indivisible, and an act of thinking is indivisible if it is of something indivisible in form or in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

As to the third, “a particular thing is one by being indivisible in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

These would include all the independent and non-independent things that were extensively discussed in book Zeta (VII).

He continues, “but that which is one by means of intelligibility and knowledge is indivisible in form, so [fourth] what is responsible for the oneness of independent things would be one in the primary sense” (ibid, emphasis added).

I expect that this last kind will turn out to be the first cause.

“But it is necessary to notice that one must not take the sorts of things that are spoken of as one as being meant in the same way as what it is to be one, or what the articulation of it is” (p. 186).

This is analogous to the distinction between saying something about something in general, and saying what something is, also discussed in book Zeta. He illustrates this below, with the example of fire.

“The same thing would also be the case with ‘element’ and ’cause’, if one had to speak about them, distinguishing the things to which the words are applied, and giving a definition of the words. For there is a sense in which fire is an element… and a sense in which it is not; for being fire is not the same thing as being an element…. And it is that way also with ’cause’ and ‘one’ and all such things, and this is why being one is being indivisible, just exactly what it is to be a this, separate on its own in either place or form or thinking, or to be both whole and indivisible, but especially to be the primary measure of each class of things, and, in the most governing sense, of the class of things with quantity, for it has come from there to apply to other things” (ibid).

Being one in the third sense above (being a particular thing) is now said to be “just exactly what it is to be a this“. This foreshadows an extensive one-to-one mapping he will develop below, between all the ways of the saying of being he elaborates in book Delta (V), and the ways of the saying of oneness.

He goes on to speak at some length about measures, which we would call units of measurement.

The most important point is that “a measure is always the same kind of thing as what it measures, for the measure of magnitudes is a magnitude, and in particular, that of length is a length, of breadth a breadth, of spoken sounds a spoken sound, of weight a weight, and of numerical units a numerical unit” (p. 188, emphasis added).

The distinction he makes here tracks perfectly with the way that different types, dimensions, and variables are handled separately in the operations defined by modern mathematics.

“And we speak of knowledge or sense perception as a measure of things for the same reason, because we recognize something by means of them, although they are measured more than they measure” (ibid).

The simultaneously humorous and serious caveat that “they are measured more than they measure” means that knowledge and perception are constrained by reality. More precisely, they are involved in mutual dependencies with the realities of things that they at once measure and are measured by.

“And Protagoras says a human being is the measure of all things, as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception, which we say are the measures of their objects. So while saying nothing, these people appear to be saying something extraordinary” (ibid).

Aristotle, at the end of his discussion of measure (longer and more detailed than included here), refers to Protagoras’ famous saying, commonly quoted as “Man is the measure of all things”. With uncharacteristic sharpness, he calls this “saying nothing”. Why? This seems worthy of a short digression.

Protagoras was a prominent Sophist, who appears in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. He wrote a controversial treatise entitled Truth, which began with the sentence, “Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not”. Plato and Aristotle both took Protagoras to be asserting a kind of individualist relativism. Reportedly, the skeptic Sextus Empiricus also read him this way. Plato took him to deny any objective reality. Aristotle in book Gamma (IV) shows rare outrage at his other reported claim that “it is not possible to contradict”. I didn’t mention him by name in my account, but Aristotle names him there as well.

Aristotle implies it is a bit more plausible to much more specifically say that knowledge and perception are measures of things, but even that only with the caveat that really “they are measured more than they measure”.

But why go on to add with such sharpness that Protagoras is “saying nothing”? I suspect the answer may lie with the other part of Aristotle’s interpretation: “as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception”.

I’m inclined to think Aristotle would regard it as outrageous to transfer what may (ambiguously) be said of specific knowledge and perception, to an unqualified saying about one who is said to possess knowledge and perception in general.

Aristotle has just given an account of what a measure is, that it must be of the same kind as the things that it measures. How could one thing (“man”) possibly be the measure of countless things that have no common measure? That does sound like nonsense. Any measure has to be of one kind or another. Modern mathematics agrees that kinds, dimensions, variables can only be collapsed together if very specific criteria are met.

What Aristotle emphasizes here about knowledge and perception — that they have a remarkable involvement with things that also measure them — seems very consistent with his general views. But the way Protagoras implicitly presents “man” as their possessor makes the possessor stand apart from the mutual involvement with things that Aristotle emphasizes, in which knowledge and perception and things measure one another. In splendid isolation from all constraints of real measure, the possessor seems to have arbitrary freedom to claim whatever she wishes.

I intuitively associate Protagoras with the attitude that what’s true for you is true for you, but what’s true for me is true for me, so don’t tell me I’m wrong, and I won’t tell you you’re wrong! Then and now, such sentiments had and have a superficial appeal, because they seem to express a live-and-let-live attitude, which seems to be a good thing. But the way it is expressed, in fact it completely undermines any possibility of meaningful dialogue, which undermines reason itself, which undermines the very thing that makes us human.

Back to the text, Aristotle turns to illustrating the one-to-one mapping I mentioned between sayings about being and sayings about oneness.

“[S]ince not even being itself is an independent thing as though it were some one thing capable of having being apart from the many beings (since it is common to them), other than solely as a thing attributed to them, it is clear that oneness is not a universal either” (ch. 2, p. 189).

For Aristotle, neither Being nor the One is an independent thing in its own right. He will nonetheless argue in book Lambda (XII) that there is a first cause for all things.

“What’s more, what is true about oneness must hold true in a similar way for all things; and being and oneness are meant in equally many ways” (ibid).

“And the same account applies also to the other classes of things, … and [if] in all instances it is the case both that the number is a number of something and that oneness is some particular one thing, and oneness itself is not the thinghood of it, then it must also be the same way with independent things” (p. 190).

“[S]o too in thinghood, one independent thing is oneness itself; and that oneness in a certain way means the same thing as being, is clear from the fact that it follows along equally through the ways being is attributed, and is not any one of them (for instance, it is not what anything is, nor of-what-sort anything is, but stands similarly toward them just as being does), and from the fact that no other thing is predicated in ‘one human being’ over and above what is predicated in ‘human being’ (just as being is not something over and above what and of-what-sort and how-much a thing is), or in ‘being one’ over and above being any particular thing” (ibid).

Saying something is one human being is the same as saying it is a human being. In book Zeta, he analogously said that “good” and “being good” are the same.

Things are often one in one respect, but many in another. The one and the many are “contraries, and not opposed as contradictories or as what are called relative terms” (ch. 3, p. 190). Next he turns to the meanings of same, other, and different.

“Since the same is meant in more than one way, in one way we sometimes speak of what is the same in number, but we say it in another sense if things are one in meaning as well as in number, as you are one with yourself in both form and material, and in another again if the articulation of the primary thinghood of things is one, for instance in the way equal straight lines are the same, … but in these equality is oneness” (p. 191).

In Fregean terms, things are what Aristotle calls one in number when they have the same reference. They are what Aristotle calls one in meaning when they have the same sense. Frege illustrates how they differ by saying that the morning star and the evening star have the same reference, but different sense.

“Things are alike if, not being simply the same, nor without difference in their composite thinghood, they are the same in form, just as a larger square is like a smaller one…. Other things are alike if they have the same form, and have it in them to be more and less, but are neither more nor less than one another. Other things, if they are the same attribute, and one in form, say white, more and less intensely, people say are alike because their form is one. Other things are alike if they have more things the same than different, either simply or superficially, as tin is like silver insofar as it is white, and gold is like fire insofar as it is yellow and fiery-red” (ibid).

“So it is clear also that other and unlike are meant in more than one way” (ibid).

“[B]ut difference is something other than otherness…. [W]hat is different from something is different in some particular respect, so it must necessarily be the same in some respect as that with which it differs” (p. 192).

For Aristotle, calling two things different presupposes that they can be meaningfully compared in the first place. This is not the case for things that are just “other” than one another. Black is different from white; they are both colors. But an apostrophe is just other than an aardvark.

This is followed by a ten-page discussion of technical details of contrariety, which I will mostly skip. Contrariety supports a definitive ruling out of some things based on other things. This has great importance for reasoning.

Incidentally, Aristotle explains why there is no essential difference between human beings with different colorings.

“And since one sort of thing is articulation while another is material, those contrarieties that are in the articulation make a difference in species, but those that are in what is conceived together with the material do not make such a difference. This is the reason that whiteness of a human being, and blackness, do not make such a difference…. For there is a difference between a white human being and a black horse, but that is not insofar as the one is white and the other is black” (ch. 9, pp. 201-202).

Finally, he argues that destructibility and indestructibility inhere in things by necessity. Whether a thing is destructible or not depends strictly on what genus of things its species belongs to.

“[A] destructible thing and an indestructible thing must be different in genus…. Therefore it is necessary that destructibility either be the thinghood or be present in the thinghood of each destructible thing; and the same argument also concerns the indestructible, since both are among things present by necessity” (ch. 10, p. 202).

Next in this series: Toward a First Cause

Causes and Sources

Aristotle distinguishes arché (principle or source) from aitia (cause or reason why). He frequently uses the metonymic shorthand of saying “being” for the sources and causes of being that are the proper concern of first philosophy.

Both “source” and “cause” get chapters in the compendium of things meant in many ways in Metaphysics book Delta (V). Sources and causes are also discussed in the short book Epsilon (VI). I have not written about “sources” before. The main effect of book Epsilon though, as we will see, is to significantly narrow the scope of first philosophy.

I very frequently point out issues related to things said in many ways, usually providing a link to my old short post Univocity. This is an extremely important topic. It goes beyond the use of language to the real diversity of the things spoken of. However, book Delta has 30 chapters, each devoted to a different specific term or terms, so I won’t try to summarize them all. I already covered the chapter on being and “is”. Here I’ll just cherry-pick basic information about sources and a remark on “that for the sake of which” from book Delta, then go on to a brief discussion of book Epsilon.

All causes are sources (book Delta (V), ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 77), but not all sources are causes.

“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” (ibid).

Aristotle’s concept of nature applies especially to living organisms, whose “nature” is an internal source of motion.

Elements are primitive constituents of bodies.

Thinking and choice are additional sources available to rational animals.

The what-it-is of a thing is a source. With sincerest respect for the outstanding translator, I disagree with the choice of “thinghood” for the ousia that Aristotle identifies with the what-it-is of a thing. (But then, I still guardedly use the English terms substance, potentiality, and actuality that I learned originally, to all of which Sachs raises quite legitimate objections. In my opinion, for instance, any of the translations formally proposed for ousia (substance, essence, thinghood, etc.) needs to be used in a guarded way, so I have stuck with the one I learned. The only way I see to get around this is to instead rely on Aristotle’s identification of ousia with the what-it-is, which translates very straightforwardly, and I am now starting to do this some of the time.)

Interestingly, in the above enumeration of sources only one of the four causes is mentioned explicitly: that for the sake of which. Not only that, but in the text the good and the beautiful seems to refer back to what was just mentioned as that for the sake of which.

Mentioning that-for-the-sake-of-which again in the chapter on cause, he explicitly identifies the end with the good.

“But the semen and the doctor and the legislator, and generally the maker, are all causes as that from which the source of change or rest is, but other things as the end or the good of the remaining ones. For that-for-the-sake-of which means to be the best thing and the end of the other things, and let it make no difference to say the good itself or the apparent good” (ch. 2, p. 79).

The whole reason the end or that-for-the-sake-of-which predominates over all the other causes in Aristotle is its association with the good.

Moving on to book Epsilon, “[E]very kind of knowledge that is discursive, or takes part in any way in thinking things through, is concerned with causes and sources, of either a precise or a simpler kind” (ch. 1, p. 109).

“[I]t is clear by… a review of examples that there is no demonstration of the thinghood or the what-it-is of things, but some other means of pointing to it” (ibid).

The what-it-is of things is an object of dialectical inquiry rather than demonstration.

“[T]he study of nature concerns things that are indeed separate, but are not motionless, while some mathematics concerns things that are indeed motionless, but presumably not separate, but in truth in material; but the first contemplative study concerns things that are both separate and motionless.”

What Aristotle calls “independent” things he also calls “separate”. This just means that they count as bona fide things having some reality of their own, and are not just any phenomena. First philosophy for Aristotle is concerned especially — though certainly not exclusively, if the text of the Metaphysics serves as a witness — with things that are both separate and unmoved.

“And while it is necessary that all causes be everlasting, these are so most of all, since they are responsible for what appears to us of the divine” (p. 110).

This is why the subject of the Metaphysics is sometimes seen as a kind of theology. Aristotle’s language here carefully delineates his concern in this regard as what appears to us of the divine. The theology here will be purely “natural”. It will not address or assume any specific tradition or revelation, but only what is openly accessible to the inquiry and experience of all rational animals.

It seems quite significant that he says “all causes” are everlasting. A billiard ball clunking into another billiard ball is just an event, not a cause at all for Aristotle. Circumstances affecting the outcomes of events will not be causes either. Form, matter, ends, and sources of motion themselves, he is saying, are not subject to coming-to-be and perishing as composite things are. But circumstances are subject to coming-to-be and perishing, which is why they don’t qualify as causes.

Modern science, on the other hand, depends on a notion of cause that has mostly to do with circumstances being the case or not. Neither notion of cause invalidates the other, but we have to be very careful to avoid confusion when we move back and forth from one to the other.

“Now if there were no other independent thing besides the composite natural ones, the study of nature would be the primary kind of knowledge; but if there is some motionless independent thing, the knowledge of this precedes it and is first philosophy, and it is universal in just that way, because it is first” (p. 111).

This is very important. Normally, universality is associated with classes and abstractions. Here he implies there is an alternate path to speaking about “all things”, by way of the dependency of all concrete things on causes, and thereby on the concrete first cause that he will argue for.

Next he recalls the incidental senses in which we say things about things.

“For some things are results of capacities to produce other things, while others result from no definite art or capacity; for of what is or happens incidentally, the cause too is incidental. Therefore, since not all things are or happen necessarily and always, but most things are and happen for the most part, it is necessary that there be incidental being…. [I]t is clear that there is no knowledge of what is incidental, since all knowledge is of what is so always or for the most part — for how else will anyone learn or teach? For it is necessary to make something definite by means of what it is always or for the most part” (p. 113).

In a somewhat Kant-like way, he is saying we have to recognize that there is incidental being, but we cannot have knowledge of it in the proper sense because incidental being is inherently particular. Following the shorthand established before, incidental “being” concerns things insofar as things are said of them incidentally. It refers specifically to the incidental way in which we say that the one “is” the other. Something just happens to be some way.

“That there are sources and causes which come and go without being in a process of coming-to-be or passing-away is evident. For if this were not so, all things would be by necessity, if there must be some nonincidental cause of what is coming into being or passing away. For will this particular thing be the case or not? It will be if this other thing happened, but if not, not….. Therefore it is clear that the result goes back as far as some starting point, but this no longer goes back to anything else. This, then, will be the origin of what happens in whichever way it chances to, and nothing else will be responsible for its happening. But to what sort of source and what sort of cause such tracing back has gone, whether to material or to that for the sake of which or to a mover, one needs to examine with the greatest care” (p. 114).

Since knowledge is being sought here, incidental causes will not be considered further. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that as causes in his sense, incidental causes too would be outside the sphere of becoming. This means that no event or circumstance is an incidental cause; rather, it may have an incidental cause. The incidental cause may be material or final or a mover, but not a form, because there is no form of what is incidental.

This eliminates one of the ways in which something is said of something — the incidental “is” that was laid out before — from the scope of the inquiry.

This is related to the point that keeps coming up in recent posts, that Aristotelian actuality is not what-is-the-case. The inquiry will end up being concerned precisely with this actuality that is not what-is-the-case. (Hegel in the logic of essence makes a similar move to put off to the side considerations of what is the case, but then at the very end of the logic of the concept, he brings back what is the case, as that within which we live and act. Addressing the gap between what is the case and the actual becomes our task.)

Then more briefly, Aristotle eliminates what was previously called being in the sense of true and false. It is unclear whether he sees any causes specific to this, analogous to those he explicitly mentions for the incidental case. In any case, the true and false — he says here as he also does in On Interpretation — have to do with what he calls combining and separating.

“[B]eing as the true and nonbeing as the false concern combining and separating” (p. 115).

Affirming something of something is “combining” the two somethings, and denying something of something is “separating” them. His choice of grammatical forms in naming these implies that he thinks of combining and separating as activities.

“[T]he false and the true are not in things, …but in thinking” (ibid).

Aristotle says that such combination and separation pertain only to thought, not to independent things. (Kant would say, combination and separation are judgments, not data that could be given to us. The later Kant would add that these judgments have a reflective dimension. Hegel would raise additional questions about the apparent sharpness of Aristotle’s distinction between thought and independent things, just as he does with similar distinctions in Kant. Similarly, he would question the sharpness of the distinction between sayings about things in their own right and incidental sayings.)

It is very common to hear a correspondence theory of truth attributed to Aristotle — i.e., a statement is true because it accurately characterizes the applicable state of affairs. That is just not what he says about truth and falsity, as we just saw. It is not a question of good representation of — or accurate pointing to — something external, but rather of good combining and separating within what is said.

There are many things we might wish Aristotle said more about, like the tantalizing suggestion here about combining and separating. But it is has been estimated that as much as two-thirds of his writings were never circulated in manuscript in the ancient world, and therefore have not come down to us (see Fortunes of Aristotle.)

Of the ways of saying “is” enumerated in book Delta, this leaves the saying of the what-it-is of things with its metonymic satellites in the other categories, and the saying in relation to potentiality and actuality still on the table.

Next he will take an in-depth look at the what-it-is of things and our saying of it.

(One of the things I admire most about Aristotle is his way of speaking simultaneously and even-handedly both about real things that have independence from us, and about the ways and the activity of our saying of and about them. I think this means he might have been receptive to Hegel’s refinements mentioned above, because Hegel recognizably aims to extend the same kind of Aristotelian even-handedness to these cases as well. Aristotle could still say that these additional cases point to the focal case of the what-it-is of things, though I think the incidental and the true and false would be related to it as something like modal extensions, rather than metonymic substitutions like the other categories.)

Next in this series: The What-It-Is of Things

Being as Such?

Aristotle begins book Gamma (IV) of the Metaphysics by saying that after all, “There is a kind of knowledge that contemplates what is insofar as it is, and what belongs to it in its own right” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 53).

To understand what this really means, we need to consider book Gamma as a whole, also taking into account in advance Aristotle’s disambiguation of “being” and “is” in book Delta (V). (There is another enumeration of the meanings of being in book Epsilon (VI), but it is does not really add anything to the one in book Delta.)

Here in book Gamma, he adds the new element that “Being is meant in more than one way, but pointing toward one meaning and some one nature rather than ambiguously…. just as every healthful thing points toward health…. For some things are called beings because they are independent things, others because they are attributes of independent things, others because they are ways into thinghood, or destructions or deprivations or qualities of thinghood, or are productive or generative of independent things, or of things spoken of in relation to independent things, or negations of any of these or of thinghood, on account of which we say even nonbeing is nonbeing. So just as there is one kind of knowledge of healthful things, this is similarly the case with the other things as well” (ch. 2, pp. 53-54).

Classically, “said in many ways” means said homonymously, like “flies” in “Time flies like an arrow” and “Fruit flies like bananas”. The same sound and spelling are used for different meanings that have no discernible relation to one another.

The comparison to health gives a pretty clear indication of what he wants to say here. But the “one thing” that is pointed to in the same way that health is pointed to is not “being”, but rather the concept of what Sachs calls independent things (“substances”).

In the disambiguation in book Delta, Aristotle says “just as many things are said to be in their own right as are meant by the modes of predication”. This is an allusion to the various ways in which things are said, which are enumerated and discussed in an elementary way in the Categories. Ousia (“substance”, or what Sachs calls “independent thinghood”) has a somewhat privileged place in this enumeration — we might say, just because it is the one that the others “point” to. Ousia will later turn out to be the “what it is” or “what it was to have been” of a thing.

The uses of “is” that he mentions are exclusively the transitive ones. He does not even mention any case like “Socrates is, full stop”. There is absolutely no mention of an “is” of existence, as opposed to the “is” of saying something about something. Saying something about something is the only role of “is” here, and this is strongly borne out by the remainder of the text of book Gamma.

Saying the what-it-is of something of that thing is for Aristotle the central, focal way of saying something about something in general. The other ways of saying something about something form what linguists might call a family of metonymies clustered around the saying of what-it-is. Metonymy involves indirectly referring to a thing by referring to one of its attributes. By contrast, Aristotle takes the what-it-is to refer directly to the thing (which is probably why Sachs calls the what-it-is the “thinghood” of the thing).

All the ways of saying something about something have in common that they are ways of saying something about something. In Sachs’ language, they are “modes of predication”. But the saying of what-it-is serves as a kind of paradigm for the rest.

The main body of book Gamma is actually a long polemic against the Sophists and the friends of Cratylus. It is about the conditions of rational discourse.

A number of the Sophists outraged Aristotle by making flagrantly self-contradictory assertions, and claiming a right to do so. Very uncharacteristically, Aristotle seems to lose his cool over this. He goes on and on about it, beating the dead horse into the ground. He does so because for him this is a violation of fundamental ethics.

To deliberately assert something and its contrary, or to claim a right to do so, is not just to talk nonsense. Aristotle implies it is deeply immoral — the deepest possible violation of intellectual integrity and the integrity of thought. As he says, it is completely impossible to have dialogue with someone who insists on this, and dialogue is the foundation of reason. For Aristotle, such a person hardly even qualifies as human.

Kant and Hegel treat unity of apperception not as something that spontaneously happens, but as the fulfillment of an ethical norm. When we commit ourselves to something by asserting it, we are then also morally committed to the assertion of what follows from it, and even more so to the denial of what is contrary to it. Aristotle’s outrage shows how strongly he shares this point of view.

The friends of Cratylus were radical Heracliteans. Heraclitus famously said that all things flow, and you cannot step in the same river twice. Cratylus claimed it would be more correct to say you cannot step in the same river once. Effectively, this means there is no such thing as being the same at all, so “same” has no real meaning. But if there is no sameness, there can be no contradiction, because contradiction is saying contrary things about the same thing. So the friends of Cratylus too ended up justifying what we would regard as self-contradictory statements.

So when Aristotle is concerned to assert that there is after all a knowledge of being as such and that it is the business of the philosopher to have it, all the evidence in book IV leads to the conclusion that what he is really saying is that the philosopher doesn’t just believe but knows that contraries are not true of the same thing in the same respect at the same time. This is simultaneously a genuine knowledge and a condition of any possible dialogue, a moral imperative as Kant would say.

The only other thing besides the principle of non-contradiction that Aristotle mentions in book IV as applying to being as such is mathematical axioms, which are similarly supposed to be true of all things whatsoever (he does not enumerate them).

Famously, Aquinas read Aristotle’s notion of “pointing toward one meaning” as a kind of analogy. The notion of an analogy of being is better considered as original to Aquinas. Analogy is a symmetrical relationship. If A is analogous to B, we should be able to conclude that B is similarly analogous to A.

But Aristotle’s example of the relation of health to healthful things is not symmetrical; health has a kind of logical primacy over healthful things, and Aristotle very explicitly gives the saying of what-it-is a similar primacy over its metonymic relatives corresponding to the other categories. That is the very means by which he gets from the non-univocity of being to a single concept. That concept is ousia — i.e., “substance”, “essence”, what Sachs calls “thinghood”, or the what-it-is of a thing.

Some commentators have argued that the subject of the Metaphysics is “ousiology”. That seems more accurate than the conventional “ontology”. In any case, Aristotle’s focus is on the conditions of meaningful saying, and especially on saying of what-it-is — not at all on being in the sense of existence.

In the big picture, existence as such is just not an important philosophical concept for Aristotle. What something is and why it is that way are what he is concerned with.

There will be a further level beyond this, in which we will further distinguish the saying of what something is by looking at it in potential and in act, where these terms are understood in a way that is independent of motion, and instead is oriented toward that-for-the-sake-of-which and the good.

Next in this series: Causes and Sources

Aristotle on Being

In book Delta (V) of the Metaphysics, devoted to things meant in more than one way, Aristotle has a chapter on “being”. This is worth quoting in full. What I want to draw attention to is Aristotle’s own very modest, “deflationary” approach in contrast to other writers. His emphasis is on ordinary use of “to be” as a verb, not some grand “ontology”. The word translated as “being” (einai) is literally the infinitive “to be”.

Moreover, being for Aristotle in all of its primary senses is always being this way or that. Aristotle mainly thinks about being in a “transitive” way. In a derivative sense, he speaks of ordinary “beings” we encounter in life. I note his strong emphasis on ways things are meaningfully said, and the parallel series of assertions about truth. One might conclude that there are as many kinds of being as there are of assertions and of categories. Aristotle’s Categories seems to deal with assertions and kinds of being together, and scholars have debated over which aspect predominates.

“Being is meant in one sense incidentally, in another sense in its own right; in the incidental sense, we say, for example, that the just person is educated, or the human being is educated, or the educated one is a human being, in much the same way as if we were to say that the educated one builds a house because it is incidental to the housebuilder to be educated, or to the educated one to be a housebuilder (for here this is means that this is incidental to this). And it is this way too in the case of the things mentioned; for whenever we say that the human being is educated or the educated one is a human being, or that the white thing is educated or this is white, we mean in some cases that both are incidental to the same thing, in others that something is incidental to a being, and in the case of the educated human being, that the educated is incidental to this person. (And in this sense even the non-white is said to ‘be’ because that to which it is incidental is.) So things that are said incidentally are said to be so either because both belong to the same being, or because one of them belongs to a being, or because the thing itself is, to which belongs that to which it is attributed.”

“But just as many things are said to be in their own right as are meant by the modes of predication; for in as many ways as these are said, in so many ways does to be have meaning. Since, then, of things predicated, some signify what a thing is, others of what sort it is, others how much it is, others to what it is related, others what it is doing or having done to it, others where it is, and others when it is, being means the same thing as each one of these. For it makes no difference whether one says a person is healing or a person heals, or a person is walking or cutting rather than that a person walks or cuts, and similarly in other cases.”

“Also, to be and is signify that something is true, and not to be signifies that it is not true but false, alike in cases of affirmation and denial; for instance, that Socrates is educated indicates that this is true, but that the diagonal is not commensurable means that this is false.”

“Again, being and what is mean in one sense something that is definite as a potency, but in another sense what is fully at work, among these things that have been mentioned. For we say of both one who is capable of seeing and one who is fully at work seeing that he sees, and similarly of both one who is capable of using knowledge and one who is using it that he knows, and also both of that to which rest already belongs and that which is capable of being at rest that it rests. And it is similar in the case of independent things, for we say that Hermes is in the block of stone, and that the half belongs to a line, and that which is not yet ripe is grain. When something is potential and when it is not must be distinguished in other places” (ch. 7, Sachs tr., pp. 86-88).

Next in this series: The Knowledge Sought

What We Saw

In passing in the last post I argued that “because I saw it” is not a reason, but a mere reiteration of an assertion. I claimed that we ought always to be able to say something more about why we believe what we do, and suggested that in the current example, this would typically take the form of more detailed claims about what we saw. (See What and Why.)

Previously, I argued against John McDowell’s claim that the space of reasons includes cases in which empirical claims may be non-inferentially justified by reference to other empirical observations. In the current analogy, what McDowell counts as justification in such cases amounts to saying “because I saw something else”. In effect, it is an appeal to another completely indeterminate “seeing”.

By contrast, when we make more detailed claims about what we saw, even though these supplementary claims are not themselves inferences, because they analyze the initial “what”, they may provide the basis for subsequent inference to the original “what”. The axis of justification shifts from other immediate observations to articulated claims about the original observation.

Because the justification now appeals to articulated content rather than to other seeings that are as completely indeterminate as the first, it can now be inferential. Such inferential justification is weaker than deductive proof; unlike a mathematical proof, for instance, it is potentially refutable. But now we have truly entered the space of rational dialogue.

In the situation of “he saw X, she saw Y“, no dialogue is possible. “He saw, she saw” is just as vacuous as “he said, she said”. In both these latter cases, one mere assertion is merely counterposed to another mere assertion, and we can say categorically that no insight could ever be gained from the exchange.

By contrast, as soon as the discussion shifts from a contest of assertions to the articulation of content, something can potentially be learned from it, whether or not we end up endorsing what is said.

An empirical observation may still provide a useful heuristic basis for belief about the world. Additional observations may add to the heuristic “weight” of that basis. But contrary to McDowell, I would not count that heuristic basis as part of the space of reasons. I call something a “reason” if and only if it provides a basis for some reasoning, which is to say some inference or inferences. To call something a non-inferential “reason” makes no sense.

And contrary to both McDowell and Brandom, I do not recognize the existence of non-inferential “knowledge” at all. Every observational report is just a claiming about appearance, and no mere claiming about appearance should count as knowledge.

What we have in the putative case of “observational knowledge” is observational belief. An observational belief may turn out to be well-founded, but any such well-foundedness depends on factors that go beyond the brute fact of the existence of observations.

We can have dialogue about claims about other claims. We cannot have true dialogue about claims about raw appearances — or indeed, properly speaking, about first-order claims at all.

This, I think, is part of the upshot of Hegel’s “logic of being”. Any first-order claim “A is B” considered in isolation fares no better than Parmenides’ saying of Being. It is logically vacuous, just because it is isolated. Isolation would mean, for instance, that we have no definition for A or B.

(The way I am using “first order” here for claims is different from the way it is used in predicate logic. In standard mathematical logic, what I am calling an “isolated first-order claim” corresponds to a proposition, rather than any construct in predicate logic. According to Frege, a proposition can only mean either “true” or “false”, so we have a similar lack of information.)

In Aristotelian terms, the claim then reduces to a mere saying, which is actually charitable, because for Aristotle, in the absence of meanings for A and B, we would have failed to express a proposition at all. Mere saying in this sense actually fails to properly say anything at all. If we don’t know what A and B are, “A is B” is the logical equivalent of arbitrary noise.

Conversely, when we do take a first-order claim as meaningful — as we indeed do all the time — we must always already have some higher-order perspective on it that makes it meaningful. All meaningful saying is saying something at a higher-order level.

Saying as Ethical Doing

Saying is a distinctive kind of doing. This goes way beyond the physical uttering of words, and beyond the immediate social aspects of speech acts. It involves the much broader process of the ongoing constitution of shared meaning in which we talking animals participate.

Before we are empirical beings, we are ethical beings. Meaning is deeply, essentially involved with valuations. The constitution of values is also an ongoing, shared process that in principle involves all rational beings past, present, and future. Our sayings — both extraordinary and everyday — contribute to the ongoing constitution of the space of reasons of which all rational beings are co-stewards. We are constantly implicitly adjudicating what is a good reason for what.

If immediate speech acts have ethical significance, this is all the more true of our implicit contributions to these ongoing, interrelated processes of constitution of meanings, valuations, and reasons. Everything we say becomes a good or bad precedent for the future.

Aristotle consistently treated “said of” relations in a normative rather than a merely empirical, factual, representational or referential way. Brandom has developed a “normative pragmatics” to systematically address related concerns. Numerous analytic philosophers have recognized the key point that to say anything at all is implicitly to commit oneself to it. As Brandom has emphasized, this typically entails other commitments as well. I would add that every commitment has meaning not only in terms of the pragmatic “force” of what is said, but also as a commitment in the ethical sense.

It is through our practices of commitment and follow-through that our ethical character is also constituted. As Robert Pippin has pointed out that Hegel emphasized in a very Aristotelian way, what we really wanted is best understood starting from what we actually did. In contrasting all this with the much narrower concept of speech acts, I want to return to an emphasis on what is said, but at the same time to take the “said” in as expansive a sense as possible. This is deeply interwoven with all our practical doings, and to be considered from the point of view of its actualization into a kind of objectivity as shared meaning that is no longer just “my” intention.