A curious feature of philosophy, as a field of human enquiry, is that it seems almost impossible to make progress. Thousands of philosophy articles and books are published every year, and they discuss interesting nuances and aspects of their chosen topics. But the next philosopher who comes along produces their own take on the topic. And the next. We can apparently endlessly create new narratives, and always find new arguments to make, but we very seldom arrive at anything like a consensus. One gets the sense that consensus is anathema to philosophers. Thousands of years have gone by and still, we cannot definitively say a realist or idealist view of the world is more accurate. To my mind, this says that something is fundamentally wrong with the way that we approach philosophy.
I no longer recall where I first encountered the idea of nominalism, but ever since, it has had a profound effect on how I think about philosophical problems. Nominalism is a wonderful tool for cutting through bullshit and restoring pointless philosophy to usefulness.
In this essay, I will briefly introduce the topic and provide my definition of nominalism. I will outline a general critique of the hypostatisation and/or reification of abstractions and then use the example of "consciousness" as a case study. This leads back to some more general conclusions about the limits of metaphysics.
Nominalism
Nominalism began as a rejection of "universals" (which we can ignore). In modern terms, nominalism is often described as a rejection of abstract objects, or more specifically as the proposition that abstract objects don't exist. However, I take a more pragmatic approach focused on epistemology. As I employ nominalism, it involves a series of propositions:
- An abstraction is not an object, it is an idea about objects.
- Abstract thought involves conceptual metaphors, i.e. metaphorically treating ideas as objects to which verbs can be metaphorically applied.
- Two problems occur: Hypostatisation treats abstractions as if they have independent existence and reification treats them as if they have physical form.
- Treating ideas as independent things and/or as having physical form is a category error.
- Belief is a feeling about an idea.*
* Hat tip to Michael Taft who tweeted "Belief is an emotion about an idea" on 8 May 2018.
Thus, my view is that abstractions are not objects at all, so arguing that such objects don't exist is beside the point. The important part is that abstractions are ideas. Here, I don't mean "ideas" in the Platonic sense, I just mean a mental representation of something, which may include thoughts, imagery, schemas (as defined by Mark Johnson), and emotions. (Note: I am aware that "abstraction" is itself an abstraction).
Thoughts may be said to exist since we do have thoughts and they affect how we behave. John Searle, for example, talks about thoughts having a "subjective mode of being". This is a pragmatic idea and it allows that an experience is epistemically objective for the person having it. It doesn't stop us from knowing about subjective states, because, as above we can compare notes about our subjectivity and discover that subjectivity has shared properties. For example, most people have an inner monologue. This is an epistemically objective fact. As John Searle puts it:
The ontological subjectivity of the domain [of consciousness] does not prevent us from having an epistemically objective science of that domain.
Or as Mary Midgley put it:
Subjectivity is an objective fact.
However, it is not possible to fit ideas or their components into an ontology of objects: we cannot see ideas, cannot hear, smell, taste, or touch them. Ideas require their own ontology (I'll come back to this in my conclusions).
Abstractions may be expressed via abstract nouns, or a concrete noun may be used abstractly. Articles commonly indicate whether a noun is being used in a concrete or abstract sense. Compare, for example, "Space, the final frontier" with "A space for everything"
A number of important concepts in philosophy are abstractions, including: consciousness, reality, truth, existence, and causation (these are all concepts from metaphysics). Concepts such as space and time, are also used abstractly. Numbers are abstract. Categories and their arrangement into taxonomies are also abstractions.
An abstraction conceptualises and generalises some aspect of experience. And this can be very useful. However, as noted, things can go wrong.
Many philosophical problems remain insoluble because they involve hypostatized and/or reified abstractions. For example, although we virtually all use the term "reality" to mean something substantive; "reality" is an abstract noun. The related concrete noun is "real". Defining "real" is difficult, however. Metaphysical definitions often involve "real", "existent", and "true" chasing each other around. An object is real if it exists; a proposition is true if it conveys something real. And so on.
Ask a philosopher, "What is the nature of reality?" and you may get a book-length reply, explaining in their own special jargon how we should think and feel about reality. However, if you ask another philosopher, their answer could well be completely different and involve a completely different jargon (or worse, the same jargon terms used differently). The two answers are likely to be mutually exclusive. For example, if the first philosopher is a realist and the second is an idealist. If I ask a realist and an idealist what is the nature of reality, at the end of the day, I'm still none the wiser about the nature of reality. And asking a third philosopher only makes things worse, not better.
There is no general agreement amongst
philosophers or scientists about the nature of reality.
We should pause to appreciate this statement. How can something so seemingly fundamental as "reality" be a constant source of confusion and conflict for thousands of years?
This is where nominalism comes into its own.
Ask me the same question, "What is the nature of reality?". I observe that "reality" is an abstract noun. And that "reality" is an abstraction. Thus "reality" is not an object, not a thing; "reality" is an idea about some objects (in this case real objects). The nature of all abstractions is that they are abstract. Ergo, I answer that the nature of reality is abstract. Reality is not a thing, it is an idea about things.
Nominalism cuts through philosophical bullshit and obscurantism. And it explains why we can't agree about abstractions like "reality". Ideas about reality are, to some extent, limited by the properties of phenomena, but within such limits, the imagination is free to run wild (and it does). And as long as a narrative has internal consistency, a philosopher is allowed to propose that it is the answer. As Douglas Adams observed (in HHGTTG), there is no incentive for academic philosophers to agree because if they did, they'd be out of a job.
The problem is not abstractions or abstract thought per se. Thinking in abstract terms can, for example, give us leverage on general problems. And most of the problems we face in daily life are general.
It helps to be aware of what kind of process abstract thinking is. In abstract thought, we, metaphorically treat an idea as a thing. So, for example, no one will be confused if I say: "I hope everyone grasps my idea of nominalism".
In a proposition like "grasp an idea" the cognitive metaphor is IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. (Following Lakoff and Johnson, I use the convention of stating cognitive metaphors in small caps). Applying this metaphor allows us to talk about ideas using verbs applicable to objects. We can toss the idea around, or kick it into the long grass. I may juggle ideas, turn them over in my mind, save them for later, or throw them out. Once the metaphorical link between ideas and objects is invoked, then we can metaphorically (or imaginatively and linguistically) interact with an idea as though it is an object. Any action applicable to an object can now be metaphorically applied to an idea. And statements reflecting such metaphors are seen as valid.
This opens up all kinds of possibilities for understanding the world and communicating our understanding. It enriches our minds to be able to imaginatively and linguistically interact with ideas in this way.
The use of cognitive metaphors is transparent and intuitive. If I say, "inflation is up", you don't need me to translate the physical metaphor drawn from our experiences of verticality or to say how that idea maps onto the idea of increasing and decreasing. This mode of expression can be sophisticated. If, for example, "inflation is up", then UP IS BAD, but if "wages are up", then UP IS GOOD. And we are not confused by this; it intuitively makes sense. Similarly, your house can burn down if it goes up in flames: two opposite spatial metaphors for the same event. Or I could say "Fire consumed your house". Coincidentally, this morning I told my neighbour (who cannot read or write) that I needed to hang my washing up. He quipped: "Washing doesn't hang up, it hangs down!"
None of this is counter-intuitive, or only accessible to intellectuals or people with an education (my neighbour has none to speak of). It doesn't require formal instruction. We all do it all the time without paying attention to it. We can make and understand such metaphors on the fly, and even use them for wordplay. The problems emerge when such metaphors are hypostatised and/or reified. Hypostatisation treats abstractions as if they have independent existence, while reification treats them as if they have physical form.
Since I rely on the idea of an "emergent property" in what follows and this is a disputed term, I want to say a few words on how I use it and relate it to the problem of ideological reductionism.
Emergentism versus Reductionism
I use the term "emergent property" with a very specific, pragmatic definition:
An emergent property is a property that an object has by virtue of its structure, rather than its substance.
I drew this definition from the book Analysis and the Fullness of Reality, by Richard H. Jones (who has also translated and commented on the works of Nāgārjuna and some Prajñāpāramitā texts; amongst many other interesting projects).
My contention, following Jones, is that structure is real; at least it is as real as substance is. The universe cannot be adequately described by either one in isolation. Structures persist over time, for example. Structures can interact with item objects and change them. For any meaningful definition of "real", structures and systems are real.
When I look at arguments over emergent properties, the main problem appears to be defining "emergent", which often invokes another abstraction, "causation". By linking emergence to something concrete like structure rather than something abstract like causation, my definition pragmatically avoids this controversy. However, since philosophers cannot agree on a definition of "emergent", perhaps it would be better to refer to structural properties and contrast them with contrast substantive properties. So let's revise the definition:
A structural property is a property that an object has by virtue of its structure, rather than its substance.
I mainly talk about this in terms of structure, which represents the static aspect of this idea. We can also talk in terms of systems which represents on the dynamic aspect. For example, the unit of life is a structure called a "cell". The structure of, say, the bilipid membrane, gives a cell distinctive properties. At the same time, a cell is also a complex dynamic system within which parts are interacting; and which, as a whole, interacts with it's environment.
But let's take a relatively simple and static example for clarity. My home is made of bricks. It could be reduced, conceptually or literally, to a stack of bricks. But if I want my home to keep the weather out and the heat in (I'm writing in mid-winter and it's -5° C outside), then a stack of bricks is no use to me. To make a home, I have to give structure to the bricks, arranging them just so and sticking them in place with mortar. The properties involved in keeping the weather out are only partially related to the substance of bricks. I grew up in a home made of wood, for example, and it kept the weather out just fine. The primary properties that keep the weather out are not substantive, but structural. To claim that a stack of bricks is somehow more real than a home made of bricks is neither cogent nor salient.
The reductionist asserts that if an object can be reduced to component parts; then the components are more real than the whole. And "reality" only resides at the level that is indivisible (echoing the atomic theory of Democritus but also reifying "reality"). Thus the reductionist effectively asserts that complex objects are not real, or at best that they are less real than simple(r) objects. This is how most science is taught, so it comes to seem intuitive (I never questioned it during my science education).
However, for some scientists, this reductionist worldview is extremely unhelpful. In biology, for example, we may well reduce an organism (via dissection for example) to discover more about its substantive properties. However, to really understand an organism, one has to look at the emergent/structural properties; i.e. one has to view it whole and alive. One has to see it interacting with its environment, seeking food and mates, avoiding pests and predators. One has to see the environment in ecological terms: life never exists in isolation; life is always massively interdependent: interacting systems within systems. Living things cannot be fully understood via reductionism, and the partial understanding that we do get is minimal. In a sense, no instance of life makes sense except in the context of all life.
The reductionist worldview, then, when expressed as views about the nature of reality is quite bizarre because it excludes all structures and systems; all structural or systemic properties. As human beings, everything we interact with is a complex structure/system.
While it is true that complex objects are physically reducible, structural properties are not. When you reduce a complex object to its component parts, you destroy the structure and you destroy the structural properties associated with the structure. For example, a ship made of steel may float, despite the fact that steel is eight times denser than water because the structure of the hull incorporates a large volume that lowers the average density of the object (typically the shape is also optimised for moving through the water). If I reduce the ship to a single huge, solid ingot of steel, it no longer has the property of buoyancy in water. The property belongs to the structure, not the substance. A ship is a real thing, it has its own distinctive properties that are largely independent of its substance.
Reductionism offers us ways to explore and understand substances and substantive properties. In order to explore and understand structures and structural properties, we have to take the opposite approach variously called anti-reductionism, emergentism, or holism. I'd call it "structuralism" but that's already taken.
Let's apply this understanding to an example: the nature of consciousness.
Consciousness
Consciousness is always a hot topic in Buddhism. In my lifetime, it has also become a hot topic amongst neurobiologists. This is one of the things that Buddhists claim to have a good (even, the best) understanding of. And yet Buddhist accounts of consciousness clash with other traditional Indian accounts, not to mention scientific accounts. How can we know who is right about consciousness? It seems that we cannot. Arguments about the nature of consciousness go on and there is no consensus in sight, despite considerable progress in understanding brains. We cannot even agree on what consciousness is. There is no broadly accepted definition. This dilemma should be familiar by now.
When smart people have argued about something for a century and there is no resolution in sight, it's time to reassess the question. When it's more than 20 centuries and there's still no end in sight, it's time to question the whole enterprise.
I submit that the problem lies with hypostatising and reifying consciousness as an independent real thing. For example, when post-humanists talk about "uploading [their] consciousness", they are treating consciousness both as an independent entity (hypostatisation) and treating it as something that has a physical location (reification). Moving an object from one location to another is one of the main ways we interact with objects.
The nominalist critique is to point out that "consciousness" is not an object; it's an abstraction, and thus (at best) an idea about a thing. The nature of consciousness is abstract.
And yet the website PhilPapers—a social media site for academic philosophers—is overflowing with works on "consciousness" as a thing. Notably all the articles on the so-called "hard problem of consciousness". Lay people often take consciousness to be a thing. When, for example, Deepak Chopra says "consciousness is the ground of all being" he treats consciousness as a fundamental substance shaping reality rather than a mental process. Or Eckhart Tolle: "Consciousness is who you are at the deepest level". Or Shirley MacLaine: "Crystals amplify the consciousness". Or Stephen Hawking: "I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program." And, as mentioned, all talk of "transferring" or "uploading" consciousness.
Note here that where we talk about "the brain" as a separate entity from the body, we are also engaging in hypostatisation. The brain has to be embodied to function. It needs skeletal support, it needs a blood supply containing oxygen, glucose, ATP, and so on. The body functions as a unified system. It may seem intuitive to hypostatise the brain, but it's not accurate. If you take the brain out of the body, the brain cannot function.
Moreover, we know that single cells, right down to bacteria are intelligent in the sense that they make decisions and can learn. A slime mould, for example, can learn and retain knowledge for generations. A planaria worm can learn a maze and retain that knowledge even after it is decapitated and grows a new head and brain. Bacteria have survived for something like 4 billion years, including 6 mass extinctions.
It seems that all life is intelligent in the sense of being able to learn and adapt (to some extent) to environmental changes. But only animals are conscious. "Intelligence" per se is not strongly connected to brains or consciousness. Or better perhaps, brains are a special case of cellular intelligence, in which structure magnifies basic cellular intelligence by orders of magnitude.
As far as anyone knows, a mind cannot be independent of the embodied brain that creates it. A huge number of studies show that damage to a brain = damage to the associated mind, with a good deal of specificity. Ghost stories notwithstanding, no one has experienced or observed conscious states that are independent of an embodied brain. And indeed we may say that a specific brain is related to a specific mind. The idea, for example, that the same mind could exist in a different brain, or some brain substitute like a computer, is clearly dependent on hypostatizing consciousness and decoupling it from the brain.
As far as anyone knows, consciousness does not have a location within the brain. Rather, conscious states are a structural property of the whole, embodied brain. Equally, conscious states cannot be located outside of the brain; rather they are a structural property of embodied brains. Thus the idea that one could move consciousness from one to another physical location involves reification.
Conscious states are states characterised by having conscious content; the waking state can be characterised as awareness of sensory experience (which includes mental experiences such as ideas and, notably, our sense of self). We are conscious—i.e. we experience a succession of conscious states—for part of the day, and therefore it can seem commonsensical to speak of "consciousness" in the abstract and to employ verbs metaphorically.
That said, it seems to be very difficult to avoid hypostatisation and/or reification of the idea of consciousness. And once we start asking substantive questions of a structural property, we're down the metaphysical rabbit hole. One may examine the phenomenology of a conscious state, and to some extent, one may generalise about conscious states. But if we start trying to talk about consciousness in concrete terms—i.e. "a consciousness", "the consciousness" or "your consciousness"—we're treating an idea as a thing. And this is a category error.
Consciousness is an idea (that we have about experiencing conscious states). It is a useful enough idea until we try to make it into a thing. Then it becomes a hindrance.
Other things being equal, what applies to "reality" and "consciousness", applies to all abstractions. And if it applies to all abstractions, then it applies to all of metaphysics. Our different ideas about metaphysics have been causing arguments, fights, and wars for all of recorded history. And we still have no idea which idea is the "right" idea, nor any viable method to approach deciding the issue. And thus I question the whole enterprise.
The problem seems to be that some people claim to know things that, as far as I can tell, no one can possibly know. And if one needed one slam-dunk critique of such claims, it is this: despite the fact that they all claim to know reality directly, those who "know" all make different claims. A defining feature of "real" objects, is that they don't depend on the observer. So if all the conclusions about reality are distinctly observer-dependent, then something has gone catastrophically wrong. And we need to go back to the drawing board.
Epistemic Privilege
Kant had already observed, in the Critique of Pure Reason, that no one has direct access to knowledge about reality. We all rely on sensory experience to gain information about the world. We all have more or less the same sensory equipment. Sensory experience is the result of a series of identical electrochemical nerve signals arriving in the brain. What such signals tell us about the world is governed by where in the brain they arrive (and how often). In synaesthesia, signals from one sensory modality leak into a different part of the brain, so that synaesthete may "see sounds" for example.
Mental activity is an internally generated sensory experience. Mental activity may relate to real-world objects, but it doesn't have to. We can sometimes infer valid knowledge from thinking, but we also make a lot of invalid inferences (Wikipedia lists +100 logical fallacies and +100 cognitive biases).
And there is no way around this. Humans have no "reality faculty" that allows us to know reality directly. Everything is mediated by electrochemical signals in nerves and neurons. The early Buddhists' view was much less sophisticated, but they do seem to have understood that an ontology of mental activity had to be distinct from an ontology of things. The Abhidharma, for example, is primarily (though not only) an ontology of sensory experience.
However, if you hang around with Buddhists you will find that they do claim epistemic privilege: they do claim to know "reality" or even "the nature of reality". This claim never sat well with me. But it took me many years of study and reflection to be able to articulate why. For example, there's no sign of the Buddha claiming to know "reality" in Buddhist scripture. He does make all kinds of claims to knowledge, some of it metaphysical. But he does not claim to know "reality". I would go as far as to say that there is no such concept in early Buddhist literature.
Sue Hamilton, noted that Early Buddhism was focused on experience. And while they clearly held some metaphysical commitments concerning, for example—space, time, and causation—they are simply background assumptions, not worked-out philosophic conclusions. All their intellectual effort goes into preserving myths and discussing the mental, physical, and magical effects of practising the Buddha's way. Whether we like it or not magic was part of Buddhism because it was everywhere in that milieu.
Buddhist practices result in all kinds of altered mental states. The pursuit of such states can have lasting positive effects on some people. But I no longer accept that any of these states is closer to reality than waking experience. I no longer believe that meditation conduces to "insights into reality" at all. As I say, I don't believe there is a word in Pāli that means "reality" as I understand it.
The proposition that no one has epistemic privilege means that all of metaphysics boils down to a discussion of ideas about reality. There are opinions about reality but an opinion is another word for a belief. And a belief is a feeling about an idea.
In this light, the failure of philosophers to make any progress in metaphysics makes sense. Metaphysicians are not arguing from valid knowledge; they are arguing from ideas about what might be valid knowledge.
At the same time, however, we do know how to draw valid inferences about reality. By closely observing phenomena and comparing notes, we can show that some experiences are different for everyone, and some experiences are the same for everyone. We call the former "subjective" and the latter "objective".
On one hand, everyone standing on top of a tall building experiences a unique range of subjective responses to the location, the view, the weather, the light, and so on. But everyone who jumps off the building is objectively accelerated towards the surface of the earth at 9.8 m/s ± 0.1 m/s until they reach terminal velocity in the order of 200 km/h (this figure is less precise because it is dependent on atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed, the size and shape of the person, what clothing they are wearing, and so on).
450 years of science have gifted us with some exquisitely precise descriptions of how objects behave under a variety of circumstances. We know these inferences are accurate, and can even say quite precisely how accurate they are and under what circumstances they have that level of precision.
The lack of epistemic privilege juxtaposed with the ability to draw accurate and precise inferences about reality more or less sums up the dilemma faced by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The former position was epitomised by the writing of David Hume (1711–1776); the latter by Isaac Newton's Principia (1687). Kant solved the dilemma by pointing out that metaphysical objects like space, time, and causation are in fact pre-existing ideas that humans have about experience. We impose structure on experience in order to make sense of it. However, for Kant, this meant that reality was always inaccessible and unknowable. As he was writing before modern science really got going He didn't really allow for valid inferences about reality by comparing notes.
Conclusions
Many of the seemingly intractable problems in philosophy and almost all mentions of consciousness in general literature involve abstractions. Nominalism gives us a powerful tool for resolving such disputes, by drawing attention to what abstractions are, i.e. abstractions are ideas, and ideas are not things.
Abstractions are not problematic per se. On the contrary, it is very useful to think in abstract, generalised, categorised ways. Most of the problems that we face in daily life are ameliorated by our ability to think in abstract and/or metaphorical terms. Moreover, the application of metaphorical verbs to ideas, via cognitive metaphors, gives us an extensive vocabulary for discussing ideas.
We run into problems when we treat subjective ideas as independent objects (hypostatisation) and/or when we treat them as having physical form (reification). Or when we treat metaphorical actions as real actions.
Ideas are not always grounded in reality. The idea of unicorns has sparked a great deal of speculation, mythology, and art. Still, unicorns have never existed. The idea of a unicorn may well draw on real horses and real animals with horns, but a horse with a single horn is an idea with no counterpart in the world. Imagination is not limited by reality.
This means, however, that we can't use the same ontology to describe both ideas and things. Things that are independent of our minds (objective) have one ontology; while ideas that are wholly dependent on our minds (subjective) have a completely different ontology. Language seems to be somewhere in between and may require its own ontology.
For example, the whole field of science is an ontology of the objective. Within this are more specific ontologies like the atomic theory of matter, the standard model of particle physics, or the Linnean taxonomy of life. By contrast, we might think of an encyclopedia or an encyclopedic dictionary (like the Oxford English Dictionary) as an ontology of ideas. And finally, we might think of a grammar manual as an ontology of language. A more general ontology of everything loses all specificity and is quite useless in practice. One suspects the same will be true for any "theory of everything" that scientists come up with. We already know, for example, that nanoscale physics is totally impractical in the macro-world.
Nominalism can reduce the amount of time that we spend on intractable problems that are caused by the hypostatisation and/or reification of ideas (and language). It amounts to better intellectual hygiene when it comes to abstract objects and metaphorical actions. Arguing over the nature of abstractions—like "reality" or "consciousness"—is a waste of time.
The nature of all abstract concepts is that they are abstract. Abstractions are ideas about things. "Reality" is an idea about real things. "Consciousness" is an idea about conscious states. Arguably, how we feel about ideas is more significant in human discourse, than the idea itself. Belief is a feeling about an idea.
~~oOo~~
Bibliography
Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press. [a long discussion of schemas]
Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.
Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.
Searle, John R. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press.
Searle, John R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. Penguin.
