J:
"maths people say one is unique--a "singleton" -- generally because they haven't decided it's prime or not. But it's still included in classes--ie the class (or set, if you will) of natural numbers. Yet...who cares?"
Exactly. Oddly, Grice never forgave J. L. Austin for having spent more than a weekend on that 'dreadful bore': Frege's "The concept of number".
--- "The page numbering is inadequate".
--
"The bridge holds or it doesn't; the plane flies or it don't. The equations are important, but only insofar that they produce useful, working tools or technology, etc(or perhaps models)."
Yes, plus the Arabs invented the zero, but the ROMANS invented the bridges.
"The proof's in the pudding. Now, supposed universals are useful as well--mammals, or natural numbers, or polygons, or even "Justice", whatever--but I think it's because they're useful that we...use them!"
Yes, I think 'dodo' is a good class. People say Dodgson was considering universalia when he had the Dodo as a critter in "Wonderland". But having been to Oxford (and the Ashmolean) I found that there is a stuffed dodo in there, which may have influenced Dodgson, too. Plus, as Alice Harvgreaves, "the real Alice", reminisced:
"Professor Dodgson had an annoying stutter. We would laugh at him! He couldn't even pronounce his name: "Do-Do-Do-Dodgson", he'd say. We called him Dodo".
"Not because they have some platonic existence. Pragmatic analyticity, instead of Russell/Frege crypto-platonic logicism. So perhaps that's a type of conceptualism rather than the dreaded N-word.
Yes. Plurals are also important, because while we cannot say, "justices", in the plural, and mean it (unless in very special circumstances) we can still refer to the 'class of all singletons', or stuff.
There's the universalia problem, and the plural problem. Spinoza (who called himself a monist) thought he had resolved the 'plural' ('pluralitas') problem. He refused to use the plural -- even as applied to food ("potato" was a mass noun for him).
His views is referred to as "monism", which influenced Leibniz. For Leibniz, there is only ONE thing (singular), which he called, for lack of a better term, "Monad".
Strictly, there is only ONE thing. It may be big, even 'infinite'. When we say, "There are two apples in the tree", strictly -- who cares (to echo J). The universe is just one. Others (O. D.?) may disagree and speak instead of the pluriverse, multiverse, or di-verse.
---
In general, Monism is easy to prove.
On the other hand, Pluralism can be a bother. To echo Grice,
"Surely when we say we are pluralists we don't
meant to say that we believe in the existence
of two bananas. The issue goes deeper than that."
For Grice, a pluralist is someone who holds NOT that there are more than one entity, but more than one TYPE of entity. This may beg the question, but then most people beg questions all the time ("What time is it?") and it's not like begging the question is a crime.
"Begging the question" is "petitio principii" which is a different class of animal.
To prove the pluralist wrong, or the conceptualist, or the realist, try interpersing each noun with "mass" expressions:
"I'm not the sort of guy to tolerate that"
-- meaning?
"I saw a kind of curious film."
----
"My mother has two classes of dogs".
etc.
And see how silly the implicatures those expressions trigger.
Or not.
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im slightly opposed to big M Metaphysics, especially considering the fact that gents like Leibniz or Spinoza lived in a pre-periodic table, pre-thermodynamics, and pre-Einsteinian time. And ...in a sense Kant's critique while not perfect suggests we avoid ultimate statements about reality as well, does it not. ..phenomena rarely fits our categories in some precise way anyway. The sky or ocean is not just blue-- it's a multitude of shades and tints (not to say chemical combinations). But ....humans call it blue because reality's much easier that way. The same for Roses --there are multitudes of forms, shapes, colors, hybrids. So without some drawn-out metaphysical rasslin' I would say we accept universals (whether blue, or "Roseness", or integrals) on a pragmatist basis, rather than ultimate "realism" , whether that is monistic, or dualist, idealist or whatever. People aren't guilty for metaphysical views, or anti-metaphysical views for that matter. They're guilty when they murder someone. At times philophasters overlook that.
ReplyDeleteHowever contra the usual darwinist reductionist I think one can argue that something like Form exists in nature--ie roses will be roses next year, ceteris paribus, not rattlesnakes--even if that is bio-chemically determined in a sense. Scientists often lop off that consideration via Occam but...whatever. Phenomena is at least regular--or much of it is--regular as maple tree leaves turning red and gold in autumn and then falling off.
Yes. Excellent points about Dualism not being a crime (murdering is).
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I would define a philosopher alla Grice. He was a monist. Except when everybody turned monist. So he became a pluralist. The point is that a philosopher is one who can ARGUE _regardless_.
I will have to revise his 'betes noires', but I don't think he listed Dualism, or Monism. Or Pluralism. Strictly, it's Singularism that opposes to "Pluralism".
In Greek it's all about the horses. I may drop a post about this.