The distinction between particulars and universals

The philosophical ‘problem of universals’ is an ancient one, which continues to be debated in the modern-day. The problem concerns the ontological status of properties and relations. To solve the problem we need to address a fundamental question about universals: do they ‘exist’ as mind independent entities, and if so, what is their nature? In order to examine this problem, we need to be clear about the distinction between particulars and universals.

A ‘particular’ is an individual entity such as a specific blade of grass or a specific tree. Particulars are (in most cases) things we can point to, or that can be observed by at least one of the senses.  Particulars can exist over time, but they can only be in one place at a time, they are ‘non-repeatable’ entities.

It is necessarily true that all particulars must have at least some properties (or qualities), for example the colour of a blade of grass or the smell of a piece of bark. Particulars also stand in relation to other particulars, for example one tree is to the left of another tree, or one specific tree is taller or older than another specific tree. These properties (e.g. green-ness) and relations (e.g. to the left of) can be seen to be in more than one place at one time, they are repeatable. The abstract noun ‘tree’ can be used to describe many items and is also repeatable.

The philosophical question is how can properties exist in more than one place at one time? If lots of things are green do they all share in the same green-ness? What is green-ness? Does green-ness exist independently of the particular items that are green? These questions extend to relations and abstract nouns. If one tree is taller than another tree, what is the nature of tall-ness? When we talk about ‘trees’ in general (i.e. abstract as opposed to concrete noun) what are we referring to? We can also extend the investigation to cover non-physical abstract nouns such as ‘justice’ and ‘goodness’.

These questions - how individual properties can be shared, how one quality or relation can be the same as another and what it is that we refer to when we use abstract nouns, are referred to as the problems of qualitative identity and resemblance. The solution, at least for some, is to posit entities called ‘universals’.

Linguistically, proper names stand for particulars whereas adjectives, verbs and prepositions stand for universals. Thus ‘London’ (proper noun) is a particular, whereas the adjective ‘green’ in the phrase ‘the green apple’ and the verb ‘like’ in the phrase ‘I like apples’ and the preposition ‘on’ in the phrase ‘the apple on the table’ are all universals. We know what the proper name London stands for, but what do universals stand for?

Universals, if they exist as entities, may be thought to be mind-independent. For Plato, they are immaterial ‘Forms’ which are transcendent, they exist in an abstract realm and can only be known by reason. For others, such as Aristotle, they are in the world, they reside in individual items. For Armstrong, universals are features of the world that are instantiated by particulars.

There are therefore a number of competing theories which attempt to solve the problem of universals. By no means all philosophers believe that universals do in fact exist as distinguishable entities, for them the world is made up only of particulars.

Plato's cave

The analogy of the cave is used by Plato to point the way to towards a new discipline - the discipline of metaphysics.

By pointing out that a higher level of understanding is attainable, and by drawing a distinction with a life lived in ignorance of this higher level, Plato is making a case for allowing philosophers to pursue their interest in metaphysics, for the good of everyone.

The prisoners in the cave have a limited understanding of their world, this is not because they are not intelligent or perceptive enough to achieve that understanding, but because they are (literally) chained. The analogy with philosophy is that philosophers are chained by their failure to ask the right questions and look in the right direction. If they were to think about the right things (e.g. Forms) they would be freed from their metaphorical chains and thereby have access to a whole new level of understanding about the world.

Plato's Forms

Plato develops his theory of Forms in order to try and explain how things that we experience are the way they are.

Plato's theory has an extremely wide scope - it is aimed at addressing a number of fundamental metaphysical questions including:

• how do we explain resemblance?
• the problem of universals (the question of whether properties exist, and if so, what they are)?
• what do we mean by matter and substance?
• what is change?

Plato's answer to these questions is a concept he calls "Forms". Forms transcend experience, are permanent and never changing. It is "from" Forms that the material world is the way it is. Forms therefore help explain the material world. The process by which this takes place is very obscure, necessarily so since the Forms are not objects of experience.
The argument for the existence of Forms seems to be abductive, inference to the best explanation.
The key issue for me in debating Forms is to try and understand what Plato actually thinks they are, this is not an easy question!

statues of Daedalus

Was Plato right to say that knowledge is better than true belief?
The difference between knowledge and true belief is that knowledge is justified and is not obtained through "luck".
I have already considered whether knowledge can be said to have intrinsic value. The general consensus I think is that is is often difficult to identify what (if any) intrinsic value there is to knowledge. I will therefore try and answer the question by considering whether knowledge has, by its nature, greater extrinsic (i.e. instrumental) value compared with true belief.
Pritchard, along with Plato, seems to think that knowledge does have more instrumental value because it is less likely to change. I think that the ability to justify true belief must also add to the level of conviction of the believer. If we are more confident that our belief is justified, then we are more likely to "leverage" this knowledge and thereby exploit its instrumental value.
For example, David Hume points out that we we cannot (and should not) take a sceptical view of causation in relation to "everyday life", since we would be paralysed by uncertainty. By justifying our beliefs about cause and effect in terms of scientific theories which are supported by evidence, we can overcome this scepticism and thereby provide support to the many "rules of thumb" which we rely on. In science, the "natural laws" which we have developed provide a framework by which we can predict the future and  understand (even control) our environment. I see these natural laws as a type of justified true belief (i.e. knowledge) which compares to a world view which comprises merely true belief, where we would not be able to benefit from scientific advances to anything like the same degree.

Is an unexamined life worth living?

Today's assignment was to read Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy, 'Chapter XV: The value of philosophy' and the section from Plato's Apology where Socrates gives a speech defending himself against the charges of "corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel".

We were then asked to post on the question "Is an unexamined life worth living?".

My response was as follows:

To answer this question I believe it is helpful to explain what we mean by "worth". For a life to be worth living it has to either have a purpose and go some way to achieve that purpose, or have some value to someone / something.

On both these points I don't see why in principle an unexamined life could not have either purpose and/or value.

Before addressing the question of whether life has to be examined before it has worth, I would like to consider whether life has any purpose in itself.

Survival machines
Richard Dawkins argues that the universe has no purpose, at least not one that we know about. In his book 'The Selfish Gene' he argues that the fundamental purpose of life is really the survival of our genes. Our bodies are "survival machines" for our genes. He writes "survival machines began as passive receptacles for the genes, providing little more than walls to protect them from the chemical warfare of their rivals and the ravages of accidental molecular bombardment". In this sense, the purpose of life is to propagate our genes, an as such an unexamined life has as much worth as an examined life. What matters is survival.

Purpose and value is a human construct
As an atheist, I do not believe that life has any purpose other than the purpose we provide for it ourselves as rational, sentient, reflective and emotional creatures.

Dawkins goes on to explain how humans have evolved into social beings. Our brains have grown to give us the ability to think and reflect. We have gained the power to overcome our mechanistic history and organise ourselves into societies that ascribe purpose, worth and value to different things.
Socrates comes across as intellectually arrogant in The Apology. He argues that "daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living". Yet he gives us little support for this proposition, other than his eloquence.

As an example of an unexamined life that I believe is worth living I would argue that great musicians or great sportsmen who do not reflect on life, but do provide great pleasure for others, are leading lives that are worth living.

What is philosophy Part 2

Not satisfied with the OED definition, let's take a look in the bible for looking-things-up pre the Internet era, Encylopædia Britannica.

The Ninth Edition of Britannia is a wonderful publication. Published in 1885, it contains articles written by some of the leading academics of the day. I was lucky enough to find a set in good condition at Barter Books in Alnwick in Northumberland many years ago.

Britannica has a five page article on the subject of philosophy. Consulting the List of Contributors in the Index we can see that the article was written by Andrew Seth MA, Professor of Logic at St Andrews University*
Extracts from EB:

• The meaning and scope of the term philosophy has varied considerably according to the usage of different authors and different ages
• Helpful introduction is to look at the historical use of the term in the history of Greek thought
• The tradition which assigns the first use of the word to Pythagorus "has hardly any claim to be regarded as authentic" [I love the use of language in old editions of Britannica]
• First used as a Greek verb by Herodotus and Thucydides, implying the pursuit of knowledge
• A specific sense of the word firsts meets us in Plato, who defines the philosopher as one who apprehends the essence or reality of things in opposition to the man who dwells in appearances and the shows of sense
• Logic, ethics, and physics, psychology, theory of knowledge, and metaphysics are all fused together by Plato in a semi-religious synthesis
• It is not until we come to Aristotle - the enclopædist of the ancient world - that we find a demarcation of the different philosophic disciplines, corresponding, in the main, to that still current [in 1885 that is]
• The earliest philosopher, or physiologers, had occupied themselves chiefly with what we may call cosmology; the one question which covers everything for them is that of the underlying substance of the world around them
• In Socrates and Plato, the start is made from a consideration of man's moral and intellectual activity; but knowledge and action are confused with one another, as in the Socratic doctrine that virtue is knowledge
• To this correspond the Platonic confusion of logic and ethics and the attempt to substitute a theory of concepts for a metaphysic of reality
• Aristotle separated the different aspects of reality here confounded, and became the founder of logic, psychology, ethics and æsthetics as separate sciences - while he prefixed to all enquiries the investigation of the ultimate nature of existence
• By the gradual sifting out of the special sciences, philosophy came to embrace primarily the inquiries grouped as "metaphysics" or "first philosophy" i.e. ontology proper (or the science of being as such) with its branch sciences of rational psychology, cosmology and (rational or natural) theology
• Subsidiary to metaphysics stand the sciences of logic and ethics, to which may be added æsthetics
• These are the three normative** sciences, which do not, primarily, describe facts, but rather prescribe ends
• It is with the ultimate synthesis that philosophy concerns itself, the sciences may be said to furnish philosophy with its matter, but philosophical criticism reacts upon the matter thus furnished, and transforms it

More from Britannica tomorrow, in particular delving further into the meaning of æsthetics

*According to the St Andrews University's website:
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1856-1931) was born in Edinburgh. He was professor of philosophy at University College, Cardiff (1883-87), and then professor of Logic and Metaphysics at St. Andrews (1887-91) and at Edinburgh (1891-1919). He added Pringle-Pattison to his name in 1898 to meet the conditions of a bequest. He was an influential teacher, and in his writings he examined philosophy through critical interpretations of the great philosophers. He wrote Scottish Philosophy: a comparison of the Scottish and German answers to Hume (1885), Hegelianism and Personality (1887), Man's Place in the Cosmos (1897), The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy (1917), The Idea of Immortality (1922), and Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (1930).

**In philosophy, normative statements affirm how things should or ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, which actions are right or wrong. Normative is usually contrasted with positive (i.e. descriptive, explanatory, or constative) claims when describing types of theories, beliefs, or propositions. Positive statements are factual statements that attempt to describe reality. (from Wikipedia)

What is metaphysics?

I have just listened to Kit Fine in conversation with Nigel Warburton on the Philosophy Bites website on this very topic.

The key points are:

• the term was first used by an editor of Aristotle to describe a collection of his writing but it is not a term that Aristotle would have used. Metaphysics by Aristotle
• notoriously difficult to define
• meta means "beyond" or "after", but the term has a deeper meaning than "after physics"
• differs from scientific knowledge as metaphysical knowledge is "a priori", i.e. independent of observation / experience
• an example of a metaphysical issue in philosophy is the question of causation
• David Hume (1711-1776) held that we reason inductively by associating constantly conjoined events, and it is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation (this is now referred to as the Regularity Theory of Causation)
• An alternative view on causation is that there is some kind of necessary connection between one thing following another in the world
• The true nature of causation is not an empirical question, it cannot be proved scientifically, and hence it is a metaphysical issue
• Another example of a metaphysical question is the nature of a person
• What is a person - what is their very nature?
• Is a person a body, a soul, a combination of both or merely a collection of experiences?
• 'What is free will' and 'what is the nature of space and time' are other examples of questions that are metaphysical
• What is a number - are they the same as the signs for numbers (numerals), are they something abstract, existing in some form of Platonic realm independent of us, or are they a kind of mental construction akin to a fictional character made up by an author
• Metaphysics operates at a very general level and doesn't deal with specifics
• Metaphysics deals with the nature of things in themselves.
• There are similarities between mathematics and metaphysics in the use of a priori reasoning, but mathematics is a narrower subject
• In the 20th century, metaphysics came under attack, principally from the logical positivist movement
• For example AJ Ayer in Language Truth and Logic (1936) deployed the verification criterion of meaning to argue that metaphysical statements are meaningless
• It is only recently that metaphysics has recovered from these attacks and it is now flourishing