On the Aristotelian account of abstraction, we abstract the forms of things via perception. But here is a problem. First of all, we sometimes have better knowledge of things not perceived than of things perceived. Let’s say you read a detailed scientific book about pangolins, though you’ve never encountered one, while I once saw a koala in a zoo, but don’t much know anything more about them than that they are cute marsupials. It seems quite problematic to say I have the form of the koala in my mind, but you do not have the form of the pangolin. For that would make the mental possession of the form of the thing an unimportant flourish to what really epistemically matters, since clearly you are better off epistemically for reading the book about pangolins than I am for seeing the koala.
Of course, presumably, the author of the pangolin book presumably saw the pangolin. But that doesn’t seem to matter much, either. There are many dinosaur species where the paleontologist knows more about the species than I know about koalas, and yet no human ever perceptually interacted with a dinosaur, but typically only with minerals that have displaced their carcasses.
What should someone committed to the Aristotelian story about abstraction say? Two options come to mind, a modest and an expansive one.
Modest option: It really doesn’t really matter much epistemically whether one has the form of a pangolin or a koala in one’s mind. What matters is the propositional knowledge. However, it is essential to our possession of the propositional knowledge that our thoughts have intentionality, that they refer to the world. And it is crucial to securing intentionality that we have Aristotelian abstraction at the interface between the world and the mind. The triceratops expert’s intentionality with respect to triceratopses is derivative from the causal chain from triceratopses to their corpses to their fossils to the light reflecting from the fossils into the expert’s eyes to (eventually somehow) the expert’s thoughts. Where the causal chain crosses from the world to the mind, we need a transmission of form to ensure intentionality for the whole chain. Maybe the transmission happens when the minerals that have replaced the bones transmit their mineral forms to the expert’s mind, in some mysterious way mediated by the light.
Expansive option: Everything in the world carries the forms of everything nondivine that is causally upstream from itself. The triceratops corpse somehow has the form of the triceratops in it, and so do the bones of the triceratops, and so do the minerals that replace the bones, and so does the light modulated by reflection from the minerals, and so do the electrical impulses in the nerves from the retinal receptors to the brain. It is easier to extract the form when it comes from seeing a live koala than when it comes from seeing fossils, so that a layman can do the former while the scientist is needed to do the latter. Similarly, when you read a book about pangolins, the ink on the page, being causally modulated by the author’s knowledge, carries the form of the pangolin (in addition to any forms naturally contained in the ink, say those of the particles constituting the ink).
Medievals already said something like this about the modulated light, so it’s just a matter of extending the story. And while the problem I am concerned about is one that does not require any science or technology beyond what the medievals had—the medievals knew about the gaining of expertise from books (if anything, they might have overestimated it!)—in a modern setting we it feels like an Aristotelian has to do this. After all, it is hard to deny that one can gain the same kind of knowledge of koalas by looking at them through high-end augmented reality goggles as from directly seeing them with our eyes. Thus, on a form-transmission story, the electrical potentials of the capacitors in the computer memory in the goggles have to somehow carry the form of the koala. But given the many ways that computer memory can be realized (think of magnetized rings versus capacitors versus markings on a CD), it seems plausible that any effect will have to have to be admitted to carry the form of its cause. It is tempting to say the form is only found in substances where there is sufficient data to reconstruct significant information about the causally-upstream object the form is of, but I think is not tenable. Presumably each bacterium is a substance, and we could have a type of biological memory in augmented reality glasses where each bit of information is stored in a different bacterium.
This story coheres very nicely with the essentiality of origins. It is a kind of a reversal of the principle of proportionality of causation on which the reality of the effect is actually or eminently found in the cause: the formal reality of a cause is found in the effect. I think it’s a defensible story. But I also find it hard to believe.
5 comments:
Perhaps it is perception as imagination, or the ability to derive it intellectually from other similar forms? I don't think one needs to have all the forms directly present in the five external senses.
I don't think it's a part of a standard Aristotelian picture that we can create forms with our minds (say, out of similar ones). But it might be an interesting revision.
When considering moral cognitivism, is it a mistake to take the truth-apt character of ordinary moral discourse at face value, rather than seeking a deeper explanation for why our moral language evolved to have that character? For example, one might argue that evolution favored assertoric moral claims because they are more effective at influencing behavior. If someone commits murder, saying "Murder is wrong" is plausibly a more effective way of discouraging such behavior than merely expressing disapproval with something like "Boo to murder!"
If such an evolutionary explanation is available, does it undermine the inference from the surface grammar of moral discourse to the conclusion that moral claims genuinely express objective truths? More generally, is taking the apparent truth-aptness of moral language at face value analogous to taking the apparent meaningfulness of words or symbols at face value? Just as it may be mistaken to infer that words possess meaning as an intrinsic ontological property, rather than explaining meaning through deeper accounts of language and cognition, might it likewise be mistaken to infer that moral claims correspond to objective moral truths merely because our ordinary discourse treats them as truth-apt?
I've been thinking about a response to Graham Oppy's objection (2013) against explanatory versions of the fine-tuning argument. As I understand it, the objection is roughly this: if God could have created radically different universes (e.g., one containing only chairs or lasting only a few seconds), then God had no all-things-considered decisive reason to create a life-permitting universe. In that case, the fact that God created a life-permitting universe is ultimately as brute as the naturalist's brute universe, so fine-tuning fails to favor theism.
My thought is to reject the assumption that God's admissible range of creation is unrestricted. Instead, God's essential nature necessarily constrains the CLASS of universes He would create to those capable of realizing significant goods (for example, life-permitting universes). However, it is not necessary that He create THIS particular universe. The remaining question is why this admissible universe rather than another. My suggestion is that, if there is no best possible universe, then perfect rationality permits arbitrary selection from within the admissible class precisely to avoid an endless and irrational search for a maximally good universe. The explanatory work is therefore done by the rational selection policy, not by a uniquely distinguishing feature of the chosen universe.
If this is correct, then what appears to be a brute fact is not genuinely brute. The choice of a particular universe is arbitrary only among equally admissible candidates, while the existence of that arbitrariness is itself explained by the rational policy governing selection. By my lights, this is one of the very few, perhaps the only, cases in which apparent arbitrariness and genuine explanatory sufficiency coexist. If so, this seems to preserve contingency at the level of individual universes while avoiding Oppy's objection and allowing fine-tuning to retain explanatory force in favor of theism.
I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts. Do you think this is a genuinely promising line of reasoning? More specifically, do you think it successfully escapes Oppy's concern that theism ultimately terminates in a brute explanatory fact? My inclination is that, although the proposal initially appears to leave a brute residue, it does not actually do so, since the apparent arbitrariness is itself accounted for by a sufficient explanation grounded in God's rational nature and the policy of avoiding irrational delay.
My own view on this stuff is still this: http://www.alexanderpruss.com/papers/DivineCreativeFreedom.pdf
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