Other Ontologies

Other Ontologies

It would be generally agreed that ethics, logic, and mathematics suffer from ontological uncertainties. We don’t know what they are about. There are ontological disagreements that never get resolved. The metaphysics is obscure. I don’t need to spell this out. Is ethics about certain special objects and properties—the Good, the non-natural property of being good—or is it about human emotions or imperatives or the divine will? How should ethical statements be analyzed? Is logic about sentences (type or token) or abstract propositions or states of affairs? Is it about mind-independent matters or is it a kind of psychological projection? Is mathematics (number theory and geometry) about Platonic universals or marks on paper or pebbles and biscuits? We don’t have similar doubts about physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, zoology (psychology is another matter). In these areas the old Aristotelian framework works well enough: matter and form. There is a stuff called matter and it takes a certain form (shape, organization). This combination produces things called substances—individual perceptible objects that have properties (attributes, accidents). But with ethics, logic, and mathematics we don’t have the idea of matter and form: the Good (or being good) is not made of matter and has no shape; same for propositions and numbers; geometric figures have form (this is where the concept comes form) but where is the matter that constitutes them? In short, the substance ontology breaks down. We might find ourselves saying that only states of consciousness can be good or bad, but we don’t have an ontology in terms of which we can make sense of this—what substance has the attribute of being good? Is being good really an attribute of anything? Hence, emotivism, prescriptivism, nihilism, etc. We likewise speak of one proposition entailing another, but we have no clear idea what these objects may be or what their logical relations look like—it is nothing like one animal giving birth to another, say. It seems “queer”. And what kind of thing is a universal—is it a proper subject of predications? Can we see universals? Where do they exist? How is one different from another? But if we switch to particulars, we seem to lose the essence: numbers are not scribbles and geometric figures are not perceptible shapes. These are far too human-dependent. In all three cases the substance ontology breaks down, but we have nothing to replace it.

Ethics, logic, and mathematics are therefore ontologically akin to the mind or consciousness: odd, anomalous, extraordinary. They are apt to induce ontological vertigo. This produces philosophical perplexity. The problems are not just metaphysical; they ramify into epistemology and philosophy of language. For how can we know such “queer” facts, or talk about them? It’s nothing like seeing a physical object and noticing its attributes. Can we even use subject-predicate sentences to describe these things? In what sense, if any, are they things? We come down with a bad case of ontological incomprehension. And all because we think in terms of the substance ontology—matter and form, object and attribute. We try to force them into a mold they don’t fit, or we flirt with nihilism: reduction or elimination. The driving force here isn’t empiricism or materialism; it’s more fundamental—substantialism. But we can’t just give up on this ontological framework, because we lack another. We are imprisoned within it. The framework doesn’t fit all subject matters. It isn’t the content of our conceptual scheme that produces the problems; it’s the form of it, its most general categories (thing, property, relation, instantiation). What we are pleased to call reality (that most descriptively empty of terms) doesn’t have a homogeneous structure (and even that word is too parochial). We think and talk about things for which we have no adequate ontological conceptual scheme. Why? Because we are substantial beings living in a world of other substantial beings, yet privy to other “realities”. One part of our thought fails to fall under another part. Thus, those intellectual cramps and contortions.

And there is a further inconvenience: philosophy itself suffers from the same problem. We don’t really know what it is about. Plato would say it is about the world of universals; Aristotle would say it is about substances in general; Locke would say it is about substances and ideas; Hume would say it is about impressions and ideas; Berkeley would say it is about ideas and the mind of God (a spiritual substance); Hegel would say it is about the World Spirit; Husserl would say it is about human phenomenology; Frege would say it is about inhuman Thoughts; Russell would say it is about human knowledge (its scope and limits); Wittgenstein would say it is about pictorial propositions or (later) language-games; Quine would say it is about science in general; linguistic philosophers would say it is about ordinary language; conceptual analysts would say it is about concepts; and so on. There isn’t much consensus here. There is a lot of tendentious rhetoric. It clearly isn’t about clearly defined natural substantial objects, animal, vegetable, or mineral (where is the periodic table of philosophical elements or a taxonomy of philosophical species?). Accordingly, meta-philosophy exists—what exactly are we talking about? Philosophy has no well-defined ontology to call its own. This makes scientists feel complacent and superior, but the same problem arises in ethics, logic, mathematics (and yes, psychology). Call it the problem of ontological indeterminacy, in both the metaphysical and epistemological sense. Does philosophy even have an ontology? What is philosophical discourse ontologically committed to?

What is to be done about all this? Not very much, except to be aware of the problem. Our minds and brains have evolved on a certain planet with a certain kind of environment. They descend from the minds and brains of earlier animals. Conceptual schemes evolve under the usual evolutionary constraints, for better or worse. They incorporate a workable ontology and serve our biological purposes well enough. But they may not fit everything that comes our way; they may not be hospitable to ethics, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. We can do these things surprisingly well, but we don’t perform so admirably when we try to comprehend their general ontology. We are much better at the primal ontology of substances and their attributes—objects in space equipped with perceptible properties and relations. Anything else is annoyingly hazy, a bit of a jumble, rather makeshift. This doesn’t mean these aren’t worthwhile subjects, well worth knowing about, but at a reflective level they are apt to flummox. I myself am a keen student of these subjects, though I don’t really know what they are about. I can’t quite get their subject matter in my sights (literally).[1]

[1] You can aim at substances with a gun, but you can’t aim at moral values, or propositions, or numbers, or concepts, or essences (and not because they won’t sit still). See my earlier papers on substance ontology and its limits, especially “Ontology of Mind”. The duality inherent in reality is not between two types of substance, material and immaterial; it’s between substances on the one hand and non-substances on the other (or whatever underlies this human distinction).