Principales microorganismos en (EM•1) y su acción

The distinction between types and tokens, as introduced by Peirce, was originally applied to words. If one were to count how many times the word “the” is printed on this page, the answer would be 23. But at the same time, there is only one word “the” in the English language. Peirce therefore says that the latter is the type “the”, whereas the occurrences of the word on this page are tokens of that type. The same with sentences. How many are there in the following four lines?

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d.

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day. The bright sun was extinguish’d.

One could either say four or three. “Whoever answers ‘four’ has counted sentence-occurrences (tokens); whoever answers ‘three’ has counted sentence- types (types).”42 Tokens are physical objects like the inscriptions “The bright sun was extinguish’d” on this page. They are printed with black ink, in the Times New Roman font. A token of the type “The bright sun was extinguish’d” may look differently. For example, the ink could be blue, and it could be handwritten, but still it would be a token of the same type.

The type/token distinction has found wide application in various areas of philosophy from logic to philosophy of mind. It has proven to be useful not only concerning language. For instance, we can also talk about a type “BMW Z3” that is tokened by certain objects on the street or in some James Bond movies.

While tokens are particulars, types are abstract objects. One of the things that might seem problematic about the claim that (some) artworks are abstract objects is that abstract objects are traditionally regarded as being atemporal. Properties, numbers, relations, and other abstract objects have no temporal extension: there is no point of time at which they began to exist, and they also will not cease to exist. But this sounds rather unconvincing when it comes to certain types. Surely there was no corresponding type before the Z3 was developed? And surely there was no type V before Pynchon wrote it? Otherwise, artworks would indeed be discovered and not created. But, as Levinson writes:

The notion that artists truly add to the world, in company with cake bakers, house builders, lawmakers, and theory constructors, is surely a deep-rooted idea that merits preservation if at all possible. The suggestion that some artists […] instead merely discover or select for attention entities they have no hand in creating is so contrary to this basic intuition regarding artists and their works that we have a strong prima facie reason to reject it if we can.43

43 _{Levinson: “What a Musical Work is”. In his: Music, Art & Metaphysics. Ithaca and London}

What does the latter mean for Günther Patzig’s suggestion that we should regard artworks as belonging to what Frege has called the “third realm”?44 Frege distinguishes three ontological “realms”. The first one contains physical objects. They can be perceived by anyone; they are objective and exist mind- independently and thus independently of actually being perceived. I have said that at least multiple artworks cannot be considered as physical objects.

Frege’s second realm contains subjective objects that are private and cannot be shared, i.e. cannot be perceived or otherwise accessed by someone other than their bearer. Frege calls them “ideas”. The second realm is “a world of sense impressions, of creations of […] imagination, of sensations, of feelings and moods, a world of inclinations, wishes and decisions.”45 As the discussion of the Croce/Collingwood theory has shown, it would also be implausible to count artworks as entities of this sort. But there is a third category in Frege’s ontology, and Patzig’s claim is that works of art are members of it.

A third realm must be recognized. Anything belonging to this realm has it in common with ideas that it cannot be perceived by the senses, but has it in common with things that it does not need an owner so as to belong to the contents of his consciousness. Thus for example the thought we have expressed in the Pythagorean theorem is timelessly true, true independent of whether anyone takes it to be true. It needs no owner. It is not true only from the time when it is discovered; just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets.46

Among the inhabitants of the third realm are also numbers and thoughts – Frege’s name for propositions.47 But should artworks be categorised as

44 _{Patzig, Günther: “Über den ontologischen Status von Kunstwerken.” In: Schmücker, Reinold}

(Ed.): Identität und Existenz. Studien zur Ontologie der Kunst. Paderborn 2003, pp. 107-120. For a discussion of Patzig’s paper, cf. also Schmücker: Was ist Kunst?, pp. 255-264.

45 _{Frege, Gottlob: “Thought”. In: Beaney, Michael (Ed.): The Frege Reader. Translated by}

Peter Geach and R. H. Stoothoff. Oxford 1997, pp. 325-345: 334.

46 _{Frege: “Thought”, p. 337.}

47 _{Künne, Wolfgang: “Criteria of Abstractness. The Ontologies of Husserl, Frege and Strawson}

against the Background of Classical Metaphysics”. In: Smith, Barry (Ed.): Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. Munich, Vienna 1982, pp. 401-437: 414.

belonging to the third realm as well? I do not think so, because members of the third realm are atemporal.

Three characteristics are usually ascribed to abstract objects that distinguish them from other objects. Abstract objects cannot be perceived by the senses; they are acausal; and they are not located in space and time.48 _{I will talk about} perception and causality in Chapter 2.3. For now, I will focus on the atemporality condition.

If having no temporal extension – which also implies unchangeability – is a necessary condition for being an abstract object, one either has to say that artworks are not abstract, since as a working hypothesis I want to stick to the commonsensical assumption that they begin to exist at some point of time and do not exist atemporally like the Pythagorean theorem; or one could deny the necessity of the atemporality condition. The latter is what Bob Hale and Wolfgang Künne do.

Künne says that contrary to the traditional conception, some abstract objects

are temporal and therefore also subject to change: “[B]iologists, for example, are accustomed to speaking of the origin of species, of their development, of their division, of their regressive development and of their becoming extinct.”49 However, a possible objection to this example would be that the sentence

(a) The species A will soon become extinct

which attributes a substantial change to an abstract object, can be paraphrased into

(a’) The last specimen of the species A will soon die

so that by (a) we do not in fact refer to an abstract object, the species, but just to physical objects subsumed under the name of species A. Künne replies “that

48 _{Hale, Bob: Abstract Objects. Oxford 1987, p. 46.} 49 _{Künne: “Criteria of Abstractness”, p. 406 f.}

such arguments are inadequate. For one can after all turn them against their proponents and say that with [a’] one predicts an early end for the species.”50

Another objection to Künne’s example would be to simply deny that species count as abstract objects. The cost of this would be to say that a paradigmatic case of a universal in the medieval problem of universals is in fact not a universal.51

Hale points out further examples that lead to the conclusion that not all abstract objects are atemporal.

No doubt games […] and languages are non-spatial. The crucial question is: are they also atemporal? It seems not. Chess and English, unlike the natural numbers or sets, have their histories. They came to be at certain more or less definite times; the fact that it may well be impossible, without arbitrariness, to identify a precise date at which English began to be spoken is clearly not to the point – as much is true of the Industrial Revolution, say, but this casts not the slightest doubt on its temporality.

There are, then, some – indeed, it is clear that there are many – otherwise plausible examples of abstract objects which, though non-spatial, do not appear to satisfy the suggested requirement of atemporality.52

Resorting to Husserl, Künne distinguishes between “free idealities” and “bound idealities”.53 Bound idealities are temporal, changeable abstract objects. That some abstract objects are temporal, however, does not mean that there are no atemporal abstract objects. “Thus the concept of ‘free ideality’ is not empty: abstract entities of certain categories are unchangeable, for example properties and numbers.”54

50 _{Künne: “Criteria of Abstractness”, p. 407, cf. also Hale: Abstract Objects, p.25.} 51 _{Künne: Abstrakte Gegenstände, p. 46.}

52 _{Hale: Abstract Objects, p. 49.}

53 _{Künne: “Criteria of Abstractness”, p. 408.} 54 _{Künne: “Criteria of Abstractness”, p. 412.}

If not all abstract objects are necessarily atemporal, then the assumed temporality of artworks does not prevent us from considering them as abstract, though they are not members of Frege’s third realm like numbers or the Pythagorean theorem. If artworks are brought into existence at a certain point of time, it must be noted that Patzig’s idea of applying Frege’s characterisation of abstract objects to artworks is flawed because of the difference between bound and free idealities.

So far I have taken it more or less for granted that artworks are created and not discovered. But I have only based this claim on the strong intuition that this is so, an intuition that is evident in the way we talk about artists and artworks. We speak of artworks being created, of artists creating works, and of creative acts. The claim that artworks are in fact discovered and not “invented” by artists might seldom or even never be found outside of philosophical discourse. It would nevertheless be beneficial for the Creation Thesis, as I shall call it, if it could be backed up by more arguments than just reference to common intuitions.