Colin asked:

What is the definition of ‘definition’?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Ah, what a great question! I don’t recall anyone asking this (going back to when Ask a Philosopher was launched in 1999). However, earlier this year in an answer to a question on the difference between ‘real’ and ‘nominal’ definitions, Hubertus Fremerey states:

“My definition of ‘definition’ would be: A method of bringing some order into the boundless chaos of experiences — sensual and intellectual.”

This is a nice idea, but to my ear falls short of the requirements of a definition. Fremerey goes on to say:

“The whole concept of ‘real definition’ is a misnomer, and even ‘nominal definition’ is. What you have as primary givens are experiences, and then you first attach labels to them and if needed you re-define the (sensual or rational) objects in the context of a theory.”

This is Fremerey’s ‘take’ on the question. A take isn’t a definition, although the way you take something can be relevant to formulating a definition. A case could be made that when analytic philosophers ‘define’ concepts (the concept of a person, or causation, or event, or etc.) what they are really doing is offering takes or theories. What they are looking for is an insightful view of the concept in question and how it fits in to our conceptual scheme.

A notorious case would be the fruitless attempt to define ‘knowledge’, with ever more elaborate sets of conditions, designed to cope with every possible counterexample. A theory of knowledge is what one is after, but a theory doesn’t necessarily require that you give a set of conditions that uniquely identify the concept in question.

So let’s narrow the question and concentrate on definitions rather than theories. A definition of a term should give you sufficient information to be able to use that term successfully and correctly, provided only that you understand the terms used in the definition. The Oxford English Dictionary (‘on Historical Principles’) is a model of this approach, which offers examples of the use of the word in question, especially early or first uses, as well as a sketch of its etymology.

A popular question in English-speaking philosophy in the 50s or 60s would have been, ‘What is the difference between a philosophical analysis and a dictionary definition?’ Now that I know how, e.g., the English word ‘person’ is used in normal conversation, its derivation from the Latin ‘persona’, what more do I need to grasp the concept of a person?

Let’s stick with this example. Suppose that the predicted breakthroughs in AI come to pass, and the first intelligent creatures with artificial brains roll of the production line. Are they persons? Whom should you ask, a philosopher or a lexicographer?

Imagine a future dystopian society where AI creatures are exploited and abused because they are not regarded as ‘persons’ by the general public despite the objections of philosophers. Or, alternatively, a society which happily embraces these mechanical beings into the ‘human race’ despite the objections of philosophers. A lexicographer is interested in how a thing is regarded, without questioning too hard the basis for the belief in question. The philosopher is the one who asks, ‘But is it really?’

As stated above, the philosopher may only be able to offer a take, not a definition. But a take can be sufficient to defeat a false definition.

What is a definition of ‘definition’? There is more than one kind of definition. I have given two, for the sake of contrast, but there are probably more (consider, e.g. the use of definition in mathematics). If there are two kinds of definition, then there are two (or possibly four!) definitions of ‘definition’, and if there are three, then etc. The point, however, is to decide what kind of definition we (as philosophers) are primarily interested in.

 

Jasbir asked:

What are the strengths and weaknesses of logical determinism?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

A typical philosophy instructor’s question. You take any theory or view X, and then tack on, ‘What are the strengths and weaknesses of…’ without any thought to whether or not it makes sense to ask that question in the case of this particular X.

Logical determinism is not a thesis, theory or claim — true or false — although it appears to be one. Today, as I write this answer, it is Thursday. Let’s say that tomorrow, Friday, either Britain will declare war on Germany or it is not the case that Britain will declare war on Germany. It is not important how probable or improbable the two alternatives are. We can state, as a matter of logical necessity, that there is no other possibility. One of these two alternatives must be the case.

‘So what?’ you may very well ask. Have I given you any important information? No. One cannot deny the law of excluded middle ‘P or not-P’ without self-contradiction. It is irrelevant what proposition one substitutes for ‘P’ — whether, for example it is a past or future tense statement — the result is the same. If you exhaust all the possibilities then you exhaust all the possibilities. Nothing else is possible.

The reason for taking an interest in logical determinism is the false belief that it entails fatalism. If it is true that tomorrow Britain will declare war on Germany, then even if Germany agrees to all Britain’s demands and pays an extra 100 billion Euros to sweeten the deal, Britain will declare war on Germany. If it is true that tomorrow Britain will declare war on Germany, then even if a giant meteorite destroys the Earth before midnight, Britain will declare war on Germany.

Obviously, this is just silly.

Somehow, implicitly — and illicitly — a further move has been made that makes the claim ‘P or not-P’ seem to say more than it actually does say. The thought goes something like this. When I consider the statement, ‘Britain will declare war on Germany’ I am picturing a possible fact, that either exists or it doesn’t exist. The fact is ‘out there’, in the future, waiting to happen, one way or the other, like a statue waiting for the unveiling ceremony. It is as if the future history of the universe is written indelibly in marble or granite, just waiting to be revealed.

That is just a picture in the fatalist’s head. It has no meaning beyond that.

Let’s say that a row over the EU is boiling over, to the point where it is looking increasingly likely that Britain will declare war on Germany. War seems inevitable. Yet there is still the possibility that it can be averted. Britain’s declaration of war won’t be a fact until it happens. If you say, ‘Either war will be declared or not,’ you are not saying anything. If you say, ‘The decision is a fact now, which nothing can alter or prevent,’ then you are making a false metaphysical statement.

 

Carla asked:

What’s the difference between Naturalism and Materialism?

Answer by Danny Krämer

That question just jumped onto me. Here is my attempt to answer it. The easy part is materialism: Materialism is a position in ontology that states, that everything there is is matter. Of cause now you have to explain what you mean by matter and how some objects that make always trouble – like the mind, numbers, values – can be material. You can be a reductive materialist. That means, you reduce non-material things to material things. For example, you reduce mental events to physical events in the brain. But you can also be a non-reductive materialist. That means, you still believe that everything is matter but that you will not reduce mental talk to physical talk. A mental event, for example, is then not just a brain state but the brain state plus some external properties like its origin.

Now it is true that most of the naturalists are materialists. But modern naturalism was introduced by Willard van Orman Quine as an epistemological thesis. He said, ‘There is no first philosophy.’ That means we do not need philosophy to justifiy our scientific practice – as for example Descartes wanted to do. All we need to know something about the world is science. If we ask what exists, we should ask what our best scientific theories postulate. This is an epistemological point. But it has ontological consequences. When we ask our sciences what exists we get first of all the answer of physics. There are fields or particles and basically everything is made out of it. And then you have to do your ontological homework as mentioned in the last paragraph.

But a naturalist need not be a materialist. Actually, he is forced to give up materialism if there is good scientific reason to. If we would gather scientific evidence that there is another substance than matter then the naturalist must abandon his belief that everything is made of matter.

 

John Smith asked:

If abstract objects are non-causal and human brains are just physical objects how are we able to know about things like numbers, sets, ethical properties, etc.?

Suppose at t1 I do not know about some abstract object x, then at t2 I come to know about x through intuition or whatever method for acquiring non-inferential knowledge of abstract objects the anti-nominalist has in mind. How exactly is X not causal, if it can bring about changes in the physical world; e.g. in my brain?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

A meaty question in metaphysics. I could see this in quotes followed by ‘Discuss’ on a Sheffield University BA Metaphysics exam paper. (I once gave a Metaphysics course at Sheffield, although this would not an exam question I would have personally chosen.)

By a remarkable coincidence, you share your name with the philosopher and theologian John Smith (1618-1652) who along with Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Benjamin Whichcote formed a group of Plotinus enthusiasts who were known as the ‘Cambridge Platonists’. This is relevant to your question, which concerns the platonist-nominalist debate, still in various guises a live topic among contemporary analytic philosophers.

One thing often lacking, unfortunately, in the analytic approach is a sense of history, so I am going to sketch briefly what it means to be a Platonist — a true Platonist rather than someone who merely dislikes the ‘nominalist’ idea that the physical world of concrete particulars is all that really exists, everything else being a more or less artificial ‘construction’.

When we talk about ‘numbers, sets and ethical properties’ we are not really referring to any entity, according to the nominalist. There is nothing ‘out there’ beyond the physical realm for our words to ‘name’. These are just words that we use according to rules.

As you correctly note, causality is the crucial notion. But how do you know that causality necessarily involves physical objects or events? That’s something that Plato would have strongly denied.

In a seminal article ‘Causation in Perception’ (in ‘Freedom and Resentment’ 1974), P.F. Strawson makes the case for a necessary link between perception and causation which does not involve the traditional, and questionable Lockean idea of a causal link between public ‘things’ in the world and private ‘ideas’ in the mind. It is essential to perception, Strawson argued, that there are ways and means by which we come to perceive objects, that, for example, perception requires light, and that it can be distorted or obstructed by things getting in the way.

Plato, in his dialogue Phaedo makes the remarkable claim that the soul is ‘akin’ to the Forms, as one of his arguments for the existence of a non-physical soul. We could not have, e.g. the idea of equality (the Form of Equals) if our soul was not of a similar nature as the Forms. There has to be a causal link there, albeit a non-physical kind of causality. In the Republic, he tells a story about how the philosopher comes to know the Form of the Good, which like the sun in the physical world provides the necessary illumination by means of which the other Forms are perceived by the soul.

Goodness plays a crucial role here, because ‘virtue’ as Plato conceives it just is aligning our souls with the order of the universe, which necessarily involves right action because you could not know, e.g. the Form of Justice without being motivated to act justly. Wrong action is a form of misalignment of the soul, obstructing intellectual perception of the Forms.

Contemporary ‘platonists’ so-called (with a small ‘p’) won’t have any of that. They may or may not think that ‘ethical properties’ are real (you can be a platonist about mathematics and a subjectivist or nihilist about ethics). Gottlob Frege (whom I mentioned in a previous answer) strongly believed that numbers ‘exist’ in their own right, despite giving, in his brilliant Foundations of Arithmetic (1984), an effective recipe for parsing away reference to numbers in favour of the logic of quantification.

So what was Frege’s story about ‘intuition’ or ‘perception’? He was a mathematician, and like many mathematicians could testify to the powerful experience of ‘seeing’ logical and numerical relationships. Unlike computers, human beings rely on their capacity for ‘vision’. Is this just metaphor? What is its cash value?

I don’t have any problem with saying that numbers are real, nor do I feel the need to ‘define’ them in terms of some other abstract objects such as sets. A number is what it is and not another thing (if you go down the definitional route you are faced with more or less arbitrary choices, so why bother?).

Are tables and chairs real? They are and they’re not. Lacking Locke’s ‘microscopical eyes’ we are forced see aggregations of atoms and molecules as single ‘objects’, which they are not ‘really’. But then neither are atoms, etc.

Why not just say, that anything you can talk about has the kind of ‘reality’ that is appropriate for the thing in question. Corresponding to this, there are any number of different notions of causality. We chunk things in different ways according to the topic. Causality and perception are everywhere and at every level (you can ‘perceive’ with the aid of an electron microscope). There is such a thing as intellectual perception, even if it does not have the metaphysical baggage that traditional Platonists or Neoplatonists gave it.

Is there no solid ground for our conceptual scheme? Why does there need to be? When Ronnie O’Sullivan strikes the white snooker ball with his cue so as to pocket the red into the center pocket, then ricochet off the black to come back into the perfect position for the next shot, his action has ’caused’ this to happen, through his exquisitely refined judgement that has no correlate in the mechanics of rebounding snooker balls. You will look in vain for an explanation on the level of physics — the ‘causation’ isn’t there, or rather there are too many ’causes’ and ‘effects’ but none of them are relevant in explaining what just took place at the snooker table.

 

Aslam asked:

Existence of God in Islam.

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

Ignoring the fact that this isn’t a question, or a statement, I shall treat this as an invitation to consider, from a philosophical standpoint, what it means to assert the existence of God within the monotheistic tradition of Islam, comparing this with Christian and Judaic teaching.

You can’t talk about the existence of God without making some claim about God’s nature. ‘God’ is just a word, until you give some account of why this word is so important to you.

An observing Jew will never write the word I have just put down as it breaks the 4th Commandment. ‘Adonai’ is not the name of God but a marker indicating something that one is forbidden to name.

I have personally seen Protestant demonstrators at the revered Catholic shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham, waving placards saying ‘Idolators!’ and accusations of a similar nature.

However, the 3rd Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make any graven images’ is taken most seriously and literally in Islam. The prohibition extends to the Prophet, and has incited murder in the streets of Paris.

What to make of this? Evidently, the entity in question is something tremendous, so awe-inspiring that it is at least questionable whether one is permitted even to name it or represent it in any form whatsoever.

Writing 500 years before the Common Era, the Greek Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes — possibly influenced by the filtering through of the Hebrew tradition as a result of the vast increase in trade in that region — was the first philosopher in the Western tradition to put forward an a priori argument for a singular deity.

The Greek ‘gods’ were too much like human beings in their quarrels and arrogance to be worthy of worship, remarked Xenophanes. To allow even two ‘gods’ would be to limit the power of each because they would first have to agree a course of action before doing anything. According to Xenophanes, the one deity does not require physical force to act, as earth-bound beings or even the gods on Olympus do. ‘He shakes all things by the thought of his mind.’

Abraham, working in his father’s idol business, came to a similar conclusion. Although perhaps in his case it was not philosophical argument but just disgust at the absurdity of bowing down before a piece of granite.

Then again, it all depends on what role this object is playing in your belief system, what exactly it is that you think you are doing, or whom you are addressing. Why do you look to the sky when you address the Lord, or Allah, or Adonai? Isn’t God everywhere?

It’s pretty clear that whatever human beings do, however they express their religious beliefs, what they are looking for is something sufficiently elevated to be worthy of worship. The best argument I have seen for belief in God is that if you don’t worship God, then you will make a ‘god’ out of something else, something more mundane, something absurd, an idol.

As an atheist, the argument leaves me unmoved, but I grasp its sense. All the evidence seems to show that the human race is still in its infancy. We cannot get by without ‘worshipping’ something. If not God, then iPhones or Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’. Why? Why the need to bow down? I don’t have an answer to that question.