Allergies to abstract objects
One of the questions that’s baffled me (quietly) during my time studying analytic philosophy is why so many otherwise sane individuals seem to think abstract objects exist. During the past week, I’ve heard more people say “Well, I don’t know what x is”, or “I don’t know what you mean by x”, so I’ll just go out on a limb and say that I don’t really get what people mean when they say things like propositions, relations and properties “exist.”
At least from my broadly physicalist/functionalist standpoint (I say “broadly” because I haven’t pinned down all the implications yet, nor have I quite discerned the connections with various strands of Indian philosophy), a proposition cannot exist. It doesn’t have any causal implications, isn’t spatio-temporal, so when you say it “exists”, I’m baffled.
And yet a substantial chunk of analytic philosophy is about these abstract objects. At least from where I stand, they seem to be a useful heuristic, a way of organizing talk about meanings and referents, but much of the (to my naive mind) unnecessary complexities of philosophy arise when we reify them as some kind of essential thing.
Richard Tieszen’s article “Consciousness of Abstract Objects” in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind is one I’ve started, then put down, then started again numerous times. I haven’t quite gotten the theoretical underpinnings of the Incompleteness Theorem necessary to evaluate that section. But I do think there’s an interesting question of abstraction going on here, and one that perhaps may be generalizeable to other areas, such as perception. (When we perceive something blue, and say “x is blue”, aren’t we abstracting from the momentary existence of the thing to the existence of a type?) Tieszen is attempting to bring together a phenomenological and scientific account of how we can have intentional states towards abstract objects. They seem to be necessary for scientific and mathematic work, after all, so the physicalist should be interested in them.
Nothing of more substance tonight, other than to note that I’m excited about the start of the school year, which will involve Sanskrit, Wittgenstein and Kripke, an introductory seminar (ranging over Frege, Russell, phil mind stuff–all of which should help me with the above), sitting in on Indian Philosophy, and being a TA in some yet-to-be-assigned course. Radical claims will come later in the semester, when I have enough balls argumentation to back them up.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Can things exist without any essential properties? Can things exist without any causal properties? If you buy the Quinean line about ontological commitment then you might think so. Its clear that we do *quantify* over things in, e.g. mathematics. We say “There is a natural number less than 1″ and are thus committed to the existence of the number zero.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
I have some more to say about this, but I need to get my thoughts straight. I think it hinges around what we mean by “essential” and “causal.” A bit of what I’ve been reading has (I think) given me some clearer questions to ask. But, yes, I think I need to delve more into Quine–I’m pretty sure that this first semester at UT will afford me some better depth in these kinds of topics.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Yeah I guess I don’t really know what to think about all this. I think the Quinean take on ontological commitment might be the source of many philosophers willingness to accept the existence of things like numbers (or whatever mathematical entities are fundamental to our mathematical theory). But I don’t know that Quine was right.