Then what need have we for essence? What do they do? — Banno

It seems that we like thinking about trying to discover just what it is we recognize when we recognize something. We don't have any need for the idea of essence, unless it might be in the form of an attachment to thinking about such things.

Good reply. The obvious response is that what it is we recognise when we recognise a tiger is, well, the tiger.

In that way essences are another example of the sort of garden path down which philosophers are so prone to wandering.

Ah, well, this would have been a much shorter thread if it had stuck to discussing Quine. Essence might be a neat way to keep philosophers away from considering more substantive issues.

We can all recognize a tiger when we see one, even though we cannot say what the essence of being a tiger is. — Janus

This was the direction I was interested in following with @Count Timothy von Icarus here, but I think he didn't want to pursue it:

So would it be fair to say that, in the example of the tiger, we must refer to the tiger itself? And a disagreement about the tiger's "essentiality" (or definition, if you prefer) would be investigated by saying, in effect, "Let's return to the tiger. Let's examine him more closely in the relevant aspects so we can learn which of us is right"? — J

This isn't meant to be some sort of trick question that implies there's no such thing as "being a tiger."
Of course there is. Nor am I suggesting that "how to recognize a tiger" is the same problem as "what constitutes a tiger." But we should think carefully about how we determine both these things, because when we move to abstracta, the problems increase by an order of magnitude.

Being of the linguistic persuasion, I again can't help but ask how "how to recognise a tiger" and "what constitutes a tiger" are anything more than questions about how we use the word "tiger".

Edit: that is, more broadly, how these two questions are asking for more than what we might do about tigers. If you can spot the tiger in the grass, and pick it out from the liger, what more do you need - what help is an essence? We would still know that once we escape the tiger's cage we ought not go back for our hat.

:100: :up:

If you can spot the tiger in the grass, and pick it out from the liger, what more do you need - what help is an essence? — Banno

This suggests one of the reasons why I think there's more to philosophy than "the linguistic turn." If you ask "What more do you need?" and I counter, "Need in order for what to happen?" or "In order to do what?" wouldn't you want to say that there is something called understanding a phenomenon/item/object which is different from doing anything with it or about it? (This is weirdly reminiscent of the force/content issue!) Can't we consider the tiger in his various aspects, learn more about what makes him unique, etc., without calling this "doing something with words"? And without invoking an "essence," which I agree is not helpful here.

And a prior question which @Count Timothy von Icarus raised earlier also is relevant. Is learning what a tiger is exactly the same as defining the word "tiger"? They are close cousins, surely, and Count T likes to use "define" for both processes (though I do not) but we can point to aspects that are dissimilar, I think. For example, to study a tiger requires a tiger; to study the word "tiger" does not.

...wouldn't you want to say that there is something called understanding a phenomenon/item/object which is different from doing anything with it or about it? — J

Isn't learning about tigers doing something? Dragging this thread again back to Quine, it's building a common web of belief.

I gather this is some blindness on my part. Help me see the duck when I can only see the rabbit.

Is learning what a tiger is exactly the same as defining the word "tiger"? — J

Well, how do they differ? And here it will be worth pointing out that "using the word" is a sort of shorthand for any sort of action - following on from the admonition not to look to meaning but to use, it's what we do that counts, not our understanding of various garden paths.

..to study a tiger requires a tiger; to study the word "tiger" does not. — J

I'm not sure about that. Can you be said to understand wth word "tiger" and yet not understand what a tiger is?

Ok, so why did Quine object to essences?

He rejected Aristotelian metaphysics. In general, he rejected the idea that objects have an intrinsic nature, independent of our web of belief. This follows pretty readily from naturalism, with our understanding of the world embedded in science and language. What we might think of as intrinsic to the stuff around us is dependent on the other beliefs we bring with us, and not to some presumed but cryptic intrinsic nature.

Further than that, for Quine notions of necessity do not concern the way things are in the world but how we talk about the world. For Quine necessity is not a feature of the world but an aspect of the language and beliefs we hold. Essentialism wrongly attributes linguistic or conceptual distinctions to the structure of reality itself. If you don't like the use of "language" here, use "conceptual" instead.

He rather famously pointed out that there are no objective boundaries between properties that are said to be necessary and those that are not. So what is essential to our ubiquitous tiger is not something about tigers, but the beliefs we bring to the table in dealing with tigers. The arguments will be familiar from his Two Dogmas paper.

Quine objected to aspects of modal logic, too, mainly on the grounds of the referential opacity of assigning necessity to individuals rather than proposition (de re necessity). Modal logic after Kripke avoids much of that critique.

What followed was that it didn't much matter what "gavagai" refers to, what the essence of "gavagai" might be, what it is to be a gavagai, so long as you got the stew. It's a pragmatic approach. One cannot be certain as to which name refers to which thing, yet it doesn't make much difference.

Isn't learning about tigers doing something? Dragging this thread again back to Quine, it's building a common web of belief. — Banno

Fair enough. But when we start talking about a web of belief, I think we are moving quite far away from a focus on use rather than meaning. Certainly Quine meant the "web" part metaphorically, but what about the "belief" part? Are beliefs about words, or about the propositions expressed by words?

..to study a tiger requires a tiger; to study the word "tiger" does not.
— J
I'm not sure about that. Can you be said to understand the word "tiger" and yet not understand what a tiger is? — Banno

That’s a somewhat different point. If understanding is binary, with the only two options being “understand” and “not understand” then I agree: If I understand the word “tiger,” I’d probably describe myself as also understanding what a tiger is. But if we allow shades of understanding, then I can lack several degrees of understanding, while still being quite clear about what a tiger is. The definition or meaning of “tiger,” for instance, might not mention that the creature has a musky odor, or include a description of his paws. I believe I better understand what a tiger is, the more I know about him. Such understanding goes well beyond “understanding the word.”

But my point was more simpleminded: If we need more info about the tiger – perhaps in pursuit of a new evolutionary theory about the big cats – we have to study the animal himself. We can’t examine the word, or the way the word is used. Whereas if we want to better understand how “tiger” is used, we can consult the linguistic community – indeed, we could do that if tigers were extinct.

(And having just glanced at your subsequent post -- bedtime here in Maryland -- I concur again that essences or intrinsic natures aren't needed to move beyond language. The troublesome passage in what you wrote is

Essentialism wrongly attributes linguistic or conceptual distinctions to the structure of reality itself. — Banno

Essentialism is misguided, but that doesn't mean there aren't conceptual distinctions and privileged metaphysical structure. They just aren't best understood as essences or whatever. But that's for another day...)

But when we start talking about a web of belief, I think we are moving quite far away from a focus on use rather than meaning. Certainly Quine meant the "web" part metaphorically, but what about the "belief" part? Are beliefs about words, or about the propositions expressed by words? — J

Back to this. Cool.

For Quine, a belief was a propositional attitude. So for Quine, yes, beliefs are attitudes towards propositions. And any propositions is (at least truth functional equivalent to) some statement.

For my part, I don't see how something might count as a belief if it could not be expressed as a proposition. If it cannot be expressed as "I believe that...", followed by some proposition, then it might be a sensation, emotion, impression or some such, but not a belief.

Whereas if we want to better understand how “tiger” is used, we can consult the linguistic community — J

But we might also ask a Ranger, in order to learn that "tiger" is used in discussing that paw, or that smell. We would thereby be broadening both our understanding of tigers, and of the use of "tiger".

Good night.

This was the direction I was interested in following with @Count Timothy von Icarus here, but I think he didn't want to pursue it:

I didn't see the question. If one wants to consider what makes a tiger a tiger, an organic whole, then one looks at tigers, of course, but also what makes all organic wholes organic wholes. One cannot look at a tiger in isolation. Why is a tiger a proper whole but not a volume of space encompassing half a tiger and a bush? Or are they equally appropriate, and calling a tiger a whole versus half a tiger, some dirt, air, and a bush a single whole arbitrary distinctions?

Obviously, I'd suggest a tiger is a whole, and any random grouping of continuous (or discontinuous) space is not likely to be a proper organic whole.

So, one looks at the difference between men, with their rational, unifying intentional aims, beasts, with their unifying goal direct behavior, plants, with their unifying goal directed behavior, etc. And one compares this with other self-organizing systems, the sorts of systems that have "life cycles" and are in some sense self-sustaining, e.g. stars, galaxies, storms (storms can be incredibly long lived on other planets), etc. And then one looks at plausible "natural kinds," such as atoms, molecules, etc., versus what appear to be mere heaps or entirely arbitrary spatio-temporal ensembles. What makes some things particular sorts of things? Are some things more properly things than others?

Aristotelianism has remained popular throughout the centuries, but it's particularly popular in the philosophy of (or philosophy inspired by) self-organizing systems, complexity studies, etc., because it seems to offer an elucidating and promising explanation of why anything is any thing at all.

The idea of essences primarily plays a role in metaphysics and philosophy of nature. It can and does play a role in much philosophy of perception and through that, philosophy of language. It will not make sense if one insists on understanding it through the lens of philosophy of language as first philosophy, where the immediate question is "how does it work in a logical system, or inserted into a standing theory of language with alien presuppositions."

Earlier you said "I don't think anyone denies the existence of tigers or rabbits." I don't think that is true. People say they "exist" in ways that are equivocal, while maintaining that they do not exist in the way that I would imagine most people suppose they do, as individual, discrete biological organisms, organic wholes, that exist outside the context of human perception, language, or culture, and which existed in this same way prior to man, and may go on existing in this same way even if man goes extinct. Likewise, individual men are individual men, regardless of what any culture or language communities' norms might indicate. And indeed these facts—that there are individual men and tigers, and that there are distinct biological species such as man and daffodil—help to explain why human language and culture develops the way they do.

That is: "we have a word for tigers because there are tigers," as opposed to "there are tigers because we have a word for tigers." I am aware that people do reverse this. I disagree.

I was just discussing this with Joshs. Did the coastline of North America exist before it was mapped? Is there a coastline, a place where the ocean meets the land, independent of the concepts and experiences of men? His answer is, not so much. No doubt we both claim the coastline "exists," but we clearly don't mean this in the same way. I would say a coastline exists in a stronger sense, regardless of any human language community existing, although a coastline is still very much a "heap." It is not a being in the way a man, or even a plant is. It has no principle of unity.

What I mean by "principle of unity" is probably ambiguous, because the particular idea of "principles" in Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Thomism, and much contemporary philosophy taking inspiration from these, is rather nuanced and complex. Suffice to say, I do not think rabbits or men are arbitrary heaps in the way a rock might be said to be. They are unified by their ends. And man can, of course, be more or less psychologically unified.

So can explain what he means by a tiger being largely what "we decide to count as a tiger." This to me suggests that what a tiger is gets determined by us. Is the idea that the language community is prior to the tiger or the cockroach, that these are not organic wholes until we decide to speak of them as such?

Some people do answer in the affirmative here. I find this problematic for many reasons, not least because, from any sort of broadly naturalistic perspective, it seems that the cockroach existed first and that the most obvious causal explanation for why different cultures all recognize roaches as both a distinct species, and recognize distinct individual roaches, is because that's what they are.

To Banno's point:

This follows pretty readily from naturalism, with our understanding of the world embedded in science and language

This strikes me as an odd framing of "naturalism," as if naturalism is defined by a commitment to the linguistic turn. Darwin, for his part, did not think he was developing a theory for how linguistic entities emerge. When I was studying biology, ambiguities in the classification system came up, or in definitions of life itself, but nowhere in my classes, in journals I read, or popular science texts did the idea come up that biology was primarily about a world "embedded" or "as embedded" in human scientific practice and language, or that the objects of biological study were primarily linguistic, or defined in terms of linguistic norms. Language, theories, models, and even classifications were means of understanding natural phenomena, but in no way constitutive of them (except accidentally). For example, a biologist might argue that there are no species, some do, but outside more philosophical spaces, this is generally justified on the grounds that our classifications are failing to match up to real distinctions that are independent of them, with the assumption being that good classifications capture important differences that are prior to the classification.

I am aware of contrary philosophies. I am aware of some scientists who embrace them. I am not sure they can be said to be paradigmatic examples of "naturalism" because they are hardly very popular, but "naturalism" is incredibly popular as a self-description.

Rather, in my experience, that something was living was assumed to be a physical reality, ambiguous perhaps, but not defined in terms of our language. Rather, our scientific language had to be perfected to capture the pre-existing fact of living things, species, etc.

Last example of equivocation: "to exist is just existential quantification." Obviously extremely different. If one is already committed to this, or something like it, it is obviously going to affect how one goes about trying to figure out perception and language.

Things have essences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think saying “have” creates the issue for people who try to deny essence. I agree things have essences, but at this rarefied level of universality, it may be better to try to see the unity, the identity, that is the essence of the same unified things thereby identified. The “what it is to be” is a “what” whether it has anything else or not, so to speak; we don’t need to distinguish “it” from what it “has” to understand essence; we just need to break it all apart to speak about it, so “has” becomes efficient for speaking, but not to those who don’t admit of identity.

An essence of some item is the set of properties that are necessary and sufficient for it to be that item.

A necessary property of some item is one that is correctly attributed to that item in all possible worlds.

It is a trivial exercise to posit a possible world in which any particular property associated with an item is absent from that item.

Therefore the notion of essence is problematic. — Banno

Your quote above points to the fact that it is really hard to drill down to the essence of anything. We divide unified things into many parts in order to simply speak about one, distinct thing as it essentially is. What a mess. I agree with that. But so be it. We need unity (essence of identity) to speak at all. Your quote doesn’t mean there is no, or can be no, essence. In fact, because it refers to “item” and “properties” (to which I can ask if there is a difference between this property and that property, requiring reference again to essence as much as “this” from “that”), it relies on essences as much as it relies on words or other things.

There is no possible world that can be distinguished from any other possible world without each such world referring to itself as distinct and referring to all other worlds as not itself.

Distinction reveals something of the essence of two things (or more) distinguished; without distinctions, without difference, there is no way to speak about anything. Without essence, without distinction, there is nothing to say nor means of thinking of a reply (or means to reply or ply, at all).

There is nothing to disagree with nor two items to bring into agreement, where there is no essence to speak of.

Could there be a possible world, much like ours, but the only difference is that in that world, there are no other possible worlds possible? Seems like this has to be possible if we allow for possible worlds to be spoken of. Or maybe such a world is not possible..?

Well, that's a fair point, but I am not totally sure what other language to use. Aside from "have," possession and participation are the two most common terms, but I'd agree that one has to still flesh these out.

There is nothing to disagree with nor two items to bring into agreement, where there is no essence to speak of.

Right, if we didn't use universals and only used completely unique terms for unique things, there would be no way to ever be in error about predication.

As Chesterton puts it:

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."

However, there is the rebuttal: "why can't predication and stipulation be arbitrary so long as we agree?"

I guess my thoughts are: "if it was arbitrary, we wouldn't be able to agree."

So would it be fair to say that, in the example of the tiger, we must refer to the tiger itself? And a disagreement about the tiger's "essentiality" (or definition, if you prefer) would be investigated by saying, in effect, "Let's return to the tiger. Let's examine him more closely in the relevant aspects so we can learn which of us is right"? — J

I didn't see the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's understandable. This thread is like Grand Central Station! (US reference to a very populated place with people coming and going.)

If one wants to consider what makes a tiger a tiger, an organic whole, then one looks at tigers, of course, but also what makes all organic wholes organic wholes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This may be so, but my question was meant to focus us on a simple example of how we go about deciding things about the objective world around us. Sure, we need a number of concepts in play to even pose the question, "What is a tiger?" -- I think that's your point? But armed with those concepts, and discovering a disagreement, the two scientists would naturally look at the tiger to resolve the question.

(A word about your suggested concept of "organic whole": We don't generally have scientific disputes about this, at least not at the level of mammals. If we disagree about what a tiger is, we're going to be looking at issues in evolutionary and molecular biology, I would assume.)

Anyway, it sounds like you agree with this, along with the caveat about requiring other concepts in our tiger-study. We're both saying that "consulting the tiger" is a necessary --"one looks at tigers, of course" -- (if not sufficient) condition for resolving a disagreement about tigers.

Now in order to do this, we don't, strictly speaking, need the word "tiger" at all. But even in the unlikely possible world in which nouns aren't used, we'd still need an indexical of some sort. We'd have to be able to point at what we, in our world, call a tiger, and say "That!" So let's ignore that unlikely world and stipulate that we need the word "tiger" (in English, obviously) to label the being under investigation.

So my next question is, Can you imagine a situation in which resolving the disagreement between the two scientists would result in changing the meaning of the word "tiger"?

For purposes of comparison: Is Pluto still a planet?

I guess my thoughts are: "if it was arbitrary, we wouldn't be able to agree." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Chess

The rules of chess are stipulated, not arbitrary. They did not pop out of the aether uncaused. How much fun is it going to be to play a game with totally arbitrary rules and victory conditions (or perhaps no victory conditions, you just move pieces around according to some random ruleset until you get bored or expire)?

Anyhow, chess comes after language. The question is how to make a language with nothing to refer to, not "if we start with a language already in hand can we make arbitrary stipulations?"

For my part, I don't see how something might count as a belief if it could not be expressed as a proposition. If it cannot be expressed as "I believe that...", followed by some proposition, then it might be a sensation, emotion, impression or some such, but not a belief. — Banno

Yes. But that proposition, as we know, can stand in a certain relation to the world, to what is the case. At some point the web has got to include statements -- beliefs -- about how propositions connect with that world. This is where I'm suggesting that there's more to the story than inter-linguistic connections.

But we might also ask a Ranger, in order to learn that "tiger" is used in discussing that paw, or that smell. We would thereby be broadening both our understanding of tigers, and of the use of "tiger". — Banno

There's no denying that the two learnings -- of tigers, and of "tiger" -- can go hand in hand. I'm just holding out for there being a difference. When I say, "We have to study the animal himself," I mean that smell-knowledge or paw-knowledge can't be derived from linguistic knowledge. Once we acquire these tiger-necessary bits of knowledge, we can of course go on to express them in words, usually,

So my next question is, Can you imagine a situation in which resolving the disagreement between the two scientists would result in changing the meaning of the word "tiger"?

Did our ancestors centuries ago experience and refer to tigers? Did they refer to and experience water and wetness? I'd say so.

But surely they didn't think of tigers as "mammals with 38 chromosomes" or "far-from equilibrium, self-organizing thermodynamic systems." Nor did our ancestors think of water as H2O or have a similar understanding of wetness, although surely they got wet and referred to getting wet.

Did tigers themselves change when we discovered that they had 38 chromosomes? It seems to me that to assume they did is to have already assumed that either all properties are accidents or none are, and hence there can be no essences, no things, etc. (or an ever expanding sea of them). This would also imply that one can have a proper Aryan physics, Jewish physics, capitalist genetics, socialist genetics, etc., since the relation of knower to known makes a thing what it is.

For purposes of comparison: Is Pluto still a planet?

Is the idea that we need some sort of metaphysical super glue between discrete signs and things, so if Pluto can stop being considered a planet then planets don't exist independently of language?

Again, I think trying to cram the idea into the frame of philosophy of language as first philosophy is decidedly unhelpful, because it leads to continually conflating and collapsing the sign vehicle by which something is known, the interpretant (i.e. the knowing), and the referent (what is known). Planets are more or less heaps, but they are such large heaps that they exhibit some form of self-organization due to their sheer size and the influence of gravity. For instance, they reform when broken apart due to collisions.

The insight that there could be edge cases on what counts as planet as per some rigid classification, or that it can be hard to determine where space begins and planet's atmosphere ends, is not, IMO, indictive of there being no planets outside of some sign convention. This is even more obvious if one switches from planets to men. If people began to think that Leonardo da Vinci really was really an extra terrestrial would he thereby become one? Would there be no fact of the matter external to social practice?

Being a whole isn't a binary either, so ambiguity shouldn't be surprising. A rock is a heap. You can break it and have two rocks (whereas if you do this to a cat you will have a corpse). But it also isn't totally without unity.

You've said many interesting things here, but would it be OK to utilize them to address the questions directly? I'm still not clear how you would answer either one. They're not trick questions, there's no "gotcha." I'm trying to explore how our ordinary practices with things in the world, and our words about them, might get transferred over into more philosophical talk. Just taking it step by step.

Maybe it will help if I offer my own answers. No, I can't imagine a case where further knowledge about what a tiger is -- even knowledge about its essence, if any -- would change what we mean when we use the word "tiger." And no, Pluto is no longer a planet, because the scientific community has changed the reference of that term, and provided good reasons for doing so. We should ask, What is the difference between the tiger case and the Pluto case?

The rules of chess are stipulated, not arbitrary. They did not pop out of the aether uncaused. How much fun is it going to be to play a game with totally arbitrary rules and victory conditions (or perhaps no victory conditions, you just move pieces around according to some random ruleset until you get bored or expire)?

Anyhow, chess comes after language. The question is how to make a language with nothing to refer to, not "if we start with a language already in hand can we make arbitrary stipulations?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea is that we don't passively engage our world like blank slates upon which the world faithfully writes. It's more that we deal with one another in activities which feature linguistic rules we've agreed upon, much like we've agreed upon the rules of chess.

In other words, language doesn't come from isolated individuals treating the world out on the range like Teddy Roosevelt. Language arises from interaction with one another, much like a community of birds squawking at one another.

The idea is that we don't passively engage our world like blank slates upon which the world faithfully writes. It's more that we deal with one another in activities which feature linguistic rules we've agreed upon, much like we've agreed upon the rules of chess

But "either the world faithfully writes on us a blank slates or tigers and ants did not exist as discrete organic wholes until a language community decided to count them as such," is not a true dichotomy.

In other words, language doesn't come from isolated individuals treating the world out on the range like Teddy Roosevelt. Language arises from interaction with one another, much like a community of birds squawking at one another.

Agreed. I don't think this implies that there is no fact about any distinct things existing in the world prior to the act of some language community. For one, this would entail that man, individual men, and language communities themselves did not exist until until after some language community came to count them as such.

Anyhow, I would just appeal to an abductive explanation. Disparate isolated cultures recognize individual animals and different species in similar ways, and toddlers easily pick up the idea of animals as wholes, because they exist in some sense as wholes. If you make up some arbitrary collection of things and try to force a child to recall it, they're going to have trouble. Half a tiger, plus some air and dirt, is not a thing in the way a whole tiger is. This is why phenomenal awareness is full of things, not indistinct sense data. When we walk around we experience trees and ants.

Even the metaphysical skeptic should be able to allow the last point. But then language is not unrelated to how things are phenomenologically present to us. An analysis that forces us to chop of the phenomenological (e.g. removing intended reference, our experiencing discrete things, etc.) is only "empiricism" in an extremely restrictive sense.

If what things are is primarily a question of language than agnosia would be a sort of aphasia, and the uncannyness of AI imagery that lacks any things should simply be an inability to put words to combinations of sense data.

We can all recognize a tiger when we see one, even though we cannot say what the essence of being a tiger is. — Janus

Suppose I tell you that you have a heart inside you that allows you to move and to live. You respond, "Watch. I will move my arm. See? We can all move, even without hearts." Or perhaps I would say that you need firing neurons to think and you say, "We can all think. What need is there for firing neurons?"

In general, if you don't know what something is then you should not criticize it. And if you want to criticize something, then you should be able to say what it is. But folks like Banno are going to criticize things like essence with complete ignorance of what it is, and a refusal to say what they are criticizing. It is prejudice on stilts.

Essence is part of an account of knowledge and cognition. No one who understands what an essence is would merely assert that we can recognize a tiger without knowing something of its essence. Essence = quiddity = "whatness." If you know what a tiger is, then you know its essence (or something of its essence - recall the strawman of claiming that essences are known perfectly and a priori).

Another good principle for those who don't want to be dumb is to ask what question a philosophical concept is answering. Instead of saying, "It's fashionable to say essences are dumb, so I'm going to say essences are dumb, even though I don't know what essences are," one should say, "Hey, the concept of essence was developed continually by hundreds of different philosophers for 2,000 years. Maybe I should give it a fair shake. Maybe I should try to figure out what it is and what questions it was attempting to answer, and whether I have better answers to those questions." Someone like Banno characteristically says, "The solution is stupid; I refuse to say what I mean by the solution; and I refuse to answer the question; we just stipulate; it's just what we do." This is prejudice, not philosophy.

Rather than essences, a better entry point into these issues is universals, and The Medieval Problem of Universals is one of the better SEP articles out there. It is historical and pedagogical rather than simply taxonomical.

. I don't think this implies that there is no fact about any distinct things existing in the world prior to the act of some language community. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't either. I don't think anyone thinks that.

I don't think anyone thinks that.

It's not hard to find this idea on this very forum. Sometimes it isn't the language community, sometimes things don't exist prior to the mind judging them as such. Or sometimes it's just skepticism as to whether things like animals exist outside our judgements.

People say all sorts of weird things. Which philosopher thinks that affirming language games means that nothing existed before humans?

Which philosopher thinks that affirming language games means that nothing existed before humans? — frank

A crazy one. A deluded one. An uneducated one.

:up:

Which philosopher thinks that affirming language games means that nothing existed before humans?

Few I'd imagine. But that also is not what we were discussing, which is not "nothing existed prior to humans" but "no discrete, proper wholes exist outside of either human conventions or the mind" These are very distinct theses, and the latter are much more popular than the former.

And you can subdivide these into positive and skeptical theses. So, mereological nihilism is not a super uncommon position. This is the position that, at the metaphysical or physical level, there are no proper wholes, no substances/things. Certainly "something exists" prior to humans, but it isn't inclusive of organic wholes that one can be right or wrong about delimiting.

Second, there is the skeptical theses. "Maybe there are organic wholes out there in the noumena, but since the mind and/or language shapes everything we experience, we cannot be sure."

And there are many forms of mereological nihilism that don't run through language at all. E.g. "there are only fundamental particles, which might be arranged cat-wise or tree-wise, but those aren't discrete things, they are heaps," or "there are only universal fields and activity in them." This is in line with the idea that all sciences are reducible to physics.

And you can subdivide these into positive and skeptical theses. So, mereological nihilism is not a super uncommon position. This is the position that, at the metaphysical or physical level, there are no proper wholes, no substances/things. Certainly "something exists" prior to humans, but it isn't inclusive of organic wholes that one can be right or wrong about delimiting — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, but there are two other options, for answering van Inwagen's Special Composition Question: mereological particularism, and mereological universalism.

The former says that composition occurs sometimes, and sometimes it does not.

The latter says that composition always occurs. This view is far crazier than mereological nihilism, because it leads straight to the related metaphysical view on ordinary objects, which says that in addition to ordinary objects, there are extra-ordinary objects, such as a trog (a mereological fusion of a tree and a dog), an incar (a car that ceases to exist when it leaves a garage), a curltpillar (a caterpillar-like object that begins to exist when an ordinary caterpillar rolls up into a ball), etc. It gets really crazy. (EDIT: the view in question is called "metaphysical permissivism". It's not identical to mereological universalism, but the two are closely related, and it's an open question whether or not universalism in the mereological sense entails permissivism in the metaphysical sense).

In case anyone is interested, you can find more information about these ideas in the SEP entry on Ordinary Objects.

Yes, or the idea that whenever there is one cat on a mat there are actually trillions of cats on a mat (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/). To me, many of these conclusions seem like the conclusions of a reductio argument.



The section in the link provided on eliminativism and permissivism covers some of the theories I am talking about. One way to solve these issues is to say that apparent proper wholes are just the result of either the mind or language.