Abstract
I provide the beginnings of an account about how Sellars’ process ontology can function as a metaphysical model that overcomes and critically delimits Aristotelian and Kantian substance ‘manifest-image’ ontologies. In this connection, I attempt to fill another important gap in Sellars’ process ontology, by sketching a response to the objection that we cannot make full sense of how processual entities can have determinate identity and individuation conditions. Moreover, I consider the manner in which persons, conceived as loci of normative authority and responsibility, can be integrated to such a radically nominalistic world. I argue that persons can be thusly integrated in the sense that although a nominalistic process world does not admit persons in its ontology, persons do exist in such a world to the extent to which certain organisms, through the activation, sustenance and reproduction of recognitive we-attitudes, bootstrap themselves into (normative) existence.
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Notes
- 1.
A corollary of this is the structural asymmetry between objects and properties observed by Aristotle: properties can have converses (non-red is the converse of red) but objects cannot (the converse of a red object would be an object colored with the whole chromatic spectrum except red, which is impossible).
- 2.
Note that this is a resolutely non-psychological and a semantic externalist conception of concepts which (a) takes it that the existence (though not the sense) of concepts is independent of concept use, application or activity, and (b) against current orthodoxy, it holds that the contents of our concepts or the meanings of our words cannot be discovered a priori or just by introspecting. To find out what the contents of the concepts we apply in describing the world really are (what we are really committed to by applying them), we have to find out what the laws of nature are, which is ultimately an empirical matter.
- 3.
Here, we are in essential agreement with McDowell (1994) and Brandom’s Hegel (2019). The very fact that the world can be knowable and something to which we can be rationally responsive only if it is essentially thinkable by concepts as a world of alethic modal facts (e.g. laws of nature) means that it is conceptually structured—though, of course, in a non-deontic, non-normative sense of ‘conceptual form’.
- 4.
This shows that in defining the ‘architecture of reality’ one is not forced to assume that there are (at least) two types of ‘building blocks’, one corresponding to things and another corresponding to the things’ qualitative aspects; nor does the nominalist ontologist who aims for simplicity and economy have to attempt a complete reduction of everything to either one of these two categories (Morganti, 2012).
- 5.
Thus, in this framework, time should not be understood as a ‘neutral’, homogeneous medium in which self-identical ‘now’s’ indefinitely ‘repeat’ themselves, differing only in their successive ordering.
- 6.
Interestingly, I think that Deleuze’s ontological framework in his Difference and Repetition (1968), suitably updated with the resources of topology (number of dimensions of virtual space, its connectivity, its ‘universal singularities’) and dynamic systems theory (phase space, trajectories, attractors), provides some valuable conceptual tools for understanding the individuation of processes independently of the object-property framework. As we saw in Chap. 7, according to Deleuze, at the fundamental level of ontology what really exists is ‘pure’ differences, primitive compatibilities-incompatibilities, that are not internally related through negation (relations of exclusive difference) but co-exist in a virtual plane of ‘multiplicities’ and are related through ‘inclusive disjunctions’ (in the mode in which all colors are ‘folded’ in white light). The ‘explication’ (morphogenetic realization) of this topological space in the actual world is what produces discreet (extended and exclusively incompatible) colors (or objects as loci of exclusively incompatible properties). Moreover, the individuation of events is based on a notion of ‘re-identification’ (‘repetition’) without generality, or need for an original self-identical entity, and in which every identifying act is simultaneously an act of creation or (non-interchangeable) variation. In other words, to identify and individuate an event is simultaneously to transform it. We saw in Chap. 7 how the Deleuzian notion of virtuality can be integrated into a Sellarsian process-nominalism which eschews traditional modal notions (possibility-necessity) and is based only on occurrent intrinsic characteristics of processes. That is, it might be the case that Sellars’ a-modal ontology needs to be supplemented with a further a-modal category equally real with, yet distinct from, occurrent actuality to account for the ongoing differentiation (and continuous ‘creation’) of temporal ‘planes’ in sensation (τ-dimension). Note also that topology and dynamic systems theory, which might prove indispensable for articulating a nominalistic process view of the world bereft of the object-property structure and exclusive difference, both make use of the ‘category’ of the ‘virtual’.
- 7.
In the process framework (suitably enriched by evolutionary theory), laws of nature are not immutable, but rather, at best, express evolutionarily entrenched ‘habits of the universe’ (Peirce).
- 8.
Armed with this conception of process individuation we can also respond to Gabriel’s rejection of a process ontology due to its supposed essential content indeterminacy (Gabriel, 2015). Gabriel defines absolute processes as “processes without anything being processed, mere becomings, not becomings of anything, but just becomings, change without anything changing”, and he dismisses the notion by arguing that “we always experience substances, rather than pure processes, and there really are no pure processes if we mean by this something that someone could possibly refer to” (Gabriel, 2015, pp. 33–34). But even if it is true that change presupposes something that changes (a locus of change), it does not follow that this ‘something’ should be substance-like. As we saw, it could well be a (bundle-structured) patterned regularity, an ongoing pattern of events, an adverbially characterized unfolding process that is individuated by what it does, by the difference it makes to other processual doings. Gabriel seems to believe that without a subjectual-objectual substratum, pure processes would be so unstable that they could not even be individuated as such. But, again, this does not follow. A patterned regularity can well be stable enough to permit individuation without an underlying essence or substratum to account for its ‘identity through change’ as a processual individual, as its ‘identity’ or ‘essence’ is constituted by the ‘gravitational’ (dynamic differential) field of forces around it.
- 9.
Notice also, importantly, that, from this point of view, an expression that is syntactically ‘molecular’, that is, constructed according to formation rules which make use of connective and quantifier signs, can nevertheless be semantically ‘atomic’, that is, represent by picturing. And this enables even highly theoretical (scientific-image-informed) representational systems to contain, in principle, basic singular representations used to make ‘atomic’ statements, which picture individual basic theoretical entities or processes (Rosenberg, 2007, p. 114).
- 10.
An indicator for this latter sort of holistic (yet non-normative) adequacy would be the practical success of this system in orienting ourselves in (or maintaining dynamic homeostatic equilibrium with) the surrounding environment.
- 11.
The attitudes in question are non-normative in their ontology (they are non-conceptual affective acts), but they can legitimately be called ‘normative’ in the sense that the attitudes of, for example, undertaking a certain commitment is something that goes beyond a mere desire, and can even express a willingness to risk or sacrifice one’s other desires.
- 12.
See also Sachs (2022). According to Sachs, Sellars’ understanding of the relations between normative content and naturalistic picturing be illuminated if we construe linguistic behavior as triangulated cybernetic behavior: we ascribe semantic content to any utterance or inscription (including our own) that can be coordinated with other utterances or inscriptions that are functionally integrated into the sensorimotor feedback loops of other cybernetic systems, where the criteria of coordination lie in successful cooperation. From this point of view, personhood is to be understood as the status of a cybernetic system that actualizes a capacity to triangulate its behavior with other cybernetic systems that can also actualize their capacities for triangulated behavior (Sachs, 2022).
- 13.
This ‘relative autonomy’ of the level of normative statuses over normative attitudes (which tends, fetishistically, to be ontologically reified) is indispensable as a tool for regulating the latter at a collective level because (a) normative we-attitudes are not ontologically transparent to themselves and (b) they are context-bound, incapable of being abstracted from their ‘qualitative’ form and content. By contrast, normative statuses, in the form of thinkable conceptual contents, can—as abstract functional roles within the space of reasons—represent any possible fact therein ‘objectively’ (as the same for everyone), irrespectively of the particular qualitative form and content of the corresponding normative attitudes that ontologically sustain the conceptual contents in question.
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Christias, D. (2023). Persons as Normative Functions in a Nominalistic Process World. In: Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_9
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