The Status of 'Brute Facts'

Disregarding any theory that posited 'brute facts' - excepting 'identity' - used to be a common thread throughout my philosophical career. As any good Leibnizian, I am deeply committed to some form of the Principle of Sufficient Reason afterall. But as my thinking about metaphysics becomes more and more naturalized, I find myself not only denying this practice but also finding it just plain mistaken metaphysics.

Granted, it would be lovely if we could do away with 'brute facts'. But not only are there philosophical reasons for thinking this an impossible project - think: first mover - but there are good reasons for thinking that primitives ought to be had at a much 'higher level' of ontology. I for one, as a sortal essentialist, think that explanation stops at natural kind identities. So asking questions like "but why is this object this natural kind?" are not pointless, but metaphysically meaningless. You might as well be asking "but why is x identical to x?"

At the recent 'Philosophy of Cosmology' conference at St. Anne's College at the University of Oxford, Paul Davies gave an interesting talk. The gist was: we can always ask 'why' and physics may not always provide an answer. I approached him after his talk and asked him if he would ever be happy with primitives in physics, or philosophy for that matter. He insisted that the questions he raised were valid and important questions for physicists to ask themselves. Now, I agree with that, but I also recognize that there are primitives and then there are primitives. If we have a proposed primitive that is capable of theoretical reduction, then we have no primitive at all. But looking for contrastive reasons for every proposed primitive is, more often than not, a futile effort. In particular, Davies asked, "but why this law, rather than some other?"

I have recently been re-reading sections of Richard Swinburne's 'The Existence of God'. An amazing book to be sure, and there's no doubt that Professor Swinburne has done much to make theological belief intellectually credible. But in his chapter on 'The Nature of Explanation', he insists on these kinds of questions. In discussing the causal powers view of natural laws, he complains that '...the law does not explain why these substances have those powers'. But if these powers are the foundations for the natural laws - there just isn't any worth in asking such questions. If Swinburne is looking for an answer to "why negative charge repels negative charge, rather than attracting it", he is simply assuming that nature has available to it all of the content of the span of logically possible worlds. This is the only thing that can be going on in these types of questions: one must be a Humean about possibility.

If you think there's a meaningful answer to the question "why does negative charge repel negative charge, rather than attract it?", you must think that it is in fact possible that negative charge might have attracted other negative charges. But why think this? As far as I can tell, one would only think this by assuming that logical possibility is the possibility-space for the concrete world. But on a dispositional conception of possibility - to ask such a thing is to be asking a rather ad hoc question. For on this view, the causal powers themselves demarcate what is possible and what is not.

So there is simply no room to ask for any contrastive explanation as to why these powers are as they are. The short answer is: this is a brute fact about reality. And if you think that it is genuinely possible that like negative charges might have attracted, the onus is on you to explain why it is that purely logical possibilities should be countenanced as true de re possibilities for objects in the concrete world. And so you must make the dreaded conceivability entails possibility link.

Counterparts & Primtivism

Counterpart theorists argue that they can avoid an unwarranted primitivism about de re modality because they can explain why it is that objects have the de re modal properties they have. Other positions, such as Sortal Essentialism and/or Dispositional Actualism, must declare de re modal properties to be primitive facts. The Counterpart theorist however, can explain why x is possibly F: x has at least one counterpart that is F in some possible world.

L.A. Paul is concerned that the actualist who is not a Counterpart theorist must posit a spooky "Modal Force" inherent in objects that governs their de re modal properties.

But note that the Counterpart theorist has an even more disturbing primitive: Possible Worlds!; even more so, if - following the originator of Counterpart theory - you hold that these worlds are concrete entities.

I am more concerned about spooky "Other Worlds" that exist as a matter of primitive fact. Which primitive am I to prefer? I say the one that causes the least ripples throughout our current conceptual scheme and which is least capable of reduction. I therefore prefer the spooky Modal Force: it's adoption not only doesn't change the character of physics, but it is instead supported and perhaps suggested by modern physics; so it causes less ripples than the posit of an infinity of possible worlds. And such a concept does not, unlike possible worlds (abstract or concrete), cry out for conceptual reduction.

Dispositional InEssentialism's Implausibility

Given dispositional realism, there are two main positions taken in the debate on whether or not dispositions are essential to their bearers*:

Dispositional Essentialism: Dispositions are the 'what it is to be' for the objects that have them and the existence of these objects is conditional upon their having these dispositions. An object having different dispositions than the ones it does is therefore impossible. Thus, different laws of nature, different objects. (Bird, Ellis & Lierse, Marcus)

Dispositional InEssentialism: Dispositions are contingent aspects of the objects that have them and the existence of these objects is not conditional upon their having these dispositions. An object having different dispositions than the ones it does is possible. Thus, different laws of nature do not imply different objects. (Armstrong, Lewis)

Now, importantly, the debate about dispositional essentialism is a debate about so-called fundamental entities; those 'natural' objects of scientific enquiry - quarks, leptons and electrons. The exemplar question is something like 'Is it possible for an electron to attract another electron'? - ie. could the dispositional nature of an electron have been different?

For the dispositional inessentialist, an electron possibly attracting another electron is accounted for by the fact that the laws of nature are contingent - the 'Contingency Thesis'. And since different laws of nature holding amounts to there being different ways things must act, it is possible that things have different constraints on the way they interact with one another and hence, different dispositional natures.

The problem with this view, I think, have been laid-out fairly successfully by Bird in his Nature's Metaphysics. For one, laws of nature understood as either regularities or nomic-necessitation generalizations both seem untenable; I won't go in to the intricacies here - suffice it to say that regularities supervene, not impose themselves on objects and nomic-necessitiation is seemingly ad hoc logic-chopping. And since an account of dispositional inessentialism entails that the laws of nature are extra-objectual and no such account of laws is plausible, neither is dispositional inessentialism.

Secondly though, and more importantly, is the charge that if the laws of nature are understood as extra-objectual (as I claimed that dispositional inessentialism presupposes), then one must be a quidditivist about properties. That is, one must hold that the dispositional nature of any property is not essential to it. Why is the dispositional inessentialist committed to property quidditivism? Firstly, she is an extra-objectual law theorist - so the laws of nature must determine dispositions, not vice-versa. Secondly, she must accept the following proposition:

(ep) An electron could be a positron.

Now, the dispositional inessentialist will protest: I would not dare say that an electron could be a positron! Rather than accepting (ep), I am making the weaker claim that an electron might have had the disposition to attract other electrons - ie. it could have been positively charged. I am not then, as you are claiming, attempting to make the claim that one kind of entity might have been another fundamentally different kind of entity - surely this is absurd.

But what does the acceptance of (ep) entail? Consider that an electron and positron share all of their structural properties and differ only in the value of their charge. The claim made by (ep) is then not simply that an electron could have had a positive charge. This is because, ex hypothesi, a positron just is an object having all of the structural properties an electron has and being positively charged. So the dispositional inessentialist is committed to (ep) afterall.

You might wonder what accepting (ep) has to do with property quidditivism, since the former concerns entities, the latter properties. But I suggest that the claim that the property 'being negatively charged' might have had the role of attracting negative charges is precisely the mistake that the dispositional inessentialist makes. Why? Because 'repelling negative charges' simply is what it is to be a negative charge. Similarly, 'being negatively charged' simply is what it is to be an electron. So, being a dispositional inessentialist entails the acceptance of (ep). And since (ep) is absurd, so is dispositional inessentialism; and, for that matter, property quidditivism.



*There is another, somewhat middle position that Mumford takes, which I call 'soft dispositional essentialism', according to which objects have their dispositions essentially, but their dispositions are relative to a world. Under soft dispositional essentialism, it is possible for an object to have different dispositions, but not different world-indexed dispositions. This account preserves the Contingency Thesis and dispositional essentialism, but is ultimately unacceptable. In short, it can't be claimed that an object such as an electron has different world-indexed dispositions since, as I suggest, what it is to be an electron is to have a particular dispositional nature. Therefore, any object with a different dispositional nature is conceptually barred from being an electron and so no electron could have different dispositions than the ones it does.

On 'The Limits of Contingency' & Metaphysical Possibility

An article by Gideon Rosen entitled 'The Limits of Contingency' recently peaked my interest. Rosen makes an interesting distinction between two conceptions of metaphysical possibility - what he calls Standard and Non-Standard. According to the standard conception of metaphysical possibility, a property P is possible for an object x iff P can be possessed by x in a world whose 'form' is the same as the actual world. By form, Rosen means something like the fundamental laws of how objects are composed or how causation goes about - something broadly like 'ontological rules'. According to the non-standard conception of metaphysical possibility, a property P is possible for an object x iff P is logically coherent with the 'what it is to be' of x. That is, only if P does not logically conflict with x's 'individual nature'.

The first thing to notice is that the standard conception requires a certain checking against the conditions of the actual world - a position which I think represents a respectful speculative sobriety. The non-standard version of metaphysical possibility only requires that a property be compatible with the 'nature' of an object and presumably, since an object's nature might very well be intact while it does not exist in the actual world (think Plantingian Essences or Platonic Divine Idea Essences), metaphysical possibility is not constrained by the conditions of the actual world.

I think that the two positions - the standard and non-standard - are, as Rosen claims, very common notions of metaphysical possibility. Those who think that sortals are the de re governors of what is metaphysically possible for an object clearly fall into the non-standard camp, though this seems a rather standard position in modern philosophy. And those who think that metaphysical possibility has something to do with the laws of the actual world will, in most instances, fall into the standard camp; those who do often want to identify metaphysical possibility with physical possibility, broadly construed.

At the risk of being philosophically trite, my sentiments lie with the middle position. In general, I think that the non-standard version is correct - metaphysical possibility must be de re in a significant sense and this sense must have to do with the 'nature' of the object in question. On the other hand, however, the non-standard conception does not appropriately respect the privileged status of actuality - there are no merely possible worlds over which we might peer out and look down upon to inspect the natures of the objects within. Any considerations that we have of this kind - where we think we have real knowledge of the modality of non-existent objects - seem to me to be based solely on our powers of conceptualizing, not on the nature of these objects themselves.

Metaphysical modality, I think, must be about objects and so must also be about their 'definitional natures', but it cannot merely be a matter of logical non-contradiction without consideration of the actual world. On the other hand, it equally cannot concern the 'form' of the actual world, except insofar as 'form' is taken to mean the natures of the objects within it.

On Aristotelian Actualism

Here is an interesting appellation for a philosophical position! The initial question is: how could any philosophical tenet which claimed in any way to be Aristotelian fail to have actualist commitments? Aristotelian Actualism has such commitments in the expected way - this brand of actualism states that there are no de re modal facts about non-actual objects - ala Adams in 'Actualism and Thisness'. I find this claim theoretically sound - if one is an actualist that is. However, interestingly enough, note that even if one is a possibilitist, one still does not grant a modal profile to non-actual objects since, for the counterpart theorist (excepting here Paul perhaps, though I yet find her position to fall back into straight Lewisian counterpart theory), no object in and of itself has any modal features; not just the indexically-picked 'actual' objects of our world - but none simpliciter.

The more important claim of Aristotelian Actualism however, is the following: what is possible might have not been possible - or, put in another way, there are things which are not possible but which might have been possible. This claim stems from the facts that (i)no non-actual object has a modal profile and (ii)which world (and objects therein) is actual is a contingent matter. But if this is the case, how do we secure the modal claims which involve quantification over non-actual objects and their de re character? In his 'In Defense of Aristotelian Actualism', GW Fitch suggests that we use Adams' 'truth-at-a-world' distinction - these objects do not have a modal profile, but if they were actual, they would.

Now, as an actualist, I find the claim of Aristotelian Actualism intuitively plausible. But I do have a certain qualm with it - it must rely on the accessibility relation. I am deeply committed to an S5 system of modal logic wherein what is possible is necessarily possible - and this is something that the Aristotelian Actualist must deny. But must an actualist simpliciter deny it? I think not; Plantinga, to the extent that he is, as he claims, an actualist, accepts an S5 system of logic.

Firstly then, note that the accessibility relation that is said to hold between possible worlds collapses into incoherency when we note that each possible world contains every other in the following sense: what is possible in W is, no matter what world happens to be actual, still possible in W.That is, every possible world, being abstractions from the concrete world, contains facts about every other possible world. So certain facts about some object which exists in W, but not in W2, still are possible 'from' W2, since the object would have existed were W actual - and there are, furthermore, definitive facts about that object's existence in W2. So, the tenet that Aristotelian Actualism holds which rests upon the accessibility relation is incoherent because any object that is a possible existent is a possible existent 'from' any possible world; admittedly, there is a certain sense according to which certain objects are not possible from certain possible worlds, but this is not possibility per se, but rather some attenuated form of physical possibility.

How can one be an actualist and yet claim that there are certain de re facts about non-actual object? Well, firstly, I think that an actualist has a strong commitment to the denial of non-actual objects. But I also think that the actualist ought to have an equally strong commitment to the sufficiency of the concrete world to provide the basis for any and every object which might exist - that the furniture of the concrete world is large enough to seat any and all modal profiles of any possibly existing objects. This being said, I agree with the Aristotelian Actualist that there are no, as Mondadori puts is, distinct possibilities for non-actual (read: non-existing) objects, but I do not agree that when these objects come into existence, something is made possible which was not already so. Non-actual objects do have full modal profiles, but they are simply not 'present' in the concrete world.

This is the intuition behind the claim that, if these objects were actual, they would have such and such modal profiles. In other words, there is a definitive fact about non-actual object's modal characters, but it is a fact which is yet to obtain. There are, as Adams might put the matter, no propositions with them as constituents, but there would be a definitive set of such propositions, should they come into existence.

In short, I agree with Aristotelian Actualism to the extent that it claims that de re modal characters are applicable only to actual objects and that all other possibility claims about non-actual objects are merely 'generic'. But I do not agree that, had some other world been actual, and some other set of objects actual, that there would be things possible that were not previously. Rather, these de re distinct possibilities were always possible, since the objects themselves were always so, but they are now 'attainable' on account of them being present in the concrete world.

Why (Lewisian) Modal Realism is Absurd

There are of course, the obvious objections - my personal favorite being the 'Humphrey' objection - also known as the 'irrelevant' objection. This is the familiar charge that, even if physically robust counterparts did exist in other spatio-temporally distant worlds, their existence and the properties they possess have no bearings on the existence of objects in this (read: 'our') world - more specifically, that their properties say nothing of the de re modal character of objects in this world; thus we might less affectionately call it the 'Who Cares?' objection.

Consider a further, related objection - what I like to call the 'depravity' objection. First, consider that modal realists, ala Lewis, refuse to grant transworld relational properties - something which, if granted, would at least secure some bind between counterparts; a bind which might plausibly be construed as parasitic in some modally important sense. Secondly, objects in any world have no properties which bespeak any sort of de re modality. There is nothing in the nature of an object, in and of itself, which is modal in character.

This of course stems from the fact that the project of the modal realist is, perhaps contrary to its name, to provide a reductive account of modality. The reduction is supposed to be (qualitatively) economical, where a de re fact about an object just is a quantification over a qualitatively similar object in another world. But that's not all - the modal realist takes himself to have reduced modality tout court. What need is there for modality when we have infinite amounts of worlds, all as concrete as our own with which to quantify over?

But, unfortunately, this is a case of theft over honest toil, and though it perhaps has advantages, it yet cannot accomplish its goal. For the modal realist must have as many worlds to secure all possibility and no more possible worlds as to admit impossibility - that is, he must have modal intuitions which are guiding his theoretical posits. Implicit modality anyone?

It gets worse when we ask: what are the rules for deciding whether or not such a certain world exists? The answer, of course, is that all of its parts (or 'members') must be compossible with one another. But how is this possibility explained? Surely not by reference to counterparts, lest there be no grounding for any world whatsoever. So, here we are again - back to primitive modality. And, unfortunately, to a modality-laden theory which grounds an attempt to explain away modality.

De Dicto Propositions Are Grounded in Concepts and De Re Propositions Are Grounded in Objects

On the contrary, Forbes' In Defense of Absolute Essentialism: Necessary propositions of a de dicto form are necessary on account of de re facts about the objects which are constituents in the proposition - namely, the subject and predicates. So de re modality is fundamental, but de dicto is not therefore ranging over merely statements, rather it expresses de re modality in a different manner. Forbes states, "...even in simple de dicto neccesities, the source of the necessity is to be found in the properties to which the predicates of the de dicto truth refer" and, accordingly, "I deny that the source of de dicto necessity is in concepts."

I reply, though we may speak of the "properties" of the square and of right angles being the ground for such a de dicto truth, these are not objects and they are neither actual nor existents - they are objects and properties merely in conceptu. For any particular square, it is true, it will have right angles as a result of its own particular nature and its de re character. But this does not change the fact that the necessity of the proposition 'a square has right angles' is grounded in the concepts 'square' and 'right angle', not in any particular square or any particular right angles - and therefore, not in a de re fashion. This is why Leibniz stated in a letter to von Hessen-Rheinfels that "...we must philosophize differently about the notion of an individual substance than we do about the specific notion of a sphere".

On the other hand, perhaps it is the case that de re statements just are expressions of de dicto statements and therefore all modality is founded in conceptu. For a property P to be necessary to an object x just is for the proposition "if x has a certain set S of properties, x will have P" to be logically necessary. So, in the end, modality in the end is founded in and depends on dicta.

I reply that though such entailments might express necessary statements of de dicto modality, this does nothing to reduce de re modality. For this de dicto truth is truly founded in the de re character of the objects in question. S entailing P necessarily speaks of the modal character of the properties of S and the nature of x. For x must be such that it is able to posses all of the properties which are members of S and each property in S must be capable of being compresent with the others. There is then de re modality in both of these aspects - since presumably not all objects that have S will have to have P and not all properties are compossible with one another. These de re truths might have some de dicto translation but it is, at any rate, secondary and supervenient with respect to them.

Concretism and Abstractionism: Grounds of Possibility

What exactly is the character of possible worlds and, more importantly, whence the ground of possibility for objects?

There are essentially two paths one might take of the character of possible worlds: concretism and abstractionism. The concretist, ala Lewis, understands possible worlds to be maximal collocations of spatio-temporally related objects. The abstractionist, ala Adams or Plantinga, understands possible worlds to be maximally consistent sets of propositions or states-of-affairs. Notice then that the abstractionist holds that there are two sorts of things in the Universe (where the term 'Universe' means the entirety of reality) - possible worlds and a concrete world to which these possible worlds might 'match-up'.

So, the concretist believes that all worlds are, so to speak, on the same playing field - each is just as 'real' as every other; hence the concretist's inherent commitment to an indexical analysis of actuality. The abstractionist however, believes that one possible world is privileged - only one world happens to match-up to the concrete world; of course, concretists have no need to have anything 'match-up' to anything else.

What then are these two conceptions' respective theories of the foundation of de re possibility? The concretists founds the de re possibilities of an object in its counterparts - those objects in different possible worlds which are qualitatively similar to the object in question. What makes it possible that an object x have a property P (one which it doesn't actually possess) is the fact that y, a qualitatively similar (but necessarily distinct) object existing in another possible world actually does have P.

The abstractionist, on the other hand, founds the de re possibilities of an object in a proposition which expresses a state of affairs containing the object actually possessing the property in question. What makes it possible that x possess P is that there (necessarily) exists a proposition which is part of a possible world of the form 'x has P'. This proposition being a part of a possible world just means, as Plantinga states, that if this possible world were actual (that is, if it did in fact match-up to the concrete world) then it would be the case that x would have P.

Now, although I think that there are plenty of problems for either view of possible worlds - I want to point out two pertinent ones here which I think go directly against our intuitional common sense.

The first is, why should we agree that the fact that some other object, wholly distinct from x and only related to it by way of it being merely qualitatively similar to it in certain respects, in virtue of it standing in some closed spatio-temporal relation to some other objects in another fully concrete world has any say whatsoever in the de re possibilities of x? The question is not the familiar objection to counterpart theory - namely "What's he got to do with me?" (though I think this is a valid and pertinent objection). Rather, the question is - what has concreteness and qualitative similarity in a counterpart have to do with grounding modal facts about objects?

Secondly, concerning abstractionism, why should we agree that a proposition in a 'Platonic Heaven' has any fundamental role in determining which things are possible for an object and which are not? The abstractionist seems to me rather to have things the wrong way around - it is the objects in the concrete world and their dispositional properties therein which ground whether or not there exist such propositions expressing states of affairs wherein they possess some certain property.

Besides this, why should we agree, with the abstractionist, that propositions which do not match-up with the concrete world even exist in any form whatsoever? Now, Plantinga certainly has independent motivation for holding this brand of abstractionism - his actualism entails, he thinks, the need to have an 'essence' which grounds the fact that there are propositions about non-existent individuals. But I am inclined to think, with Adams, that there are no singular propositions about non-actual individuals - these propositions supervene on actual existents. And I am also therefore inclined to think that propositions about an object x possessing a property P 'exist', but not, as it were, pre-objectually or extra-objectually.

The Plague of Predicative Essentialism

I can't accept any theory that posits the essence of an object to be comprised of, or reducible to a set of properties.

The essence of an object is that from which all the properties of an object flow.

The following is an appropriate picture: An infinite amount of essences exist, none differing solo numero and all being in the company of one another. Their being present to one another results in each of them contributing to a relational situs wherein each of the essences exhibit some set of characteristics resulting from the relationship of it to every other essence in its presence. Each essence is, in virtue of its particular relationship to every other object, clothed in a certain quiddity comprised of a total set of properties. Objects are hylomorphic - equally essence and properties, haecceity and suchness, non-qualitative and qualitative, individual and communal, non-relational and relational.

Any account wherein properties are considered primitive must view the essence of an object as ineffectually inactive or else a derivative entity. But such an account cannot explain how these properties can be their own de re foundation or how they can set a non-trivial limit to and specification of the property possession of an object. In short, the effects of primitivising properties is that all investigation of the nature of objects must be left to logical analysis. Possibility will be nothing more than non-contradiction between the predicates of an object and the predicates comprising some conceptual context. Necessity will be merely the impossibility of non-contradiction between the predicates of an object and the predicates comprising some conceptual context. But diamonds and boxes are only conceptual aids.

Real possibility flows from the essence of an object - it declares a property possible just in case the property is compossible with every other property in some conceptual context and there is some property that the object has from which, if it were to be included in this context,it would follow that the property in question would be exemplified. This is the real character of Leibnizian worlds - one which respects the pregnancy of properties with determinate properties founded in the relationship of the 'concept' of the object in respect to every other object.