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tags: Philosophy
rel: Effective Summarization
Thought
My motivation for this read is continuation of what is meant to summarize effectively. It seems that a correct summarization is related to approaching the “essence” of what is written, reflected on the subject to be summarized.
NOTE
What (if anything) determines when an entity comes into our goes out of existence?
Is it possible for one and the same organism to be first a caterpillar and then a butterfly? Is it impossible for a human being to undergo the sort of transformation we encounter in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning only to find himself transformed into a giant insect.
Essence - related terms
- Quiddity
- Haeccity (thisness)
Essentialists hold that grasping the essence of, or what it is to be, an entity is crucial to an accurate understanding of the world.
Anti-essentialists, interpret our apparent essence ascriptions as in some what reflective of our specifically human interests, goals, or practices, rather than the world of “as such.”
Essentialism is the view that object have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity.
Quine challenges essentialism - “you can change anything to anything by easy stages through some connecting series of possible worlds”
Distinction between essence and accident.
Locke distinguished between real essence and nominal essence. The real essence of an item is what it is. By contrast, the nominal essence of an item is, roughly, our abstract conception of what an item is. Locke argued that we do not grasp whatever real essences there may be, and so are stuck with only their nominal essences.
History
Ancient
Socrates asks questions in form of “What is X?” Menos attempts to answer the question of “What is Virtue?” by listing a number of example of virtues. Socrates states this is unsatisfactory, as a list doesn’t tell us what X is. One must seek to identity a single form (eidos) common to all instances of X.
Eidos - form, essence, type or species.
Medieval
Things in the world have mind-independent essences. A term used is quiddity which means what in Latin.
Modality in contemporary philosophy is one of the ways to demarcate the distinction between essential and accidental features Effective Summarization.
Socrates and Plato each have the same human essence, yet they are different individuals since they are composed of different matter in which the human essence is instantiated.
Though Aquinas believes that proper accidents can give us some knowledge of essences, he believes that our knowledge of essences will always be incomplete. He famously writes: “No philosopher is able to perfectly investigate even the nature of one fly …”
Henry of Ghent (c. 1217–93) claims that existence does not add a distinct reality to essence, but rather it adds a distinct “intention” to essence. “Intentio” in Latin literally means “a stretching forth” or “reaching out toward”. So, in claiming that existence adds an intention to essence, he is suggesting that existence adds to an essence an ordering to something outside of itself.
Modern
According to the Aristotelian tradition that serves as a foil to much early modern philosophy, the nature or essence of x is what it is to be x. To use a standard example, what it is to be a human being, such as Hypatia, is to be a rational animal: being rational and being an animal are essential properties of Hypatia. Of course, Hypatia possesses other properties, such as having hair or being curious. These are not essential properties of Hypatia, but instead are “accidents,” for they are not part of what it is to be her.
NOTE
Accident - a property that the entity or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. An accident does not affect its essence, according to many philsophers.
Non-essentialism - Often synonymous to anti-foundationalism, non-essentialism in philosophy is the non-belief in an essence (from Latin esse) of any given thing, idea, or metaphysical entity (e.g. God). Non-essentialism might also be defined cataphatically (i.e. affirmatively; see cataphatic theology) as the belief that for any entity, there are no specific traits or ground of being which entities of that kind must possess to be considered “that entity”.
Descartes:
Each substance has one principal property which constitutes its nature and essence, and to which all its other properties are referred. Thus extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance; and thought constitutes the nature of thinking substance. Everything else which can be attributed to body presupposes extension, and is merely a mode of an extended thing; and similarly, whatever we find in the mind is simply one of the various modes of thinking.
Descartes view a small number of an entity’s properties as essential. Spinoza and Leibniz opt for a highly inclusive approach that maintains all of an entity’s properties are essential to it. This is a “superessentialist” view (Spinoza laid the groundworks, Leibniz embraced.)
Spinoza equates an entity’s essence with its conatus, power, or striving to remain in existence.
Leibniz:
The complete or perfect notion of an individual substance contains all of its predicates, past, present, and future. For certainly it is now true that a future predicate will be, and so it is contained in the notion of a thing. And thus everything that will happen to Peter or Judas, both necessary and free, is contained in the perfect individual notion of Peter and Judas …
Locke - real essences and nominal essences. Real: First, Essence may be taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is. And thus the real internal, but generally (in substances) unknown constitution of things, whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence
Nominal: But, it being evident that things are ranked under names into sorts or species, only as they agree to certain abstract ideas, to which we have annexed those names, the nominal essence of each genus, or sort, comes to be nothing but that abstract idea which the general, or sortal (if I may have leave so to call it from sort, as I do general from genus), name stands for.
As a slogan, we may say that real essences are in the world, whereas nominal essences are in the mind.
Pragmatism
is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.
- classical with Pierce, James, Dewey, Addams, Cooper
- mid-century with C.I. Lewis, Quine, Ramsey, later Wittgenstein
- neo with Rorty, Putnam, Brandom, Price
Rorty: pragmatism is simply anti-essentialism applied to notions like ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘language’, ‘mortality’…
Peirce
Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim: implies definition can never be a source of philosophical insight.
They strongly repudiate the idea that metaphysics is ‘first philosophy’, for example. Peirce regarded metaphysics as instead dependent upon what he called the ‘normative sciences’ (logic, ethics, and aesthetics)
Essence: “A property P is an essential property of being an F iff anything is an F partly in virtue of having P. A property P is the essence of being an F iff anything is an F in virtue of having P. The essence of being F is the sum of its essential properties”
Essentialism: the doctrine that (at least some) kinds have (at least some) essential properties.
Realist Essentialism: if entities have essences (or essential properties), then they possess them “independently of how these entities are described, conceptualized or otherwise placed with respect to our specifically human interests, purposes or activities”
Anti-realist Essentialism: essences (or essential properties) are, or at least can be in some sense mind-dependent, socially constructed, or ‘conferred’
Anti-essentialism (active): the denial of essentialism based on some competing meta- physical claim about kinds.
Anti-essentialism (passive): refusal to endorse essentialism based, not on any competing metaphysics, but as part of an effort to maintain a ‘strategic silence’ on any/all metaphysical questions given their unintelligibility
Pragmatism began with C.S. Peirce in How to Make our Ideas Clear. There are two grades of clarity in it - “clearness” about a kind (like lithium recognized in samples based on appearance) and then “distinctness” (ability to describe lithium in abstract exact terms like an atomic number). An additional grade clarity is added “pragmatic meaning”:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
Peirce’s notion of an ideal limit of inquiry (once you understand all of lithium’s many effects with practical bearings there’s nothing more to be said about its nature.)
If one engages in the project of definition, the danger is that one word will be ‘defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception ever being reached.‘
James
There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon another … Whichever one of these aspects of its being I temporarily class it under, makes me unjust to the other aspects. But … I always am classing it under one aspect or another, I am always unjust, always partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity — the necessity which my finite and practical nature lays upon me. My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time …
Contemporary (analytic tradition)
Russell was still suffering from, as he much later put it, being “indoctrinated with the philosophies of Kant and Hegel”
Russell thought that the only way to make sense of essence is to treat “essence” as a synonym of “nominal definition”: “In fact, the question of ‘essence’ is one as to the use of words a word may have an essence, but a thing cannot”
Wittgenstein
In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he made frequent use of essentialist language but it is important to note that he was committed to the doctine that “the only necessity that exists is logical necessity.” For Wittgenstein in Tractatus, essence was closely connected to logical form, which pertained to language but also to the world.
He suggested that the logical form of color sentences involves numbers representing coordinates in a color space, so that “one shade of colour cannot simultaneously have two different degrees of brightness or redness”
Language of Essence
How we structure our utterances and what words we use can affect what is conveyed, what comes to mind, and the sorts of judgements we are apt to make. For example, saying that someone is “an addict” and saying that someone “struggles with addiction” might lead to different judgments about the degree to which addiction is a defining feature of the person, whether this feature is contingent, and how much it explains about the person’s behavior. Similarly, “Raccoons eat avocados” and “Some raccoon has eaten an avocado” convey propositions of very different strengths.
rel:The Flexible Lyric Essays by Ellen Bryant Voigt
broader view that nouns as a lexical category are poised to elicit essentialist thinking. Research has found that children and adults take nouns rather than adjectives or verbs to convey more information about a category
Applications
A prominent and prima facie plausible idea, which can be traced back to the work of John Searle is that social objects are a special kind of artifact—namely, artifacts which are created and maintained not through mere individual intentionality but through collective intentionality, specifically the collective acceptance of rules or principles. Let us call this the “collective acceptance view of social objects”. Construed in essentialist terms, this view provides the following account of the full or complete essence of being a social object:
COLLECTIVE ACCEPTANCE VIEW OF SOCIAL OBJECTS: It is essential to x’s being a social object that it is an object which has been intentionally made and maintained for a certain purpose, through the collective acceptance of rules or principles.
Anti-essentialist Challenges
One form challenges the intelligibility of the notion of essence. A second form challenges whether essences are real, as opposed to being mere projections of our language, mind, or conventions onto reality. A third form challenges whether essences are knowable, at least by creatures like us. And a fourth form challenges whether there is any point or usefulness in appealing to essences
Wittgenstein
Early on in the Tractatus Wittgenstein argues that it is a condition of the possibility of propositions—of saying something, true or false—that there exist simple objects that have certain “internal properties” or essences and that constitute “the substance of the world”, only to claim later in the work that that very metaphysical view is an attempt to say what cannot be said. In the Investigations Wittgenstein criticizes the view that our concepts track essences in reality and urges that essence should be understood as an expression of the “grammar” of our language. While vastly differing in both form and content, both works undertake to criticize the drive to conceptions of meaning that fund the metaphysical appeal to the concept of essence.
Philosophical Investigations:
Thought is surrounded by a halo.—Its essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it—It must rather be of the purest crystal … We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language
Wittgenstein writes, “if a fact is to be a picture, it must have something in common with what it depicts. There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable one to be a picture of the other at all”
Consider a map that depicts relative distances of certain cities. The commonality of form guarantees that any arrangement of elements in the picture (what Wittgenstein calls “pictorial structure”) represents a possible arrangement in the reality that the picture depicts.
A picture cannot depict its pictorial form, it displays it. A picture cannot place itself outside its representational form.
Any kind of explanation of a language presupposes language already. And in a certain sense, the use of language is something that cannot be taught, i.e., I cannot use language to teach it in the way in which language could be used to teach someone to play the piano.—And that of course is just another way of saying: I cannot use language to get outside of language