metaphysics quiz #2

Now why would I suggest that the table is something other than the brownness, hardness, and four-leggedness that I can see in front of me? One reason is that I could imagine these properties changing while the table remains the same particular that it was. 

I could paint the table white, for instance, because it fits in better with the decor of my office. If I did that, then it would still be one and the same table, it would simply have changed its appearance. Something will have changed, while something has remained the same. 

In philosophy, we see that all sorts of confusion can reign if we speak loosely of it being the same table, so we employ an important distinction. We can say that something has changed qualitatively even though it has remained numerically the same. 

So the table can be different in its qualities - it was brown and now it is white - but it remains one and the same thing. The table that was brown is now the table that is white. Imagine if a visitor comes into my room and asks what's happened to my old brown table. It's perfectly acceptable for me to respond that it's still here: it's just that they didn't recognize it because I had painted it. Being One and the same, despite such changes in qualities, is what we mean by numerical sameness (the topic of change will be explored more in Chapter 4). 

It is this consideration that leads me to think that the table itself cannot be the same thing as its properties. At least some of them could change and yet it would still be the same table. So when I look at and feel the properties of the table, I am observing just that - its properties - and not the table itself. But what, then, is the table, if it is not its properties? 

Here is a suggestion. The table is something that underlies the properties and holds them all together in one place. It is something I cannot see or touch, because all I experience is a thing's properties, but I know it is there through my rational thinking. When I move the table across the room, for instance, all of its properties move with it. They are clustered together in a semi-permanent way. It is not as if the brownness and hardness of the table can move but the four-leggedness can get left behind. 

I say that the properties are clustered only semi-permanently, though. As we have seen, some properties can be shed from the cluster and new ones take their place, so we cannot be absolutely strict and say that the properties are bound together inseparably. 

The brownness can be shed and replaced by whiteness. 

Such a view of particulars may be best understood through the metaphor of a pin cushion that is used to hold pins together in one place. The pins represent the properties of an object and the cushion represents the particular itself. Some call this a substratum view of particulars, where the pin cushion is the substratum that underlies all the properties on view. One pin stands for the brownness of the table, another stands for its hardness, and a third stands for its weight, another its height, and so on for every single property the table has. And if we could strip these away - mentally, through a process of abstraction - we would come to understand that the thing itself is separate from them and is that in which they all inhere. Of course, when you remove all the pins from a real pin cushion, you are still left with something that you can see and touch. But remember that our metaphorical pin cushion, when all its pins have been removed, is a particular that has been stripped of all its properties so that we can think of what the table itself is. And without properties, it couldn't therefore look or feel like anything. 

Consider, for instance, a cat. We can think of it without its blackness; for that is a property and we want to know what the thing is that underlies all its properties. But removing its blackness isn't like skinning a cat. As well as removing its colour, we also have to take away its shape, as that is just another property like the rest, and so is its four-leggedness, smelliness, and furriness. Take all those away and we could well wonder what this underlying substratum really is. It would have to be invisible. It would have no length, breadth, or height, and no colour or solidity. 

There would be a bareness to it that may really make us start to wonder whether we have anything at all. 

Philosophers are notorious for working out all the implications of an idea. But they don't necessarily always accept those implications. Sometimes a consequence is so ridiculous that it can be taken as good grounds for rejecting the initial supposition. 

Such a counterintuitive consequence will have reduced the supposition from which it sprang to absurdity. Perhaps we can say that's happened in this case. It was suggested that the particular had to be something other than its properties. But once we started to abstract away the properties of the cat from the cat itself, we realized that it would leave hardly anything. Our substratum-cat seems to be nothing at all. It has no weight, no colour, no extension in space, and so on. And this starts to look like a non-thing. Isn't it the case that everything that exists has properties? It is not as if 'bare' particulars could exist and that some of them were just fortunate enough to accidentally acquire properties. Certainly every physical thing that ever has and ever  Will exist has some shape or weight or feature. And to talk as if the thing can in some way exist independently of those properties was perhaps the mistake that led us to absurdity. Let’s  us, in that case, consider a different approach. If there can be no 'bare' particulars, existing without having properties, then we might want to think again of the cluster or bundle of properties with which we began. When in our minds we stripped away those properties, in a process of abstraction, the fear was that we were left with nothing at all. So shouldn't we then just countenance the possibility that there is nothing more to a particular than that bundle of properties? If there really is no remainder once all the properties have been removed, then we know that our particular cannot be more than them. The bundle view is that particulars can be accounted for in terms only of properties. How plausible is this view? 

There are a couple of problems associated with it, which come from the problem of change that we already discussed. If a thing were just a collection of properties, it couldn't survive any change. 

If one property were lost and another gained, we would have a different collection: for I am assuming that what makes a collection the same thing at different times is that it is composed of the same component things. Consequently, two collections are different if the things collected within them are different. And clearly, the particulars that interest us change all the time while remaining (numerically) the same. A cat changes its shape frequently. Sometimes it is lying out flat, other times it is rolled up in a ball, and then it might be running around, changing its shape continuously. How can the cat be just a collection of properties when they change all the time? 

It may be possible to answer this objection, though. Perhaps we should think of a thing as a series of bundles of properties, united By a degree of continuity. So while the table can be changed and painted white, it keeps roughly the same weight, height, and physical position. I am assuming the physical position of an object is one of its properties, and clearly it is a pretty important one in this context. I am confident the white table is the same thing as the previous brown table in no small part because I find it in the same room. And if it has moved, I expect that it did so gradually by passing through a series of locations between where it started out and where it ended up. While the cat changes shape rapidly, it keeps the same colour, furriness, smell, and, importantly, it is in the same place; or if it has changed its position, it has done so through a series of locations. We could say, therefore, that while the bundles of properties come and go, a particular thing is a succession of such bundles with an appropriate continuity running throughout. 

There are a number of other difficulties to be faced, but before going on to consider one of them, it is worth mentioning what might be a big advantage of this bundle view. The first account we considered was one in which particulars were underlying substrata that held the properties of a thing together. To account for particular objects such as a table, a chair, a dog, and a tree, we had two kinds of ingredients. We had a thing's properties and its substratum. But with this new bundle theory, it seems that we need only one kind of thing. We just have the properties and, when they come in a bundle or a continuous sequence of such bundles, we say that we thereby have a particular object. So where we previously needed two elements, we now have only one. 

Another way of looking at this is to say that the notion of substratum has been reduced away entirely in other terms. Objects would just be nothing more than bundles of properties, appropriately arranged. 

The second theory is thus a simpler one in so far as it invokes fewer kinds of entity. The unknowable formless substratum seemed to give us nothing extra: if the bundle theory is correct, then the substratum is dispensable. Now there is no particular reason why a simpler and more economical theory is more likely to be true than a complex and uneconomical one, but philosophers prefer the simple ones. Certainly, there seems no reason to tolerate redundancy in one's theory of the world because any redundant elements are clearly not needed for the account to work. They serve no purpose.