Características de la adolescencia

The thesis of ontological realism does not say anything about the nature of mind-independent reality—except its existence. It is thus compatible with various theories which characterize the elements of reality as objects, events, processes, fields, or systems.

In particular, OR does not entail the world picture, the so-called classical realism, usually associated with classical Newtonian mechanics: the world consists of mass points, and their systems, which have a sharply defined location, mass, and momentum, and obey deterministic laws of motion. Indeed, a very different picture of the micro-world is given by (the received interpretation of) quantum mechanics, which implies that the state of atomic systems is causally dependent on their interactions with other such systems or with macroscopic measuring devices. But the possibility that we may intentionally make causal interventions into the micro-world and in a sense ‘create’ its properties does not imply the ontological mind-dependency of nature (cf. Section 5.4).

The hot issue of traditional metaphysics was the debate between ‘nominalists’ and

‘realists’.⁶

end p.28 Both of them are (or usually are) ontological

realists in our sense. According to nominalism, the world consists of particulars and nothing but particulars; general terms like ‘brown’ and ‘horse’ are only linguistic vehicles for classifying individuals. A Platonist or transcendent realist claims that there are

eternally and independently existing universals, like brownness and horseness. A moderate (Aristotelian) realist takes universals to be immanent, always combined with individuals as their ‘forms’. David Armstrong (1978) defends a type of immanent

universalism: universals are peculiar kinds of physical entities (that is, belong to World 1) which can exist or be instantiated in many places at the same time.

A ‘predicate nominalist’ explains properties in terms of predication: a dog Skip is brown, because we apply the predicate ‘brown’ to it. This idea has been a source of anti-realist views in contemporary philosophy: it seems to imply that, independently of human languages, the world consists merely of ‘bare’ or propertyless particulars. The language-independent world is an ‘amorphic mass of individuals’, without any structure at all, before human beings introduce concepts for describing it (cf. Ch. 7). Such versions of nominalism fail to explain why a predicate is correctly applicable to some objects and not to others.⁷

The alternatives to nominalism have not appeared to be very plausible, either, if they require the assumption of transcendent universals. The Aristotelian view of immanent universals has gained popularity through Armstrong's work, and some philosophers believe it to be the best foundation of scientific realism (see e.g. Tooley 1987). However, some realists feel that this theory requires strange entities that are multiply and

undividedly located: the same universal (e.g. brownness) is wholly present in two distinct

brown particulars. A further difficulty is the problem of instantiation: if uninstantiated universals are accepted (see Tooley 1987), they seem to be Platonic entities; but if every universal must have instances in the actual world (see Armstrong 1978), then it is

difficult to explain the existence of laws of nature which typically involve uninstantiated properties and counterfactual conditionals.

For an emergent materialist, the following account of physical objects and properties seems promising. I cannot pretend that the following sketch would solve all the open problems here, but I believe it is in the right direction.

Let us first note that, instead of bare particulars, physical objects have end p.29

been understood as pieces of material substance with attributes (substance theory) or as sets of properties (bundle theory). If properties are universals, the latter theory cannot explain the difference between ‘numerically identical’ individuals.⁸ Let us, therefore, consider the possibility that physical objects are bundles of tropes in the sense of D. C.

Williams (1953). Tropes are ‘property-individuals’, qualities located in space and time, such as the-brownness-of-Skip and the-softness-of-the-fur-of-Skip.⁹ Tropes as quality-instances have natural relations of similarity.¹⁰

Like all other ontological systems, the trope theory has its difficulties, which are now being actively investigated. Armstrong has recently become more favourable to tropes than before: he says that the trope theory (which he regards as ‘moderate nominalism’) is

‘an important and quite plausible rival’ to his earlier moderate realism, and considers it in a form (attributed to John Locke) which takes tropes to be attribute-individuals tied with pieces of independently existing material substance (see Armstrong 1989).

The dog Skip is a bundle (or the mereological sum) of jointly occurring tropes; its similarity with other brown things is explained by the objective likeness of their brownish tropes. No special substance is needed, nor a universal, independently existing, and multiply located brownness. While the physical tropes exist in the mind-independent World 1, the property of being brown can be understood as the class of similar tropes (cf. Williams 1953). As a class is most naturally conceived as a human-made construction, created by abstraction from similar tropes, properties belong to World 3. Here it is not a problem that some of such properties may be uninstantiated in the actual world. This view might be called tropic realism.

What has been said about properties applies more generally to relations between objects.

Relations have been understood as transcendent or immanent universals, or

nominalistically in terms of n-place predicates (n>1). Campbell (1990) favours the theory that relations do not really exist. In my view, a tropic realist should understand genuine relations between objects primarily as n-ary property-instances (e.g. the love-between-John-and-Mary). The general relation of loving is then formed by abstraction from such tropes.

Besides intrinsic properties, which characterize what or how a particular object is in itself (e.g. ‘white’, ‘two-legged’), objects have also relational properties, which involve

relations to some further objects. For example, while ‘x is a father of y’ expresses a two-place relation,

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is a relational property of x.

Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities is often understood in terms of the intrinsic–relational division, but this is somewhat misleading. The primary

qualities (such as solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest, and number) presuppose spatial, temporal, and causal relations.¹¹ Moreover, quantitative properties (like ‘has the length of 5.2 metres’) presuppose scales of measurement that are constructed from comparisons between objects.¹²

Objects with their relations constitute complex objects or systems. The most general theory of wholes, consisting of any kind of parts with any kind of relations, is mereology.

Secondary qualities (such as colour, sound, smell, and taste) can be understood in different ways: as experiences in animal and human minds, as dispositions of physical objects to produce certain types of experience in the mind of a perceiver, but also as physical dispositions to generate or reflect certain physical influences (e.g. an object is red if it is able to reflect light rays of wavelength between 647 and 700 nm). In the last alternative, they are ontologically mind-independent attributes of physical objects.

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Changes in the state of a system (e.g. sunrise, opening of a window) are generic events or event types. The occurrence of a generic event at a moment of time, or more generally, in a spatio-temporal location or zone, is a singular event. Causally continuous sequences of events constitute processes. Bertrand Russell has argued that physical objects can be constructed from events that are their successive temporal slices (e.g. ‘Socrates-at-time-t’). More generally, process ontologies (in contrast to thing ontologies) take the dynamic concepts of event and process to be more basic than the concept of object.

More specific conceptions require that the elements and parts of a complex object are spatio-temporally and causally connected.

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Many philosophers define events simply as instantiations of properties—without end p.31

without linking this concept to change. According to Kim (1973), an event is an exemplification at a time of a property by a substance or a relation by substances.

Chisholm (1970) takes such properties within events to be universals, but Bennett (1988), attributing this view to Leibniz, holds that events can be understood as tropes, i.e.

property-instances in a spatio-temporal zone. In this case, it also possible to think that causality is primarily a relation between tropes. Hence, tropic realism can be formulated as a version of dynamic ontology.

Tropic realism does not imply that there is a privileged conceptual framework (nature's own language as it were) for categorizing and describing reality. The general descriptive terms of our language refer to classes of tropes (e.g. ‘red’) or classes of physical object (e.g. ‘cat’), i.e. to properties and substances, and these classes can be formed by our conceptual activity in various ways. The world does not divide itself uniquely into natural kinds (cf. Quine 1969), but nevertheless the ‘redness’ and ‘cathood’ of some physical objects is based upon their objectively existing features. Our way of speaking about tropes is derivative from the talk about their classes: a name for a trope is obtained by adding indexical expressions to a property term.

This means also that tropic realism does not entail essentialism, which claims that particular objects possess some of their properties ‘essentially’ or ‘necessarily’, some

only ‘accidentally’. The identity of an object or event is always relative to a description.

It is up to us to agree on those intrinsic and relational properties that guarantee the preservation of the ‘identity’ of a certain kind of entity. Some changes transform an object into another kind, while ‘mere Cambridge changes’ preserve its identity.¹⁵ While idealism and dualism regard the human mind as an independent substance or process-like stream of mental events, reductive materialism identifies the mind with the brain as a physical system. Emergent materialists think that mentality or consciousness is an emergent characteristic of the complex system of the human brain with its cultural and social environment. In contrast to eliminative materialists, all these views admit that, in some sense or another, World 2—i.e. the human mind and its contents (such as thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, hallucinations, volitions, pains, feelings, and emotions)—is real (see Section 2.3).

Here it is important to recall Peirce's ‘medieval’ definition of reality that he attributed to Duns Scotus: what is real is ‘independent of the vagaries

end p.32

of me and you’, i.e. its characters are ‘independent of what anybody may think them to be’ (CP 5.311, 5.405). By this criterion, my seeing a pink elephant in my room is a real mental fact about me, but the elephant, as the object or content of this hallucination, is not a part of reality.

According to tropic realism, physical properties and events as tropes are

mind-independent. However, ontological realism need not deny that physical objects may also have non-physical, mind-involving properties which ontologically presuppose relations to consciousness or to cultural and social institutions.¹⁶

A physical object with its physical and non-physical properties is a cultural entity in World 3. Such an entity has, as it were, a material kernel in World 1, but enriched with its relations to World 2 and 3 entities it becomes a cultural object with some mind-involving relational properties.

For example, a tree is sacred if and only if there are people who worship it; a landscape is pleasant if and only if it pleases some people; a piece of gold has economic value if and only if it can be used as an object or measure of commercial exchange. Similarly, material artefacts (tables, tools, houses, works of art) have both physical properties (weight, geometric form, colour) and non-physical relational properties (designer and manufacturer, intended function, commercial value).

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Besides material artefacts, World 3 also contains abstract constructions, such as novels, symphonies, numbers, and propositions. Such objects do not have physical properties at all, but they can be documented in World 1 (a symphony by its score, sound waves on air, or compact disc; a proposition expressed by a sentence) and manifested in World 2 (the thoughts and ideas of a composer; a mental construction of a mathematician). Without

In spite of their ‘mixed’ character, we can conceptually distinguish the World 1 and World 3 parts of cultural entities.

end p.33

such documentation and manifestation an abstract entity cannot survive in World 3.¹⁸

When an object has a property, or several objects bear relations to each other, we speak of states of affairs or facts. Traditionally, singular facts (e.g. a particular piece of chalk is white at a moment of time) are distinguished from general facts (e.g. snow is white).

General facts can be understood as classes of singular facts. Singular facts may be complex in the sense that they involve many objects or properties. Simple singular states of affairs have the structure ⟨a, P, t⟨, ⟨a, b, R, t⟨, etc., where a and b are particular objects or events, P is a property, R is a dyadic relation, and t is a moment of time.¹⁹

Facts may be positive (‘John loves Mary’) or negative (‘Mary does not love John’). A complex fact involving a group of people A and a relation R may tell for each pair ⟨a, b⟨

Depending on the ontological theory, P and R may be understood as universals (Russell, Chisholm, Armstrong) or tropes (Stout).

A× A whether R holds between a and b or not. Such a complex fact corresponds to relational systems or structures in the sense of Tarski's model theory (see Section 3.4).

The totality of all facts is the actual world (comprising Worlds 1, 2, and 3). In language we can also describe alternatives to the facts about the actual world. Such alternative states of affairs, when they are compossible, constitute possible worlds.

The so-called ‘modal realists’ claim that possible worlds are as real as the actual world (Lewis 1986). In my view, it is rational to accept ‘Ersatz realism’ (Stalnaker 1984) which takes possible worlds to exist only in the form of linguistic descriptions (cf. Hintikka 1975). In this sense, possible worlds are ontologically mind-involving.

It does not follow that an ontological realist needs to be an actualist who identifies the real with the actual. For example, fire has the capability of burning human skin, even if it is not actually burning anyone's skin anywhere now; a social custom of raising one's hat is preserved even at those moments of time when no one has the opportunity to follow it;

the atoms of transuranic substances belong to reality, even if they may fail to be actualized at a given moment. Following Aristotle, the domain of reality can thus be taken to consist of actual and potential things and properties: against Hume, dispositions, causal powers, objective physical probabilities or propensities, and laws endowed with nomic necessity could

end p.34

be included among real potencies.²⁰

The real potencies or possibilities should be distinguished from conceptual possibilities.

Some ‘realist’ (read: Platonist) philosophers have wished to populate reality with anything that can be conceived or imagined in a logically consistent way. This

‘Meinongian jungle’ contains all the strange creatures of human imagination.

This seems also to be the content of what Peirce called ‘scholastic realism’: his category of ‘thirdness’ expresses the idea of ‘real generals’

in the world. Unlike Aristotelian universals, Peirce's ‘generals’ are relational, and their existence means that the world is governed by lawful regularities.

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To conclude this section, we should say something about the relation of the ontological views to the project of scientific realism. If scientific realists are committed to the reasonable ontology should distinguish the real things from the fictional figments of our A imagination: for example, Donald Duck is a fictional entity, while reality contains

pictures of Donald Duck (in World 1), love for Donald Duck (in World 2), and the cult of Disneyland (in World 3).

scientific world view (cf. Section 1.2), perhaps they should apply the principle of ontological parsimony (the so-called Occam's razor), restrict their attention only to scientifically accepted or acceptable statements, and exclude metaphysics from their system? If one yields to the horror of metaphysics (with the logical positivists and Dummett), this recommendation seems to be warranted. But that would presuppose a sharp semantic dichotomy between meaningful science and meaningless metaphysics (see Section 1.2). In my view, it is more plausible to take science and metaphysics to be in mutual interaction with each other without a fixed borderline.

The scientia mensura doctrine argues that science should be allowed to decide

ontological questions (see Sellars 1963; Tuomela 1985). I agree that science is the best source for beliefs about reality. This suggests the viability of science-based metaphysics, however. For example, current developments in science (especially in quantum

mechanics) point to the direction that the universe is a dynamically developing causal system which is at least partly governed by probabilistic laws. This gives support to an anti-reductionist evolutionary and indeterminist process ontology, even though as a statement about the entire world this is a metaphysical claim. Of course, this tentative generalization from current science is fallible and may be mistaken. Further, we have no a priori guarantee that science will decide, even in the ideal ‘Peircean’ limit (cf. Section 4.6), such issues as the existence of God, determinism vs. indeterminism, or universals vs. tropes.

Conversely, ontological concepts and theses are relevant to the scientific realist in several ways. First, scientific research programmes cannot help using general ontological terms like ‘object’ and ‘fact’. Such terms are needed in the interpretation of the content of our best theories in science, and (pace Fine 1984) some philosophical content has to be given to them. Secondly, ontological terms are needed in order to formulate the philosophical programme of scientific realism, and attempts to defend or to denounce this programme usually appeal to specific (often tacit) ontological assumptions. For example, even though one cannot claim that tropic realism could be justified by scientific evidence, or that scientific realism necessarily presupposes this ontological doctrine, I find it occasionally useful to articulate and to defend scientific realism by referring to it. The opponents of

‘metaphysical realism’ (cf. Ch. 7) in turn usually rely in their criticism on some metaphysical doctrine like nominalism.

Pihlström (1996) argues against metaphysical forms of realism that ontological issues, even though important, are always ‘pragmatically’ relative to our ‘practices’ and

‘interests’. But it might be the case that the best way of accounting for the pervasive features of the institutional practice we call science is to assume some metaphysical view like the trope theory, so that in this case such metaphysics would have a pragmatic justification.