Aristotelian abstraction

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.