Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's immaterialism, which says that matter does not exist, is one of those slightly famous moments in the history of philosophy. As the story goes, Johnson and his friends stood outside a church and complained about "Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter." They did not believe the idea but did not see a way to refute it. As James Boswell reports it, Johnson answered with great enthusiasm. He kicked or stomped a large stone and declared, "I refute it thus." As see it, such a demonstration only shows that Johnson did not understand the substance of the matter.
What matters about matter is that it's a certain kind of substance, which is to say that matter is refutable and problematic because it is taken as something underlying or standing below (sub-stance) the outward appearances, such as the hardness and heaviness of Johnson's rock. In other words, "substance" is a metaphysical reality, not an empirical or phenomenal reality. Johnson only confirmed the latter, which was not in dispute in the first place. The point is not to defend Berkeley or Idealism but rather to simply unpack this stuff called substance. Pragmatists like William James and Robert Pirsig both reject what the latter called "the metaphysics of substance" - and not just physical substance but also mental substance - so I'll rely on them to help unpack this notion. Let's start with Charles Sanders Peirce's "canonical statement," as the Stanford Encyclopedia describes it, from his essay titled ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’. (James approvingly quoted this pithy formula):
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
As the SEP article explains, this was the central proposition of Pragmatism and it was meant to be used, among other things, "as a tool for criticism, demonstrating the emptiness of a priori "ontological metaphysics" and "to undermine spurious metaphysical ideas." Oddly, perhaps, Pierce deployed this pragmatic principle to show "that the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation was empty and incoherent." Just as it is with Johnson's rock, the bread and the wine is identified by a certain set of distinctive features found in experience, by a particular set of effects on the senses so, Pierce says, "to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon". The doctrine of transubstantiation (please notice the root word "substance") says that the bread and wine still look and taste exactly like bread and wine but its underlying substance, which can never be experienced or sensed, has been transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The point is not to dispute theological doctrines but to fully illustrate the difference between empirically knowable rocks and the unknowable material substance that supposedly lurks beneath.
Physicalism or scientific realism is often taken as non-metaphysical or even as anti-metaphysical but it certainly counts as metaphysics, as a metaphysics of substance. And to the extent that empirical science is predicated on metaphysical substances, it's going beyond the empirical world and beyond the proper domain of science. The pragmatists weren't rejecting religion or science as such. Far from it. But they do have very strong reservations about metaphysical claims, claims about essences, or about the things-in-themselves. In the application of the scientific method, Pierce, who was as hard-nosed as a Positivist, said that...
Almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish--one word being defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception ever being reached--or else is downright absurd; so that all such rubbish being swept away, what will remain of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences.
Illustration by James Asher at There Are Real Things.
Hello, David:
Yeah, the point regarding belief in substances generalizes to other positions, including the belief that everything is fundamentally physical, which is metaphysical but either vacuous or false. Couple things that aren’t physical are fear and the number four, for example. Alternatively, if ‘physical’ is spread to cover those cases as well, then the category is too big. What work then is the word ‘physical’ doing?
I wrote an article about this issue and its relation to the mind-body problem here: http://bpritchett.blogspot.kr/2015/02/searching-for-soul.html.
Best wishes,
BP
David and Billie,
It’s always refreshing to here from like-minded individuals. It is an embarrassment to philosophy that the majority–or at least seemingly majority–of our academics have embraced physicalism, or do not oppose it more openly. I enjoyed both of these brief pieces. I do have to disagree with Billie on the Integrated Information thing. I read some of original ITT papers. Equating consciousness with any quantity seems off-base to me, and I find Informational Ontologies a hopeless muddle of trying to magically imbue numbers with semantic meaning.
Billie, with regard to Cartesian substance. Do you think being able to assign a spatial position to an object carries the same ontological weight as having spatial extension? Are these equivalent formulations to Descartes? An infinitesimal point may be located in space but not be extended, no? Is that point material to Descartes…
-Marc
Hello, Marc:
Regarding IIT: yeah, it’s a hypothesis I’m interested in it but it could for all that be the wrong way to frame the problem.
You’re right that I didn’t make a distinction between, say, spatially extended objects and spacetime points. Nobody before the 20th century would have been aware of the possibility of the latter, and especially not Descartes.
In any case, the reasoning still stands that no other account of physicalism can explain abstract objects like numbers or constructs like economic recessions which we take to be real. It’s possible somebody could say that these objects and concepts depend on something physical, but that still means to admit of some entities that aren’t physical. Alternatively, we could say that these entities are physical, but then in what non-trivial sense are they physical?
I’m in complete agreement about your impression of the limits of physicalism. I would really like to hear a physicalist in the audience tell us what, within his/her ontology, the number 4 is, too. Any takers out there?
The answer to this question is obvious: There is no such thing as the number four.
Well, whatever you do, please don’t tell the number “4.”
Here’s evidence for K’s claim:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/elevator-in-china_notice-how-many-numbers-are-missing-in-this-25-fl-bldg.jpg
Thumbs up, Alan C.
And empirical evidence, at that.
“I refute it thus.”
O I see I thought the question was concerning the existence of the object denoted by “the number 4”, not the existence of the writing itself or of variations of it.
In that case there exists many number fours all of which are physical.
In case the question was actually concerning the number four or any other natural number for that matter, my answer still stands, there exist no such thing.
I might add that this is a pretty standard view, there is nothing immediately problematic with it.
I would be very interested to read a philosophical argument that supports physicalism and the nonexistence of numbers while simultaneously explaining the relation between physics and mathematics. Please add a link or post a reference that you feel makes this case.
I have no such reference, but I can present to you the argument:
Since the existence of numbers is totally extraneous to mathematics, so too is the existence of numbers totally extraneous to any other subject that involves mathematics.
If you think that the mathematical objects used in physics need somehow to exist to merit their use it is worth noting that you won’t get away by just the existence of the natural numbers, are you saying that all mathematical entities used in physics exists? What about supercompact cardinals or some other such exotic object, they exist too?
Posing existence to mathematical objects would lead to an ontological menagerie of gigantic size. Therefore i offer a competing view: Such objects do not exist, they are however, to the physicist and others, what latitude and longitude are to the pilot, useful fictions.
Just as a small addendum, I seem to recall reading somewhere that you only need (N,0,1,s,+,×) to do all current physics, I don’t know if this is true but it’s interesting nonetheless .
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I’m not opposed to positing the existence of a multitude of mathematical objects, but I can see how this becomes problematic. Even more worrisome, it seems that mathematicians will forever be able to construct new mathematical objects. A similar worry occurs in particle physics, as some speculate that there is no end to discovering new particles at higher and higher energies.
I don’t follow the analogy of longitude-navigation to mathematics-physics. Longitude is an arbitrary coordinate system to help with navigation along the earth. There are many coordinate systems and many other ways to navigate. Mathematics is not an arbitrary ‘tool’ to help us form physical theories. Physical theories, at least to the physicalist, cannot be formulated without mathematics. And the useful fiction argument applies equally well to the objects of physics–electrons are not actual objects, they are useful fictions that help us manipulate the world.
Anyway, thank you for reminding me about anti-Platonist attitudes about numbers.
I know almost nothing about it, Marc, but there is a long-running debate about the relationship between math and the physical sciences. There must be somebody out there who’s both a physicalist and an anti-realist with respect to numbers. If I were going to look into this discourse, I’d start with the Stanford Encyclopedia along with the big names and issues mentioned there.
“Mathematics plays a central role in our scientific picture of the world. How the connection between mathematics and the world is to be accounted for remains one of the most challenging problems in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and general philosophy. A very important aspect of this problem is that of accounting for the explanatory role mathematics seems to play in the account of physical phenomena.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-explanation/
There is one paper in particular that seems to have gotten a lot of press, Eugene Wigner’s 1960 piece titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” which seems to have posed the same sort of challenge that your question does.
Thanks for reading, gents.
Robert Pirsig, William James, and John Dewey reject the same dichotomies such as objectivity/subjectivity, mind/body and so on. Or rather they are drastically reduced in rank, so to speak, so that the mental and the physical are not primary ontological substances but just two major thought categories into which we sort experience. Experience comes first and that’s where the real and the concrete is located. This is a position that James called “radical empiricism” and Dewey called ‘immediate empiricism’. The problem with substance dualism (Cartesian dualism) or a substance monism (physicalism) is that they “confer existential status to the products of reflection,” as Dewey puts it. In other words, they give primary ontological status to concepts and abstractions.
“Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the “apprehension” by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories put a mental “representation,” “image,” or “content” into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common-sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full.” — William James, 1904
nature is what we are aware of in perception. this is clearly an instance of experiencing. i cannot see how a 21st century thinker could possibly not assert a subject and an object, here. ‘what we’
dmb,
i think it is physical relations that form the physicalists’ ontology, not matter, and definitely not substance. on the proper metaphysical notion of substance, physical matter is not the same thing as substance. Aristotle said it was a composite of formed (morphe) stuff (hyle), and in the hands of aquinas, hylemorphism
means a substance is pure potential (prime matter) with varying degrees of actuality depending on how it is formed (en-souled). like for bishop berkeley, god holds all of aquinas’ forms, and can put them on anything he wants.
since you brought it up, should god wrap his own immaterial soul – no hyle, pure immaterial actuality – you really couldn’t tell that god was actually in a consecrated church cracker using bodily sense perception. the added ‘effect’ (as it seems peirce likes to call it) of god-ensouled bread is spiritually sensed. billy james no doubt would agree about this spirit sense given his fondness for seances, sooth-sayers and many other varieties of religious experience.
pragmatists’ self-description is identical to idealism, much like berkeley’s, except that the recepticle of ideas and material forms resides, not in the mind of god, but rather in the collective human mentality:
“Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
how are those ‘effects’ anything but forms (morphe) of substance. and those ‘objects’ just dispelled by all true pragmatists, well they must be the stuff (hyle) of substance. so the mentality of pragmatist conceivers cannot conceive prime matter, and bam, objects disappear. at least pragmatists are in agreement w/ aquinas in that only immaterial conceiving minds can know immaterial concepts like the forms that peirce calls effects. but shit, even the holy monk
believed in physical reality.
David,
thanks for your robust clarification of my concerns that pragmatism is merely idealism of experienced forms, that it clearly posits conscious subjects, and that it denies material existence in sole favor of human mentality.
Thanks for reading, Burl, but I think there is no cause for concern. Pragmatism is a theory of truth and, as James put it, “it is a method only” and “stands for no particular results”. While it’s certainly possible to be an idealist and still use this pragmatic method, James’s idealist critics were often shocked and horrified by his pragmatic attitudes. Even further, his radical empiricism was practically invented in order to defeat idealism, particularly the British idealism of his day (Royce and Bradley). One of the two major essays in his radical empiricism is titled “Does Consciousness Exist?” and the central aim of that effort is to deny that consciousness is a thing or a substance but rather a process. For these reasons and many others, I think it’s quite incorrect to describe pragmatism as “merely idealism,” and to say “it clearly posits conscious subjects”. It does seem reasonable to claim that it denies materialism or physicalism, especially insofar as it is a metaphysical claim about primary substances. You might say that pragmatism and idealism have a common enemy in that respect. Both pragmatism and radical empiricism are extremely empirical, so much so that together they can rightly be described as an experiential monism wherein experience and reality amount to the same thing. It is important to notice, however, that “experience” should not be taken to mean the experience of the physical by the mental because for James experience included both as features within experience.
“In the beginning to understand his view, it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word ‘experience’ in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is not to be understood in terms of the experiencING subject, or as the interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from the interaction. Instead, Dewey’s view is radically empirical: experience is an activity in which subject and object are unified and CONSTITUTED as partial features and relations within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity. Dewey warns us not to misconstrue aspects of this unified experience-activity: distinctions made in reflection. If we do confuse them, we invent the philosophical problem of how to get them together. The error of materialists and idealists alike – the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection – is the result of neglect of the context of reflection on experience.” — John Stuhr, Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy
very helpful post, david. i did some more googling of pragmatism and reread passages from james i’d read before. as always, i got a hefty sense of vagueness (nothing unusual for philosophy writings, i have come to accept), but i get what he wants a person to see combining within an experience. same from your quoted piece about dewey’s experience. but if we are not to trust, or place value on, or perhaps reify any specific things we might discriminate/abstract in experience, what then?
i mean to say, it is reasonable to posit primacy of experience, and anything may be in an experience wirh something or even everything else. there will be subjects and/or objects, and maybe atoma and even the number 4, as well. but if these many things are not real, how is experience anything but a monism?