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 Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Introduction to Metaphysics

Chapter 2 - Teleology

Chapter 3 - Philosophy of Mind

Chapter 4 - Free Will

Chapter 5 - Problem of Universals

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Chapter 6 - Ontology

Chapter 7 - Action Theory (Philosophy) and Abstract Object

Chapter 8 - Category of Being

Chapter 9 - Universal and Unobservable

Chapter 10 - Existence

Chapter 11 - Motion (Physics)

Chapter 12 - Physical Body and Substance Theory

Chapter 13 - Concept

Chapter 14 - Essence

Chapter 15 - Experience

Chapter 16 - Idea

Chapter 17 - Intelligence

Chapter 18 - Memetics

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Chapter 1

Introduction to Metaphysics

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental

nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally,
metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:

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1. "What is there?"
2. "What is it like?"

A person who studies metaphysics would be called either a metaphysicist or a

metaphysician. The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which
people understand the world, including existence, the definition of object, property,
space, time, causality, and possibility.

A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into the basic categories of
being and how they relate to each other.

Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of
metaphysics known as natural philosophy. The term science itself meant "knowledge" of,
originating from epistemology. The scientific method, however, transformed natural
philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment unlike the rest of
philosophy. By the end of the 18th century, it had begun to be called "science" to
distinguish it from philosophy. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical enquiry of
a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.

Etymology
The word "metaphysics" derives from the Greek words μετά (metá) ("beyond" or "after")
and φυσικά (physiká) ("physics"). It was first used as the title for several of Aristotle's
works, because they were usually anthologized after the works on physics in complete
editions. The prefix meta- ("beyond") indicates that these works come "after" the chapters
on physics. However, Aristotle himself did not call the subject of these books
"Metaphysics": he referred to it as "first philosophy." The editor of Aristotle's works,
Andronicus of Rhodes, is thought to have placed the books on first philosophy right after
another work, Physics, and called them τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ βιβλία (ta meta ta physika
biblia) or "the books that come after the [books on] physics". This was misread by Latin
scholiasts, who thought it meant "the science of what is beyond the physical".

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However, once the name was given, the commentators sought to find intrinsic reasons for
its appropriateness. For instance, it was understood to mean "the science of the world
beyond nature (phusis in Greek)," that is, the science of the immaterial. Again, it was
understood to refer to the chronological or pedagogical order among our philosophical
studies, so that the "metaphysical sciences would mean, those that we study after having
mastered the sciences that deal with the physical world" (St. Thomas Aquinas, "In Lib,
Boeth. de Trin.", V, 1).

There is a widespread use of the term in current popular literature, which replicates this
error, i.e. that metaphysical means spiritual non-physical: thus, "metaphysical healing"
means healing by means of remedies that are not physical.

History

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The first known philosopher, according to Aristotle, is Thales of Miletus. He taught that
all things derive from a single first cause or Arche (origin or beginning), and that this first
cause was in fact moisture, frequently translated "water." Thales also taught that the
world is harmonious, has a harmonious structure, and thus is intelligible to rational
understanding.

Other Miletians, such as Anaximander and Anaximenes, also had a monistic conception
of the first cause.

Parmenides of Elea held that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and
motion, are illusory. The true underlying reality is that “all is one”. From this concept of
a single unitary Being, Parmenides went on to say that non-Being is logically impossible,
and therefore change is in fact impossible. In spite of these counter-intuitive claims,
Parmenides is considered one of the founders of metaphysics, because he introduced the
method of basing claims about appearances on a logical concept of Being.

Scientific questions in ancient Greece were addressed to metaphysicians, but by the 18th
century, the skeptics' How do you know? led to a new branch of philosophy called
epistemology (how we know) to fill-out the metaphysics (what we know) and this led to
science (Latin to know) and to the scientific method (whose precision is still being
debated). Skepticism evolved epistemology out of metaphysics. Thereafter, metaphysics
denoted philosophical inquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.

Metaphysics as a discipline was a central part of academic inquiry and scholarly

education even before the age of Aristotle, who considered it "the Queen of Sciences." Its
issues were considered no less important than the other main formal subjects of physical
science, medicine, mathematics, poetics and music. Since the beginning of modern
philosophy during the seventeenth century, problems that were not originally considered
within the bounds of metaphysics have been added to its purview, while other problems
considered metaphysical for centuries are now typically subjects of their own separate
regions in philosophy, such as philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of
perception, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.

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In some cases, subjects of metaphysical scholarship have been found to be entirely
physical and natural, thus making them part of science proper (cf. the theory of
Relativity).

Aristotle's branching

Aristotle's Metaphysics was divided into three parts, which are now regarded as the
proper branches of traditional Western metaphysics:

Ontology
The study of Being and existence; includes the definition and classification of
entities, physical or mental, the nature of their properties, and the nature of
change.
Natural Theology

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The study of a God or Gods; involves many topics, including among others the
nature of religion and the world, existence of the divine, questions about Creation,
and the numerous religious or spiritual issues that concern humankind in general.
Universal science
The study of first principles, which Aristotle believed were the foundation of all
other inquiries. An example of such a principle is the law of noncontradiction and
the status it holds in non-paraconsistent logics.

Universal science or first philosophy treats of "being qua being"—that is, what is basic to
all science before one adds the particular details of any one science. Essentially "being
qua being" may be translated as "being insofar as being goes" or as "being in terms of
being." This includes topics such as causality, substance, species and elements, as well as
the notions of relation, interaction, and finitude.

Central questions
Most positions that can be taken with regards to any of the following questions are
endorsed by one or another notable philosopher. It is often difficult to frame the questions
in a non-controversial manner.

Empirical and Conceptual Objects

Objects and their properties

The world seems to contain many individual things, both physical, like apples, and
abstract such as love and the number 3; the former objects are called particulars.
Particulars are said to have attributes, e.g. size, shape, color, location and two particulars
may have some such attributes in common. Such attributes, are also termed Universals or
Properties; the nature of these, and whether they have any real existence and if so of what
kind, is a long-standing issue, realism and nominalism representing opposing views.

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Metaphysicians concerned with questions about universals or particulars are interested in
the nature of objects and their properties, and the relationship between the two. Some,
e.g. Plato, argue that properties are abstract objects, existing outside of space and time, to
which particular objects bear special relations. David Armstrong holds that universals
exist in time and space but only at their instantiation and their discovery is a function of
science. Others maintain that what particulars are a bundle or collection of properties
(specifically, a bundle of properties they have).

Abstract objects and mathematics

Some philosophers endorse views according to which there are abstract objects such as
numbers, or Universals. (Universals are properties that can be instantiated by multiple
objects, such as redness or squareness.) Abstract objects are generally regarded as being
outside of space and time, and/or as being causally inert. Mathematical objects and

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fictional entities and worlds are often given as examples of abstract objects. The view
that there really are no abstract objects is called nominalism. Realism about such objects
is exemplified by Platonism. Other positions include moderate realism, as espoused by
Aristotle, and conceptualism.

The philosophy of mathematics overlaps with metaphysics because some positions are
realistic in the sense that they hold that mathematical objects really exist, whether
transcendentally, physically, or mentally. Platonic realism holds that mathematical
entities are a transcendent realm of non-physical objects. The simplest form of mathe-
matical empiricism claims that mathematical objects are just ordinary physical objects,
i.e. that squares and the like physically exist. Plato rejected this view, among other
reasons, because geometrical figures in mathematics have a perfection that no physical
instantiation can capture. Modern mathematicians have developed many strange and
complex mathematical structures with no counterparts in observable reality, further
undermining this view. The third main form of realism holds that mathematical entities
exist in the mind. However, given a materialistic conception of the mind, it does not have
the capacity to literally contain the many infinities of objects in mathematics.
Intuitionism, inspired by Kant, sticks with the idea that "there are no non-experienced
mathematical truths". This involves rejecting as intuitionistically unacceptable anything
that cannot be held in the mind or explicitly constructed. Intuitionists reject the law of the
excluded middle and are suspicious of infinity, particularly of transfinite numbers.

Other positions such as formalism and fictionalism that do not attribute any existence to
mathematical entities are anti-realist.

Cosmology and cosmogony

Metaphysical Cosmology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the world as the
totality of all phenomena in space and time. Historically, it has had quite a broad scope,
and in many cases was founded in religion. The ancient Greeks did not draw a distinction
between this use and their model for the cosmos. However, in modern times it addresses
questions about the Universe beyond the scope of physical science. It is distinguished

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from religious cosmology in that it approaches these questions using philosophical
methods (e.g. dialectics). Cosmogony deals specifically with the origin of the universe.

Modern metaphysical cosmology and cosmogony try to address questions such as:

• What is the origin of the Universe? What is its first cause? Is its existence
necessary?
• What are the ultimate material components of the Universe?
• What is the ultimate reason for the existence of the Universe? Does the cosmos
have a purpose?

Determinism and free will

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human

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cognition, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior
occurrences. It holds that no random, spontaneous, stochastic, mysterious, or miraculous
events occur. The principal consequence of the deterministic claim is that it poses a
challenge to the existence of free will.

The problem of free will is the problem of whether rational agents exercise control over
their own actions and decisions. Addressing this problem requires understanding the
relation between freedom and causation, and determining whether the laws of nature are
causally deterministic. Some philosophers, known as Incompatibilists, view determinism
and free will as mutually exclusive. If they believe in determinism, they will therefore
believe free will to be an illusion, a position known as Hard Determinism. Proponents
range from Baruch Spinoza to Ted Honderich.

Others, labeled Compatibilists (or "Soft Determinists"), believe that the two ideas can be
coherently reconciled. Adherents of this view include Thomas Hobbes and many modern
philosophers.

Incompatibilists who accept free will but reject determinism are called Libertarians, a
term not to be confused with the political sense. Robert Kane is a modern defender of this
theory.

It is believed that determinism necessarily entails that humanity or individual humans

have no influence on the future and its events (a position known as Fatalism).
Determinists believe a human being's future depends on present and past events beyond
the individual's influence.

Quantum physics
Proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics believe that
Determinism was proven incorrect with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which
states that certain corresponding physical quantities (such as position and momentum,
energy and time, eigenstates of spin in non-parallel directions) cannot be determined

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simultaneously to an arbitrarily small error. For example, the more precisely a particle's
position is measured, the less precisely one can know its momentum from the same
measurement. If the momentum is more precisely measured to account for this, the
uncertainty in the position will rise. This counter-intuitive result is a consequence of the
wave-like behavior of subatomic particles. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is thus a
statement providing an inverse correlation between the uncertainties of certain corres-
ponding measurements.

This line of reasoning has led physicists to develop Quantum field theory and use the
"wave function" to describe physical systems. While differential equations govern the
evolution of the wave function, the wave function itself only specifies the probability of
an event to be measured. Thus, while the evolution of the wave function is deterministic,
the history of a particle is not. The widely held view amongst physicists regards the
apparent determinism of Newtonian dynamics, for example, as the limiting behavior of
inherently probabilistic phenomena. Classical physics is then considered a convenient

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and sufficiently accurate description of nature only at macroscopic scales. A large enough
scale is usually thought of as much larger than the Compton wavelength of the object
considered.

Alternative interpretations of quantum theory, such as de Broglie–Bohm theory and

the many-worlds interpretation, provide a deterministic theoretical framework that is
consistent with empirical observation of quantum mechanical phenomena. Notable
physicists, such as Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, never believed that Quantum
Mechanics was a fundamental theory. Einstein is famous for believing that while
Quantum Mechanics provided good experimental predictions, it should ultimately be
replaced with a deterministic theory that could account for the seemingly probabilistic
nature of the atomic regime. In a letter to Max Born, Einstein wrote, "Quantum
mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real
thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old
one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice." This quote is
commonly paraphrased "God does not play dice" or "God does not play dice with the
universe", and other slight variants.

Though there remains skepticism, there is a scientific consensus that the laws of Quantum
Mechanics correctly describe the universe up to current experimental bounds, and that it
is necessary for the very consistency of the subject that it be probabilistic in nature.

Identity and change

The Greeks took some extreme positions on the nature of change: Parmenides denied that
change occurs at all, while Heraclitus thought change was ubiquitous: "[Y]ou cannot step
into the same river twice".

Identity, sometimes called Numerical Identity, is the relation that a "thing" bears to itself,
and which no "thing" bears to anything other than itself (cf. sameness). According to
Leibniz, if some object x is identical to some object y, then any property that x has, y will

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have as well. However, it seems, too, that objects can change over time. If one were to
look at a tree one day, and the tree later lost a leaf, it would seem that one could still be
looking at that same tree. Two rival theories to account for the relationship between
change and identity are Perdurantism, which treats the tree as a series of tree-stages, and
Endurantism, which maintains that the tree—the same tree—is present at every stage in
its history.

Mind and matter

The nature of matter was a problem in its own right in early philosophy. Aristotle himself
introduced the idea of matter in general to the Western world, adapting the term hyle,
which originally meant "lumber." Early debates centered on identifying a single
underlying principle. Water was claimed by Thales, air by Anaximenes, Apeiron (the
Boundless) by Anaximander, fire by Heraclitus. Democritus, in conjunction with his

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mentor, Leucippus, conceived of an atomic theory many centuries before it was accepted
by modern science. It is worth noting, however, that the grounds necessary to ensure
validity to the proposed theory's veridical nature were not scientific, but just as
philosophical as those traditions espoused by Thales and Anaximander.

The nature of the mind and its relation to the body has been seen as more of a problem as
science has progressed in its mechanistic understanding of the brain and body. Proposed
solutions often have ramifications about the nature of mind as a whole. René Descartes
proposed substance dualism, a theory in which mind and body are essentially different,
with the mind having some of the attributes traditionally assigned to the soul, in the
seventeenth century. This creates a conceptual puzzle about how the two interact (which
has received some strange answers, such as occasionalism). Evidence of a close
relationship between brain and mind, such as the Phineas Gage case, have made this form
of dualism increasingly unpopular.

Another proposal discussing the mind-body problem is idealism, in which the material is
sweepingly eliminated in favor of the mental. Idealists, such as George Berkeley, claim
that material objects do not exist unless perceived and only as perceptions. The "German
idealists" such as Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer took Kant as their starting-point,
although it is debatable how much of an idealist Kant himself was. Idealism is also a
common theme in Eastern philosophy. Related ideas are panpsychism and panex-
perientialism, which say everything has a mind rather than everything exists in a mind.
Alfred North Whitehead was a twentieth-century exponent of this approach.

Idealism is a monistic theory that holds there is a single universal substance or principles.
Neutral monism, associated in different forms with Baruch Spinoza and Bertrand Russell,
seeks to be less extreme than idealism, and to avoid the problems of substance dualism. It
claims that existence consists of a single substance that in itself is neither mental nor
physical, but is capable of mental and physical aspects or attributes – thus it implies a
dual-aspect theory.

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For the last one hundred years, the dominant metaphysics has without a doubt been
materialistic monism. Type identity theory, token identity theory, functionalism,
reductive physicalism, nonreductive physicalism, eliminative materialism, anomalous
monism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism and emergence are just some of the
candidates for a scientifically informed account of the mind. (It should be noted that
while many of these positions are dualisms, none of them are substance dualism.)

Prominent recent philosophers of mind include David Armstrong, Ned Block, David
Chalmers, Patricia and Paul Churchland, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Douglas
Hofstadter, Jerry Fodor, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, John
Smart, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Fred Alan Wolf.

Necessity and possibility

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Metaphysicians investigate questions about the ways the world could have been. David
Lewis, in "On the Plurality of Worlds," endorsed a view called Concrete Modal realism,
according to which facts about how things could have been are made true by other
concrete worlds, just like ours, in which things are different. Other philosophers, such as
Gottfried Leibniz, have dealt with the idea of possible worlds as well. The idea of
necessity is that any necessary fact is true across all possible worlds; that is, we could not
imagine it to be otherwise. A possible fact is true in some possible world, even if not in
the actual world. For example, it is possible that cats could have had two tails, or that any
particular apple could have not existed. By contrast, certain propositions seem necessarily
true, such as analytic propositions, e.g. "All bachelors are unmarried." The particular
example of analytic truth being necessary is not universally held among philosophers. A
less controversial view might be that self-identity is necessary, as it seems fundamentally
incoherent to claim that for any x, it is not identical to itself; this is known as the law of
identity, a putative "first principle". Aristotle describes the principle of non-contradiction,
"It is impossible that the same quality should both belong and not belong to the same
thing . . . This is the most certain of all principles . . . Wherefore they who demonstrate
refer to this as an ultimate opinion. For it is by nature the source of all the other axioms."

Religion and spirituality

Theology is the study of a God or gods and the nature of the divine. Whether there is a
god (monotheism), many gods (polytheism) or no gods (atheism), or whether it is
unknown or unknowable whether any gods exist (agnosticism), and whether the Divine
intervenes directly in the world (theism), or its sole function is to be the first cause of the
universe (deism); these and whether a God or gods and the World are different (as in
panentheism and dualism), or are identical (as in pantheism), are some of the primary
metaphysical questions concerning philosophy of religion.

Within the standard Western philosophical tradition, theology reached its peak under the
medieval school of thought known as scholasticism, which focused primarily on the
metaphysical aspects of Christianity. The work of the scholastics is still an integral part

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of modern philosophy, with key figures such as Thomas Aquinas still playing an
important role in the philosophy of religion.

Space and time

In Book XI of the Confessions, Saint Augustine of Hippo asked the fundamental question
about the nature of time. A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space
have existence apart from the human mind. Idealists, including Kant, claim that space and
time are mental constructs used to organize perceptions, or are otherwise surreal.

Suppose that one is sitting at a table, with an apple in front of him or her; the apple exists
in space and in time, but what does this statement indicate? Could it be said, for example,
that space is like an invisible three-dimensional grid in which the apple is positioned?
Suppose the apple, and all physical objects in the universe, were removed from existence

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entirely. Would space as an "invisible grid" still exist? René Descartes and Leibniz
believed it would not, arguing that without physical objects, "space" would be meanin-
gless because space is the framework upon which we understand how physical objects
are related to each other. Newton, on the other hand, argued for an absolute "container"
space. The pendulum swung back to relational space with Einstein and Ernst Mach.

While the absolute/relative debate, and the realism debate are equally applicable to time
and space, time presents some special problems of its own. The flow of time has been
denied in ancient times by Parmenides and more recently by J. M. E. McTaggart in his
paper The Unreality of Time.

The direction of time, also known as "time's arrow", is also a puzzle, although physics is
now driving the debate rather than philosophy. It appears that fundamental laws are time-
reversible and the arrow of time must be an "emergent" phenomenon, perhaps explained
by a statistical understanding of thermodynamic entropy.

Common-sense tells us that objects persist across time, that there is some sense in which
you are the same person you were yesterday, in which the oak is the same as the acorn, in
which you perhaps even can step into the same river twice. Philosophers have developed
two rival theories for how this happens, called "endurantism" and "perdurantism".
Broadly speaking, endurantists hold that a whole object exists at each moment of its
history, and the same object exists at each moment. Perdurantists believe that objects are
four-dimensional entities made up of a series of temporal parts like the frames of a
movie.

The value and future of metaphysics

A number of individuals have suggested that metaphysics as a whole should be rejected.

David Hume argued with his empiricist principle that all knowledge involves either
relations of ideas or matters of fact:

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If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us
ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it
contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit
it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

However, Hume's assertion may be self-defeating if it itself is not self-evident or

empirically verifiable.

Immanuel Kant prescribed a limited role to the subject and argued against knowledge
progressing beyond the world of our representations, except to knowledge that the
noumena exist:

...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a

position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in

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the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason pp. Bxxvi-xxvii

Proceeding from Kant's statement about antinomy, A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth and
Logic using the verifiability theory of meaning concluded that metaphysical propositions
were neither true nor false but strictly meaningless, as were religious views. However,
Karl Popper argued that metaphysical statements are not meaningless statements, but
rather not fallible, testable or provable statements i.e. neither empirical observations nor
logical arguments could falsify metaphysical statements to show them to be true or false.
Hence, a metaphysical statement usually implies an idea about the world or about the
universe, which may be reasonable but is ultimately not empirically testable.

Rudolf Carnap, in his book Philosophy and Logical Syntax, used the concept of
verifiability to reject metaphysics.

Metaphysicians cannot avoid making their statements nonverifiable, because if they made
them verifiable, the decision about the truth or falsehood of their doctrines would depend
upon experience and therefore belong to the region of empirical science. This con-
sequence they wish to avoid, because they pretend to teach knowledge which is of a
higher level than that of empirical science. Thus they are compelled to cut all connection
between their statements and experience; and precisely by this procedure they deprive
them of any sense.
— Rudolf Carnap

John Locke, a founder of empiricism, expressed that most of the doctrine of innate ideas
in the metaphysics, such as Cartesian dualism and the Platonic realm were ridiculous and
nonsensical.

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Chapter 2

Teleology

A teleology is any philosophical account which holds that final causes exist in nature,
meaning that design and purpose analogous to that found in human actions are inherent
also in the rest of nature. The word comes from the Greek τέλος, telos, root: τελε-, "end,

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purpose." The adjective "teleological" has a broader usage, for example in discussions
where particular ethical theories or types of computer programs (such as "teleo-reactive"
programs) are sometimes described as teleological because they involve aiming at goals.

Teleology was explored by Plato and Aristotle, by Saint Anselm around 1000 AD, and
later by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment. It was fundamental to the
speculative philosophy of Hegel.

A thing, process or action is teleological when it is for the sake of an end, i.e., a telos or
final cause. In general it may be said that there are two types of final causes, which may
be called intrinsic finality and extrinsic finality.

• A thing or action has an extrinsic finality when it is for the sake of something
external to itself. For example, Aristotle argued that animals are for the sake of
man, a thing external to them. Humans also exhibit extrinsic finality when they
seek something external to themselves (e.g., the happiness of a child). If the
external thing had not existed that action would not display finality.

• A thing or action has an intrinsic finality when it is for the sake of something not
external to itself. For example, one might try to be happy simply for the sake of
being happy, and not for the sake of anything outside of that.

In modern science teleological explanations are deliberately avoided, because whether

they are true or false is argued to be beyond the ability of human perception and
understanding to judge. Some disciplines, in particular within evolutionary biology, are
still prone to use language that appears teleological when they describe natural tendencies
towards certain end conditions; but these arguments can always be rephrased in non-
teleological forms.

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Classical teleology
Platonic

In the Phaedo, Plato argues that true explanations for any given physical phenomenon
must be teleological. He bemoans those who fail to distinguish between a thing's
necessary and sufficient causes, which he identifies respectively as material and final
causes (Phaedo 98-9):

Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause, from that without which the cause
would not be able to act, as a cause. It is what the majority appear to do, like people
groping in the dark; they call it a cause, thus giving it a name that does not belong to it.
That is why one man surrounds the earth with a vortex to make the heavens keep it in
place, another makes the air support it like a wide lid. As for their capacity of being in the

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best place they could be at this very time, this they do not look for, nor do they believe it
to have any divine force, but they believe that they will some time discover a stronger
and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together more, and they do not believe that
the truly good and 'binding' binds and holds them together.
—Plato, Phaedo 99

Plato here argues that, e.g., the materials that compose a body are necessary conditions
for its moving or acting in a certain way, but that these materials cannot be the sufficient
condition for its moving or acting as it does. For example (given in Phaedo 98), if
Socrates is sitting in an Athenian prison, the elasticity of his tendons is what allows him
to be sitting, and so a physical description of his tendons can be listed as necessary
conditions or auxiliary causes of his act of sitting (Phaedo 99b; Timaeus 46c9-d4, 69e6).
However, these are only necessary conditions of Socrates' sitting. To give a physical
description of Socrates' body is to say that Socrates is sitting, but it does not give us any
idea why it came to be that he was sitting in the first place. To say why he was sitting and
not not sitting, we have to explain what it is about his sitting that is good, for all things
brought about (i.e., all products of actions) are brought about because the actor saw some
good in them. Thus, to give an explanation of something is to determine what about it is
good. Its goodness is its actual cause - its purpose, telos or "reason for which" (Timaeus
27d8-29a).

Aristotelian

Similarly, Aristotle argued that Democritus was wrong to attempt to reduce all things to
mere necessity, because doing so neglects the aim, order, and "final cause," which brings
about these necessary conditions:

Democritus, however, neglecting the final cause, reduces to necessity all the operations
of nature. Now they are necessary, it is true, but yet they are for a final cause and for the
sake of what is best in each case. Thus nothing prevents the teeth from being formed and
being shed in this way; but it is not on account of these causes but on account of the
end....

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—Aristotle, Generation of Animals V.8, 789a8-b15

In the Physics Aristotle rejected Plato's assumption that the universe was created by an
intelligent designer using eternal forms as his model. For Aristotle, natural ends are
produced by "natures" (principles of change internal to living things), and natures,
Aristotle argued, do not deliberate:

"It is absurd to suppose that ends are not present [in nature] because we do not see an
agent deliberating."
—Aristotle, Physics 2.8, 199b27-9.

These Platonic and Aristotelian arguments ran counter to those presented earlier by
Democritus and later by Lucretius, both of whom were supporters of what is now often
called metaphysical naturalism, or accidentalism:

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Nothing in the body is made in order that we may use it. What happens to exist is the
cause of its use.
—Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), IV, 833; cf. 822-56.

Modern and postmodern philosophy

In the various neo-Hegelian schools - proposing a history of our species some consider to
be at variance with Darwin, as well as with the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, and with what is now called analytic philosophy — the point of
departure is not so much formal logic and scientific fact but 'identity'. (In Hegel's
terminology: 'objective spirit'.)

Individual human consciousness, in the process of reaching for autonomy and freedom,
has no choice but to deal with an obvious reality: the collective identities (such as the
multiplicity of world views, ethnic, cultural and national identities) that divide the human
race and set (and always have set) different groups in violent conflict with each other.
Hegel conceived of the 'totality' of mutually antagonistic world-views and life-forms in
history as being 'goal-driven', that is, oriented towards an end-point in history. The
'objective contradiction' of 'subject' and 'object' would eventually 'sublate' into a form of
life that leaves violent conflict behind. This goal-oriented, 'teleological' notion of the
'historical process as a whole' is present in a variety of 20th century authors, although its
prominence declined drastically after the Second World War.

In contrast teleology and "grand narratives" are eschewed in the postmodern attitude and
teleology may be viewed as reductive, exclusionary and harmful to those whose stories
are erased.

Against this, Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that a narrative understanding of oneself, of
one's capacity as an independent reasoner, one's dependence on others and on the social
practices and traditions in which one participates, all tend towards an ultimate good of
liberation. Social practices may themselves be understood as teleologically oriented to

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internal goods, for example practices of philosophical and scientific enquiry are
teleologically ordered to the elaboration of a true understanding of their objects.
MacIntyre's book After Virtue famously dismissed the naturalistic teleology of Aristotle's
'metaphysical biology', but he has cautiously moved from that book's account of a
sociological teleology toward an exploration of what remains valid in a more traditional
teleological naturalism.

Teleology and ethics

Teleology informs the study of ethics.

Business ethics

Businessmen commonly think in terms of purposeful action as in, for example,

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management by objectives. Teleological analysis of business ethics leads to consideration
of the full range of stakeholders in any business decision, including the management, the
staff, the customers, the shareholders, the country, humanity and the environment.

Medical ethics

Teleology provides a moral basis for the professional ethics of medicine, as doctors are
generally concerned with outcomes and must therefore know the telos of a given
treatment paradigm.

Consequentialism

The broad spectrum of consequentialist ethics, of which utilitarianism is likely the most
well-known, focuses on the end result or consequences, with such maxims as Utilitarian
philosopher John Stuart Mill's "the greatest good for the greatest number", or the
maximum utility. Hence they are teleological in nature. This is in contrast with
deontological ethics, such as Immanuel Kant's the Categorical Imperative, in which an
end result or consequences are less important, or even irrevelant, but the action itself, the
means or will, is the focus.

Teleology and science

In modern science, in particular within evolutionary biology, an explantion that relies on
teleology is considered to be unconvincing, and scientists aim to develop explanations
which avoid it.

Biology

Apparent teleology is a recurring issue in evolutionary biology, much to the consternation

of some writers.

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Statements which imply that nature has goals, for example where a species is said to do
something "in order to" to achieve survival, appear teleological, and therefore invalid.
Usually, it is possible to rewrite such sentences to avoid the apparent teleology. Some
biology courses have incorporated exercises requiring students to rephrase such sentences
so that they do not read teleologically. Nevertheless, biologists still frequently write in a
way which can be read as implying teleology even if that is not the intention. These
issues have recently been discussed by John Reiss. He argues that evolutionary biology
can be purged of such teleology by rejecting the analogy of natural selection as a
watchmaker; arguments against this analogy have been promoted by writers such as
Richard Dawkins.

Other authors are more skeptical. James Lennox has argued that Darwin was a
teleologist, and biologist philosopher Francisco Ayala has argued that all statements
about processes can be trivially translated into teleological statements, and vice versa, but
that teleological statements are more explanatory and cannot be disposed of. Karen

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Neander has argued that the modern concept of biological 'function' is dependent upon
selection. So, for example, it is not possible to say that anything that simply winks into
existence without going through a process of selection has functions. We decide whether
an appendage has a function by analysing the process of selection that led to it.
Therefore, any talk of functions must be posterior to natural selection and function cannot
be defined in the manner advocated by Reiss and Dawkins.

Cybernetics and teleonomy

Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener have conceived of feedback
mechanisms as lending a teleology to machinery. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the
term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." Cybernetics is the
study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and
machines, and in combinations of the two.

In recent years, end-driven teleology has become contrasted with "apparent" teleology,
i.e. teleonomy or process-driven systems.

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Chapter 3

Philosophy of Mind

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A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to
correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain.

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental
events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the
physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the
mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although
there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to
the physical body.

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Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the
mind-body problem. Dualism can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle and the Sankhya and
Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, but it was most precisely formulated by René
Descartes in the 17th century. Substance Dualists argue that the mind is an independently
existing substance, whereas Property Dualists maintain that the mind is a group of
independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is
not a distinct substance.

Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities.
This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century
BC and was later espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza. Physicalists
argue that only the entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that the mind will
eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve.
Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world is either
mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monists adhere to the position

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that there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties
of this unknown substance. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries
have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type
identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.

Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist

position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from
the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially
in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various
neurosciences. Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which
challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct. Reductive physicalists
assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific
accounts of physiological processes and states. Non-reductive physicalists argue that
although the brain is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental
descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the language
and lower-level explanations of physical science. Continued neuroscientific progress has
helped to clarify some of these issues. However, they are far from having been resolved,
and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and the
intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic
terms.

The mind-body problem

The mind-body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between
minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. The main aim of philosophers
working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes,
and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect the body.

Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at our various sensory organs
from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately
causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for

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a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a
specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question,
then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray
matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.

A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires)
cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract. These comprise some
of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at
least the time of René Descartes.

Dualist solutions to the mind-body problem

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Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter (or body). It
begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical. One of
the earliest known formulations of mind-body dualism was expressed in the eastern
Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE), which divided the world
into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakriti (material substance). Specifically, the Yoga Sutra
of Patanjali presents an analytical approach to the nature of the mind.

In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of
Plato and Aristotle. Each of these maintained, but for different reasons, that humans'
"intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in
terms of, their physical body. However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René
Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a
"res cogitans". Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and
self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence.
He was therefore the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it still
exists today.

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Arguments for dualism

The most frequently used argument in favour of dualism is that it appeals to the common-
sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from inanimate matter. If asked what
the mind is, the average person would usually respond by identifying it with their self,
their personality, their soul, or some other such entity. They would almost certainly deny
that the mind simply is the brain, or vice-versa, finding the idea that there is just one
ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic, or simply unintelligible. Many modern
philosophers of mind think that these intuitions are misleading and that we should use our
critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, to examine these
assumptions to determine whether there is any real basis to them.

Another important argument in favor of dualism is that the mental and the physical seem
to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties. Mental events have a

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subjective quality, whereas physical events do not. So, for example, one can reasonably
ask what a burnt finger feels like, or what a blue sky looks like, or what nice music
sounds like to a person. But it is meaningless, or at least odd, to ask what a surge in the
uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral portion of the hippocampus feels like.

The Argument from Reason holds that if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the
effects of physical causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the
consequent of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning
from ground to consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would be no way of
knowing this—or anything else not the direct result of a physical cause—and we could
not even suppose it, except by a fluke.

Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events 'qualia' or 'raw feels'.
There is something that it is like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on.
There are qualia involved in these mental events that seem particularly difficult to reduce
to anything physical.

If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical reality (the brain), one
must explain how physical memories are created concerning consciousness. Dualism
must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality. One possible
explanation is that of a miracle, proposed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche,
where all mind-body interactions require the direct intervention of God. Another possible
explanation has been proposed by C. S. Lewis. Although at the time Lewis wrote
Miracles, Quantum Mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages
of acceptance, he stated the logical possibility that if the physical world was proved to be
indeterministic this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally
viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable
event could be philosophically described as an action of a non physical entity on physical
reality.

The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by Todd Moody, and
developed by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind. The basic idea is that

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one can imagine one's body, and therefore conceive the existence of one's body, without
any conscious states being associated with this body. Chalmers' argument is that it seems
very plausible that such a being could exist because all that is needed is that all and only
the things that the physical sciences describe about a zombie must be true of it. Since
none of the concepts involved in these sciences make reference to consciousness or other
mental phenomena, and any physical entity can be by definition described scientifically
via physics, the move from conceivability to possibility is not such a large one. Others
such as Dennett have argued that the notion of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent, or
unlikely, concept. It has been argued under physicalism, that one must either believe that
anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie—following
from the assertion that one's own conviction about being (or not being) a zombie is a
product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This
argument has been expressed by Dennett who argues that "Zombies think, they are
conscious, think, they have qualia, think, they suffer pains—they are just 'wrong'
(according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever

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discover!"

Interactionist dualism

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)

Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first

espoused by Descartes in the Meditations. In the 20th century, its major defenders have
been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles. It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs
and desires, causally interact with physical states.

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Descartes' famous argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Seth has a
clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking thing which has no spatial extension (i.e.,
it cannot be measured in terms of length, weight, height, and so on). He also has a clear
and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, subject to
quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical
because they have radically different properties.

At the same time, however, it is clear that Seth's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have
causal effects on his body and vice-versa: A child touches a hot stove (physical event)
which causes pain (mental event) and makes her yell (physical event), this in turn
provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the caregiver (mental event), and so on.

Descartes' argument crucially depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear
and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Many contemporary philosophers
doubt this. For example, Joseph Agassi suggests that several scientific discoveries made

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since the early 20th century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own
ideas. Freud has shown that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's
unconscious motivations better than the person himself does. Duhem has shown that a
philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than that person
herself does, while Malinowski has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's
customs and habits better than the person whose customs and habits they are. He also
asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see things that are not
there provide grounds for rejecting Descartes' argument, because scientists can describe a
person's perceptions better than the person herself can. The weakness common to all
these arguments against interactionism is that they put all introspective insight in doubt.
We know people make mistakes about the world (including other's internal states), but
not always. Therefore, it is logically absurd to assume persons are always in error about
their own mental states and judgements about the nature of the mind itself.

Other forms of dualism

Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions.
Occasionalism is not shown.

1. Psychophysical parallelism, or simply parallelism, is the view that mind and

body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one
another. Instead, they run along parallel paths (mind events causally interact with
mind events and brain events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to
influence each other. This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried
Leibniz. Although Leibniz was an ontological monist who believed that only one
type of substance, the monad, exists in the universe, and that everything is

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 reducible to it, he nonetheless maintained that there was an important distinction
between "the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God
had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in harmony
with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.
2. Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche which asserts that
all supposedly causal relations between physical events, or between physical and
mental events, are not really causal at all. While body and mind are different
substances, causes (whether mental or physical) are related to their effects by an
act of God's intervention on each specific occasion.
3. Property dualism, is the view that the world is constituted of just one kind of
substance - the physical kind - there exist two distinct kinds of properties:
physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view that non-
physical, mental properties (such as beliefs, desires and emotions) inhere in some
physical substances (namely brains).
1. Strong emergentism asserts that when matter is organized in the appro-

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priate way (i.e. in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental
properties emerge. Hence, it is a form of emergent materialism. These
emergent properties have an independent ontological status and cannot be
reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical substrate from which
they emerge. A form of property dualism has been espoused by David
Chalmers and the concept has undergone something of a renaissance in
recent years, but was already suggested in the 19th century by William
James.
2. Epiphenomenalism is a doctrine first formulated by Thomas Henry
Huxley. It consists of the view that mental phenomena are causally
ineffectual, where one or more mental states do not have any influence on
physical states. Physical events can cause other physical events and
physical events can cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause
anything, since they are just causally inert by-products (i.e. epipheno-
mena) of the physical world. This view has been defended most strongly
in recent times by Frank Jackson.
3. Non-reductive Physicalism is the view that mental properties form a
separate ontological class to physical properties: mental states (such as
qualia) are not reducible to physical states. The ontological stance towards
qualia in the case of non-reductive physicalism does not imply that qualia
are causally inert; this is what distinguishes it from epiphenomenalism.
4. Panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, altern-
atively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view.
Superficially, it seems to be a form of property dualism, since it regards
everything as having both mental and physical properties. However, some
panpsychists say mechanical behaviour is derived from primitive
mentality of atoms and molecules — as are sophisticated mentality and
organic behaviour, the difference being attributed to the presence or
absence of complex structure in a compound object. So long as the
reduction of non-mental properties to mental ones is in place, pan-
psychism is not a (strong) form of property dualism; otherwise it is.

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Monist solutions to the mind-body problem
In contrast to dualism, monism does not accept any fundamental divisions. The funda-
mentally disseparate nature of reality has been central to forms of eastern philosophies
for over two millennia. In Indian and Chinese philosophy, monism is integral to how
experience is understood. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western
philosophy are physicalist. Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance
is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best science. However, a
variety of formulations (see below) are possible. Another form of monism, idealism,
states that the only existing substance is mental. Although pure idealism, such as that of
George Berkeley, is uncommon in contemporary Western philosophy, a more sophi-
sticated variant called panpsychism, according to which mental experience and properties
may be at the foundation of physical experience and properties, has been espoused by
some philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and David Ray Griffin.

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Phenomenalism is the theory that representations (or sense data) of external objects are
all that exist. Such a view was briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the
logical positivists during the early 20th century. A third possibility is to accept the
existence of a basic substance which is neither physical nor mental. The mental and
physical would then both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was
adopted by Baruch Spinoza and was popularized by Ernst Mach in the 19th century. This
neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism.

Physicalistic monisms

Behaviorism
Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the
first half. In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of
introspectionism. Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to
careful examination for accuracy and cannot be used to form predictive generalizations.
Without generalizability and the possibility of third-person examination, the behaviorists
argued, psychology cannot be scientific. The way out, therefore, was to eliminate the idea
of an interior mental life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and
focus instead on the description of observable behavior.

Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes

called logical behaviorism) was developed. This is characterized by a strong verific-
ationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life
senseless. For the behaviorist, mental states are not interior states on which one can make
introspective reports. They are just descriptions of behavior or dispositions to behave in
certain ways, made by third parties to explain and predict others' behavior.

Philosophical behaviorism, notably held by Wittgenstein, has fallen out of favor since the
latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of cognitivism. Cognitivists reject
behaviorism due to several perceived problems. For example, behaviorism could be said

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to be counter-intuitive when it maintains that someone is talking about behavior in the
event that a person is experiencing a painful headache.

Identity theory
Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by John Smart and Ullin Place
as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers reasoned that, if
mental states are something material, but not behavioral, then mental states are probably
identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental state M is
nothing other than brain state B. The mental state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus
be nothing more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions".

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The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory,
every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows)
to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token-token
correspondences can fall outside of the type-type correspondences. The result is token
identity.

Despite its initial plausibility, the identity theory faces a strong challenge in the form of
the thesis of multiple realizability, first formulated by Hilary Putnam. It is obvious that
not only humans, but many different species of animals can, for example, experience

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pain. However, it seems highly unlikely that all of these diverse organisms with the same
pain experience are in the same identical brain state. And if the latter is the case, then
pain cannot be identical to a specific brain state. The identity theory is thus empirically
unfounded.

On the other hand, even granted all above, it does not follow that identity theories of all
types must be abandoned. According to token identity theories, the fact that a certain
brain state is connected with only one mental state of a person does not have to mean that
there is an absolute correlation between types of mental states and types of brain state.
The type-token distinction can be illustrated by a simple example: the word "green"
contains four types of letters (g, r, e, n) with two tokens (occurrences) of the letter e along
with one each of the others. The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences
of mental events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings of physical events.
Anomalous monism (see below) and most other non-reductive physicalisms are token-
identity theories. Despite these problems, there is a renewed interest in the type identity

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theory today, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.

Functionalism
Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the
inadequacies of the identity theory. Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an
empirical computational theory of the mind. At about the same time or slightly after,
D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism which
analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles. Finally,
Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of
meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman. Another one,
psychofunctionalism, is an approach adopted by naturalistic Philosophy of Mind
associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn.

What all these different varieties of functionalism share in common is the thesis that
mental states are characterized by their causal relations with other mental states and with
sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. That is, functionalism abstracts away from the
details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of
non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized scientifically by
its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining certain chemical balances. From this
point of view, it does not really matter whether the kidney be made up of organic tissue,
plastic nanotubes or silicon chips: it is the role that it plays and its relations to other
organs that define it as a kidney.

Nonreductive physicalism
Non reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to
mind-body relations: 1) Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states, but
2) All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to
behavior, brain states or functional states. Hence, the question arises whether there can

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still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism is an attempt
to formulate such a physicalism.

Davidson uses the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but
are not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence:
there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical–causal
reducibility between the mental and physical without ontological reducibility.

Because nonreductive physicalist theories attempt to both retain the ontological

distinction between mind and body and to try to solve the 'surfeit of explanations puzzle'
in some way; critics often see this as a paradox and point out the similarities to
epiphenomenalism, in that it is the brain that is seen as the root 'cause' not the mind, and
the mind seems to be rendered inert.

Epiphenomenalism regards one or more mental states as the byproduct of physical brain

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states, having no influence on physical states. The interaction is one-way (solving the
'surfeit of explanations puzzle') but leaving us with non-reducible mental states (as a
byproduct of brain states) - both ontologically and causally irreducible to physical states.
Pain would be seen by epiphenomenaliasts as being caused by the brain state but as not
having effects on other brain states, though it might have effects on other mental states
(i.e. cause distress).

Emergentism

Emergentism is a form of "nonreductive physicalism" that involves a layered view of

nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity and each corres-
ponding to its own special science. Some philosophers hold that emergent properties
causally interact with more fundamental levels, while others maintain that higher-order
properties simply supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction. The latter
group therefore holds a less strict, or "weaker", definition of emergentism, which can be
rigorously stated as follows: a property P of composite object O is emergent if it is
metaphysically impossible for another object to lack property P if that object is composed
of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in an identical
configuration.

Sometimes emergentists use the example of water having a new property when Hydrogen
H and Oxygen O combine to form H2O (water). In this example there "emerges" a new
property of a transparent liquid that would not have been predicted by understanding
hydrogen and oxygen as a gas. This is analogous to physical properties of the brain
giving rise to a mental state. Emergentists try to solve the notorious mind-body gap this
way. One problem for emergentism is the idea of "causal closure" in the world that does
not allow for a mind-to-body causation.

Expressional Philosophy states that there are no dualisms, only that which is expressed,
as Water is to the dualistic H20 in the above example. Mind emerges from processes
of Matter and the Energies these processes bring about. Al Engleman proposes in

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"Expressions: A Philosophy of Mind", a finality to William Blake's "I am My Mind", by
stating that all Matter and Energy is Mind, what he calls Proto-Mind, and from this Proto-
Mind's processes, a threshold barrier is overcome, and Life emerges as Self-Working
Energy (Mind). This is called Expressional Emergence, in much the same way Genetic
Biologists understand the Genotype-Phenotype Expression.

Eliminative materialism

If one is a materialist and believes that all aspects of our common sense psychology will
find reduction to a mature cognitive-neuroscience, and that non-reductive materialism is
mistaken, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism.

There are several varieties of eliminative materialism, but all maintain that our common-
sense "folk psychology" badly misrepresents the nature of some aspect of cognition.

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Eliminativists regard folk psychology as a falsifiable theory, and one likely to be falsified
by future cognitive-neuroscientific research. Should better theories of the mental come
along they argue, we might need to discard certain basic common-sense mental notions
that we have always taken for granted, such as belief, consciousness, emotion, qualia, or
propositional attitudes.

Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland argue that while folk psychology
treats cognition as fundamentally sentence-like, the non-linguistic vector/matrix model of
neural network theory or connectionism will prove to be a much more accurate account
of how the brain works.

The Churchlands often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and
ontologies which have arisen in the course of history. For example, Ptolemaic astronomy
served to explain and roughly predict the motions of the planets for centuries, but
eventually this model of the solar system was eliminated in favor of the Copernican
model. The Churchlands believe the same eliminative fate awaits the "sentence-cruncher"
model of the mind in which thought and behavior are the result of manipulating sentence-
like states called "propositional attitudes."

Linguistic criticism of the mind-body problem

Each attempt to answer the mind-body problem encounters substantial problems. Some
philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion. These
philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the tradition of linguistic
criticism, therefore reject the problem as illusory. They argue that it is an error to ask how
mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that human
experience can be described in different ways—for instance, in a mental and in a
biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of
the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong contexts. This is
the case, for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The brain is simply
the wrong context for the use of mental vocabulary—the search for mental states of the
brain is therefore a category error or a sort of fallacy of reasoning.

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Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter
Hacker. However, Hilary Putnam, the originator of functionalism, has also adopted the
position that the mind-body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved
according to the manner of Wittgenstein.

Externalism and internalism

Where is the mind located? If the mind is a physical phenomenon of some kind, it has to
be located somewhere. There are two possible options: either the mind is internal to the
body (internalism) or the mind is external to it (externalism). More generally, either the
mind depends only on events and properties taking place inside the subject's body or it
depends also on factors external to it.

Proponents of internalism are committed to the view that neural activity is sufficient to

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produce the mind. Proponents of externalism maintain that the surrounding world is in
some sense constitutive of the mind.

Externalism differentiates into several versions. The main ones are semantic externalism,
cognitive externalism, phenomenal externalism. Each of these versions of externalism
can further be divided whether they refer only to the content or to the vehicles of mind.

Semantic externalism holds that the semantic content of the mind is totally or partially
defined by state of affairs external to the body of the subject. Hilary Putnam's Twin earth
thought experiment is a good example.

Cognitive externalism is a very broad collections of views that suggests the role of the
environment, of tools, of development, and of the body in fleshing out cognition.
Embodied cognition, The extended mind, enactivism are good example.

Phenomenal externalism suggests that the phenomenal aspects of the mind are external to
the body. Authors who addressed this possibility are Ted Honderich, Edwin Holt,
Francois Tonneau, Kevin O'Regan, Riccardo Manzotti, Teed Rockwell.

Naturalism and its problems

The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical) world. Such
a position faces the problem that the mind has certain properties that no other material
thing seems to possess. Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these
properties can nonetheless emerge from a material thing. The project of providing such
an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental." Some of the
crucial problems that this project attempts to resolve include the existence of qualia and
the nature of intentionality.

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Qualia

Many mental states seem to be experienced subjectively in different ways by different

individuals. And it is characteristic of a mental state that it has some experiential quality,
e.g. of pain, that it hurts. However, the sensation of pain between two individuals may not
be identical, since no one has a perfect way to measure how much something hurts or of
describing exactly how it feels to hurt. Philosophers and scientists therefore ask where
these experiences come from. The existence of cerebral events, in and of themselves,
cannot explain why they are accompanied by these corresponding qualitative expe-
riences. The puzzle of why many cerebral processes occur with an accompanying
experiential aspect in consciousness seems impossible to explain.

Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences.
This follows from an assumption about the possibility of reductive explanations.

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According to this view, if an attempt can be successfully made to explain a phenomenon
reductively (e.g., water), then it can be explained why the phenomenon has all of its
properties (e.g., fluidity, transparency). In the case of mental states, this means that there
needs to be an explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a
certain way.

The 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger criticized the ontological
assumptions underpinning such a reductive model, and claimed that it was impossible to
make sense of experience in these terms. This is because, according to Heidegger, the
nature of our subjective experience and its qualities is impossible to understand in terms
of Cartesian "substances" that bear "properties." Another way to put this is that the very
concept of qualitative experience is incoherent in terms of – or is semantically income-
mensurable with the concept of – substances that bear properties.

This problem of explaining introspective first-person aspects of mental states and

consciousness in general in terms of third-person quantitative neuroscience is called the
explanatory gap. There are several different views of the nature of this gap among
contemporary philosophers of mind. David Chalmers and the early Frank Jackson
interpret the gap as ontological in nature; that is, they maintain that qualia can never be
explained by science because physicalism is false. There are two separate categories
involved and one cannot be reduced to the other. An alternative view is taken by
philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. According to them, the gap is
epistemological in nature. For Nagel, science is not yet able to explain subjective
experience because it has not yet arrived at the level or kind of knowledge that is
required. We are not even able to formulate the problem coherently. For McGinn, on
other hand, the problem is one of permanent and inherent biological limitations. We are
not able to resolve the explanatory gap because the realm of subjective experiences is
cognitively closed to us in the same manner that quantum physics is cognitively closed to
elephants. Other philosophers liquidate the gap as purely a semantic problem. This
semantical problem, of course, led to the famous "Qualia Question", which is: Does Red
cause Redness?

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Intentionality

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John Searle - one of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological
naturalism (Berkeley 2002)

Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in

relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that
they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values.
When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural
processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say
that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so
how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of
assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for
example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that
he was an historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But
where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical
processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.

Philosophy of mind and science

Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to examination and
description by the natural sciences. Since mental processes are intimately related to
bodily processes, the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of human beings play
an important role in the philosophy of mind. There are many scientific disciplines that
study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology,
computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology,
and psychology.

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Neurobiology

The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural sciences in
general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study are, in the first place,
physical processes, which are considered to be the foundations of mental activity and
behavior. The increasing success of biology in the explanation of mental phenomena can
be seen by the absence of any empirical refutation of its fundamental presupposition:
"there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states."

Within the field of neurobiology, there are many subdisciplines which are concerned with
the relations between mental and physical states and processes: Sensory neurophysiology
investigates the relation between the processes of perception and stimulation. Cognitive
neuroscience studies the correlations between mental processes and neural processes.
Neuropsychology describes the dependence of mental faculties on specific anatomical

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regions of the brain. Lastly, evolutionary biology studies the origins and development of
the human nervous system and, in as much as this is the basis of the mind, also describes
the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of mental phenomena beginning from
their most primitive stages.

Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have
furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on
ancient philosophical problems.

The methodological breakthroughs of the neurosciences, in particular the introduction of

high-tech neuroimaging procedures, has propelled scientists toward the elaboration of
increasingly ambitious research programs: one of the main goals is to describe and
comprehend the neural processes which correspond to mental functions. Several groups
are inspired by these advances. New approaches to this question are being pursued by
Steven Ericsson-Zenith at the Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering, where they
propose a new mechanics for devices called 'machines that experience', designed to
implement sentience and the fundamental mechanisms of motility and recognition. Jeff
Hawkins has established the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Berkeley,
where they explore biomimicry for recognition algorithms.

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Computer science

Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least
with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such
things as computers. From the beginning, computer programmers have been able to
develop programs which permit computers to carry out tasks for which organic beings
need a mind. A simple example is multiplication. But it is clear that computers do not use
a mind to multiply. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This
question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical debate because of
investigations in the field of artificial intelligence.

Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research program and a more
ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and
strong AI. The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the successful

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simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make computers become conscious or
aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on the contrary, is a computer with consciousness
similar to that of human beings. The program of strong AI goes back to one of the
pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers
think?", he formulated the famous Turing test. Turing believed that a computer could be
said to "think" when, if placed in a room by itself next to another room which contained a
human being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and the
human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses turned out to
be indistinguishable from those of the human. Essentially, Turing's view of machine
intelligence followed the behaviourist model of the mind—intelligence is as intelligence
does. The Turing test has received many criticisms, among which the most famous is
probably the Chinese room thought experiment formulated by Searle.

The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains
open. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new
contributions to the resolution of the "mind body problem". They suggest that based on
the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all
computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to
understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain (wetware).

Psychology

Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally
empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions.
Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs
and outputs to the human organism.

An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have
discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of
forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each
other. This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states.
However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws

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discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind-body problem
already described.

Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition

Here we focus on one style or tradition of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually
called analytic philosophy (sometimes described as Anglo-American philosophy). Many
other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes subsumed under the broad
label of continental philosophy. In any case, though topics and methods here are
numerous, in relation to the philosophy of mind the various schools that fall under this
label (phenomenology, existentialism, etc.) can globally be seen to differ from the
analytic school in that they focus less on language and logical analysis alone but also take
in other forms of understanding human existence and experience. With reference
specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to translate into attempts to grasp the

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concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some sense that does not merely
involve the analysis of linguistic forms.

In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel discusses three

distinct types of mind: the 'subjective mind', the mind of an individual; the 'objective
mind', the mind of society and of the State; and the 'Absolute mind', a unity of all
concepts.

In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in response or opposition to
this Hegelian tradition are phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology, founded
by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind and how phenol-
menological processes shape our experiences. Existentialism, a school of thought
founded upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, focuses on the
content of experiences and how the mind deals with such experiences.

An example (though not very well known) of a philosopher of mind and cognitive
scientist who tries to synthesize ideas from both traditions is Ron McClamrock.
Borrowing from Herbert Simon and also influenced by the ideas of existential phenol-
menologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, McClamrock
suggests that humans' condition of being-in-the-world ("Dasein", "In-der-welt-sein")
makes it impossible for them to understand themselves by abstracting away from it and
examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which they themselves are
not an integral part.

Another philosopher of this type is Sean Dorrance Kelly, who is Professor and Chair of
Philosophy at Harvard. Kelly, who has taught courses on 20th century French and
German Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, as well as Philosophy of Cognitive Science,
may be seen as building upon the work of his mentor Hubert Dreyfus, an existentialist
who has engaged his colleague in philosophy at Berkeley, John Searle, in extensive
debate on these issues over a period of decades.

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Philosophy of mind in Buddhism
"If one were to ask, 'Which aging & death? And whose is this aging & death?' and if one
were to ask, 'Is aging & death one thing, and is this the aging & death of someone/
something else?' both of them would have the same meaning, even though their words
would differ. When there is the view that the jiva is the same as the body, there isn't the
leading of the holy life. And when there is the view that the jiva is one thing and the body
another, there isn't the leading of the holy life. Avoiding these two extremes, the
Tathagata points out the Dhamma in between: From birth as a requisite condition comes
aging & death."

Eastern traditions such as Buddhism do not hold to the dualistic mind/body model but do
assert that the mind and body are separate entities. Buddhism in particular does not hold
to the notion of a soul, or ātman. Some forms of Buddhism assert that a very subtle level

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of mind leaves the body at the time of death and goes to a new life. According to
Buddhist scholar Dharmakirti, the definition of mind is that which is clarity and cognizes.
In this definition, 'clarity' refers to the nature of mind, and 'cognizes' to the function of
mind. Mind is clarity because it always lacks form and because it possesses the actual
power to perceive objects. Mind cognizes because its function is to know or perceive
objects. In Ornament of the Seven Sets, Buddhist scholar Khedrubje says that thought,
awareness, mind and cognizer are synonyms. Buddha explained that although mind lacks
form, it can nevertheless be related to form. Thus, our mind is related to our body and is
"located" at different places throughout the body. This is to be understood in the context
of how the five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness are generated. There
are many different types of mind—sense awarenesses, mental awarenesses, gross minds,
subtle minds, and very subtle minds—and they are all formless (lacking shape, color,
sound, smell, taste or tactile properties) and they all function to cognize or know. There is
no such thing as a mind without an object known by that mind. Even though none of
these minds is form, they can be related to form.

Consequences of philosophy of mind

There are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the philosophy of
mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the
nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and
what his or her identity consists of also have much to do with the philosophy of mind.
There are two subjects that, in connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused
special attention: free will and the self.

Free will

In the context of philosophy of mind, the problem of free will takes on renewed intensity.
This is certainly the case, at least, for materialistic determinists. According to this
position, natural laws completely determine the course of the material world. Mental
states, and therefore the will as well, would be material states, which means human
behavior and decisions would be completely determined by natural laws. Some take this

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reasoning a step further: people cannot determine by themselves what they want and what
they do. Consequently, they are not free.

This argumentation is rejected, on the one hand, by the compatibilists. Those who adopt
this position suggest that the question "Are we free?" can only be answered once we have
determined what the term "free" means. The opposite of "free" is not "caused" but
"compelled" or "coerced". It is not appropriate to identify freedom with indetermination.
A free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if it had chosen otherwise. In
this sense a person can be free even though determinism is true. The most important
compatibilist in the history of the philosophy was David Hume. More recently, this
position is defended, for example, by Daniel Dennett, and, from a dual-aspect
perspective, by Max Velmans.

On the other hand, there are also many incompatibilists who reject the argument because
they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called libertarianism. These philoso-

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phers affirm the course of the world is either a) not completely determined by natural law
where natural law is intercepted by physically independent agency, b) determined by
indeterministic natural law only, or c) determined by indeterministic natural law in line
with the subjective effort of physically non-reducible agency. Under Libertarianism, the
will does not have to be deterministic and, therefore, it is potentially free. Critics of the
second proposition (b) accuse the incompatibilists of using an incoherent concept of
freedom. They argue as follows: if our will is not determined by anything, then we desire
what we desire by pure chance. And if what we desire is purely accidental, we are not
free. So if our will is not determined by anything, we are not free.

The self

The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of self. If by
"self" or "I" one refers to an essential, immutable nucleus of the person, most modern
philosophers of mind will affirm that no such thing exists. The idea of a self as an
immutable essential nucleus derives from the idea of an immaterial soul. Such an idea is
unacceptable to most contemporary philosophers, due to their physicalistic orientations,
and due to a general acceptance among philosophers of the scepticism of the concept of
'self' by David Hume, who could never catch himself doing, thinking or feeling anything.
However, in the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, develop-
mental biology and neuroscience, the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleus—
an integrated representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic
connections—seems reasonable. The view of the self as an illusion is widely accepted by
many philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Thomas Metzinger.

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Chapter 4

Free Will

Free will is the purported ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of
constraints. Historically, the constraint of dominant concern has been the metaphysical
constraint of determinism. The opposing positions within that debate are metaphysical

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libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus that free will exists; and hard
determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus that free will does not exist.

Both of these positions, which agree that causal determination is the relevant factor in the
question of free will, are classed as incompatibilists. Those who deny that determinism is
relevant are classified as compatibilists, and offer various alternative explanations of
what constraints are relevant, such as physical constraints (e.g. chains or imprisonment),
social constraints (e.g. threat of punishment or censure), or psychological constraints (e.g.
compulsions or phobias).

The principle of free will has religious, ethical, and scientific implications. For example,
in the religious realm, free will implies that an omnipotent divinity does not assert its
power over individual will and choices. In ethics, it may hold implications regarding
whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. The question of
free will has been a central issue since the beginning of philosophical thought.

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In western philosophy

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A simplified taxonomy of the most important philosophical positions regarding free will

The basic philosophical positions on the problem of free will can be divided in acco-
rdance with the answers they provide to two questions:

1. Is determinism true?
2. Does free will exist?

Determinism is roughly defined as the view that all current and future events are causally
necessitated by past events combined with the laws of nature. Neither determinism nor its
opposite, indeterminism, are positions in the debate about free will.

Compatibilism (also called soft determinism) is the view that the assumption of free will
and the existence of a concept of determinism are compatible with each other; this is
opposed to Incompatibilism, which is the view that there is no way to reconcile a belief in
a deterministic universe with a belief in a concept of free will beyond that of a perceived
existence. Hard determinism is the version of incompatibilism that accepts the assum-
ption of determinism and rejects the idea that humans have any free will.

Libertarianism agrees with hard determinism only in rejecting compatibilism.

Libertarians accept the existence of a concept of free will along with an assumption of
indeterminism to some extent. Some of its proponents reject physical determinism and
argue for some version of physical indeterminism that is compatible with freedom.
Others are Metaphysical libertarians who appeal to mind-body dualism to argue a special
case for sentient beings.

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The theory of determinism has been challenged from the earliest philosophers, notably
Epicurus and Lucretius, to the latest theory of quantum mechanics, which postulates
irreducible physical indeterminacy.

The standard argument against the existence of free will is very simple. Either
determinism is true or indeterminism is true. These exhaust the logical possibilities and
have led to two further contentions: If determinism is true, we are not free. If indeter-
minism is true, our actions are random and our will lacks the control to be morally
responsible. These contentions however are more problematic and have been some of the
central issues around which recent debate has centered.

Determinism

Determinism is a broad term with a variety of meanings. Corresponding to each of these

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different meanings, there arises a different problem of free will.

Causal (or nomological) determinism is the thesis that future events are necessitated by
past and present events combined with the laws of nature. Such determinism is some-
times illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Imagine an entity that
knows all facts about the past and the present, and knows all natural laws that govern the
universe. Such an entity may be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future, down to
the smallest detail.

Logical determinism is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present or
future, are either true or false. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of
how choices can be free, given that what one does in the future is already determined as
true or false in the present.

Theological determinism is the thesis that there is a god who determines all that humans
will do, either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience or by
decreeing their actions in advance. The problem of free will, in this context, is the
problem of how our actions can be free, if there is a being who has determined them for
us ahead of time.

Biological determinism is the idea that all behavior, belief, and desire are fixed by our
genetic endowment. There are other theses on determinism, including cultural deter-
minism and psychological determinism. Combinations and syntheses of determinist
theses, e.g. bio-environmental determinism, are even more common.

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Compatibilism

WT Thomas Hobbes was a classical compatibilist

Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. Most "classical
compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, claim that a person acts on their own only when
the person wanted to do the act and the person could have done otherwise, if the person
had decided to. Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to the each
individual and not to some abstract notion of will, asserting, for example, that "no liberty
can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which con-
sisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to
do." In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is
universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". To
illustrate their standpoint, compatibilists point to cases of someone's free will being
denied, through rape, murder, theft, or others. In these cases, free will is lacking not
because the past is determining the future, but because the aggressor is choosing the
victim's desires about his own actions. Their argument is that determinism does not
matter; what matters is that individuals' choices are the results of their own desires and
are not overridden by some external (or internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one need
not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at
odds with free will.

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William James' views were ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical
grounds," he did not believe that there was evidence for it on scientific grounds, nor did
his own introspections support it. Moreover, he did not accept incompatibilism as
formulated below; he did not believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a
prerequisite of moral responsibility. In his work Pragmatism, he wrote that "instinct and
utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment
and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. He did believe that indeterminism is
important as a "doctrine of relief"—it allows for the view that, although the world may be
in many respects a bad place, it may, through individuals' actions, become a better one.
Determinism, he argued, undermines meliorism—the idea that progress is a real concept
leading to improvement in the world.

"Modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue that there
are cases where a coerced agent's choices are still free because such coercion coincides
with the agent's personal intentions and desires. Frankfurt, in particular, argues for a

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version of compatibilism called the "hierarchical mesh". The idea is that an individual
can have conflicting desires at a first-order level and also have a desire about the various
first-order desires (a second-order desire) to the effect that one of the desires prevails
over the others. A person's will is to be identified with their effective first-order desire,
i.e., the one that they act on. So, for example, there are "wanton addicts", "unwilling
addicts" and "willing addicts." All three groups may have the conflicting first-order
desires to want to take the drug to which they are addicted and to not want to take it.

The first group, "wanton addicts", have no second-order desire not to take the drug. The
second group, "unwilling addicts", have a second-order desire not to take the drug, while
the third group, "willing addicts", have a second-order desire to take it. According to
Frankfurt, the members of the first group are to be considered devoid of will and
therefore no longer persons. The members of the second group freely desire not to take
the drug, but their will is overcome by the addiction. Finally, the members of the third
group willingly take the drug to which they are addicted. Frankfurt's theory can ramify to
any number of levels. Critics of the theory point out that there is no certainty that
conflicts will not arise even at the higher-order levels of desire and preference. Others
argue that Frankfurt offers no adequate explanation of how the various levels in the
hierarchy mesh together.

In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will,
which he further elaborated in the book Freedom Evolves. The basic reasoning is that, if
one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then
because of chaos and epistemic limits on the precision of our knowledge of the current
state of the world, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined
things are "expectations". The ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing
with these expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future.

According to Dennett, because individuals have the ability to act differently from what
anyone expects, free will can exist. Incompatibilists claim the problem with this idea is
that we may be mere "automata responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our

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environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or
by random chance. More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been
offered, as have other critiques.

Incompatibilism

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Baron d'Holbach was a hard determinist

"Hard determinists", such as Martin Luther and d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who
accept determinism and reject free will. "Metaphysical libertarians", such as Thomas
Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane, are those incompatibilists who accept free
will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true.
Another view is that of hard incompatibilism, which states that free will is incompatible
with both determinism and indeterminism. This view is defended by Derk Pereboom.

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One of the traditional arguments for incompatibilism is based on an "intuition pump": if a
person is determined in his or her choices of actions, then he or she must be like other
mechanical things that are determined in their behavior such as a wind-up toy, a billiard
ball, a puppet, or a robot. Because these things have no free will, then people must have
no free will, if determinism is true. This argument has been rejected by compatibilists
such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common
with these things, it does not follow that there are no important differences.

Another argument for incompatibilism is that of the "causal chain." Incompatibilism is

key to the idealist theory of free will. Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom
of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior. They insist, rather, that free will means
that man must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of his actions. He must be a causa
sui, in the traditional phrase. To be responsible for one's choices is to be the first cause of
those choices, where first cause means that there is no antecedent cause of that cause. The
argument, then, is that if man has free will, then man is the ultimate cause of his actions.

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If determinism is true, then all of man's choices are caused by events and facts outside his
control. So, if everything man does is caused by events and facts outside his control, then
he cannot be the ultimate cause of his actions. Therefore, he cannot have free will. This
argument has also been challenged by various compatibilist philosophers.

A third argument for incompatibilism was formulated by Carl Ginet in the 1960s and has
received much attention in the modern literature. The simplified argument runs along
these lines: if determinism is true, then we have no control over the events of the past that
determined our present state and no control over the laws of nature. Since we can have no
control over these matters, we also can have no control over the consequences of them.
Since our present choices and acts, under determinism, are the necessary consequences of
the past and the laws of nature, then we have no control over them and, hence, no free
will. This is called the consequence argument. Peter van Inwagen remarks that C.D.
Broad had a version of the consequence argument as early as the 1930s.

The difficulty of this argument for compatibilists lies in the fact that it entails the
impossibility that one could have chosen other than one has. For example, if Jane is a
compatibilist and she has just sat down on the sofa, then she is committed to the claim
that she could have remained standing, if she had so desired. But it follows from the
consequence argument that, if Jane had remained standing, she would have either
generated a contradiction, violated the laws of nature or changed the past. Hence,
compatibilists are committed to the existence of "incredible abilities", according to Ginet
and van Inwagen. One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of
abilities and necessities, or that the free will evoked to make any given choice is really an
illusion and the choice had been made all along, oblivious to its "decider". David Lewis
suggests that compatibilists are only committed to the ability to do something otherwise
if different circumstances had actually obtained in the past.

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Libertarian incompatibilism

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Various definitions of free will that have been proposed, for both Compatibilism, and
Incompatibilism (Hard Determinism, Hard Incompatibilism, Libertarianism Traditional,
and Libertarianism Volition).

Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of income-

patiblism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the individual to
be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circum-
stances.

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or

naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that a non-physical mind overrides
physical causality, so that physical events in the brain that lead to the performance of
actions do not have an entirely physical explanation. This approach is allied to mind-body
dualism in philosophy. According to this view, the world is not believed to be closed
under Physics. An extra-physical will is believed to play a part in the decision making
process. According to a somewhat related theological explanation, a soul is said to make
decisions and override physical causality.

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Explanations of libertarianism, which do not involve dispensing with physicalism, require
physical indeterminism such as probabilistic sub atomic particle behavior that was
unknown to many of the early writers on free will. This is because physical determinism,
under the assumption of physicalism, implies there is only one possible future that is not
compatible with libertarian free will. Some explanations involve invoking panpsychism,
the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire
universe, in both sentient and non-sentient entities. Other approaches do not require free
will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe; ordinary randomness is appealed to
as supplying the "elbow room" believed to be necessary by libertarians. Free volition is
regarded as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of
indeterminism. An example of this kind of approach has been developed by Robert Kane.
Although at the time C. S. Lewis wrote Miracles, Quantum Mechanics (and physical
indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, he stated the logical
possibility that if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic this would provide
an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a

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scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically
described as an action of a non physical entity on physical reality (noting that under a
reductive physicalist point of view the non physical entity must be independent of the self
identity or mental processing of the sentient being).

Free will as a combination of chance and determination

In 1884 William James described a two-stage model of free will: in the first stage the
mind develops random alternative possibilities for action, and in the second an adequ-
ately determined will selects one option. A number of other thinkers have since refined
this idea, including Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper, Henry
Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, Alfred Mele, and Martin Heisenberg.

Each of these models tries to reconcile libertarian free will with the existence of
irreducible chance (today in the form of quantum indeterminacy), which threatens to
make an agent's decision random, thus denying the control needed for responsibility.

If a single event is caused by chance, then logically indeterminism would be "true." For
centuries, philosophers have said this would undermine the very possibility of certain
knowledge. Some go to the extreme of saying that real chance would make the whole
state of the world totally independent of any earlier states.

The Stoic Chrysippus said that a single uncaused cause could destroy the universe
(cosmos),

"Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal

necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is
causally connected. For nothing exists or has come into being in the cosmos without a
cause. The universe will be disrupted and disintegrate into pieces and cease to be a unity
functioning as a single system, if any uncaused movement is introduced into it."

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James said most philosophers have an "antipathy to chance." His contemporary John
Fiske described the absurd decisions that would be made if chance were real,

"If volitions arise without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot infer from them the
character of the antecedent states of feeling. ... The mother may strangle her first-born
child, the miser may cast his long-treasured gold into the sea, the sculptor may break in
pieces his lately-finished statue, in the presence of no other feelings than those which
before led them to cherish, to hoard, and to create."

In modern times, J. J. C. Smart has described the problem of admitting indeterminism,

"Indeterminism does not confer freedom on us: I would feel that my freedom was
impaired if I thought that a quantum mechanical trigger in my brain might cause me to
leap into the garden and eat a slug."

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The challenge for two-stage models is to admit some indeterminism but not permit it to
produce random actions, as determinists fear. And of course a model must limit
determinism but not eliminate it as some libertarians think necessary.

Two-stage models limit the contribution of random chance to the generation of

alternative possibilities for action. But note that, in recent years, compatibilist analytic
philosophers following Harry Frankfurt have denied the existence of alternative
possibilities. They develop "Frankfurt-type examples" (thought experiments) in which
they argue an agent is free even though no alternative possibilities exist, or the agent is
prevented at the last moment by neuroscientific demons from "doing otherwise."

Other views

Much of Arthur Schopenhauer's writing is focused on the notion of will and its relation to
freedom.

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Some philosophers' views are difficult to categorize as either compatibilist or income-
patibilist, hard determinist or libertarian. John Locke, for example, denied that the phrase
"free will" made any sense (compare with theological noncognitivism, a similar stance on
the existence of God). He also took the view that the truth of determinism was irrelevant.
He believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the
ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences
of a choice: "...the will in truth, signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or
choose". Similarly, David Hume discussed the possibility that the entire debate about free
will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He also suggested that it might be
accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a velleity), which is
associated with many of our actions when we perform them. On reflection, we realize
that they were necessary and determined all along.

Arthur Schopenhauer put the puzzle of free will and moral responsibility in these terms:

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Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and
thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life. ... But a posteriori,
through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to
necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his
conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very
character which he himself condemns...

In his On the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer stated, "You can do what you will, but
in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely
nothing other than that one thing."

Rudolf Steiner, who collaborated in a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's work,

wrote The Philosophy of Freedom, which focuses on the problem of free will. Steiner
(1861–1925) initially divides this into the two aspects of freedom: freedom of thought
and freedom of action. He argues that inner freedom is achieved when we bridge the gap
between our sensory impressions, which reflect the outer appearance of the world, and
our thoughts, which give us access to the inner nature of the world. Outer freedom is
attained by permeating our deeds with moral imagination. Steiner aims to show that these
two aspects of inner and outer freedom are integral to one another, and that true freedom
is only achieved when they are united.

The contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson agrees with Locke that the truth or falsity
of determinism is irrelevant to the problem. He argues that the notion of free will leads to
an infinite regress and is therefore senseless. According to Strawson, if one is responsible
for what one does in a given situation, then one must be responsible for the way one is in
certain mental respects. But it is impossible for one to be responsible for the way one is in
any respect. This is because to be responsible in some situation "S", one must have been
responsible for the way one was at "S-1". To be responsible for the way one was at "S-1",
one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S-2", and so on. At some point in
the chain, there must have been an act of origination of a new causal chain. But this is
impossible. Man cannot create himself or his mental states ex nihilo. This argument

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entails that free will itself is absurd, but not that it is incompatible with determinism.
Strawson calls his own view "pessimism" but it can be classified as hard incompatibilism.

Ted Honderich holds the view that "determinism is true, compatibilism and income-
patibilism are both false" and the real problem lies elsewhere. Honderich maintains that
determinism is true because quantum phenomena are not events or things that can be
located in space and time, but are abstract entities. Further, even if they were micro-level
events, they do not seem to have any relevance to how the world is at the macroscopic
level. He maintains that incompatibilism is false because, even if determinism is true,
incompatibilists have not, and cannot, provide an adequate account of origination. He
rejects compatibilism because it, like incompatibilism, assumes a single, fundamental
notion of freedom. There are really two notions of freedom: voluntary action and
origination. Both notions are required to explain freedom of will and responsibility. Both
determinism and indeterminism are threats to such freedom. To abandon these notions of
freedom would be to abandon moral responsibility. On the one side, we have our

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intuitions; on the other, the scientific facts. The "new" problem is how to resolve this
conflict.

Moral responsibility
Different ethical systems assign moral responsibility differently. For instance, depending
on how a philosophical system addresses the Standard argument against free will (i.e.
Compatibilism or a type of Incompatibilism) a moral agent will be held morally
responsible according to different criteria.

Moral responsibility often overlaps with, but is separate from, Legal responsibility.

In science
Physics

Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers
claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to
predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a
mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. Quantum mechanics predicts events only
in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all.
Current physical theories cannot resolve the question of whether determinism is true of
the world, being very far from a potential Final Theory, and open to many different
interpretations.

Assuming that an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, one

may still object that such indeterminism is for all practical purposes confined to micro-
scopic phenomena. However, many macroscopic phenomena are based on quantum
effects, for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying
quantum effects into practically usable signals.

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A more significant question is whether the indeterminism of quantum mechanics allows
for the traditional idea of free will. Under the assumption of physicalism it has been
argued that the laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of
the motion of particles regardless of whether or not free will exists. And also that if an
action is taken due to quantum randomness, this in itself would mean that traditional free
will is absent, since such action cannot be controllable by a physical being claiming to
possess such free will. Following this argument, traditional free will would only be
possible under the assumption of compatibilism; in a deterministic universe, or in an
indeterministic universe where the human body is for all intents and neurological
purposes deterministic.

An alternative approach is to see free will as a consequence of a combination of specific

deterministic and indeterministic processes, not as a fundamental alternative to both
determinism and indeterminism. The requirement for some level of indeterminism makes
such theories incompatibilistic. Robert Kane has capitalized on the success of quantum

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mechanics and chaos theory to defend incompatibilist freedom in his The Significance of
Free Will and other writings.

Genetics

Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of
the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the
relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in
human behavior. The view of most researchers is that many human behaviors can be
explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories. This point of
view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible
for their actions. Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of
"genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of explanation with
exculpation". Responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, as long as
behaviour responds to praise and blame. Moreover, it is not certain that environmental
determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.

Neuroscience

It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the
brain's decision-making process at work. A seminal experiment in this field was
conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a
random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain
(in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it
was well known that the readiness potential caused and preceded the physical action,
Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To
determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second
hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock
when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet's W
time.

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Libet found that the unconscious brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to
subjects' movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of
a conscious intention to move.

More studies have since been conducted, including some that try to:

• support Libet's original findings

• suggest that the cancelling or "veto" of an action may first arise subconsciously as
well
• explain the underlying brain structures involved
• suggest models that explain the relationship between conscious intention and
action

Neurology and psychiatry

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There are several brain-related conditions in which an individual's actions are not felt to
be entirely under his or her control. Although the existence of such conditions does not
directly refute the existence of free will, the study of such conditions, like the neuro-
scientific studies above, is valuable in developing models of how the brain may construct
our experience of free will.

For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary
movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so
when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary",
because they are not strictly involuntary: they may be experienced as a voluntary
response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must
eventually be expressed. People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress
their tics for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward.
The control exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and
exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.

In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful beh-
aviours without the intention of the subject. The affected limb effectively demonstrates 'a
will of its own.' The sense of agency does not emerge in conjunction with the overt
appearance of the purposeful act even though the sense of ownership in relationship to
the body part is maintained. This phenomenon corresponds with an impairment in the
premotor mechanism manifested temporally by the appearance of the Bereitscha-
ftspotential recordable on the scalp several hundred milliseconds before the overt
appearance of a spontaneous willed movement. Using functional magnetic resonance
imaging with specialized multivariate analyses to study the temporal dimension in the
activation of the cortical network associated with voluntary movement in human subjects,
an anterior-to-posterior sequential activation process beginning in the supplementary
motor area on the medial surface of the frontal lobe and progressing to the primary motor
cortex and then to parietal cortex has been observed. The sense of agency thus appears to
normally emerge in conjunction with this orderly sequential network activation
incorporating premotor association cortices together with primary motor cortex. In

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particular, the supplementary motor complex on the medial surface of the frontal lobe
appears to activate prior to primary motor cortex presumably in associated with a
preparatory pre-movement process. In a recent study using functional magnetic resonance
imaging, alien movements were characterized by a relatively isolated activation of the
primary motor cortex contralateral to the alien hand, while voluntary movements of the
same body part included the concomitant activation of motor association cortex
associated with the premotor process. The clinical definition requires "feeling that one
limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor
activity" (emphasis in original). This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus
callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The
standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left
hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right
hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of
will.

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Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia
is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will
sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will,
the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot
controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet
clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that
compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as
proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.

Determinism and emergent behaviour

In generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is

assumed not to exist. However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical
context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behaviour from the
interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the
emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even
though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist. In this picture, even if
the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so will be simpler than
just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations.

As an illustration, some strategy board games have rigorous rules in which no inform-
ation (such as cards' face values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such
as dice rolling) occur in the game. Nevertheless, strategy games like chess and especially
Go, with its simple deterministic rules, can have an extremely large number of
unpredictable moves. By analogy, "emergentists" suggest that the experience of free will
emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate
infinite and unpredictable behaviour. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and
there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior
would become predictable.

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Cellular automata and the generative sciences can model emergent processes of social
behavior on this philosophy.

Experimental psychology

Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily
through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will. In his book, The
Illusion of Conscious Will Wegner summarizes empirical evidence supporting the view
that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner observes that one event
is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met:

1. The first event immediately precedes the second event, and

2. The first event is consistent with having caused the second event.

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For example, if a person hears an explosion and sees a tree fall down that person is likely
to infer that the explosion caused the tree to fall over. However, if the explosion occurs
after the tree falls down (i.e., the first requirement is not met), or rather than an explosion,
the person hears the ring of a telephone (i.e., the second requirement is not met), then that
person is not likely to infer that either noise caused the tree to fall down.

Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own
conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior,
and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that
their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior. However, Wegner has been able
to manipulate people's thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two
requirements for causal inference. Through such work, Wegner has been able to show
that people will often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have in fact not
caused, and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors
that they did cause. For instance, priming subjects with information about an effect
increases the probability that a person falsely believes to be the cause of it. The
implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will (which he says might
be more accurately labelled as 'the emotion of authorship') is not tethered to the execution
of actual behaviors, but is inferred from various cues through an intricate mental process,
authorship processing. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument
for free will, Wegner has asserted that his work informs only of the mechanism for
perceptions of control, not for control itself.

Emily Pronin has argued that the subjective experience of free will is supported by the
introspection illusion. This is the tendency for people to trust the reliability of their own
introspections while distrusting the introspections of other people. The theory implies that
people will more readily attribute free will to themselves rather than others. This
prediction has been confirmed by three of Pronin and Kugler's experiments. When
college students were asked about personal decisions in their own and their roommate's
lives, they regarded their own choices as less predictable. Staff at a restaurant described
their co-workers' lives as more determined (having fewer future possibilities) than their
own lives. When weighing up the influence of different factors on behaviour, students

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gave desires and intentions the strongest weight for their own behavior, but rated
personality traits as most predictive of other people.

Psychologists have shown that reducing a person's belief in free will makes them less
helpful and more aggressive.

In Eastern philosophy
In Hindu philosophy

The six orthodox (astika) schools of thought in Hindu philosophy do not agree with each
other entirely on the question of free will. For the Samkhya, for instance, matter is
without any freedom, and soul lacks any ability to control the unfolding of matter. The
only real freedom (kaivalya) consists in realizing the ultimate separateness of matter and

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self. For the Yoga school, only Ishvara is truly free, and its freedom is also distinct from
all feelings, thoughts, actions, or wills, and is thus not at all a freedom of will. The
metaphysics of the Nyaya and Vaisheshika schools strongly suggest a belief in
determinism, but do not seem to make explicit claims about determinism or free will.

A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry
about free will in the Hindu tradition.

Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words
are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within
our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space
and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this
universe; it cannot be found here.

However, the preceding quote has often been misinterpreted as Vivekananda implying
that everything is predetermined. What Vivekananda actually meant by lack of free will
was that the will was not "free" because it was heavily influenced by the law of cause and
effect—"The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is
something behind the will which is free." Vivekananda never said things were absolutely
determined and placed emphasis on the power of conscious choice to alter one's past
karma: "It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But it is the strong man
who stands up and says I will make my own fate."

Similarly, Vivekananda's teacher Ramakrishna Paramahansa, using an analogy said that

man is like a cow tied to a pole with a rope—the karmic debts and human nature bind
him and the amount of free will he has is analogous to the amount of freedom the rope
allows; as one progresses spiritually, the rope becomes longer.

Mimamsa, Vedanta, and the more theistic versions of Hinduism such as Shaivism and
Vaishnavism, have often emphasized the importance of free will. The doctrine of karma
requires both that we pay for our actions in the past, and that our actions in the present be

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free enough to allow us to deserve the future reward or punishment that we will receive
for our present actions.

In Buddhist philosophy

Buddhism accepts both freedom and determinism (or something similar to it), but rejects
the idea of an agent, and thus the idea that freedom is a free will belonging to an agent.
According to the Buddha, "There is free action, there is retribution, but I see no agent that
passes out from one set of momentary elements into another one, except the [connection]
of those elements." Buddhists believe in neither absolute free will, nor determinism. It
preaches a middle doctrine, named pratitya-samutpada in Sanskrit, which is often
translated as "inter-dependent arising". It is part of the theory of karma in Buddhism. The
concept of karma in Buddhism is different from the notion of karma in Hinduism. In
Buddhism, the idea of karma is much less deterministic. The Buddhist notion of karma is

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primarily focused on the cause and effect of moral actions in this life, while in Hinduism
the concept of karma is more often connected with determining one's destiny in future
lives.

In Buddhism it is taught that the idea of absolute freedom of choice (i.e. that any human
being could be completely free to make any choice) is foolish, because it denies the
reality of one's physical needs and circumstances. Equally incorrect is the idea that we
have no choice in life or that our lives are pre-determined. To deny freedom would be to
deny the efforts of Buddhists to make moral progress (through our capacity to freely
choose compassionate action). Pubbekatahetuvada, the belief that all happiness and
suffering arise from previous actions, is considered a wrong view according to Buddhist
doctrines. Because Buddhists also reject agenthood, the traditional compatibilist strate-
gies are closed to them as well. Instead, the Buddhist philosophical strategy is to examine
the metaphysics of causality. Ancient India had many heated arguments about the nature
of causality with Jains, Nyayists, Samkhyists, Cārvākans, and Buddhists all taking
slightly different lines. In many ways, the Buddhist position is closer to a theory of
"conditionality" than a theory of "causality", especially as it is expounded by Nagarjuna
in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

In Kashmir Shaivism

The concept of free will plays a central role in Kashmir Shaivism. Known under the
technical name of svātantrya it is the cause of the creation of the universe—a primordial
force that stirs up the absolute and manifests the world inside the supreme consciousness
of Śiva.

Svātantrya is the sole property of God, all the rest of conscious subjects being co-
participant in various degrees to the divine sovereignty. Humans have a limited degree of
free will based on their level of consciousness. Ultimately, Kashmir Shaivism as a
monistic idealist philosophical system views all subjects to be identical - "all are one" -
and that one is Śiva, the supreme consciousness. Thus, all subjects have free will but they

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can be ignorant of this power. Ignorance too is a force projected by svātantrya itself upon
the creation and can only be removed by svātantrya.

A function of svātantrya is that of granting divine grace - śaktipāt. In this philosophical

system spiritual liberation is not accessible by mere effort, but dependent only on the will
of God. Thus, the disciple can only surrender himself and wait for the divine grace to
come down and eliminate the limitations that imprison his consciousness.

Causality in Kashmir Shaivism is considered to be created by Svātantrya along with the

universe. Thus there can be no contradiction, limitation or rule to force Śiva to act one
way or the other. Svātantrya always exists beyond the limiting shield of cosmic illusion,
māyā.

In other theology

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The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with
free will, particularly in Reformed circles. For if God knows exactly what will happen,
right down to every choice one makes, the status of choices as free is called into question.
If God had timelessly true knowledge about one's choices, this would seem to constrain
one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea battle:
tomorrow there will or will not be a sea battle. If there will be one, then it seems that it
was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle
will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't
occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths—true
propositions about the future.

However, some philosophers follow William of Ockham in holding that necessity and
possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of
empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of
one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient. Some philosophers
follow Philo of Alexandria, a philosopher known for his homocentrism, in holding that
free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that non-human animals lack free will.

Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using
the word neshama (from the Hebrew root [Link].m. or .‫נ‬.‫ש‬.‫ מ‬meaning "breath"), but the
ability to make a free choice is through Yechida (from Hebrew word "yachid", ‫דיחי‬,
singular), the part of the soul that is united with God, the only being that is not hindered
by or dependent on cause and effect (thus, freedom of will does not belong to the realm
of the physical reality, and inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected).

In Islam the theological issue is not usually how to reconcile free will with God's
foreknowledge, but with God's jabr, or divine commanding power. al-Ash'ari developed
an "acquisition" or "dual-agency" form of compatibilism, in which human free will and
divine jabr were both asserted, and which became a cornerstone of the dominant Ash'ari
position. In Shia Islam, Ash'aris understanding of a higher balance toward predestination
is challenged by most theologists. Free will, according to Islamic doctrine is the main

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factor for man's accountability in his/her actions throughout life. All actions taken by
man's free will are said to be counted on the Day of Judgement because they are his/her
own and not God's.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that divine omnipotence cannot be separated
from divine goodness. As a truly omnipotent and good being, God could create beings
with true freedom over God. Furthermore, God would voluntarily do so because "the
greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do
for it, is to be truly free." Alvin Plantinga's "free will defense" is a contemporary
expansion of this theme, adding how God, free will, and evil are consistent.

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Chapter 5

Problem of Universals

The problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether

universals exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties,
kinds or relations, such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can

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be predicated of individuals or particulars or that individuals or particulars can be
regarded as sharing or participating in. For example, Scott, Pat, and Chris have in
common the universal quality of being human or humanity. While many standard cases
of universals are also typically regarded as abstract objects (such as humanity), abstract
objects are not necessarily universals. For example, numbers can be held to be particular
yet abstract objects.

The problem of universals is about their status; as to whether universals exist inde-
pendently of the individuals of whom they can be predicated or if they are merely
convenient ways of talking about and finding similarity among particular things that are
radically different. This has led philosophers to raise questions like, if they exist, do they
exist in the individuals or only in people's minds or in some separate metaphysical
domain? Questions like these arise from attempts to account for the phenomenon of
similarity or attribute agreement among things. For example, living grass and some
apples are similar, namely in having the attribute of greenness. The issue, however, is
how to account for this and related facts.

Positions
There are three main positions on the issue: realism, idealism and nominalism (some-
times simply called "anti-realism" with regard to universals).

Realism

The realist school claims that universals are real — they exist and are distinct from the
particulars that instantiate them. There are various forms of realism. Two major forms are
Platonic realism (universalia ante res) and Aristotelian realism (universalia in rebus).
Platonic realism is the view that universals are real entities and they exist independent of
particulars. Aristotelian realism, on the other hand, is the view that universals are real
entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them.

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Realists tend to argue that universals must be posited as distinct entities in order to
account for various phenomena. For example, a common realist argument, arguably
found in Plato, is that universals are required for certain general words to have meaning
and for the sentences in which they occur to be true or false. Take the sentence "Djivan
Gasparyan is a musician". The realist may claim that this sentence is only meaningful and
expresses a truth because there is an individual, Djivan Gasparyan, who possesses a
certain quality, musicianship. Thus it is assumed that the property is a universal which is
distinct from the particular individual who has the property (MacLeod & Rubenstein,
2006, §1b).

Nominalism

Nominalists assert that only individuals or particulars exist and deny that universals are
real (i.e. that they exist as entities or beings). The term "nominalism" comes from the

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Latin nomen ("name"). There are various forms of nominalism (which is sometimes also
referred to as "terminism"), three major forms are resemblance nominalism, conce-
ptualism and trope nominalism. Nominalism has been endorsed or defended by many,
including William of Ockham, D. C. Williams (1953), David Lewis (1983) and arguably
H. H. Price (1953) and W. V. O. Quine (1961).

Nominalists often argue for their view by claiming that nominalism can account for all
the relevant phenomena, and therefore—by Ockham's razor or some sort of principle of
simplicity—nominalism is preferable, since it posits fewer entities. Whether nominalism
can truly "account" for all of the relevant phenomena, is of course, hotly debated.

Idealism

Idealism is a broad category that includes several diverse themes, from the radical doubt
about what can truly be perceived externally of Kant to the verification of the sum of
potential manifestations of matter and concepts as the Absolute Ideal of Hegel. This
position argues that the nature of reality is based only in our minds or ideas. The external
world is inseparable from the mind, consciousness or perceptions. Universals are real and
exist independently of that on which they might be predicated.

Ancient thought
Plato

Plato believed there to be a sharp distinction between the world of perceivable objects
and the world of universals or forms: one can only have mere opinions about the former,
but one can have knowledge about the latter. For Plato it was not possible to have
knowledge of anything that could change or was particular, since knowledge had to be
forever unfailing and general. For that reason, the world of the forms is the real world,
like sunlight, the sensible world is only imperfectly or partially real, like shadows. This
Platonic realism, however, in denying full reality to the material world, differs sharply

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with modern forms of idealism, which generally assert the reality of the external, physical
world and which in some versions deny the reality of ideals.

One of the first nominalist critiques of Plato's realism was that of Diogenes of Sinope,
who said "I've seen Plato's cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness."

Aristotle

Plato's student Aristotle disagreed with his tutor. Aristotle transformed Plato's forms into
"formal causes", the blueprints or essences of individual things. Whereas Plato idealized
geometry, Aristotle emphasized nature and related disciplines and therefore much of his
thinking concerns living beings and their properties. The nature of universals in
Aristotle's philosophy therefore hinges on his view of natural kinds.

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Consider for example a particular oak tree. This is a member of a species and it has much
in common with other oak trees, past, present and future. Its universal, its oakness, is a
part of it. A biologist can study oak trees and learn about oakness and more generally the
intelligible order within the sensible world. Accordingly, Aristotle was more confident
than Plato about coming to know the sensible world; he was a prototypical empiricist and
a founder of induction. Aristotle was a new, moderate sort of realist about universals.

Medieval thought
Boethius

The problem was introduced to the medieval world by Boethius, by his translation of
Porphyry's Isagoge. It begins:

For the moment, I shall naturally decline to say, concerning genera and species, whether
they subsist, whether they are bare, pure isolated conceptions, whether, if subsistent, they
are corporeal or incorporeal, or whether they are separated from or in sensible objects and
other related matters. This sort of problem is of the very deepest and requires more
extensive investigation.

Paulus Venetus

Paul of Venice referred to words as nothing more than "flatus voci".

Abelard

Peter Abelard was intrigued by the works of Boethius, and wrote an extensive com-
mentary on the Isagoge.

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Duns Scotus

Duns Scotus argued strongly against both nominalism and conceptualism, arguing instead
for Scotist realism, a medieval response to the conceptualism of Abelard.

Ockham

William of Ockham argued strongly that universals are a product of abstract human
thought. According to Ockham, universals are just words/names that only exist in the
mind and have no real place in the external world.

Medieval realism

Realism was argued for by both Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Aquinas argued

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that both the essence of a thing and its existence were clearly distinct, in this regard he is
close to the teaching of Aristotle. Scotist realism argues that in a thing there is no real
distinction between the essence and the existence, instead there is only a Formal
distinction. Both these opinions were denied by Scotus' pupil William of Ockham.

Medieval nominalism

Nominalism was first formulated as a philosophical theory in the Middle Ages. The
French philosopher and theologian Roscellinus (c. 1050-c. 1125) was an early, prominent
proponent of this view. It can be found in the work of Peter Abelard and reached its
flowering in William of Ockham, who was the most influential and thorough nominalist.
Abelard's and Ockham's version of nominalism is sometimes called conceptualism, which
presents itself as a middle way between nominalism and realism, asserting that there is
something in common among like individuals, but that it is a concept in the mind, rather
than a real entity existing independently of the mind. Ockham argued that only
individuals existed and that universals were only mental ways of referring to sets of
individuals. "I maintain", he wrote, "that a universal is not something real that exists in a
subject... but that it has a being only as a thought-object in the mind [objectivum in
anima]". As a general rule, Ockham argued against assuming any entities that were not
necessary for explanations. Accordingly, he wrote, there is no reason to believe that there
is an entity called "humanity" that resides inside, say, Socrates, and nothing further is
explained by making this claim. This is in accord with the analytical method which has
since come to be called Ockham's razor, the principle that the explanation of any
phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.

Critics argue that conceptualist approaches only answer the psychological question of
universals. If the same concept is correctly and non-arbitrarily applied to two individuals,
there must be some resemblance or shared property between the two individuals that
justifies their falling under the same concept and that is just the metaphysical problem
that universals were brought in to address, the starting-point of the whole problem
(MacLeod & Rubenstein, 2006, §3d). If resemblances between individuals are asserted,

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conceptualism becomes moderate realism; if they are denied, it collapses into nomin-
alism.

Modern and contemporary views

Berkeley

George Berkeley, best known for his empiricism, was also an advocate of an extreme
nominalism. Indeed, he disbelieved even in the possibility of a general thought as a
psychological fact. It is impossible to imagine a man, the argument goes, unless one has
in mind a very specific picture of one who is either tall or short, European or Asian, blue-
eyed or brown-eyed, et cetera. When one thinks of a triangle, likewise, it is always
obtuse, right-angled or acute. There is no mental image of a triangle in general. Not only
then do general terms fail to correspond to extra-mental realities, they don't correspond to

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thoughts either.

Berkeleyan nominalism contributed to the same thinker's critique of the possibility of

matter. In the climate of English thought in the period following Isaac Newton's major
contributions to physics, there was much discussion of a distinction between primary
qualities and secondary qualities. The primary qualities were supposed to be true of
material objects in themselves (size, position, momentum) whereas the secondary
qualities were supposed to be more subjective (color and sound). But on Berkeley's view,
just as it is meaningless to speak of triangularity in general aside from specific figures, so
it is meaningless to speak of mass in motion without knowing the colour. If the colour is
in the eye of the beholder, so is the mass.

Mill

John Stuart Mill discussed the problem of universals in the course of a book that
eviscerated the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton. Mill wrote, "The formation of a
concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from all
other attributes of the same object and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined
from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any
way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other
attributes, the idea of an individual object".

At this point in his discussion he seems to be siding with Berkeley. But he proceeds to
concede, under some verbal camouflage, that Berkeley's position is factually wrong and
that every human mind performs the trick Berkeley thought impossible:

But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomeration, we have the power of
fixing our attention on them, to the neglect of the other attributes with which we think
them combined. While the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we
may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes and may really, for a brief
interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept.

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In other words, we may be "temporarily unconscious" of whether an image is white,
black or yellow and concentrate our attention on the fact that it is a man and on just those
attributes necessary to identify it as a man (but not as any particular one). It may then
have the significance of a universal of manhood.

Peirce

The 19th century American logician Charles Sanders Peirce, known as the father of
pragmatism, developed his own views on the problem of universals in the course of a
review of an edition of the writings of George Berkeley. Peirce begins with the
observation that "Berkeley's metaphysical theories have at first sight an air of paradox
and levity very unbecoming to a bishop". He includes among these paradoxical doctrines
Berkeley's denial of "the possibility of forming the simplest general conception". He
wrote that if there is some mental fact that works in practice the way that a universal

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would, that fact is a universal. "If I have learned a formula in gibberish which in any way
jogs my memory so as to enable me in each single case to act as though I had a general
idea, what possible utility is there in distinguishing between such a gibberish... and an
idea?" Peirce also held as a matter of ontology that what he called "thirdness", the more
general facts about the world, are extra-mental realities.

James

William James learned pragmatism, this way of understanding an idea by its practical
effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Which was not to
Peirce's taste - he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually
to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead). Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and
against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in
his ontology:

From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to
universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should
have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular and in adoration of
that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought
to be that of the more adorable things and that the things of worth are all concretes and
singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to
know new truths about individual things.

– William James, The Principles of Psychology

There are at least three ways in which a realist might try to answer James' challenge of
explaining the reason why universal conceptions are more lofty than those of particulars -
there is the moral/political answer, the mathematical/scientific answer and the anti-
paradoxical answer. Each has contemporary or near contemporary advocates.

The moral or political response is given by the conservative philosopher Richard M.

Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences, where he describes how the acceptance of "the

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fateful doctrine of nominalism" was "the crucial event in the history of Western culture;
from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence".

Roger Penrose contends that the foundations of mathematics can't be understood absent
the Platonic view that "mathematical truth is absolute, external and eternal, and not based
on man-made criteria ... mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own..."

Nino Cocchiarella (1975), professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana University, has

maintained that conceptual realism is the best response to certain logical paradoxes to
which nominalism leads. It is noted that in a sense Cocchiarella has adopted Platonism
for anti-Platonic reasons. Plato, as seen in the dialogue Parmenides, was willing to accept
a certain amount of paradox with his forms. Cocchiarella adopts the forms to avoid
paradox.

Armstrong

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The Australian philosopher David Malet Armstrong has been one of the leading realists
in the twentieth century, and has used a concept of universals to build a naturalistic and
scientifically realist ontology upon. In both Universals and Scientific Realism and
Universals: An Opinionated Introduction, Armstrong describes the relative merits of a
number of nominalist theories which appeal either to "natural classes" (a view he ascribes
to Anthony Quinton), concepts, resemblance relations or predicates, and also discusses
non-realist "trope" accounts (which he describes in the Universals and Scientific Realism
volumes as "particularism"). He gives a number of reasons to reject all of these, but also
dismisses a number of realist accounts.

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Chapter 6

Ontology

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Parmenides was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the
fundamental nature of reality.

Ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: "of that which is", and -λογία, -logia:
science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or
reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally
listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals
with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such
entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to simil-
arities and differences.

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Overview
Ontology, in analytic philosophy, concerns the determining of whether some categories
of being are fundamental and asks in what sense the items in those categories can be said
to "be". It is the inquiry into being in so much as it is being, or into beings insofar as they
exist—and not insofar as, for instance, particular facts obtained about them or particular
properties related to them.

Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns (including
abstract nouns) refer to existent entities. Other philosophers contend that nouns do not
always name entities, but that some provide a kind of shorthand for reference to a
collection of either objects or events. In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an
entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a
collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection

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of a specific kind of intellectual activity. Between these poles of realism and nominalism,
there are also a variety of other positions; but any ontology must give an account of
which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one
applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, space, time,
truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philoso-
phy.

Some fundamental questions

Principal questions of ontology are "What can be said to exist?", "Into what categories, if
any, can we sort existing things?", "What are the meanings of being?", "What are the
various modes of being of entities?". Various philosophers have provided different
answers to these questions.

One common approach is to divide the extant subjects and predicates into groups called
categories. Of course, such lists of categories differ widely from one another, and it is
through the co-ordination of different categorical schemes that ontology relates to such
fields as library science and artificial intelligence. Such an understanding of ontological
categories, however, is merely taxonomic, classificatory. The categories are, properly
speaking, the ways in which a being can be addressed simply as a being, such as what it
is (its 'whatness', quidditas or essence), how it is (its 'howness' or qualitativeness), how
much it is (quantitativeness), where it is, its relatedness to other beings, etc.

Further examples of ontological questions include:

• What is existence, i.e. what does it mean for a being to be?

• Is existence a property?
• Is existence a genus or general class that is simply divided up by specific
differences?
• Which entities, if any, are fundamental? Are all entities objects?
• How do the properties of an object relate to the object itself?

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 • What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental, attributes of a
given object?
• How many levels of existence or ontological levels are there? And what
constitutes a 'level'?
• What is a physical object?
• Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists?
• Can one give an account of what it means to say that a non-physical entity exists?
• What constitutes the identity of an object?
• When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to merely changing?
• Do beings exist other than in the modes of objectivity and subjectivity, i.e. is the
subject/object split of modern philosophy inevitable?

Concepts

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Essential ontological dichotomies include:

• Universals and particulars

• Substance and accident
• Abstract and concrete objects
• Essence and existence
• Determinism and indeterminism

History of ontology
Etymology

While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself is the New Latin
form ontologia, which appeared in 1606, in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob
Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Göckel
(Goclenius).

The first occurrence in English of "ontology" as recorded by the OED (Oxford English
Dictionary, second edition, 1989) appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines
ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’ - though, of course, such an entry
indicates the term was already in use at the time. It is likely the word was first used in its
Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which themselves are based on the
Greek. The current on-line edition of the OED (Draft Revision September 2008) gives as
first occurrence in English a work by Gideon Harvey (1636/7-1702): Archelogia
philosophica nova; or, New principles of Philosophy. Containing Philosophy in general,
Metaphysicks or Ontology, Dynamilogy or a Discourse of Power, Religio Philosophi or
Natural Theology, Physicks or Natural philosophy - London, Thomson, 1663.

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Origins

Parmenides and Monism

Parmenides was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the
fundamental nature of existence. In his prologue or proem he describes two views of
existence; initially that nothing comes from nothing, and therefore existence is eternal.
Consequently our opinions about truth must often be false and deceitful. Most of western
philosophy, and science - including the fundamental concepts of falsifiability and the
conservation of energy - have emerged from this view. This posits that existence is what
can be conceived of by thought, created, or possessed. Hence, there can be neither void
nor vacuum; and true reality can neither come into being nor vanish from existence.
Rather, the entirety of creation is eternal, uniform, and immutable, though not infinite (he
characterized its shape as that of a perfect sphere). Parmenides thus posits that change, as

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perceived in everyday experience, is illusory. Everything that can be apprehended is but
one part of a single entity. This idea somewhat anticipates the modern concept of an
ultimate grand unification theory that finally explains all of existence in terms of one
inter-related sub-atomic reality which applies to everything.

Ontological pluralism
The opposite of eleatic monism is the pluralistic conception of Being. In the 5th century
BC, Anaxagoras and Leucippus replaced the reality of Being (unique and unchanging)
with that of Becoming and therefore by a more fundamental and elementary ontic
plurality. This thesis originated in the Greek-ion world, stated in two different ways by
Anaxagoras and by Leucippus. The first theory dealt with "seeds" (which Aristotle
referred to as "homeomeries") of the various substances. The second was the atomistic
theory, which dealt with reality as based on the vacuum, the atoms and their intrinsic
movement in it.

The materialist Atomism proposed by Leucippus was indeterminist, but then developed
by Democritus in a deterministic way. It was later (4th century BC) that the original
atomism was taken again as indeterministic by Epicurus. He confirmed the reality as
composed of an infinity of indivisible, unchangeable corpuscles or atoms (atomon, lit.
‘uncuttable’), but he gives weight to characterize atoms while for Leucippus they are
characterized by a "figure", an "order" and a "position" in the cosmos. They are, besides,
creating the whole with the intrinsic movement in the vacuum, producing the diverse flux
of being. Their movement is influenced by the Parenklisis (Lucretius names it Clinamen)
and that is determined by the chance. These ideas foreshadowed our understanding of
traditional physics until the nature of atoms was discovered in the 20th century.

Plato
Plato developed this distinction between true reality and illusion, in arguing that what is
real are eternal and unchanging Forms or Ideas (a precursor to universals), of which
things experienced in sensation are at best merely copies, and real only in so far as they

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copy (‘participate in’) such Forms. In general, Plato presumes that all nouns (e.g.,
‘Beauty’) refer to real entities, whether sensible bodies or insensible Forms. Hence, in
The Sophist Plato argues that Being is a Form in which all existent things participate and
which they have in common (though it is unclear whether ‘Being’ is intended in the sense
of existence, copula, or identity); and argues, against Parmenides, that Forms must exist
not only of Being, but also of Negation and of non-Being (or Difference).

Aristotle
Ontology as an explicit discipline was inaugurated by Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, as
the study of that which is common to all things which exist, and of the categorisation of
the diverse senses in which things can and do exist. What exists, in so far as Aristotle
concludes, are a plurality of independently existing substances – roughly, physical
objects – on which the existence of other things, such as qualities or relations, may

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depend; and of which substances consist both of a form (e.g. a shape, pattern, or
organisation), and of a matter formed (Hylomorphism). Disagreeing with Plato, who
taught that frameworks or Forms have an existence of their own, Aristotle holds that
universals do not have an existence over and above the particular things which instantiate
them.-

In his Categories, Aristotle identifies ten possible kinds of thing that can be the subject or
the predicate of a proposition. For Aristotle there are four different ontological
dimensions:

i) according to the various categories or ways of addressing a being as such

ii) according to its truth or falsity (e.g. fake gold, counterfeit money)
iii) whether it exists in and of itself or simply 'comes along' by accident
iv) according to its potency, movement (energy) or finished presence
(Metaphysics Book Theta).

Other ontological topics

Ontological and epistemological certainty

René Descartes, with "je pense donc je suis" or "cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I
am", argued that "the self" is something that we can know exists with epistemological
certainty. Descartes argued further that this knowledge could lead to a proof of the
certainty of the existence of God, using the ontological argument that had been
formulated first by Anselm of Canterbury.

Certainty about the existence of "the self" and "the other", however, came under
increasing criticism in the 20th century. Sociological theorists, most notably George
Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other",
the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. According to
Mead, "we do not assume there is a self to begin with. Self is not presupposed as a stuff
out of which the world arises. Rather the self arises in the world". The Cartesian Other

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was also used by Sigmund Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force,
and Émile Durkheim who viewed this as a psychologically manifested entity which
represented God in society at large.

Body and environment, questioning the meaning of being

Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism existed at various times in the 20th
century, and the postmodernists and body philosophers tried to reframe all these
questions in terms of bodies taking some specific action in an environment. This relied to
a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive
action in natural and artificial settings—as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive
science.

The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the

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idea of being itself became difficult to really define. What did people mean when they
said "A is B", "A must be B", "A was B"...? Some linguists advocated dropping the verb
"to be" from the English language, leaving "E Prime", supposedly less prone to bad
abstractions. Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage.
Heidegger distinguished human being as existence from the being of things in the world.
Heidegger proposes that our way of being human and the way the world is for us are cast
historically through a fundamental ontological questioning. These fundamental ontolo-
gical categories provide the basis for communication in an age: a horizon of unspoken
and seemingly unquestionable background meanings, such as human beings understood
unquestioningly as subjects and other entities understood unquestioningly as objects.
Because these basic ontological meanings both generate and are regenerated in everyday
interactions, the locus of our way of being in an historical epoch is the communicative
event of language in use. For Heidegger, however, communication in the first place is not
among human beings, but language itself shapes up in response to questioning (the
inexhaustible meaning of) being. Even the focus of traditional ontology on the 'whatness'
or 'quidditas' of beings in their substantial, standing presence can be shifted to pose the
question of the 'whoness' of human being itself.

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Chapter 7

Action Theory (Philosophy) and Abstract

Object

Action theory

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Action theory is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes
causing intentional (willful) human bodily movements of more or less complex kind.
This area of thought has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics (Third Book). With the advent of psychology and later neuro-
science, many theories of action are now subject to empirical testing.

Philosophical action theory, or the 'philosophy of action', should not be confused with
sociological theories of social action, such as the action theory established by Talcott
Parsons.

Overview
Basic action theory typically describes action as behavior caused by an agent in a
particular situation. The agent's desires and beliefs (e.g. my wanting a glass of water and
believing the clear liquid in the cup in front of me is water) lead to bodily behavior (e.g.
reaching over for the glass). In the simple theory, the desire and belief jointly cause the
action. Michael Bratman has raised problems for such a view and argued that we should
take the concept of intention as basic and not analyzable into beliefs and desires.

In some theories a desire plus a belief about the means of satisfying that desire are always
what is behind an action. Agents aim, in acting, to maximize the satisfaction of their
desires. Such a theory of prospective rationality underlies much of economics and other
social sciences within the more sophisticated framework of Rational Choice. However,
many theories of action argue that rationality extends far beyond calculating the best
means to achieve one's ends. For instance, a belief that I ought to do X, in some theories,
can directly cause me to do X without my having to want to do X (i.e. have a desire to do
X). Rationality, in such theories, also involves responding correctly to the reasons an
agent perceives, not just acting on wants.

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While action theorists generally employ the language of causality in their theories of
what the nature of action is, the issue of what causal determination comes to has been
central to controversies about the nature of free will.

Conceptual discussions also revolve around a precise definition of action in philosophy.

Scholars may disagree on which bodily movements fall under this category, e.g. whether
thinking should be analysed as action, and how complex actions involving several steps
to be taken and diverse intended consequences are to be summarised or decomposed.

Discussion
For example, throwing a ball is an instance of action; it involves an intention, a goal, and
a bodily movement guided by the agent. On the other hand, catching a cold is not
considered an action because it is something which happens to a person, not something

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done by one. Generally an agent doesn't intend to catch a cold or engage in bodily
movement to do so (though we might be able to conceive of such a case). Other events
are less clearly defined as actions or not. For instance, distractedly drumming ones
fingers on the table seems to fall somewhere in the middle. Deciding to do something
might be considered a mental action by some. However, others think it is not an action
unless the decision is carried out. Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not
be considered an action for similar reasons (for e.g. lack of bodily movement). It is
contentious whether believing, intending, and thinking are actions since they are mental
events.

Some would prefer to define actions as requiring bodily movement. The side effects of
actions are considered by some to be part of the action; in an example from Anscombe's
manuscript Intention, pumping water can also be an instance of poisoning the inhabitants.
This introduces a moral dimension to the discussion. If the poisoned water resulted in a
death, that death might be considered part of the action of the agent that pumped the
water. Whether a side effect is considered part of an action is especially unclear in cases
in which the agent isn't aware of the possible side effects. For example, an agent that
accidentally cures a person by administering a poison he was intending to kill him with.

A primary concern of the philosophy of action is to analyze the nature of actions and
distinguish them from similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions,
explaining the relationship between actions and their effects, explaining how an action is
related to the beliefs and desires which cause and/or justify it, as well as examining the
nature of agency. A primary concern is the nature of free will and whether actions are
determined by the mental states that precede them. Some philosophers (e.g. Donald
Davidson) have argued that the mental states the agent invokes as justifying his action are
physical states that cause the action. Problems have been raised for this view because the
mental states seem to be reduced to mere physical causes. Their mental properties don't
seem to be doing any work. If the reasons an agent cites as justifying his action, however,
are not the cause of the action, they must explain the action in some other way or be
causally impotent.

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Abstract object
An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but
rather exists as a type of thing (as an idea, or abstraction). In philosophy, an important
distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are
sometimes called abstracta (sing. abstractum) and concrete objects are sometimes
called concreta (sing. concretum).

In philosophy
The type-token distinction identifies that physical objects are tokens of a particular type
of thing. The "type" that it is a part of itself is an abstract object. The abstract-concrete
distinction is often introduced and initially understood in terms of paradigmatic examples
of objects of each kind:

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Examples of Abstract and Concrete Objects
Abstracta Concreta
Tennis A tennis player
Redness The red coloring of an apple.
Five Five cats
Justice A court
Human Socrates

Abstract objects have often garnered the interest of philosophers because they are taken
to raise problems for popular theories. In ontology, abstract objects are considered
problematic for physicalism and some forms of naturalism. Historically, the most
important ontological dispute about abstract objects has been the problem of universals.
In epistemology, abstract objects are considered problematic for empiricism. If abstracta
lack causal powers or spatial location, how do we know about them? It is hard to say how
they can affect our sensory experiences, and yet we seem to agree on a wide range of
claims about them. Some, such as Edward Zalta and arguably Plato (in his Theory of
Forms), have held that abstract objects constitute the defining subject matter of
metaphysics or philosophical inquiry more broadly. To the extent that philosophy is
independent of empirical research, and to the extent that empirical questions do not
inform questions about abstracta, philosophy would seem specially suited to answering
these latter questions.

Abstract objects and causality

Another popular proposal for drawing the abstract-concrete distinction has it that an
object is abstract if it lacks any causal powers. A causal power is an ability to affect
something causally. Thus the empty set is abstract because it cannot act on other objects.
One problem for this view is that it is not clear exactly what it is to have a causal power.

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For a more detailed exploration of the abstract-concrete distinction, follow the link below
to the Stanford Encyclopedia article.

Concrete and abstract thinking

Jean Piaget uses the terms "concrete" and "formal" to describe the different types of
learning. Concrete thinking involves facts and descriptions about everyday, tangible
objects, while abstract (formal operational) thinking involves a mental process.

Concrete idea Abstract idea

It will sink if its density is greater than the
Heavy things sink
density of the liquid.
You breathe in oxygen and breathe out Gas exchange takes place between the air in the
carbon dioxide alveoli and the blood

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Water diffuses through the cell membrane of the
Plants get water through their roots
root hair cells...

Terminology
In language, abstract and concrete objects are often synonymous with concrete nouns and
abstract nouns. In English, many abstract nouns are formed by adding noun-forming
suffixes ("-ness", "-ity", "-tion") to adjectives or verbs. Examples are "happiness",
"circulation" and "serenity".

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Chapter 8

Category of Being

In metaphysics (in particular, ontology), the different kinds or ways of being are called
categories of being or simply categories. To investigate the categories of being is to
determine the most fundamental and the broadest classes of entities. A distinction

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between such categories, in making the categories or applying them, is called an
ontological distinction.

Categorical distinctions
The common or dominant ways to view categories as of the end of the 20th century.

1. via bundle theory as bundles of properties - categories reflect differences in these

2. via peer-to-peer comparisons or dialectics - categories are formed by conflict/
debate
3. via value theory as leading to specific ends - categories are formed by choosing
ends
4. via conceptual metaphors as arising from characteristics of human cognition itself
- categories are found via cognitive science and other study of that biological
system

Any of these ways can be criticized for...

• for seeking to make distinctions that aren't as universal as claimed (greedy

reductionism)
• for serious bias in point of view (subject-object problem or God's eye view)
• for relying on theological or spiritual claims a priori, for relying too much on
surface conflict or current investigative priorities to point out differences
• for ignoring action
• for ignoring the perceived or biospheric context, or the cognitive mechanisms that
perceive and invent categories
• or for relying on a complex empirical process of investigation that is poorly
understood and only recently embarked upon.

In process philosophy, this last is the only possibility, but historically philosophers have
been loath to conclude that nothing exists but process.

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Categorization of existence
Intuition as evasion

A seemingly simpler way to view categories is as arising only from intuition.

Philosophers argue this evades the issue. What it means to take the category physical
object seriously as a category of being is to assert that the concept of physical objecthood
cannot be reduced to or explicated in any other terms - not, for example, in terms of
bundles of properties but only in terms of other items in that category.

In this way, many ontological controversies can be understood as controversies about

exactly which categories should be seen as fundamental, irreducible, or primitive. To
refer to intuition as the source of distinctions and thus categories doesn't resolve this.

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Ideology, dogma, theory
Modern theories give weight to intuition, perceptually observed properties, comparisons
of categories among persons, and the direction of investigation towards known specified
ends, to determine what humanity in its present state of being needs to consider
irreducible. They seek to explain why certain beliefs about categories would appear in
political science as ideology, in religion as dogma, or in science as theory.

as metaphors

A set of ontological distinctions related by a single conceptual metaphor was called an

ontological metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who claimed that such
metaphors arising from experience were more basic than any properties or symbol-based
comparisons. Their cognitive science of mathematics was a study of the embodiment of
basic symbols and properties including those studied in the philosophy of mathematics,
via embodied philosophy, using cognitive science. This theory comes after several
thousand years of inquiry into patterns and cognitive bias of humanity.

Categories of being
Philosophers have many differing views on what the fundamental categories of being are.
In no particular order, here are at least some items that have been regarded as categories
of being by someone or other:

Physical objects

Physical objects are beings; certainly they are said to be in the simple sense that they
exist all around us. So a house is a being, a person's body is a being, a tree is a being, a
cloud is a being, and so on. They are beings because, and in the sense that, they are
physical objects. One might also call them bodies, or physical particulars, or concrete
things, or matter, or maybe substances (but bear in mind the word 'substance' has some
special philosophical meanings).

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Minds

Minds -- those "parts" of us that think and perceive—are considered beings by some
philosophers. Each of us, according to common sense anyway, "has" a mind. Of course,
philosophers rarely just assume that minds occupy a different category of beings from
physical objects. Some, like René Descartes, have thought that this is so (this view is
known as dualism, and functionalism also considers the mind as distinct from the body),
while others have thought that concepts of the mental can be reduced to physical concepts
(this is the view of physicalism or materialism). Still others maintain though "mind" is a
noun, it is not necessarily the "name of a thing" distinct within the whole person. In this
view the relationship between mental properties and physical properties is one of
supervenience – similar to how "banks" supervene upon certain buildings.

Classes

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We can talk about all human beings, and the planets, and all engines as belonging to
classes. Within the class of human beings are all of the human beings, or the extension of
the term 'human being'. In the class of planets would be Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and
all the other planets that there might be in the universe. Classes, in addition to each of
their members, are often taken to be beings. Surely we can say that in some sense, the
class of planets is, or has being. Classes are usually taken to be abstract objects, like sets;
'class' is often regarded as equivalent, or nearly equivalent, in meaning to 'set'. Denying
that classes and sets exist is the contemporary meaning of nominalism.

Properties

The redness of a red apple, or more to the point, the redness all red things share, is a
property. One could also call it an attribute of the apple. Very roughly put, a property is
just a quality that describes an object. This will not do as a definition of the word
'property' because, like 'attribute', 'quality' is a near-synonym of 'property'. But these
synonyms can at least help us to get a fix on the concept we are talking about. Whenever
one talks about the size, color, weight, composition, and so forth, of an object, one is
talking about the properties of that object. Some—though this is a point of severe
contention in the problem of universals -- believe that properties are beings; the redness
of all apples is something that is. To deny that universals exist is the scholastic variant of
nominalism.

Relations

An apple sitting on a table is in a relation to the table it sits on. So we can say that there is
a relation between the apple and the table: namely, the relation of sitting-on. So, some
say, we can say that that relation has being. For another example, the Washington
Monument is taller than the White House. Being-taller-than is a relation between the two
buildings. We can say that that relation has being as well. This, too, is a point of
contention in the problem of universals.

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Space and Time

Space and time are what physical objects are extended into. There is debate as to whether
time exists only in the present or whether far away times are just as real as far away
spaces, and there is debate as to whether space is curved. Many contemporary thinkers
actually suggest that time is the fourth dimension, thus reducing space and time to one
distinct ontological entity, the space-time continuum.

Propositions

Propositions are units of meaning. They should not be confused with declarative
sentences, which are just sets of words in languages that refer to propositions. Declarative
sentences, ontologically speaking, are thus ideas, a property of substances (minds), rather
than a distinct ontological category. For instance, the English declarative sentence "snow

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is white" refers to the same proposition as the equivalent French declarative sentence "la
neige est blanche"; two sentences, one proposition. Similarly, one declarative sentence
can refer to many propositions; for instance, "I am hungry" changes meaning (i.e. refers
to different propositions) depending on the person uttering it.

Events

Events are that which can be said to occur. To illustrate, consider the claim "John went to
a ballgame"; if true, then we must ontologically account for every entity in the sentence.
"John" refers to a substance. But what does "went to a ballgame" refer to? It seems wrong
to say that "went to a ballgame" is a property that instantiates John, because "went to a
ballgame" does not seem to be the same ontological kind of thing as, for instance,
redness. Thus, events arguably deserve their own ontological category.

Properties, relations, and classes are supposed to be abstract, rather than concrete. Many
philosophers say that properties and relations have an abstract existence, and that
physical objects have a concrete existence. That, perhaps, is the paradigm case of a
difference in ways in which items can be said to be, or to have being.

Many philosophers have attempted to reduce the number of distinct ontological

categories. For instance, David Hume famously regarded Space and Time as nothing
more than psychological facts about human beings, which would effectively reduce
Space and Time to ideas, which are properties of humans (substances). Nominalists and
realists argue over the existence of properties and relations. Finally, events and
propositions have been argued to be reducible to sets (classes) of substances and other
such categories.

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History
Aristotle

Category came into use with Aristotle's essay Categories, in which he discussed univocal
and equivocal terms, predication, and ten categories:

• Substance, essence (ousia) — examples of primary substance: this man, this

horse; secondary substance (species, genera): man, horse
• Quantity (poson, how much), discrete or continuous — examples: two cubits
long, number, space, (length of) time.
• Quality (poion, of what kind or description) — examples: white, black,
grammatical, hot, sweet, curved, straight.
• Relation (pros ti, toward something) — examples: double, half, large, master,

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knowledge.
• Place (pou, where) — examples: in a marketplace, in the Lyceum
• Time (pote, when) — examples: yesterday, last year
• Position, posture, attitude (keisthai, to lie) — examples: sitting, lying, standing
• State, condition (echein, to have or be) — examples: shod, armed
• Action (poiein, to make or do) — examples: to lance, to heat, to cool (something)
• Affection, passion (paschein, to suffer or undergo) — examples: to be lanced, to
be heated, to be cooled

Kant

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposed the following system:

• Quantity
o Unity
o Plurality
o Totality
• Quality
o Reality
o Negation
o Limitation
• Relation
o Inherence and Subsistence (substance and accident)
o Causality and Dependence (cause and effect)
o Community (reciprocity)
• Modality
o Possibility
o Existence
o Necessity

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Peirce & Husserl

Charles Sanders Peirce, who had read Kant closely and who also had some knowledge of
Aristotle, proposed a system of merely three phenomenological categories: Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness, which he repeatedly invoked in his subsequent writings.

Edmund Husserl (1962, 2000) wrote extensively about categorial systems as part of his
phenomenology.

For Gilbert Ryle (1949), a category (in particular a "category mistake") is an important
semantic concept, but one having only loose affinities to an ontological category.

Others

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Contemporary systems of categories have been proposed by Wilfrid Sellars (1974),
Grossman (1983), Johansson (1989), Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (1994), Roderick
Chisholm (1996), Barry Smith (ontologist) (2003), and Jonathan Lowe (2006).

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Chapter 9

Universal and Unobservable

Universal

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In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely char-
acteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that
can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For example, suppose there
are two chairs in a room, each of which is green. These two chairs both share the quality
of "chairness," as well as greenness or the quality of being green. Metaphysicians call this
quality that they share a "universal", because it can be instantiated or exemplified by
many particular things. There are three major kinds of qualities or characteristics: types
or kinds (e.g. mammal), properties (e.g. short, strong), and relations (e.g. father of, next
to). These are all different types of universal.

The noun "universal" contrasts with "individual", while the adjective "universal"
contrasts with "particular". Paradigmatically, universals are abstract (e.g. humanity),
whereas particulars are concrete (e.g. the person of Socrates). However, universals are
not necessarily abstract and particulars are not necessarily concrete. For example, one
might hold that numbers are particular yet abstract objects. Likewise, some philosophers,
such as D.M. Armstrong, consider universals to be concrete. Most do not consider classes
to be universals, although some prominent philosophers do, such as John Bigelow.

Problem of universals
The problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether universals
exist. The problem arises from attempts to account for the phenomenon of similarity or
attribute agreement among things. For example, live grass and Granny Smith apples are
similar or agree in attribute, namely in having the attribute of greenness. The issue is how
to account for this sort of agreement in attribute among things. There are two main
positions on the issue: realism and nominalism (sometimes simply called "anti-realism"
about universals). Realists posit the existence of universals to account for attribute
agreement. Nominalists deny that universals exist, claiming that they are not necessary to
explain attribute agreement. Complications which arise include the implications of
language use and the complexity of relating language to ontology.

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Particular
A universal may have instances, known as its particulars. For example, the type dog (or
doghood) is a universal, as are the property red (or redness) and the relation betweenness
(or being between). Any particular dog, red thing, or object that is between other things is
not a universal, however, but is an instance of a universal. That is, a universal type
(doghood), property (redness), or relation (betweenness) inheres in a particular object (a
specific dog, red thing, or object between other things).

Platonic Realism

Platonic realism holds universals to be the referents of general terms, such as the abstract,
nonphysical, non-mental entities to which words like "sameness", "justice", and "beauty"
refer. Particulars are the referents of proper names, like "Phaedo," or of definite

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descriptions that identify single objects, like the phrase, "that bed over there". Other
metaphysical theories may use the terminology of universals to describe physical entities.
Plato's examples of what we might today call universals included mathematical and
geometrical ideas such as a circle and natural numbers as universals. Plato's views on
universals did, however, vary across several different discussions. In some cases, Plato
spoke as if the perfect circle functioned as the form or blueprint for all copies and for the
word definition of circle. In other discussions, Plato describes particulars as "partici-
pating" in the associated universal.

Ness-Ity-Hood Principle
The Ness-Ity-Hood Principle is used mainly by English-speaking philosophers to
generate convenient, concise names for universals or properties. According to the Ness-
Ity-Hood Principle, a name for any universal may be formed that is distinctive, "of left-
handers" may be formed by taking the predicate "left-handed" and adding "ness", which
yields the name "left-handedness". The principle is most helpful in cases where there is
not an established or standard name of the universal in ordinary English usage: What is
the name of the universal distinctive of chairs? "Chair" in English is used not only as a
subject (as in "The chair is broken"), but also as a predicate (as in "That is a chair"). So to
generate a name for the universal distinctive of chairs, take the predicate "chair" and add
"ness", which yields "chairness". (Though it is clear that "chairity" would not work, it is
arguable that "chairhood" is preferable to "chairness". It is important to see that the Ness-
Ity-Hood Principle offers no way of adjudicating such relatively trivial distinctions.)

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Unobservable
An unobservable (also called impalpable) is an entity whose existence, nature,
properties, qualities or relations are not directly observable by man. In philosophy of
science typical examples of "unobservables" are atomic particles, the force of gravity,
causation and beliefs or desires. However, some philosophers (ex. George Berkeley) also
characterize all objects — trees, tables, other minds, microbiological things and so on to
which humans ascribe as the thing causing their perception—as unobservable.

"Unobservables" is a reference similar to Immanuel Kant's distinction between noumena

(things-in-themselves, i.e., raw things in their necessarily unknowable state, before they
pass through the formalizing apparatus of the senses and the mind in order to become
perceived objects) and phenomena (the perceived object). According to Kant humans can
never know noumena; all that humans know is the phenomena. Kant's distinction is

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similar to John Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Secondary
qualities are what humans perceive such as redness, chirping, heat, mustiness or
sweetness. Primary qualities would be the actual qualities of the things themselves which
give rise to the secondary qualities which humans perceive.

The ontological nature and epistemological issues concerning unobservables is a central

topic in philosophy of science. The notion that a given unobservable exists is referred to
as scientific realism, in contrast to instrumentalism, the notion that unobservables such as
atoms are useful models but don't necessarily exist.

Metcalf distinguishes three kinds of unobservables. One is the logically unobservable,

which involves a contradiction. An example would be a length which is both longer and
shorter than a given length. The second is the practically unobservable, that which we can
conceive of as observable by the known sense-faculties of man but we are prevented from
observing by practical difficulties. The third kind is the physically unobservable, that
which can never be observed by any existing sense-faculties of man.

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Chapter 10

Existence

In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that
persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more
specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of

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existence as well as different identity conditions for objects and properties. Philosophers
investigate questions such as "What exists?", "How do we know?", "To what extent are
the senses a reliable guide to existence?", and "What is the meaning, if any, of assertions
of the existence of categories, ideas, and abstractions?"

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general,
as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part
of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions
concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can
be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and
differences. A lively debate continues about the existence of God.

Epistemology studies criteria of truth, defining "primary truths" inherently accepted in

the investigation of knowledge. The first is existence. It is inherent in every analysis. Its
self-evident, a priori nature cannot be consistently doubted, since a person objecting to
existence according to some standard of proof must implicitly accept the standard's
existence as a premise.

Materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter, that all things are composed of
material, and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material
interactions.

Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological

processes that exist from those that do not —either because such functions have ceased
(death), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as "inanimate".

Etymology
The word "existence" comes from the Latin word existere meaning "to appear", "to
arise", "to become", or "to be", but literally, it means "to stand out" (ex- being the Latin
prefix for "out" added to the Latin verb stare, meaning "to stand").

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Historical conceptions
In the Western tradition of philosophy, the first comprehensive treatments of the subject
are from Plato's Phaedo, Republic, and Statesman and Aristotle's Metaphysics, though
earlier fragmentary writing exists. Aristotle developed a complicated theory of being,
according to which only individual things, called substances, fully have being, but other
things such as relations, quantity, time, and place (called the categories) have a derivative
kind of being, dependent on individual things. In Aristotle's Metaphysics, there are four
causes of existence or change in nature: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient
cause, and the final cause.

The Neo-Platonists and some early Christian philosophers argued about whether
existence had any reality except in the mind of God. Some taught that existence was a
snare and a delusion, that the world, the flesh, and the devil existed only to tempt weak

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humankind away from God.

The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, perhaps following the Islamic philosopher
Avicenna, argued that God is pure being, and that in God essence and existence are the
same. At about the same time, the nominalist philosopher William of Ockham argued, in
Book I of his Summa Totius Logicae (Treatise on all Logic, written some time before
1327), that Categories are not a form of Being in their own right, but derivative on the
existence of individuals.

Early modern philosophy

The early modern treatment of the subject derives from Antoine Arnauld and Pierre
Nicole's Logic, or The Art of Thinking, better known as the Port-Royal Logic, first
published in 1662. Arnauld thought that a proposition or judgment consists of taking two
different ideas and either putting them together or rejecting them:

After conceiving things by our ideas, we compare these ideas and, finding that some
belong together and others do not, we unite or separate them. This is called affirming or
denying, and in general judging. This judgment is also called a proposition, and it is easy
to see that it must have two terms. One term, of which one affirms or denies something, is
called the subject; the other term, which is affirmed or denied, is called the attribute or
Praedicatum.

The two terms are joined by the verb "is" (or "is not", if the predicate is denied of the
subject). Thus every proposition has three components: the two terms, and the "copula"
that connects or separates them. Even when the proposition has only two words, the three
terms are still there. For example "God loves humanity", really means "God is a lover of
humanity", "God exists" means "God is a thing".

This theory of judgment dominated logic for centuries, but it has some obvious
difficulties: it only considers proposition of the form "All A are B.", a form logicians call
universal. It does not allow propositions of the form "Some A are B", a form logicians

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call existential. If neither A nor B includes the idea of existence, then "some A are B"
simply adjoins A to B. Conversely, if A or B do include the idea of existence in the way
that "triangle" contains the idea "three angles equal to two right angles", then "A exists"
is automatically true, and we have an ontological proof of A's existence. (Indeed
Arnauld's contemporary Descartes famously argued so, regarding the concept "God"
(discourse 4, Meditation 5)). Arnauld's theory was current until the middle of the
nineteenth century.

David Hume argued that the claim that a thing exists, when added to our notion of a
thing, does not add anything to the concept. For example, if we form a complete notion of
Moses, and superadd to that notion the claim that Moses existed, we are not adding
anything to the notion of Moses.

Kant also argued that existence is not a "real" predicate, but gave no explanation of how
this is possible. Indeed, his famous discussion of the subject is merely a restatement of

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Arnauld's doctrine that in the proposition "God is omnipotent", the verb "is" signifies the
joining or separating of two concepts such as "God" and "omnipotence".

Schopenhauer claimed that “everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of
this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word,
representation.” According to him there can be "No object without subject" because
"everything objective is already conditioned as such in manifold ways by the knowing
subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms…"

Predicative nature
John Stuart Mill (and also Kant's pupil Herbart) argued that the predicative nature of
existence was proved by sentences like "A centaur is a poetic fiction" or "A greatest
number is impossible" (Herbart). Franz Brentano challenged this; so also (as is better
known) did Frege. Brentano argued that we can join the concept represented by a noun
phrase "an A" to the concept represented by an adjective "B" to give the concept
represented by the noun phrase "a B-A". For example, we can join "a man" to "wise" to
give "a wise man". But the noun phrase "a wise man" is not a sentence, whereas "some
man is wise" is a sentence. Hence the copula must do more than merely join or separate
concepts. Furthermore, adding "exists" to "a wise man", to give the complete sentence "a
wise man exists" has the same effect as joining "some man" to "wise" using the copula.
So the copula has the same effect as "exists". Brentano argued that every categorical
proposition can be translated into an existential one without change in meaning and that
the "exists" and "does not exist" of the existential proposition take the place of the
copula. He showed this by the following examples:

The categorical proposition "Some man is sick" has the same meaning as the existential
proposition "A sick man exists" or "There is a sick man".
The categorical proposition "No stone is living" has the same meaning as the existential
proposition "A living stone does not exist" or "there is no living stone".

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The categorical proposition "All men are mortal" has the same meaning as the existential
proposition "An immortal man does not exist" or "there is no immortal man".
The categorical proposition "Some man is not learned" has the same meaning as the
existential proposition "A non-learned man exists" or "there is a non-learned man".

Frege developed a similar view (though later) in his great work The Foundations of
Arithmetic, as did Charles Sanders Peirce (but Peirce held that the possible and the real
are not limited to the actually, individually existent). The Frege-Brentano view is the
basis of the dominant position in modern Anglo-American philosophy: that existence is
asserted by the existential quantifier (as expressed by Quine's slogan "To be is to be the
value of a variable." — On What There Is, 1948).

Semantics

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In mathematical logic, there are two quantifiers, "some" and "all", though as Brentano
(1838–1917) pointed out, we can make do with just one quantifier and negation. The first
of these quantifiers, "some". is also expressed as "there exists". Thus, in the sentence
"There exists a man", the term "man" is asserted to be part of existence. But we can also
assert, "There exists a triangle." Is a "triangle" — an abstract idea — part of existence in
the same way that a "man" — a physical body — is part of existence? Do abstractions
such as goodness, blindness, and virtue exist in the same sense that chairs, tables, and
houses exist? What categories, or kinds of thing, can be the subject or the predicate of a
proposition?

Worse, does "existence" exist?

In some statements, existence is implied without being mentioned. The statement "A
bridge crosses the Thames at Hammersmith" cannot just be about a bridge, the Thames,
and Hammersmith. It must be about "existence" as well. On the other hand, the statement
"A bridge crosses the Styx at Limbo" has the same form, but while in the first case we
understand a real bridge in the real world made of stone or brick, what "existence" would
mean in the second case is less clear.

The nominalist approach is to argue that certain noun phrases can be "eliminated" by
rewriting a sentence in a form that has the same meaning, but does not contain the noun
phrase. Thus Ockham argued that "Socrates has wisdom", which apparently asserts the
existence of a reference for "wisdom", can be rewritten as "Socrates is wise", which
contains only the referring phrase "Socrates". This method became widely accepted in the
twentieth century by the analytic school of philosophy.

However, this argument may be inverted by realists in arguing that since the sentence
"Socrates is wise" can be rewritten as "Socrates has wisdom", this proves the existence of
a hidden referent for "wise".

A further problem is that human beings seem to process information about fictional
characters in much the same way that they process information about real people. For

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example, in the 2008 United States presidential election, a politician and actor named
Fred Thompson ran for the Republican Party nomination. In polls, potential voters
identified Fred Thompson as a "law and order" candidate. Thompson plays a fictional
character on the television series Law and Order. Doubtless the people who make the
comment are aware that Law and Order is fiction, but at some level, they process fiction
as if it were fact. Another example of this is the common experience of actresses who
play the villain in a soap opera being accosted in public as if they are to blame for the
actions of the characters they play.

A scientist might make a clear distinction about objects that exist, and assert that all
objects that exist are made up of either matter or energy. But in the layperson's
worldview, existence includes real, fictional, and even contradictory objects. Thus if we
reason from the statement "Pegasus flies" to the statement "Pegasus exists", we are not
asserting that Pegasus is made up of atoms, but rather that Pegasus exists in a particular
worldview, the worldview of classical myth. When a mathematicians reasons from the

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statement "ABC is a triangle" to the statement "triangles exist", she is not asserting that
triangles are made up of atoms but rather that triangles exist within a particular
mathematical model.

Modern approaches
According to Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions, the negation operator in a
singular sentence takes wide and narrow scope: we distinguish between "some S is not P"
(where negation takes "narrow scope") and "it is not the case that 'some S is P'" (where
negation takes "wide scope"). The problem with this view is that there appears to be no
such scope distinction in the case of proper names. The sentences "Socrates is not bald"
and "it is not the case that Socrates is bald" both appear to have the same meaning, and
they both appear to assert or presuppose the existence of someone (Socrates) who is not
bald, so that negation takes narrow scope.

The theory of descriptions has generally fallen into disrepute, though there have been
recent attempts to revive it by Stephen Neale and Frank Jackson. According to the direct-
reference view, an early version of which was originally proposed by Bertrand Russell,
and perhaps earlier by Gottlob Frege, a proper name strictly has no meaning when there
is no object to which it refers. This view relies on the argument that the semantic function
of a proper name is to tell us which object bears the name, and thus to identify some
object. But no object can be identified if none exists. Thus, a proper name must have a
bearer if it is to be meaningful.

Existence in the wide and narrow senses

According to the "two sense" view of existence, which derives from Alexius Meinong,
existential statements fall into two classes.

1. Those asserting existence in a wide sense. These are typically of the form "N is P"
for singular N, or "some S is P".

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 2. Those asserting existence in a narrow sense. These are typically of the form "N
exists" or "Ss exist".

The problem is then evaded as follows. "Pegasus flies" implies existence in the wide
sense, for it implies that something flies. But it does not imply existence in the narrow
sense, for we deny existence in this sense by saying that Pegasus does not exist. In effect,
the world of all things divides, on this view, into those (like Socrates, the planet Venus,
and New York City) that have existence in the narrow sense, and those (like Sherlock
Holmes, the goddess Venus, and Minas Tirith) that do not.

However, common sense suggests the non-existence of such things as fictional characters
or places.

European views

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Influenced by the views of Brentano's pupil Alexius Meinong, and by Edmund Husserl,
Germanophone and Francophone philosophy took a different direction regarding the
question of existence.

Anti-realist arguments

Anti-realism is the view of idealists who are skeptics about the physical world,
maintaining either: 1) that nothing exists outside the mind, or 2) that we would have no
access to a mind-independent reality even if it may exist. Realists, in contrast, hold that
perceptions or sense data are caused by mind-independent objects. An "anti-realist" who
denies that other minds exist (i. e., a solipsist) is different from an "anti-realist" who
claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are unobservable other
minds (i. e., a logical behaviorist).

Dharmic "middle way" view

The Indian philosopher Nagarjuna (c. 150 - 250 CE) largely advanced existence concepts
and founded the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

In eastern philosophy, Anicca (Sanskrit anitya) or "impermanence" describes existence. It

refers to the fact that all conditioned things (sankhara) are in a constant state of flux. In
reality there is no thing that ultimately ceases to exist; only the appearance of a thing
ceases as it changes from one form to another. Imagine a leaf that falls to the ground and
decomposes. While the appearance and relative existence of the leaf ceases, the com-
ponents that formed the leaf become particulate material that goes on to form new plants.
Buddhism teaches a middle way, avoiding the extreme views of eternalism and nihilism.
The middle way recognizes there are vast differences between the way things are
perceived to exist and the way things really exist. The differences are reconciled in the
concept of Shunyata by addressing the existing object's served purpose for the subject's
identity in being. What exists is in non-existence, because the subject changes.

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Trailokya elaborates on three kinds of existence, those of desire, form, and formlessness
in which there are karmic rebirths. Taken further to the Trikaya doctrine, it describes how
the Buddha exists. In this philosophy, it is accepted that the Buddha exists in more than
one absolute way.

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Chapter 11

Motion (Physics)

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Motion involves change in position, such as in this perspective of rapidly leaving
Yongsan Station

In physics, motion is a change in position of an object with respect to time. Change in

action is the result of an unbalanced force. Motion is typically described in terms of
velocity, acceleration, displacement, time and speed. An object's velocity cannot change
unless it is acted upon by a force, as described by Newton's first law. An object's momen-
tum is directly related to the object's mass and velocity, and the total momentum of all
objects in a closed system (one not affected by external forces) does not change with
time, as described by the law of conservation of momentum.

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A body which does not move is said to be at rest, motionless, immobile, stationary, or to
have constant (time-invariant) position.

Motion is always observed and measured relative to a frame of reference. As there is no

absolute frame of reference, absolute motion cannot be determined; this is emphasised by
the term relative motion. A body which is motionless relative to a given reference frame,
is still moving relative to infinitely many other frames. Thus, everything in the universe is
moving.

More generally, the term motion signifies any temporal change in a physical system. For
example, one can talk about motion of a wave or a quantum particle (or any other field)
where the concept location does not apply.

Laws of Motion

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In physics, motion in the universe is described through two sets of apparently con-
tradictory laws of mechanics. Motions of all large scale and familiar objects in the
universe (such as projectiles, planets, cells, and humans) are described by classical
mechanics. Whereas the motion of very small atomic and sub-atomic sized objects is
described by quantum mechanics.

Classical mechanics

Classical mechanics is used for describing the motion of macroscopic objects, from
projectiles to parts of machinery, as well as astronomical objects, such as spacecraft,
planets, stars, and galaxies. It produces very accurate results within these domains, and is
one of the oldest and largest subjects in science, engineering and technology.

Classical mechanics is fundamentally based on Newton's Laws of Motion. These laws

describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and the motion of that body.
They were first compiled by Sir Isaac Newton in his work Philosophiæ Naturalis Princi-
pia Mathematica, first published on July 5, 1687. His three laws are:

1. In the absence of a net external force, a body either is at rest or moves with
constant velocity.
2. The net external force on a body is equal to the mass of that body times its
acceleration; F = ma. Alternatively, force is proportional to the time derivative of
momentum.
3. Whenever a first body exerts a force F on a second body, the second body exerts a
force −F on the first body. F and −F are equal in magnitude and opposite in
direction.

Newton's three laws of motion, along with his law of universal gravitation, explain
Kepler's laws of planetary motion, which were the first to accurately provide a mathe-
matical model or understanding orbiting bodies in outer space. This explanation unified
the motion of celestial bodies and motion of objects on earth.

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Classical mechanics was later further enhanced by Albert Einstein's special relativity and
general relativity. Special relativity explains the motion of objects with a high velocity,
approaching the speed of light; general relativity is employed to handle gravitation
motion at a deeper level.

Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a set of principles describing physical reality at the atomic level of
matter (molecules and atoms) and the subatomic (electrons, protons, and even smaller
particles). These descriptions include the simultaneous wave-like and particle-like
behavior of both matter and radiation energy, this described in the wave–particle duality.

In contrast to classical mechanics, where accurate measurements and predictions can be

calculated about location and velocity, in the quantum mechanics of a subatomic particle,

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one can never specify its state, such as its simultaneous location and velocity, with
complete certainty (this is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle).

In addition to describing the motion of atomic level phenomenon, quantum mechanics is

useful in understanding some large scale phenomenon such as superfluidity, super-
conductivity, and biological systems, including the function of smell receptors and the
structures of proteins.

Kinematics
Kinematics is a branch of classical mechanics devoted to the study of motion, but not the
cause of the motion. As such it is concerned with the various types of motions.

Two classes of motion covered by kinematics are uniform motion and non-uniform
motion. A body is said to be in uniform motion when it travels equal distances in equal
intervals of time (i.e. at a constant speed). For example, a body travels 5 km in 1 hour and
another 5 km in the next hour, and so on continuously. Uniform motion is closely
associated with inertia as described in Newton's first law of motion. However, most
familiar types of motion would be non-uniform motion, as most bodies are constantly
being acted upon by many different force simultaneously, as such they do not travel equal
distances in equal intervals of time. For example, a body travels 2 km in 25 minutes but
takes 30 minutes to travel the next 2 km.

List of "imperceptible" human motions

Humans, like all things in the universe are in constant motion, however, aside from
obvious movements of the various external body parts and locomotion, humans are in
motion in a variety of ways which are more difficult to perceive. Many of these
"imperceptible motions" are only perceivable with the help of special tools and careful
observation. The larger scales of "imperceptible motions" are difficult for humans to
perceive for two reasons: 1) Newton's laws of motion (particularly Inertia) which prevent
humans from feeling motions of a mass to which they are connected, and 2) the lack of an

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obvious frame of reference which would allow individuals to easily see that they are
moving. The smaller scales of these motions are too small for humans to sense.

Universe

• Spacetime (the fabric of the universe) is actually expanding. Essentially,

everything in the universe is stretching like a rubber band. This motion is the most
obscure as it is not physical motion as such, but rather a change in the very nature
of the universe. The primary source of verification of this expansion was provided
by Edwin Hubble who demonstrated that all galaxies and distant astronomical
objects were moving away from us ("Hubble's law") as predicted by a universal
expansion.

Galaxy

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• The Milky Way Galaxy, is hurtling through space at an incredible speed. It is
powered by the force left over from the Big Bang. Many astronomers believe the
Milky Way is moving at approximately 600 km/s relative to the observed
locations of other nearby galaxies. Another reference frame is provided by the
Cosmic microwave background. This frame of reference indicates that The Milky
Way is moving at around 552 km/s.

Solar System

• The Milky Way is rotating around its dense galactic center, thus the solar system
is moving in a circle within the galaxy's gravity. Away from the central bulge or
outer rim, the typical stellar velocity is between 210 and 240 km/s (or about a
half-million mi/h).

Earth

• The Earth is rotating or spinning around its axis, this is evidenced by day and
night, at the equator the earth has an eastward velocity of 0.4651 km/s (or
1040 mi/h).
• The Earth is orbiting around the Sun in an orbital revolution. A complete orbit
around the sun takes one year or about 365 days; it averages a speed of about
30 km/s (or 67,000 mi/h).

Continents

• The Theory of Plate tectonics tells us that the continents are drifting on con-
vection currents within the mantle causing them to move across the surface of the
planet at the slow speed of approximately 1 inch (2.54 cm) per year. However, the
velocities of plates range widely. The fastest-moving plates are the oceanic plates,
with the Cocos Plate advancing at a rate of 75 mm/yr (3.0 in/yr) and the Pacific
Plate moving 52–69 mm/yr (2.1–2.7 in/yr). At the other extreme, the slowest-

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 moving plate is the Eurasian Plate, progressing at a typical rate of about 21 mm/yr
(0.8 in/yr).

Internal body

• The human heart is constantly contracting to move blood throughout the body.
Through larger veins and arteries in the body blood has been found to travel at
approximately 0.33 m/s. Though considerable variation exists, and peak flows in
the venae cavae have been found to range between 0.1 m/s and 0.45 m/s.
• The smooth muscles of hollow internal organs are moving. The most familiar
would be peristalsis which is where digested food is forced throughout the
digestive tract. Though different foods travel through the body at rates, an average
speed through the human small intestine is 2.16 m/h or 0.036 m/s.
• Typically some sound is audible at any given moment, when the vibration of these

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sound waves reaches the ear drum it moves in response and allows the sense of
hearing.
• The human lymphatic system is constantly moving excess fluids, lipids, and
immune system related products around the body. The lymph fluid has been
found to move through a lymph capillary of the skin at approximately 0.0000097
m/s.

Cells

The cells of the human body have many structures which move throughout them.

• Cytoplasmic streaming is a way which cells move molecular substances

throughout the cytoplasm.
• Various motor proteins work as molecular motors within a cell and move along
the surface of various cellular substrates such as microtubules. Motor proteins are
typically powered by the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate, (ATP), and
convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Vesicles propelled by motor
proteins have been found to have a velocity of approximately 0.00000152 m/s.

Particles

• According to the laws of thermodynamics all particles of matter are in constant

random motion as long as the temperature is above absolute zero. Thus the
molecules and atoms which make up the human body are vibrating, colliding, and
moving. This motion can be detected as temperature; higher temperatures (which
represent greater kinetic energy in the particles) feel warm to humans whom sense
the thermal energy transferring from the object being touched to their nerves.
Similarly, when lower temperature objects are touched, the senses perceive the
transfer of heat away from the body as feeling cold.

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Subatomic particles

• Within each atom, electrons exist in an area around the nucleus. This area is
called the electron cloud. According to Bohr's model of the atom, electrons have a
high velocity, and the larger the nucleus they are orbiting the faster they would
need to move. If electrons 'move' about the electron cloud in strict paths the same
way planets orbit the sun, then electrons would be required to do so at speeds
which far exceed the speed of light. However, there is no reason that one must
confine them self to this strict conceptualization, that electrons move in paths the
same way macroscopic objects do. Rather one can conceptualize electrons to be
'particles' that capriciously exist within the bounds of the electron cloud.
• Inside the atomic nucleus the protons and neutrons are also probably moving
around due the electrical repulsion of the protons and the presence of angular
momentum of both particles.

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Light
Light propagates at 299,792,458 m/s, often approximated as 300,000 kilometres per
second or 186,000 miles per second. The speed of light (or c) is the speed of all massless
particles and associated fields in a vacuum, and it is believed to be the upper limit on the
speed at which energy, matter, and information can travel.

Types of motion
• Simple harmonic motion – (e.g. pendulum).
• Linear motion – motion which follows a straight linear path, and whose
displacement is exactly the same as its trajectory.
• Reciprocating (i.e. vibration)
• Brownian Motion (i.e. the random movement of particles)
• Circular motion (e.g. the orbits of planets)
• Rotary motion – a motion about a fixed point ex. the wheel of a bicycle
• Curvilinear Motion – It is defined as the motion along a curved path that may be
planar or in three dimensions.

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Chapter 12

Physical Body and Substance Theory

Physical body

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In physics, a physical body or physical object (sometimes simply called a body or
object) is a collection of masses, taken to be one. For example, a cricket ball can be
considered an object but the ball also consists of many particles (pieces of matter).

In philosophy; particularly the branch of metaphysics called ontology which is the study
of existence; a physical object is an object which exists throughout a particular trajectory
in space over a particular duration of time, as contrasted with abstract objects such as
mathematical objects which do not exist at any particular time or place.

The common conception of physical objects includes that they have extension in the
physical world, although there do exist theories of quantum physics and cosmology
which may challenge this.

In classical physics, mechanics, quantum physics, and

cosmology
A physical body is an object which can be described by the theories of classical
mechanics, or quantum mechanics, and experimented upon with physical instruments.
This includes the determination of trajectory of position through space, and in some cases
of orientation in space, over a duration of time, as well as means to change these, by
exerting forces.

In classical physics, a physical body is a body with mass, not only energy, is three
dimensional (extended in 3-dimensions of space), has a trajectory of position and
orientation in space, and is lasting for some duration of time. It is the subject of study in
an experiment and is the object referred to in a law of physics, or physical theory. It can
be considered as a whole, but may be composed of a collection of smaller physical
bodies, e.g. a weight, ball, proton, or planet.

For instance, the force of gravity will accelerate a body if it is not supported, thus causing
a change of its position (that is, it falls freely). However, it is not necessary for there to be

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forces present for an object position to change - only the rate of change of the object's
position, that is, its velocity, will change under the influence of forces.

But in Quantum physics and Cosmology, there is a debate as to whether some elementary
particles are not bodies, but are mere points without extension in physical space within
space-time, or are always extended in at least one dimension of space as in String theory
or M theory.

In psychology
In some branches of psychology, depending on school of thought, a physical body is a
physical object with physical properties, as compared to mental objects. In (reductioni-
stic) behaviorism, a physical body and its properties are the (only) meaningful objects of
study. While in the modern day behavioral psychotherapy it is still only the means for

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goal oriented behavior modifications, in Body Psychotherapy it is not a means only
anymore, but its felt sense is a goal of its own. In cognitive psychology, physical bodies
as they occur in biology are studied in order to understand the mind, which may not be a
physical body, as in functionalist schools of thought.

In philosophy
A physical body is an enduring object that exists throughout a particular trajectory of
space and orientation over a particular duration of time, and which is extended in the
world of physical space, e.g. as studied by physics. Examples are a cloud, a human body,
a weight, a billard ball, a table, or a proton. This is contrasted with abstract objects such
as mental objects, which exist in the mental world, and mathematical objects. Other
examples that are not physical bodies are emotions, the concept of "justice", a feeling of
hatred, or the number "3". In some philosophies, like the Idealism of George Berkeley, a
physical body is a mental object, but still has extension in the space of a visual field.

In new age philosophy, mysticism and religion

In some systems of mysticism, such as Theosophy, the physical body is understood as
the last of several progressively denser "vehicles of consciousness". In Blavat-
skyian Theosophy it is called by the Vedantic name sthula sarira - "gross body" - and
distinguished from the linga sarira, the "subtle body" or astral double. In C. W. Lead-
beater and Alice Bailey, the physical body is distinguished from the etheric body, which
serves as its "blueprint", and structures of the etheric body, such as chakras, are mirrored
in the main glands and nerve ganglia of the physical body.

In some religions, and in some new age philosophies, a physical body is contrasted with
the self, mind, spirit, soul, or astral projection, and sometimes with an heavenly body. It
is ephemeral in time, not eternal. It may be what houses the spirit or soul, and it is what is
left behind in an astral projection, or ascention into heaven. A physical body exists on
earth, not in heaven, not in the astral world, nor in the aether.

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Substance theory
Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about
objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a
property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears.

Substance is a key concept in ontology and metaphysics. Philosophies may be divided

into Monist, Dualist, or Pluralist varieties according to the number of substances they
consider the world to comprise. According to Monistic views, such as those of stoicism
and Spinoza, there is only one substance, often identified as God or Being. These modes
of thinking are sometimes associated with the idea of immanence. Dualism sees the world
as being composed of two fundamental substances, while Pluralism, a feature of
Platonism , for example, and Aristotelianism, states that more substances exist, and often
that these substances can be placed into an ontological hierarchy.

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The concept of substance in Western philosophy
In the millennia-old Aristotelian tradition, as well as early modern traditions that follow
it, substances or ousia are treated as having attributes and modes or things.

This concept helps to explain, for instance, state transitions. Let us take a quantity of
water and freeze it into ice. Substance theory maintains that there is a "substance" which
is unchanged through this transition, which is both the liquid water and also the frozen
ice. It maintains that the water is not replaced by the ice – it is the same "stuff," or
substance. If this is true, then it must be the case that the wetness of water, the hardness
of ice, are not essential to the underlying substance. (Essentially, matter does not
disappear, it only changes form.)

The Aristotelian view of God considered God as both ontologically and causally prior to
all other substance; others, including Spinoza, argued that God is the only substance.
Substance, according to Spinoza, is one and indivisible, but has multiple modes; what we
ordinarily call the natural world, together with all the individuals in it, is immanent in
God: hence the famous phrase Deus sive Natura ("God, or Nature"). Aristotle was
creating his theory of substance in response and counter to Plato's theory of framework or
structures called the theory of forms.

The Roman Catholic Church has adopted substance theory as part of its theology of
transsubstantiation.

Criticisms of the concept of substance

The idea of substance was famously critiqued by David Hume, who held that since
substance is not able to be perceived, it should not be assumed to exist. Friedrich
Nietzsche and, after him, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze also
rejected the notion of "substance", and in the same movement the concept of subject

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contained with the framework of Platonic idealism. For this reason, Althusser's "anti-
humanism" and Foucault's statements were criticized, by Jürgen Habermas and others, for
misunderstanding that this led to a fatalist conception of social determinism. For
Habermas, only a subjective form of liberty could be conceived, to the contrary of
Deleuze who talks about "a life", as an impersonal and immanent form of liberty.

For Heidegger, Descartes means by "substance" that by which "we can understand
nothing else than an entity which is in such a way that it need no other entity in order to
be." Therefore, only God is a substance as ens perfectissimus (most perfect being).
Heidegger showed the inextricable relationship between the concept of substance and of
subject, which explains why, instead of talking about "man" or "humankind", he speaks
about the Dasein, which is not a simple subject, nor a substance.

Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, as part of his critique of transsubstantiation,

rejected substance theory and instead proposed the doctrine of transfinalization, which he

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felt was more attuned to modern philosophy. However, this doctrine was rejected by
Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Mysterium Fidei.

Primitive concepts of substance theory

Two primitive concepts (i.e., genuine notions that cannot be explained in terms of
something else) in substance theory are the bare particular and the inherence relation.

Bare particular

In substance theory, a bare particular of an object is the element without which the object
would not exist, that is, its substance, which exists independent from its properties, even
if it is physically impossible for it to lack properties entirely. It is "bare" because it is
considered without its properties and "particular" because it is not abstract. The properties
that the substance has are said to inhere in the substance.

In substance theory of the mind, the objects are minds.

Inherence relation

Another primitive concept in substance theory is the inherence relation between a

substance and its properties. For example, in the sentence, "The apple is red," substance
theory says that red inheres in the apple. Substance theory considers to be clear the
meaning of the apple having the property of redness or the property of being juicy, and
that a property's inherence in a substance is similar to, but not identical with, being part
of the substance. Thus, Aristotle wrote:

"By being 'present in a subject' I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole, but
being incapable of existence apart from the said subject." (The Categories 1a 24-26)

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The inverse relation is participation. Thus in the example above, just as red inheres in the
apple, so the apple participates in red.

Arguments supporting the theory

Two common arguments supporting substance theory are the argument from grammar
and the argument from conception.

Argument from grammar

The argument from grammar uses traditional grammar to support substance theory. For
example, the sentence, "Snow is white," contains a grammatical subject, "snow", and the
assertion that the grammatical subject is white. The argument holds that it makes no
grammatical sense to speak of "whiteness" disembodied, without snow or some other

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grammatical subject that is white. That is, the only way to make a meaningful claim is to
speak of a grammatical subject and to predicate various properties of it. Substance theory
calls this grammatical subject of predication a substance. Thus, in order to make claims
about physical objects, one must refer to substances, which must exist in order for those
claims to be meaningful.

Many ontologies, including bundle theory, reject the argument from grammar on the
basis that a grammatical subject does not necessarily refer to a metaphysical subject.
Bundle theory, for example, maintains that the grammatical subject of statement refers to
its properties. For example, a bundle theorist understands the grammatical subject of the
sentence, "Snow is white", as a referent to a bundle of properties, including perhaps the
containing of ice crystals, being cold, and being a few feet deep. To the bundle theorist,
the sentence then modifies that bundle of properties to include the property of being
white. The bundle theorist, then, maintains that one can make meaningful statements
about bodies without referring to substances that lack properties.

Argument from conception

Another argument for the substance theory is the argument from conception. The
argument claims that in order to conceive of an object's properties, like the redness of an
apple, one must conceive of the object that has those properties. According to the
argument, one cannot conceive of redness, or any other property, distinct from the thing
that has that property. The thing that has the property, the argument maintains, is a
substance. The argument from conception holds that properties (e.g. redness or being four
inches wide) are inconceivable by themselves and therefore it is always a substance that
has the properties. Thus, it asserts, substances exist.

A criticism of the argument from conception is that properties' being of substances does
not follow from inability to think of isolated properties. The bundle theorist, for example,
says that properties need only be associated with a bundle of other properties, which
bundle is called an object. The critic maintains that the inability for an individual
property to exist in isolation does not imply that substances exist. Instead, he argues,

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bodies may be bundles of properties, and an individual property may simply be unable to
exist separately from such a bundle.

Bundle theory
In direct opposition to substance theory is bundle theory, whose most basic premise is
that all concrete particulars are merely constructions or 'bundles' of attributes, or qualitive
properties:

Necessarily, for any concrete entity, a, if for any entity, b, b is a constituent of a, then b is
an attribute.

The bundle theorist's principal objections to substance theory concern the bare particulars
of a substance, which substance theory considers independently of the substance's

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properties. The bundle theorist objects to the notion of a thing with no properties,
claiming that one cannot conceive of such a thing and citing John Locke, who described a
substance as "a something, I know not what." To the critic, as soon as one has any notion
of a substance in mind, a property accompanies that notion. That is, to the critic it is not
only physically impossible to encounter a bare particular without properties, but the very
notion of a thing without properties is so strange that he cannot even form such a notion.

Indiscernibility

The indiscernibility argument from the substance theorist targets those bundle theorists
who are also metaphysical realists. Metaphysical realism uses repeatable entities known
as universals exemplified by concrete particulars to explain the phenomenon of attribute
agreement. Substance theorists then say that bundle theory and metaphysical realism can
only coexist by introducing an identity of indiscernibles creed, which substance theorists
suggest is incoherent. The identity of indiscernibles says that any concrete particular
that is numerically different from another must have its own qualitive properties, or
attributes.

Since bundle theory states that all concrete particulars are merely constructions or
'bundles' of attributes, or qualitive properties, the substance theorist's indiscernibility
argument claims that the ability to recognize numerically different concrete particulars,
such as concrete objects, requires those particulars to have discernible qualitative
differences in their attributes and that the metaphysical realist who is also a bundle
theorist must therefore concede to the existence of 'discernible (numerically different)
concrete particulars', the 'identity of indiscernibles', and a 'principle of constituent
identity'.

Discernible concrete particulars

Necessarily, for any complex objects, a and b, if for any entity, c, c is a
constituent of a if and only if c is a constituent of b, then a is numerically identical
with b.

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The indiscernibility argument points out that if bundle theory and discernible concrete
particulars theory explain the relationship between attributes, then the identity of
indiscernibles theory must also be true:

Identity of indiscernibles
Necessarily, for any concrete objects,a and b, if for any attribute, Φ, Φ is an
attribute of a if and only if Φ is an attribute of b, then a is numerically identical
with b.

The indiscernibles argument then asserts that the identity of indiscernibles is false. For
example, two different pieces of printer paper can be side by side, numerically different
from each other. However, the argument says, all of their qualitive properties can be the
same (e.g. both can be white, rectangular-shaped, 9 x 11 inches...). Thus, the argument
claims, bundle theory and metaphysical realism cannot both be correct.

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However, bundle theory combined with trope theory (as opposed to metaphysical
realism) is immune to the indiscernibles argument. The immunity stems from the fact that
each trope (attribute) can only be held by one concrete particular, thus qualitively
indiscernible objects can exist while being numerically identical and the identity of
indiscernibles therefore does not hold.

The argument also becomes more complex when it is considered whether "position"
should be considered an attribute. It is after all through the differing positions that we in
practice differentiate between otherwise identical pieces of paper.

Stoicism
The Stoics rejected the idea that incorporeal beings inhere in matter, as taught by Plato
and Aristotle. They believed that all being is corporeal. Thus they developed a scheme of
categories different from Aristotle's based on the ideas of Anaxagoras and Timaeus.

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Chapter 13

Concept

A concept (abstract term: conception) is a cognitive unit of meaning—an abstract idea or

a mental symbol sometimes defined as a "unit of knowledge," built from other units
which act as a concept's characteristics. A concept is typically associated with a corres-

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ponding representation in a language or symbology such as a single meaning of a term.

There are prevailing theories in contemporary philosophy which attempt to explain the
nature of concepts. The representational theory of mind proposes that concepts are mental
representations, while the semantic theory of concepts (originating with Frege's
distinction between concept and object) holds that they are abstract objects. Ideas are
taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear to the mind as
images as some ideas do. Many philosophers consider concepts to be a fundamental
ontological category of being.

The meaning of "concept" is explored in mainstream information science, cognitive

science, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. The term "concept" is traced back to
1554–60 (Latin conceptum - "something conceived"), but what is today termed "the
classical theory of concepts" is the theory of Aristotle on the definition of terms.

Origin and acquisition of concepts

A posteriori abstractions

John Locke's description of a general idea corresponds to a description of a concept.

According to Locke, a general idea is created by abstracting, drawing away, or removing
the uncommon characteristic or characteristics from several particular ideas. The
remaining common characteristic is that which is similar to all of the different
individuals. For example, the abstract general idea or concept that is designated by the
word "red" is that characteristic which is common to apples, cherries, and blood. The
abstract general idea or concept that is signified by the word "dog" is the collection of
those characteristics which are common to Airedales, Collies, and Chihuahuas.

In the same tradition as Locke, John Stuart Mill stated that general conceptions are
formed through abstraction. A general conception is the common element among the
many images of members of a class. "...[W]hen we form a set of phenomena into a class,
that is, when we compare them with one another to ascertain in what they agree, some

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general conception is implied in this mental operation" (A System of Logic, Book IV, Ch.
II). Mill did not believe that concepts exist in the mind before the act of abstraction. "It is
not a law of our intellect, that, in comparing things with each other and taking note of
their agreement, we merely recognize as realized in the outward world something that we
already had in our minds. The conception originally found its way to us as the result of
such a comparison. It was obtained (in metaphysical phrase) by abstraction from
individual things" (Ibid.).

For Schopenhauer, empirical concepts "...are mere abstractions from what is known
through intuitive perception, and they have arisen from our arbitrarily thinking away or
dropping of some qualities and our retention of others." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol.
I, "Sketch of a History of the Ideal and the Real"). In his On the Will in Nature,
"Physiology and Pathology," Schopenhauer said that a concept is "drawn off from
previous images ... by putting off their differences. This concept is then no longer
intuitively perceptible, but is denoted and fixed merely by words." Nietzsche, who was

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heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, wrote: "Every concept originates through our
equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept 'leaf' is
formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through
forgetting the distinctions..."

By contrast to the above philosophers, Immanuel Kant held that the account of the
concept as an abstraction of experience is only partly correct. He called those concepts
that result of abstraction "a posteriori concepts" (meaning concepts that arise out of
experience). An empirical or an a posteriori concept is a general representation
(Vorstellung) or non-specific thought of that which is common to several specific
perceived objects (Logic, I, 1., §1, Note 1).

A concept is a common feature or characteristic. Kant investigated the way that empirical
a posteriori concepts are created.

The logical acts of the understanding by which concepts are generated as to their form
are:

1. comparison, i.e., the likening of mental images to one another in relation

to the unity of consciousness;
2. reflection, i.e., the going back over different mental images, how they can
be comprehended in one consciousness; and finally
3. abstraction or the segregation of everything else by which the mental
images differ ...

In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare,
reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential
and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a
willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different
from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I

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reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves,
and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree.

– Logic, §6

Kant's description of the making of a concept has been paraphrased as "...to conceive is
essentially to think in abstraction what is common to a plurality of possible instances..."
(H.J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysics of Experience, I, 250). In his discussion of Kant,
Christopher Janaway wrote: "...generic concepts are formed by abstraction from more
than one species."

A priori concepts

Kant declared that human minds possess pure or a priori concepts. Instead of being

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abstracted from individual perceptions, like empirical concepts, they originate in the
mind itself. He called these concepts categories, in the sense of the word that means
predicate, attribute, characteristic, or quality. But these pure categories are predicates of
things in general, not of a particular thing. According to Kant, there are 12 categories that
constitute the understanding of phenomenal objects. Each category is that one predicate
which is common to multiple empirical concepts. In order to explain how an a priori
concept can relate to individual phenomena, in a manner analogous to an a posteriori
concept, Kant employed the technical concept of the schema.

Conceptual structure
It seems intuitively obvious that concepts must have some kind of structure. Up until
recently, the dominant view of conceptual structure was a containment model, associated
with the classical view of concepts. According to this model, a concept is endowed with
certain necessary and sufficient conditions in their description which unequivocally
determine an extension. The containment model allows for no degrees; a thing is either
in, or out, of the concept's extension. By contrast, the inferential model understands
conceptual structure to be determined in a graded manner, according to the tendency of
the concept to be used in certain kinds of inferences. As a result, concepts do not have a
kind of structure that is in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; all conditions are
contingent (Margolis:5).

However, some theorists claim that primitive concepts lack any structure at all. For
instance, Jerry Fodor presents his Asymmetric Dependence Theory as a way of showing
how a primitive concept's content is determined by a reliable relationship between the
information in mental contents and the world. These sorts of claims are referred to as
"atomistic", because the primitive concept is treated as if it were a genuine atom.

Embodied content

In cognitive linguistics, abstract concepts are transformations of concrete concepts

derived from embodied experience. The mechanism of transformation is structural

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mapping, in which properties of two or more source domains are selectively mapped onto
a blended space. A common class of blends are metaphors. This theory contrasts with the
rationalist view that concepts are perceptions (or recollections, in Plato's term) of an
independently existing world of ideas, in that it denies the existence of any such realm. It
also contrasts with the empiricist view that concepts are abstract generalizations of
individual experiences, because the contingent and bodily experience is preserved in a
concept, and not abstracted away. While the perspective is compatible with Jamesian
pragmatism (above), the notion of the transformation of embodied concepts through
structural mapping makes a distinct contribution to the problem of concept formation.

Philosophical implications
Concepts and metaphilosophy

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A long and well-established tradition philosophy posits that philosophy itself is nothing
more than conceptual analysis. This view has its proponents in contemporary literature as
well as historical. According to Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? (1991),
philosophy is the activity of creating concepts. This creative activity differs from
previous definitions of philosophy as simple reasoning, communication or contemplation
of universals. Concepts are specific to philosophy: science creates "functions", and art
"sensations". A concept is always signed: thus, Descartes' Cogito or Kant's "tran-
scendental". It is a singularity, not universal, and connects itself with others concepts, on
a "plane of immanence" traced by a particular philosophy. Concepts can jump from one
plane of immanence to another, combining with other concepts and therefore engaging in
a "becoming-Other."

Concepts in epistemology

Concepts are vital to the development of scientific knowledge. For example, it would be
difficult to imagine physics without concepts like: energy, force, or acceleration.
Concepts help to integrate apparently unrelated observations and phenomena into viable
hypotheses and theories, the basic ingredients of science. The concept map is a tool that
is used to help researchers visualize the inter-relationships between various concepts.

Ontology of concepts

Although the mainstream literature in cognitive science regards the concept as a kind of
mental particular, it has been suggested by some theorists that concepts are real things
(Margolis:8). In most radical form, the realist about concepts attempts to show that the
supposedly mental processes are not mental at all; rather, they are abstract entities, which
are just as real as any mundane object.

Plato was the starkest proponent of the realist thesis of universal concepts. By his view,
concepts (and ideas in general) are innate ideas that were instantiations of a tran-
scendental world of pure forms that lay behind the veil of the physical world. In this way,
universals were explained as transcendent objects. Needless to say this form of realism

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was tied deeply with Plato's ontological projects. This remark on Plato is not of merely
historical interest. For example, the view that numbers are Platonic objects was revived
by Kurt Gödel as a result of certain puzzles that he took to arise from the phenol-
menological accounts.

Gottlob Frege, founder of the analytic tradition in philosophy, famously argued for the
analysis of language in terms of sense and reference. For him, the sense of an expression
in language describes a certain state of affairs in the world, namely, the way that some
object is presented. Since many commentators view the notion of sense as identical to the
notion of concept, and Frege regards senses as the linguistic representations of states of
affairs in the world, it seems to follow that we may understand concepts as the manner in
which we grasp the world. Accordingly, concepts (as senses) have an ontological status
(Morgolis:7).

According to Carl Benjamin Boyer, in the introduction to his The History of the Calculus

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and its Conceptual Development, concepts in calculus do not refer to perceptions. As
long as the concepts are useful and mutually compatible, they are accepted on their own.
For example, the concepts of the derivative and the integral are not considered to refer to
spatial or temporal perceptions of the external world of experience. Neither are they
related in any way to mysterious limits in which quantities are on the verge of nascence
or evanescence, that is, coming into or going out of appearance or existence. The abstract
concepts are now considered to be totally autonomous, even though they originated from
the process of abstracting or taking away qualities from perceptions until only the
common, essential attributes remained.

Concepts in Empirical Investigations

Concepts, as abstract units of meaning, play a key role in the development and testing of
theories. For example, a simple relational hypothesis can be viewed as either a conceptual
hypothesis (where the abstract concepts form the meaning) or an operationalized
hypothesis, which is situated in the real world by rules of interpretation. For example,
take the simple hypothesis Education increases Income. The abstract notion of education
and income (concepts) could have many meanings. A conceptual hypothesis cannot be
tested. They need to be converted into operational hypothesis or the abstract meaning of
education must be derived or operationalized to something in the real world that can be
measured. Education could be measured by “years of school completed” or “highest
degree completed” etc. Income could be measured by “hourly rate of pay” or “yearly
salary” etc. The system of concepts or conceptual framework can take on many levels of
complexity. When the conceptual framework is very complex and incorporates causality
or explanation they are generally referred to as a theory. Noted philosopher of science
Carl Gustav Hempel says this more eloquently “An adequate empirical interpretation
turns a theoretical system into a testable theory: The hypothesis whose constituent terms
have been interpreted become capable of test by reference to observable phenomena.
Frequently the interpreted hypothesis will be derivative hypotheses of the theory; but
their confirmation or disconfirmation by empirical data will then immediately strengthen
or weaken also the primitive hypotheses from which they were derived.”

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Hempel provides a useful metaphor that describes the relationship between the
conceptual framework and the framework as it is observed and perhaps tested (interpreted
framework). “The whole system floats, as it were, above the plane of observation and is
anchored to it by rules of interpretation. These might be viewed as strings which are not
part of the network but link certain points of the latter with specific places in the plane of
observation. By virtue of those interpretative connections, the network can function as a
scientific theory”.

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Chapter 14

Essence

In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance
what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its
identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has

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contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. The concept
originates with Aristotle, who used the Greek expression to ti ên einai, literally 'the what
it was to be', or sometimes the shorter phrase to ti esti, literally 'the what it is,' for the
same idea. This phrase presented such difficulties for his Latin translators that they
coined the word essentia (English "essence") to represent the whole expression. For
Aristotle and his scholastic followers the notion of essence is closely linked to that of
definition (horismos).

In the history of western thought, essence has often served as a vehicle for doctrines that
tend to individuate different forms of existence as well as different identity conditions for
objects and properties; in this eminently logical meaning, the concept has given a strong
theoretical and common-sense basis to the whole family of logical theories based on the
"possible worlds" analogy set up by Leibniz and developed in the intensional logic from
Carnap to Kripke, which was later challenged by "extensionalist" philosophers such as
Quine.

Ontological status
In his dialogues Plato suggests that concrete beings acquire their essence through their
relations to "Forms"- abstract universals logically or ontologically separate from the
objects of sense perception. These Forms are often put forth as the models or paradigms
of which sensible things are "copies". When used in this sense, the word form is often
capitalized. Sensible bodies are in constant flux and imperfect and hence, by Plato's
reckoning, less real than the Forms which are eternal, unchanging and complete. Typical
examples of Forms given by Plato are largeness, smallness, equality, unity, goodness,
beauty and justice.

Aristotle moves the Forms of Plato to the nucleus of the individual thing, which is called
ousía or substance. Essence is the tí of the thing, the to tí en einai. Essence corresponds to
the ousia's definition; essence is a real and physical aspect of the ousía. (Aristotle,
"Metaphisic", I)

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According to nominalists (Roscelin of Compiègne, William of Ockham, John Duns
Scotus, William of Champeaux, Bernard of Chartres), universals aren't concrete entities,
just voice's sounds; there are only individuals: "nam cum habeat eorum sententia nihil
esse praeter individuum(...)" (Roscelin, De gener. et spec., 524). Universals are words
that can to call several individuals; for example the word "homo". Therefore a universal
is reduced to a sound's emission. (Roscelin, "De generibus et speciebus")

According to Edmund Husserl essence is ideal. However, ideal means that essence is the
intentional object of the conscience. Essence is interpreted as sense. (E. Husserl, "Ideas
pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy", paragraphs
3 and 4).

Existentialism

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Existentialism was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre's statement that for human beings
"existence precedes essence." In as much as "essence" is a cornerstone of all meta-
physical philosophy and the grounding of Rationalism, Sartre's statement was a refutation
of the philosophical system that had come before him (and, in particular, that of Husserl,
Hegel, and Heidegger). Instead of "is-ness" generating "actuality," he argued that exi-
stence and actuality come first, and the essence is derived afterward. For Kierkegaard, it
is the individual person who is the supreme moral entity, and the personal, subjective
aspects of human life that are the most important; also, for Kierkegaard all of this had
religious implications.

In metaphysics
"Essence," in metaphysics, is often synonymous with the soul, and some existentialists
argue that individuals gain their souls and spirits after they exist, that they develop their
souls and spirits during their lifetimes. For Kierkegaard, however, the emphasis was upon
essence as "nature." For him, there is no such thing as "human nature" that determines
how a human will behave or what a human will be. First, he or she exists, and then comes
attribute. Jean-Paul Sartre's more materialist and skeptical existentialism furthered this
existentialist tenet by flatly refuting any metaphysical essence, any soul, and arguing
instead that there is merely existence, with attributes as essence.

Thus, in existentialist discourse, essence can refer to physical aspect or attribute to the
ongoing being of a person (the character or internally determined goals), or to the infinite
inbound within the human (which can be lost, can atrophy, or can be developed into an
equal part with the finite), depending upon the type of existentialist discourse.

Marxism's essentialism
Karl Marx was a follower of Hegel's thought, and he, too, developed a philosophy in
reaction to his master. In his early work, Marx used Aristotelian style teleology and
derived a concept of humanity's essential nature. Marx's Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844 describe a theory of alienation based on human existence being

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completely different from human essence. Marx said human nature was social, and that
humanity had the distinct essence of free activity and conscious thought.

Some scholars, such as Philip Kain, have argued that Marx abandoned the idea of a
human essence, but many other scholars point to Marx's continued discussion of these
ideas despite the decline of terms such as essence and alienation in his later work.

Buddhism
Within the Madhyamika school of Mahayana Buddhism, Candrakirti identifies the self
as:

an essence of things that does not depend on others; it is an intrinsic nature. The
non-existence of that is selflessness.

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-- Bodhisattvayogacaryācatuḥśatakaṭikā 256.1.7

Two dominant lines of interpretation present Buddhism respectively as 1) negating the

very essence of essence, or 2) negating the reducibility of essence or the problem thereof
to anything falling short of it. On account of the former "relativist" reading, the concept
of Buddhist Emptiness testifies to a strong assertion that all phenomena are empty of any
essence (cf. the notion of smarana and the Heart Sutra), also known as Anatta/Anatman.
On account of the contemporary relativistic reading of Buddhism, Buddhism's "anti-
essentialism" has already been fully demonstrated to lie at the very root of Buddhist
praxis. Anti-relativists object that "the very root of Buddhism" is the very essence of a
tradition that points back to its very essence by negating (neti neti) any phenomenon
falling short of it. Again, modern relativistic readings of Buddhism tend to present the
tradition as essentially defined by the essential belief that the belief in essence is an
afflictive obscuration which serves as the root of all suffering. Contemporary scholarship
in line with intellectual trends such as historicism, pragmatism, globalism, etc., remains
committed to reading Buddhism as rejecting the tenets of Idealism and Materialism alike,
while reducing the ideas of truth and existence, along with any assertions that depend
upon them, to their function within the contexts and conventions that assert them. The
contextualist reading in question owes its dawn to the popularity of Relativism or
Pragmatism particularly in contemporary Anglo-American academia. For the relativist
interpreter of Buddhism, replacement paradoxes such as Ship of Theseus are answered by
stating that the Ship of Thesesus remains so (within the conventions that assert it) until it
ceases to function as the Ship of Theseus.

Among the many canonical Buddhist sources articulating a philosophical "Examination

of Essence," stands Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, The Fundamental Wisdom of
the Middle Way. Chapter I examines the Conditions of Existence, while Chapter XV
examines Essence in itself, difference, the eternalist's view and nihilists view of essence
and non-essence.

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Hinduism
In understanding any individual personality, a distinction is made between one's
Swadharma (essence) and Swabhava (mental habits and conditionings of ego person-
ality). Svabhava is the nature of a person, which is a result of his or her samskaras
(impressions created in the mind due to one's interaction with the external world). These
samskaras create habits and mental models and those become our nature. While there is
another kind of svabhava that is a pure internal quality - smarana - we are here focusing
only on the svabhava that was created due to samskaras (because to discover the pure,
internal svabhava and smarana, one should become aware of one's samskaras and take
control over them). Dharma is derived from the root Dhr - to hold. It is that which holds
an entity together. That is, Dharma is that which gives integrity to an entity and holds the
core quality and identity (essence), form and function of that entity. Dharma is also
defined as righteousness and duty. To do one's dharma is to be righteous, to do one's

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dharma is to do one's duty (express one's essence).

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Chapter 15

Experience

WT Grand Central Terminal

Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of

some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or
event. The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experi-
ment.

The concept of experience generally refers to know-how or procedural knowledge, rather

than propositional knowledge: on-the-job training rather than book-learning.
Philosophers dub knowledge based on experience "empirical knowledge" or "a posteriori
knowledge".

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The interrogation of experience has a long tradition in continental philosophy. Experience
plays an important role in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. The German term
Erfahrung, often translated into English as "experience", has a slightly different implic-
ation, connoting the coherency of life's experiences.

A person with considerable experience in a certain field can gain a reputation as an

expert.

Certain religious traditions (such as types of Buddhism, Surat Shabd Yoga, mysticism
and Pentecostalism) and educational paradigms with, for example, the conditioning of
military recruit-training (also known as "boot camps"), stress the experiential nature of
human epistemology. This stands in contrast to alternatives: traditions of dogma, logic or
reasoning. Participants in activities such as tourism, extreme sports and recreational drug-
use also tend to stress the importance of experience.

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Types of experience
The word "experience" may refer, somewhat ambiguously, both to mentally unprocessed
immediately perceived events as well as to the purported wisdom gained in subsequent
reflection on those events or interpretation of them.

Some wisdom-experience accumulates over a period of time, though one can also
experience (and gain general wisdom-experience from) a single specific momentary
event.

One may also differentiate between (for example) physical, mental, emotional, spiritual,
vicarious and virtual experience(s).

Physical experience

Physical experience occurs whenever an object or environment changes. In other words,

physical experiences relate to observables. They need not involve modal properties nor
mental experiences.

Mental experience

Mental experience involves the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as

combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including
all unconscious cognitive processes. The term can refer, by implication, to a thought
process. Mental experience and its relation to the physical brain form an area of philoso-
phical debate: some identity theorists originally argued that the identity of brain and
mental states held only for a few sensations. Most theorists, however, generalized the
view to cover all mental experience.

Mathematicians can exemplify cumulative mental experience in the approaches and skills
with which they work. Mathematical realism, like realism in general, holds that mathe-

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matical entities exist independently of the human mind. Thus humans do not invent
mathematics, but rather discover and experience it, and any other intelligent beings in the
universe would presumably do the same. This point of view regards only one sort of
mathematics as discoverable; it sees triangles, right angles, and curves, for example, as
real entities, not just the creations of the human mind. Some working mathematicians
have espoused mathematical realism as they see themselves experiencing naturally-
occurring objects. Examples include Paul Erdős and Kurt Gödel. Gödel believed in an
objective mathematical reality that could be perceived in a manner analogous to sense
perception. Certain principles (for example: for any two objects, there is a collection of
objects consisting of precisely those two objects) could be directly seen to be true, but
some conjectures, like the continuum hypothesis, might prove undecidable just on the
basis of such principles. Gödel suggested that quasi-empirical methodology such as
experience could provide sufficient evidence to be able to reasonably assume such a
conjecture. With experience, there are distinctions depending on what sort of existence
one takes mathematical entities to have, and how we know about them.

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Emotional experience

Humans can rationalize falling in (and out) of love as "emotional experience". Societies
which lack institutional arranged marriages can call on emotional experience in
individuals to influence mate-selection. The concept of emotional experience also
appears in the notion of emotional intelligence and empathy.

Spiritual experience

Newberg and Newberg provide a view on spiritual experience. Mystics can describe their
visions as "spiritual experiences". However, psychology may explain the same expe-
riences in terms of altered states of consciousness, which may come about accidentally
through (for example) very high fever, infections such as meningitis, sleep deprivation,
fasting, oxygen deprivation, nitrogen narcosis (deep diving), psychosis, temporal-lobe
epilepsy, or a traumatic accident. People can likewise achieve such experiences more
deliberately through recognized mystical practices such as sensory deprivation or mind-
control techniques, hypnosis, meditation, prayer, or mystical disciplines such as mantra
meditation, yoga, Sufism, dream yoga, or surat shabda yoga). Some "primitive religions"
encourage spiritual experiences through the ingestion of psychoactive drugs such as
alcohol and opiates, but more commonly with entheogenic plants and substances such as
cannabis, salvia divinorum, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, DXM, ayahuasca, or datura.
Another way to induce spiritual experience through an altered state of consciousness
involves psychoacoustics, binaural beats, or light-and-sound stimulation.

Social experience

Growing up and living within a society can foster the development and observation of
social experience. Social experience provides individuals with the skills and habits
necessary for participating within their own societies, as a society itself is formed through

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a plurality of shared experiences forming norms, customs, values, traditions, social roles,
symbols and languages.

Virtual experience and simulation gaming

Using computer simulations can enable a person or groups of persons to have virtual
experiences in virtual reality. Role-playing games treat "experience" (and its acquisition)
as an important, measurable, and valuable commodity. Many role-playing video games,
for instance, feature units of measurement used to quantify or assist a player-character's
progression through the game - called experience points.

Immediacy of experience

Someone able to recount an event they witnessed or took part in has "first hand

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experience". First hand experience of the "you had to be there" variety can seem
especially valuable and privileged, but it often remains potentially subject to errors in
sense-perception and in personal interpretation.

Second-hand experience can offer richer resources: recorded and/or summarised from
first-hand observers or experiencers or from instruments, and potentially expressing
multiple points of view.

Third-hand experience, based on indirect and possibly unreliable rumour or hearsay, can
(even given reliable accounts) potentially stray perilously close to blind honouring of
authority.

Subjective experience

Subjective experience can involve a state of individual subjectivity, perception on which

one builds one's own state of reality; a reality based on one’s interaction with one's
environment. The subjective experience depends on one’s individual ability to process
data, to store and internalize it. For example: our senses collect data, which we then
process according to biological programming (genetics), neurological network-
relationships and other variables such as relativity etc., all of which affect our individual
experience of any given situation in such a way as to render it subjective.

Contexts of experience

Experience plays an important role in experiential groups.

Changes in experience through history

Some post-modernists suggest that the nature of human experiencing (quite apart from
the details of the experienced surrounds) has undergone qualitative change during
transition from the pre-modern through the modern to the post-modern.

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Alternatives to experience
Immanuel Kant contrasted experience with reason: "Nothing, indeed, can be more
harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called
experience. Such experience would never have existed at all, if at the proper time, those
institutions had been established in accordance with ideas."

Writing
The American author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay entitled "Experience"
(published in 1844), in which he asks readers to disregard emotions that could alienate
them from the divine; it provides a somewhat pessimistic representation of the
Transcendentalism associated with Emerson.

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Art
In 2005 the art group Monochrom organized a series of happenings that ironically took
up the implications of the term "experience": Experience the Experience.

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Chapter 16

Idea

WTPlato, one of the first philosophers to discuss ideas in detail

In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks.
Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In
other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not
necessarily appear as images. Many philosophers consider ideas to be a fundamental
ontological category of being.

The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas is considered to be an

essential and defining feature of human beings.

In a popular sense, an idea arises in a reflex, spontaneous manner, even without thinking
or serious reflection, for example, when we talk about the idea of a person or a place.

Innate and adventitious ideas

One view on the nature of ideas is that there exist some ideas (called innate ideas) which
are so general and abstract, that they could not have arisen as a representation of any
object of our perception, but rather were, in some sense, always in the mind before we

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could learn them. These are distinguished from adventitious ideas which are images or
concepts which are accompanied by the judgment that they are caused by some object
outside of the mind.

Another view holds that we only discover ideas in the same way that we discover the real
world, from personal experiences. The view that humans acquire all or almost all their
behavioral traits from nurture (life experiences) is known as tabula rasa ("blank slate").
Most of the confusions in the way of ideas arise at least in part from the use of the term
"idea" to cover both the representation percept and the object of conceptual thought. This
can be illustrated in terms of the doctrines of innate ideas, "concrete ideas versus abstract
ideas", as well as "simple ideas versus complex ideas".

Philosophy

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Plato

Plato was one of the earliest philosophers to provide a detailed discussion of ideas. He
considered the concept of idea in the realm of metaphysics and its implications for
epistemology. He asserted that there is a realm of Forms or Ideas, which exist inde-
pendently of anyone who may have thought of these ideas. Material things are then
imperfect and transient reflections or instantiations of the perfect and unchanging ideas.
From this it follows that these Ideas are the principal reality. In contrast to the individual
objects of sense experience, which undergo constant change and flux, Plato held that
ideas are perfect, eternal, and immutable. Consequently, Plato considered that knowledge
of material things is not really knowledge; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging
ideas.

René Descartes

Descartes often wrote of the meaning of idea as an image or representation, often but not
necessarily "in the mind", which was well known in the vernacular. In spite of the fact
that Descartes is usually credited with the invention of the non-Platonic use of the term,
we find him at first following this vernacular use.b In his Meditations on First Philosophy
he says, "Some of my thoughts are like images of things, and it is to these alone that the
name 'idea' properly belongs." He sometimes maintained that ideas were innate and uses
of the term idea diverge from the original primary scholastic use. He provides multiple
non-equivalent definitions of the term, uses it to refer to as many as six distinct kinds of
entities, and divides ideas inconsistently into various genetic categories. For him
knowledge took the form of ideas and philosophical investigation is the deep con-
sideration of these ideas. Many times however his thoughts of knowledge and ideas were
like those of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists. In Neoplatonism, the Intelligence (Nous) is
the true first principle—the determinate, referential "foundation" (arkhe)—of all
existents; for it is not a self-sufficient entity like the One, but rather possesses the ability
or capacity to contemplate both the One, as its prior, as well as its own thoughts, which
Plotinus identifies with the Platonic Ideas or Forms (eide). A non-philosophical definition
of Nous is good sense (a.k.a. "common sense"). Descartes is quoted as saying, "Of all

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things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied
with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire
more of it than they already have."q:René Descartes

John Locke

In striking contrast to Plato's use of idea is that of John Locke. In his Introduction to An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defines idea as "that term which, I
think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man
thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or
whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking; and I could not avoid
frequently using it." He said he regarded the book necessary to examine our own abilities
and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. In his
philosophy other outstanding figures followed in his footsteps—Hume and Kant in the

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18th century, Arthur Schopenhauer in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper in the 20th century. Locke always believed in good
sense—not pushing things to extremes and on taking fully into account the plain facts of
the matter. He considered his common sense ideas "good-tempered, moderate, and down-
to-earth."c

David Hume

Hume differs from Locke by limiting idea to the more or less vague mental recon-
structions of perceptions, the perceptual process being described as an "impression."
Hume shared with Locke the basic empiricist premise that it is only from life experiences
(whether their own or others') that humans' knowledge of the existence of anything
outside of themselves can be ultimately derived, that they shall carry on doing what they
are prompted to do by their emotional drives of varying kinds. In choosing the means to
those ends, they shall follow their accustomed associations of ideas.d Hume has con-
tended and defended the notion that "reason alone is merely the 'slave of the passions'."

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Immanuel Kant

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"Modern Book Printing" from the Walk of Ideas

Immanuel Kant defines an idea as opposed to a concept. "Regulator ideas" are ideals that
one must tend towards, but by definition may not be completely realized. Liberty,
according to Kant, is an idea. The autonomy of the rational and universal subject is
opposed to the determinism of the empirical subject. Kant felt that it is precisely in
knowing its limits that philosophy exists. The business of philosophy he thought was not
to give rules, but to analyze the private judgements of good common sense.e

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Rudolf Steiner

Whereas Kant declares limits to knowledge ("we can never know the thing in itself"), in
his epistemological work, Rudolf Steiner sees ideas as "objects of experience" which the
mind apprehends, much as the eye apprehends light. In Goethean Science (1883), he
declares, "Thinking ... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear.
Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." He holds
this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific observations.

Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt widens the term from Kant's usage to include conscious representation of some
object or process of the external world. In so doing, he includes not only ideas of memory
and imagination, but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the

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term to the first two groups. One of Wundt's main concerns was to investigate conscious
processes in their own context by experiment and introspection. He regarded both of
these as exact methods, interrelated in that experimentation created optimal conditions for
introspection. Where the experimental method failed, he turned to other objectively
valuable aids, specifically to those products of cultural communal life which lead one to
infer particular mental motives. Outstanding among these are speech, myth, and social
custom. Wundt designed the basic mental activity apperception—a unifying function
which should be understood as an activity of the will. Many aspects of his empirical
physiological psychology are used today. One is his principles of mutually enhanced
contrasts and of assimilation and dissimilation (i.e. in color and form perception and his
advocacy of objective methods of expression and of recording results, especially in
language. Another is the principle of heterogony of ends—that multiply motivated acts
lead to unintended side effects which in turn become motives for new actions.

Charles Sanders Peirce

C.S. Peirce published the first full statement of pragmatism in his important works "How
to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) and "The Fixation of Belief" (1877). In "How to Make
Our Ideas Clear" he proposed that a clear idea (in his study he uses concept and idea as
synonymic) is defined as one, when it is apprehended such as it will be recognized
wherever it is met, and no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it is
said to be obscure. He argued that to understand an idea clearly we should ask ourselves
what difference its application would make to our evaluation of a proposed solution to the
problem at hand. Pragmatism (a term he appropriated for use in this context), he
defended, was a method for ascertaining the meaning of terms (as a theory of meaning).
The originality of his ideas is in their rejection of what was accepted as a view and
understanding of knowledge by scientists for some 250 years, i.e. that, he pointed,
knowledge was an impersonal fact. Peirce contended that we acquire knowledge as
participants, not as spectators. He felt "the real" is which, sooner or later, information
acquired through ideas and knowledge with the application of logical reasoning would
finally result in. He also published many papers on logic in relation to ideas.

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G.F. Stout and J.M. Baldwin

G.F. Stout and J.M. Baldwin, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology , define
idea as "the reproduction with a more or less adequate image, of an object not actually
present to the senses." They point out that an idea and a perception are by various
authorities contrasted in various ways. "Difference in degree of intensity", "comparative
absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject", "comparative dependence on
mental activity", are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared
with a perception.

It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a
mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given above of
the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea.
When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with

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which he can say "This is a chair, that is a stool", he has what is known as an "abstract
idea" distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair. Furthermore a
complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular
constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the
idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse,
that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.

In anthropology and the social sciences

Diffusion studies explore the spread of ideas from culture to culture. Some anthro-
pological theories hold that all cultures imitate ideas from one or a few original cultures,
the Adam of the Bible or several cultural circles that overlap. Evolutionary diffusion
theory holds that cultures are influenced by one another, but that similar ideas can be
developed in isolation.

In mid-20th century, social scientists began to study how and why ideas spread from one
person or culture to another. Everett Rogers pioneered diffusion of innovations studies,
using research to prove factors in adoption and profiles of adopters of ideas. In 1976, in
his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggested applying biological evolutionary
theories to the spread of ideas. He coined the term meme to describe an abstract unit of
selection, equivalent to the gene in evolutionary biology.

Semantics
Dr. Samuel Johnson

James Boswell recorded [Link] Johnson's opinion about ideas. Johnson claimed that
they are mental images or internal visual pictures. As such, they have no relation to
words or the concepts which are designated by verbal names.

He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the
sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which

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an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an idea or image of a mountain, a
tree, a building; but we cannot surely have an idea or image of an argument or
proposition. Yet we hear the sages of the law 'delivering their ideas upon the question
under consideration;' and the first speakers in parliament 'entirely coinciding in the idea
which has been ably stated by an honourable member;' — or 'reprobating an idea
unconstitutional, and fraught with the most dangerous consequences to a great and free
country.' Johnson called this 'modern cant.'

Validity of ideas
In the objective worth of our ideas there remains the problem of the validity. As all
cognition is by ideas, it is obvious that the question of the validity of our ideas in this
broad sense is that of the truth of our knowledge as a whole. Otherwise to dispute this is
to take up the position of skepticism. This has often been pointed out as a means of

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intellectual suicide. Any chain of reasoning (common sense) by which we attempt to
demonstrate the falsity of our ideas has to employ the very concept of ideas itself. Then
insofar as such reasoning demands assent to the conclusion, it implies belief in the
validity of all the ideas employed in the premises of the argument.

To assent the fundamental mathematical and logical axioms, including that of the
principle of contradiction, implies admission of the truth of the ideas expressed in these
principles. With respect to the objective worth of ideas, as involved in perception
generally, the question raised is that of the existence of an independent material world
comprising other human beings. The idealism of David Hume and John Stuart Mill would
lead logically to solipsism (the denial of any others besides ourselves). The main
foundation of all idealism and skepticism is the assumption (explicit or implicit), that the
mind can never know what is outside of itself. This is to say that an idea as a cognition
can never go outside of itself. This can be further expressed as we can never reach to and
mentally apprehend anything outside of anything of what is actually a present state of our
own consciousness.

• First, this is based on a prior assumption for which no real proof is or can be given
• Second, it is not only not self-evident, but directly contrary to what our mind
affirms to be our direct intellectual experience.

What is possible for a human mind to apprehend cannot be laid down beforehand. It must
be ascertained by careful observations and by study of the process of cognition. This
postulates that the mind cannot apprehend or cognize any reality existing outside of itself
and is not only a self-evident proposition, it is directly contrary to what such observation
and the testimony of mankind affirms to be our actual intellectual experience.

John Stuart Mill and most extreme idealists have to admit the validity of memory and
expectation. This is to say that in every act of memory or expectation which refers to any
experience outside the present instant, our cognition is transcending the present
modifications of the mind and judging about reality beyond and distinct from the present
states of consciousness. Considering the question as specially concerned with universal

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concepts, only the theory of moderate realism adopted by Aristotle and Saint Thomas can
claim to guarantee objective value to our ideas. According to the nominalist and
conceptualist theories there is no true correlate in rerum naturâ corresponding to the
universal term.

Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the rest claim that their universal
propositions are true and deal with realities. It is involved in the very notion of science
that the physical laws formulated by the mind do mirror the working of agents in the
external universe. The general terms of these sciences and the ideas which they signify
have objective correlatives in the common natures and essences of the objects with which
these sciences deal. Otherwise these general statements are unreal and each science is
nothing more than a consistently arranged system of barren propositions deduced from
empty arbitrary definitions. These postulates then have no more genuine objective value
than any other coherently devised scheme of artificial symbols standing for imaginary
beings. However the fruitfulness of science and the constant verifications of its

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predictions are incompatible with such a hypothesis.

Relationship of ideas to modern legal time- and scope-limited

monopolies
Relationship between ideas and patents

On Susceptibility to Exclusive Property

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural
and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable
to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is
derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary
right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no
individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance.

By a universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men
equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when
he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of
social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an
idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed
in exclusive and stable property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it
is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively
possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself
into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its
peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses

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the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and
mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in
which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or
exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement
to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done,
according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from
anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we
copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to

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the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case,
and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that
these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be
observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England
in new and useful devices.

To protect the cause of invention and innovation, the legal constructions of Copyrights
and Patents was established. Patent law regulates various aspects related to the functional
manifestation of inventions based on new ideas or incremental improvements to existing
ones. Thus, patents have a direct relationship to ideas.

Relationship between ideas and copyrights

A picture of a lightbulb is often used to represent a person having an idea

In some cases, authors can be granted limited legal monopolies on the manner in which
certain works are expressed. This is known colloquially as copyright, although the term
intellectual property is used mistakenly in place of copyright. Copyright law regulating
the aforementioned monopolies generally does not cover the actual ideas. The law does
not bestow the legal status of property upon ideas per se. Instead, laws purport to regulate
events related to the usage, copying, production, sale and other forms of exploitation of
the fundamental expression of a work, that may or may not carry ideas. Copyright law is
fundamentally different to patent law in this respect: patents do grant monopolies on
ideas.

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A copyright is meant to regulate some aspects of the usage of expressions of a work, not
an idea. Thus, copyrights have a negative relationship to ideas.

Work means a tangible medium of expression. It may be an original or derivative work of

art, be it literary, dramatic, musical recitation, artistic, related to sound recording, etc. In
(at least) countries adhering to the Berne Convention, copyright automatically starts
covering the work upon the original creation and fixation thereof, without any extra steps.
While creation usually involves an idea, the idea in itself does not suffice for the purposes
of claiming copyright.

Relationship of ideas to confidentiality agreements

Confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements are legal instruments that assist corpor-
ations and individuals in keeping ideas from escaping to the general public. Generally,

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these instruments are covered by contract law.

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Chapter 17

Intelligence

Intelligence is a term describing one or more capacities of the mind. In different contexts
this can be defined in different ways, including the capacities for abstract thought,
understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence and

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problem solving.

Intelligence is most widely studied in humans, but is also observed in animals and plants.
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines or the simulation of intelligence in
machines.

Numerous definitions of and hypotheses about intelligence have been proposed since
before the twentieth century, with no consensus reached by scholars. Within the
discipline of psychology, various approaches to human intelligence have been adopted.
The psychometric approach is especially familiar to the general public, as well as being
the most researched and by far the most widely used in practical settings.

History of the term

Intelligence derives from the Latin verb intelligere which derives from inter-legere
meaning to "pick out" or discern. A form of this verb, intellectus, became the medieval
technical term for understanding, and a translation for the Greek philosophical term nous.
This term was however strongly linked to the metaphysical and cosmological theories of
teleological scholasticism, including theories of the immortality of the soul, and the
concept of the Active Intellect (also known as the Active Intelligence). This entire
approach to the study of nature was strongly rejected by the early modern philosophers
such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, all of whom
preferred the word "understanding" in their English philosophical works. Hobbes for
example, in his Latin De Corpore, used "intellectus intelligit" (translated in the English
version as "the understanding understandeth") as a typical example of a logical absurdity.
The term "intelligence" has therefore become less common in English language philo-
sophy, but it has later been taken up (without the scholastic theories which it once
implied) in more contemporary psychology.

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Definitions

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Humans have pondered the nature of intelligence for centuries

How to define intelligence is controversial. Groups of scientists have stated the follo-
wing:

1. from "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" (1994), an editorial statement by fifty-

two researchers:

A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to
reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn
quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow

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 academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper
capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense"
of things, or "figuring out" what to do.

2. from "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" (1995), a report published by the

Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association:

Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to
adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in
various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought. Although
these individual differences can be substantial, they are never entirely consistent:
a given person's intellectual performance will vary on different occasions, in
different domains, as judged by different criteria. Concepts of "intelligence" are
attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena. Although
considerable clarity has been achieved in some areas, no such conceptualization

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has yet answered all the important questions, and none commands universal
assent. Indeed, when two dozen prominent theorists were recently asked to define
intelligence, they gave two dozen, somewhat different, definitions.

Besides the foregoing definitions, these psychology and learning researchers also have
defined intelligence as:

Researcher Quotation
Judgment, otherwise called "good sense," "practical sense,"
Alfred Binet "initiative," the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances ...
auto-critique.
The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act
David Wechsler purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his
environment.
Cyril Burt Innate general cognitive ability
To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail a set of
skills of problem solving — enabling the individual to resolve
genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and,
Howard Gardner
when appropriate, to create an effective product — and must also
entail the potential for finding or creating problems — and thereby
laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge.
Linda Gottfredson The ability to deal with cognitive complexity.
Sternberg & Salter Goal-directed adaptive behavior.
The theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability describes
intelligence as "the unique propensity of human beings to change
Reuven Feuerstein
or modify the structure of their cognitive functioning to adapt to
the changing demands of a life situation."

What is considered intelligent varies with culture. For example, when asked to sort, the
Kpelle people take a functional approach. A Kpelle participant stated "the knife goes with

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the orange because it cuts it." When asked how a fool would sort, they sorted
linguistically, putting the knife with other implements and the orange with other foods,
which is the style considered intelligent in other cultures.

Human intelligence
Theories of human intelligence

The most researched and by far the most widely used in practical settings is psychometric
testing with one example being intelligence quotient (IQ) tests. There are critics, who do
not dispute the stability of IQ test scores or the fact that they predict certain forms of
achievement rather effectively. They do argue, however, that to base a concept of
intelligence on IQ test scores alone is to ignore many important aspects of mental ability.

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Psychometric approach

The IQs of a large enough population are calculated so that they conform to a normal
distribution.

The approach to understanding intelligence with the most supporters and published
research over the longest period of time is based on psychometric testing. Such

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intelligence quotient (IQ) tests include the Stanford-Binet, Raven's Progressive Matrices,
the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children.
There are also psychometric tests which are not intended to measure intelligence itself
but some closely related construct such as scholastic aptitude. In the United States
examples include the SSAT, the SAT, the ACT, the GRE, the MOAT, the LSAT, and the
GMAT.

Intelligence tests are widely used in educational, business, and military settings due to
their efficacy in predicting behavior. IQ and g (discussed in the next section) are
correlated with many important social outcomes—individuals with low IQs are more
likely to be divorced, have a child out of marriage, be incarcerated, and need long-term
welfare support, while individuals with high IQs are associated with more years of
education, higher status jobs and higher income. Intelligence is significantly correlated
with successful training and performance outcomes, and IQ/g is the single best predictor
of successful job performance.

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General intelligence or g

There are many different kinds of IQ tests using a wide variety of methods. Some tests
are visual, some are verbal, some tests only use of abstract-reasoning problems, and some
tests concentrate on arithmetic, spatial imagery, reading, vocabulary, memory or general
knowledge. The psychologist Charles Spearman early this century made the first formal
factor analysis of correlations between the tests. He found that a single common factor
explained for the positive correlations among test. This is an argument still accepted in
principle by many psychometricians. Spearman named it g for "general intelligence
factor". In any collections of IQ tests, by definition the test that best measures g is the one
that has the highest correlations with all the others. Most of these g-loaded tests typically
involve some form of abstract reasoning. Therefore Spearman and others have regarded g
as the perhaps genetically determined real essence of intelligence. This is still a common
but not proven view. Other factor analyses of the data are with different results are
possible. Some psychometricians regard g as a statistical artifact. The accepted best
measure of g is Raven's Progressive Matrices which is a test of visual reasoning.

Historical psychometric theories

Several different theories of intelligence have historically been important. Often they
emphasized more factors than a single one like in g

Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory

Many of the broad, recent IQ tests have been greatly influenced by the Cattell-Horn-
Carroll theory. It is argued to reflect much of what is known about intelligence from
research. A hierarchy of factors is used. g is at the top. Under it there are 10 broad
abilities that in turn are subdivided into 70 narrow abilities. The broad abilities are:

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 • Fluid Intelligence (Gf): includes the broad ability to reason, form concepts, and
solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures.
• Crystallized Intelligence (Gc): includes the breadth and depth of a person's
acquired knowledge, the ability to communicate one's knowledge, and the ability
to reason using previously learned experiences or procedures.
• Quantitative Reasoning (Gq): the ability to comprehend quantitative concepts and
relationships and to manipulate numerical symbols.
• Reading & Writing Ability (Grw): includes basic reading and writing skills.
• Short-Term Memory (Gsm): is the ability to apprehend and hold information in
immediate awareness and then use it within a few seconds.
• Long-Term Storage and Retrieval (Glr): is the ability to store information and
fluently retrieve it later in the process of thinking.
• Visual Processing (Gv): is the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize, and think
with visual patterns, including the ability to store and recall visual representations.
Auditory Processing (Ga): is the ability to analyze, synthesize, and discriminate

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•
auditory stimuli, including the ability to process and discriminate speech sounds
that may be presented under distorted conditions.
• Processing Speed (Gs): is the ability to perform automatic cognitive tasks,
particularly when measured under pressure to maintain focused attention.
• Decision/Reaction Time/Speed (Gt): reflect the immediacy with which an
individual can react to stimuli or a task.

Modern tests do not necessarily measure of all of these broad abilities. For example, Gq
and Grw may be seen as measures of school achievement and not IQ. Gt may be difficult
to measure without special equipment.

g was earlier often subdivided into only Gf and Gc which were though to correspond to
the Nonverbal or Performance subtests and Verbal subtests in earlier versions of the
popular Wechsler IQ test. More recent research has shown the situation to be more
complex.

Controversies

Henry D. Schlinger argues that intelligence tests have been used to support nativistic
theories which view intelligence as a qualitative object with a relatively fixed quantity.
Critics of psychometrics claim that intelligence is often more complex and broader in
conception than what is measured by IQ tests. Furthermore, skeptics argue that even
though tests of mental abilities are correlated, people still have unique strengths and
weaknesses in specific areas. Consequently they argue that psychometric theorists over-
emphasize g, despite the fact that g was defined so as to encompass all inter-correlated
capabilities and skills.

Researchers in the field of human intelligence have encountered a considerable amount of

public concern and criticism—much more than scientists in other areas normally receive.
A number of critics have challenged the relevance of psychometric intelligence in the
context of everyday life. There have also been controversies over genetic factors in

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intelligence, particularly questions regarding the relationship between race and intelli-
gence and sex and intelligence. Another controversy in the field is how to interpret the
increases in test scores that have occurred over time, the so-called Flynn effect.

Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most vocal critics of intelligence testing. In his book
The Mismeasure of Man Gould argued that intelligence could not be quantified to a
single numerical entity. He also challenged the hereditarian viewpoint on intelligence.
Many of Gould's criticisms were aimed at Arthur Jensen, who responded that his work
had been misrepresented. Gould also investigated the methods of 19th-century cranio-
metry. Jensen stated that drawing conclusions from early intelligence research is like
condemning the auto industry by criticizing the performance of the Model T.

Multiple intelligences

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Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is based on studies not only of normal
children and adults but also by studies of gifted individuals (including so-called
"savants"), of persons who have suffered brain damage, of experts and virtuosos, and of
individuals from diverse cultures. This led Gardner to break intelligence down into at
least eight different components: logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, interper-
sonal, intrapersonal, naturalist and existential intelligences. He argues that psychometric
tests address only linguistic and logical plus some aspects of spatial intelligence. A major
criticism of Gardner's theory is that it has never been tested, or subjected to peer review,
by Gardner or anyone else, and indeed that it is unfalsifiable.

Triarchic theory of intelligence

Robert Sternberg proposed the triarchic theory of intelligence to provide a more
comprehensive description of intellectual competence than traditional differential or
cognitive theories of human ability. The triarchic theory describes three fundamental
aspects of intelligence. Analytic intelligence comprises the mental processes through
which intelligence is expressed. Creative intelligence is necessary when an individual is
confronted with a challenge that is nearly, but not entirely, novel or when an individual is
engaged in automatizing the performance of a task. Practical intelligence is bound in a
sociocultural milieu and involves adaptation to, selection of, and shaping of the environ-
ment to maximize fit in the context. The triarchic theory does not argue against the
validity of a general intelligence factor; instead, the theory posits that general intelligence
is part of analytic intelligence, and only by considering all three aspects of intelligence
can the full range of intellectual functioning be fully understood.

More recently, the triarchic theory has been updated and renamed the Theory of
Successful Intelligence by Sternberg. Intelligence is defined as an individual's assessment
of success in life by the individual's own (idiographic) standards and within the
individual's sociocultural context. Success is achieved by using combinations of
analytical, creative, and practical intelligence. The three aspects of intelligence are
referred to as processing skills. The processing skills are applied to the pursuit of success
through what were the three elements of practical intelligence: adapting to, shaping of,

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and selecting of one's environments. The mechanisms that employ the processing skills to
achieve success include utilizing one's strengths and compensating or correcting for one's
weaknesses.

Sternberg's theories and research on intelligence remain contentious within the scientific
community.

Piaget's theory and Neo-Piagetian theories

In Piaget's theory of cognitive development the focus is not on mental abilities but rather
on a child's mental models of the world. As a child develops, increasingly more accurate
models of the world are developed which enable the child to interact with the world
better. One example being object permanence where the child develops a model where
objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched.

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Piaget's theory described four main stages and many sub-stages in the development.
Degree of progress through these is correlated with but is not identical with psychometric
IQ.

Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development expand Piaget's theory in various ways

such as also considering psychometric-like factors such as processing speed and working
memory, "hypercognitive" factors like self-monitoring, more stages, and more consider-
ation on how progress may vary in different domains such as spatial or social.

Piaget's theory has been criticized for the age of appearance of a new model of the world,
such as object permanence, being dependent on how the testing is done. More generally,
the theory may be very difficult to test empirically due to the difficulty of proving or not
proving that a mental model is the explanation for the results of the testing.

Emotional intelligence
Daniel Goleman and several other researchers have developed the concept of emotional
intelligence and claim it is at least as "important" as traditionally proposed components of
intelligence. These theories grew from observations of human development and of brain
injury victims who demonstrate an acute loss of a particular cognitive function—e.g. the
ability to think numerically, or the ability to understand written language.

Many researchers believe that emotional intelligence is a composite of general intelli-

gence and agreeableness, one of the five dimensions of personality in the five-factor
model of personality. In this model, an emotionally intelligent person would score higher
than average in both dimensions, and vice versa. Moreover, an emotionally intelligent
person cannot score high on only one of the two traits. For example, an individual with
low general mental ability and high agreeableness would be impaired in his ability to
produce emotionally intelligent behavior despite his intentions, while an individual with
high general mental ability and low agreeableness would be perfectly capable of being
emotionally intelligent, but not inclined to do so.

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Latent inhibition
Latent inhibition has been related to elements of intelligence, namely creativity and
genius.

Empirical evidence

IQ proponents have claimed that IQ's predictive validity has been demonstrated, for
example in predicting non-academic outcomes such as job performance, and that the
various multiple intelligence theories have little or no such support. Meanwhile, it has
been claimed that the relevance and existence of multiple intelligences have not been
borne out when tested. A set of ability tests that do not correlate together would support
the claim that multiple intelligences are independent of each other.

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Evolution of intelligence

Our hominid and human ancestors evolved large and complex brains exhibiting an ever-
increasing intelligence through a long evolutionary process. Many different explanations
have been proposed.

Improving intelligence

Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary

traits through various forms of intervention. Conscious efforts to influence intelligence
raise ethical issues. Eugenics has variously been regarded as meritorious or deplorable in
different periods of history, falling greatly into disrepute after the defeat of Nazi
Germany in World War II.

Neuroethics considers the ethical, legal and social implications of neuroscience, and deals
with issues such as the difference between treating a human neurological disease and
enhancing the human brain, and how wealth impacts access to neurotechnology.
Neuroethical issues interact with the ethics of human genetic engineering.

Because intelligence appears to be at least partly dependent on brain structure and the
genes shaping brain development, it has been proposed that genetic engineering could be
used to enhance the intelligence, a process sometimes called biological uplift in science
fiction. Experiments on mice have demonstrated superior ability in learning and memory
in various behavioral tasks.

Transhumanist theorists study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using
techniques to enhance human abilities and aptitudes, and individuals ameliorating what
they regard as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition.

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Factors associated with intelligence

A number of factors are known to correlate with IQ but since correlation does not imply
causation the true relationship between these factors is uncertain unless there are also
other forms of evidence. There are also group differences regarding IQ.

• Environment and intelligence

• Fertility and intelligence
• Flynn effect
• Health and intelligence
• Height and intelligence
• Heritability of IQ
• Longevity and intelligence
• Nations and intelligence

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• Neuroscience and intelligence
• Race and intelligence
• Religiosity and intelligence
• Sex and psychology

Animal and plant intelligence

The common Chimpanzee can use tools. This chimpanzee is using a stick in order to get
food.

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Although humans have been the primary focus of intelligence researchers, scientists have
also attempted to investigate animal intelligence, or more broadly, animal cognition.
These researchers are interested in studying both mental ability in a particular species,
and comparing abilities between species. They study various measures of problem
solving, as well as mathematical and language abilities. Some challenges in this area are
defining intelligence so that it means the same thing across species (e.g. comparing
intelligence between literate humans and illiterate animals), and then operationalizing a
measure that accurately compares mental ability across different species and contexts.

Wolfgang Köhler's pioneering research on the intelligence of apes is a classic example of

research in this area. Stanley Coren's book, The Intelligence of Dogs is a notable popular
book on the topic. Nonhuman animals particularly noted and studied for their intelligence
include chimpanzees, bonobos (notably the language-using Kanzi) and other great apes,
dolphins, elephants and to some extent parrots and ravens. Controversy exists over the
extent to which these judgments of intelligence are accurate.

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Cephalopod intelligence also provides important comparative study. Cephalopods appear
to exhibit characteristics of significant intelligence, yet their nervous systems differ
radically from those of most other notably intelligent life-forms (mammals and birds).

It has been argued that plants should also be classified as being intelligent based on their
ability to sense the environment and adjust their morphology, physiology and phenotype
accordingly.

Artificial intelligence

The artificial intelligence quiz show contestant "Watson", appearing on the US quiz show
Jeopardy! in 2011.

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Artificial intelligence (or AI) is both the intelligence of machines and the branch of
computer science which aims to create it, through "the study and design of intelligent
agents" or "rational agents", where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its
environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. Achievements in
artificial intelligence include constrained and well-defined problems such as games,
crossword-solving and optical character recognition. General intelligence or strong AI
has not yet been achieved and is a long-term goal of AI research.

Among the traits that researchers hope machines will exhibit are reasoning, knowledge,
planning, learning, communication, perception, and the ability to move and manipulate
objects. In the field of artificial intelligence there is no consensus on how closely the
brain should be simulated.

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Chapter 18

Memetics

Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution,

originating from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It purports to be an
approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a

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gene, is essentially a "unit of culture"—an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc. which is
"hosted" in one or more individual minds, and which can reproduce itself from mind to
mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to
adopt a belief is seen memetically as a meme reproducing itself. As with genetics,
particularly under Dawkins's interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its con-
tribution to the effectiveness of its host. Memetics is notable for sidestepping the
traditional concern with the truth of ideas and beliefs.

The Journal of Memetics was published electronically from 1997 to 2005.

History of the term

In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used
the term meme to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene,
arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. In his book,
Dawkins contended that the meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the
mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. It is a pattern that can influence its
surroundings – that is, it has causal agency – and can propagate. This created great debate
among sociologists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines, because Dawkins
himself did not provide a sufficient explanation of how the replication of units of
information in the brain controls human behaviour and ultimately culture, since the
principal topic of the book was genetics. Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a
comprehensive theory of memetics in The Selfish Gene, but rather coined the term meme
in a speculative spirit. Accordingly, the term "unit of information" came to be defined in
different ways by many scientists.

The modern memetics movement dates from the mid 1980s. A January 1983 Meta-
magical Themas column by Douglas Hofstadter, in Scientific American, was influential
as was his 1985 book of the same name. "Memeticist" was coined as analogous to
"geneticist" originally in The Selfish Gene. Later Arel Lucas suggested that the discipline
that studies memes and their connections to human and other carriers of them be known
as memetics by analogy with 'genetics.'" Dawkins' The Selfish Gene has been a factor in

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drawing in people of disparate intellectual backgrounds. Another stimulus was the
publication in 1991 of Consciousness Explained by Tufts University philosopher Daniel
Dennett, which incorporated the meme concept into a theory of the mind. In his 1991
essay Viruses of the Mind, Richard Dawkins used memetics to explain the phenomenon
of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions. By then,
memetics had also become a theme appearing in fiction (e.g. Neal Stephenson's Snow
Crash).

However, the foundation of memetics in full modern incarnation originates in the

publication in 1996 of two books by authors outside the academic mainstream: Virus of
the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motiv-
ational speaker and professional poker player, Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion:
How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher
who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch claimed to have conceived
his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural

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evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not even aware of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene
until his book was very close to publication.

Around the same time as the publication of the books by Lynch and Brodie, an e-journal
appeared on the web, hosted by the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester
Metropolitan University Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information
Transmission. The journal was afterwards taken over by Francis Heylighen of the CLEA
research institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The e-journal soon became the central
point for publication and debate within the nascent memetics community. (There had
been a short-lived paper memetics publication starting in 1990, the Journal of Ideas
edited by Elan Moritz.) In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the
West of England, published The Meme Machine, which more fully worked out the ideas
of Dennett, Lynch, and Brodie and attempted to compare and contrast them with various
approaches from the cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel, and
controversial, memetic-based theories for the evolution of language and the human sense
of individual selfhood.

The term is a transliteration of the Ancient Greek μιμητής (mimētḗs), meaning "imitator,
pretender", and was used in 1904, by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon,
best known for his development of the engram theory of memory, in his work Die
mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen,
translated into English in 1921 as The Mneme. Until Daniel Schacter published Forgotten
Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory in 2000, Semon's
work had little influence, though it was quoted extensively in Erwin Schrödinger's
prescient 1956 Tarner Lecture "Mind and Matter".

Internalists and externalists

The memetics movement split almost immediately into two. The first group were those
who wanted to stick to Dawkins' definition of a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission".
Gibran Burchett, another memeticist responsible for helping to research and co-coin the

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term memetic engineering, along with Leveious Rolando and Larry Lottman, has stated
that a meme can be defined, more precisely, as "a unit of cultural information that can be
copied, located in the brain". This thinking is more in line with Dawkins' second
definition of the meme in his book The Extended Phenotype. The second group wants to
redefine memes as observable cultural artifacts and behaviors. However, in contrast to
those two positions, Blackmore does not reject either concept of external or internal
memes.

These two schools became known as the "internalists" and the "externalists." Prominent
internalists included both Lynch and Brodie; the most vocal externalists included Derek
Gatherer, a geneticist from Liverpool John Moores University, and William Benzon, a
writer on cultural evolution and music. The main rationale for externalism was that
internal brain entities are not observable, and memetics cannot advance as a science,
especially a quantitative science, unless it moves its emphasis onto the directly
quantifiable aspects of culture. Internalists countered with various arguments: that brain

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states will eventually be directly observable with advanced technology, that most cultural
anthropologists agree that culture is about beliefs and not artifacts, or that artifacts cannot
be replicators in the same sense as mental entities (or DNA) are replicators. The debate
became so heated that a 1998 Symposium on Memetics, organised as part of the 15th
International Conference on Cybernetics, passed a motion calling for an end to
definitional debates.

An advanced statement of the internalist school came in 2002 with the publication of The
Electric Meme, by Robert Aunger, an anthropologist from the University of Cambridge.
Aunger also organised a conference in Cambridge in 1999, at which prominent
sociologists and anthropologists were able to give their assessment of the progress made
in memetics to that date. This resulted in the publication of Darwinizing Culture: The
Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Aunger and with a foreword by Dennett, in
2000.

Maturity
In 2005, the Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
ceased publication and published a set of articles on the future of memetics. The website
states that although "there was to be a relaunch...after several years nothing has
happened". Susan Blackmore has left the University of the West of England to become a
freelance science writer and now concentrates more on the field of consciousness and
cognitive science. Derek Gatherer moved to work as a computer programmer in the
pharmaceutical industry, although he still occasionally publishes on memetics-related
matters. Richard Brodie is now climbing the world professional poker rankings. Aaron
Lynch disowned the memetics community and the words "meme" and "memetics"
(without disowning the ideas in his book), adopting the self-description "thought
contagionist". Lynch lost his previous funding from a private sponsor and after his book
royalties declined, he was unable to support himself as a private memetics/thought-
contagion consultant. He died in 2005.

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Susan Blackmore (2002) re-stated the definition of meme as: whatever is copied from
one person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of
information. Further she said that memes, like genes, are replicators in the sense as
defined by Dawkins. That is, they are information that is copied. Memes are copied by
imitation, teaching and other methods. The copies are not perfect: memes are copied with
variation; moreover, they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be
copied again. Only some of the variants can survive. The combination of these three
elements (copies; variation; competition for survival) forms precisely the condition for
Darwinian evolution, and so memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Large groups of
memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or
memeplexes. In her definition, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This
requires brain capacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model.
Since the process of social learning varies from one person to another, the imitation
process cannot be said to be completely imitated. The sameness of an idea may be
expressed with different memes supporting it. This is to say that the mutation rate in

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memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and
every interaction of the imitation process. It becomes very interesting when we see that a
social system composed of a complex network of microinteractions exists, but at the
macro level an order emerges to create culture.

Criticism
Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a
dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural
evolution" among other things. As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script
for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism
(i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy
and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.

Another criticism comes from semiotics, (e.g., Deacon, Kull) stating that the concept of
meme is a primitivized concept of Sign. Meme is thus described in memetics as a sign
without its triadic nature. In other words, meme is a degenerate sign, which includes only
its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are
memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.

Mary Midgley criticises memetics for at least two reasons: One, culture is not best
understood by examining its smallest parts, as culture is pattern-like, comparable to an
ocean current. Many more factors, historical and others, should be taken into account
than only whatever particle culture is built from. Two, if memes are not thoughts (and
thus not cognitive phenomena), as Daniel C. Dennett insists in "Darwin's Dangerous
Idea", what, then, are they? What ontological status do they have? Do they, as meme-
ticists (who are also reductionists) insist, in fact exist?

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New developments
Dawkins responds in A Devil's Chaplain that there are actually two different types of
memetic processes (controversial and informative). The first is a type of cultural idea,
action, or expression, which does have high variance; for instance, a student of his who
had inherited some of the mannerisms of Wittgenstein. However, he also describes a self-
correcting meme, highly resistant to mutation. As an example of this, he gives origami
patterns in elementary schools – except in rare cases, the meme is either passed on in the
exact sequence of instructions, or (in the case of a forgetful child) terminates. This type
of meme tends not to evolve, and to experience profound mutations in the rare event that
it does.

Another definition, given by Hokky Situngkir, tried to offer a more rigorous formalism
for the meme, memeplexes, and the deme, seeing the meme as a cultural unit in a cultural

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complex system. It is based on the Darwinian genetic algorithm with some modifications
to account for the different patterns of evolution seen in genes and memes. In the method
of memetics as the way to see culture as a complex adaptive system, he describes a way
to see memetics as an alternative methodology of cultural evolution. However, there are
as many possible definitions that are credited to the word "meme". For example, in the
sense of computer simulation the term memetic algorithm is used to define a particular
computational viewpoint.

Memetics can be simply understood as a method for scientific analysis of cultural

evolution. However, proponents of memetics as described in the Journal of Memetics –
Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission believe that 'memetics' has the
potential to be an important and promising analysis of culture using the framework of
evolutionary concepts. Keith Henson who wrote Memetics and the Modular-Mind
(Analog Aug. 1987) makes the case that memetics needs to incorporate evolutionary
psychology to understand the psychological traits of a meme's host. This is especially
true of time-varying, meme-amplification host-traits, such as those leading to wars.

Recently, Christopher diCarlo has developed the idea of 'memetic equilibrium' to

describe a cultural compatible state with biological equilibrium. In "Problem Solving and
Neurotransmission in the Upper Paleolithic" (in press), diCarlo argues that as human
consciousness evolved and developed, so too did our ancestors' capacity to consider and
attempt to solve environmental problems in more conceptually sophisticated ways.
Understood in this way, problem solving amongst a particular group, when considered
satisfactory, often produces a feeling of environmental control, stability, in short—
memetic equilibrium. But the pay-off is not merely practical, providing purely functional
utility—it is biochemical and it comes in the form of neurotransmitters. The relationship
between a gradually emerging conscious awareness and sophisticated languages in which
to formulate representations combined with the desire to maintain biological equilibrium,
generated the necessity for memetic equilibrium to fill in conceptual gaps in terms of
understanding three very important aspects in the Upper Paleolithic: causality, morality,
and mortality. The desire to explain phenomena in relation to maintaining survival and

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reproductive stasis, generated a normative stance in the minds of our ancestors—
Survival/Reproductive Value (or S-R Value).

The application of memetics to a difficult complex social system problem, environmental

sustainability, has recently been attempted at [Link]. Using meme types and memetic
infection in several stock and flow simulation models, Jack Harich has demonstrated
several interesting phenomena that are best, and perhaps only, explained by memes. One
model, The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace, argues that the fundamental
reason corruption is the norm in politics is due to an inherent structural advantage of one
feedback loop pitted against another. Another model, The Memetic Evolution of
Solutions to Difficult Problems, uses memes, the evolutionary algorithm, and the
scientific method to show how complex solutions evolve over time and how that process
can be improved. The insights gained from these models are being used to engineer
memetic solution elements to the sustainability problem.

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Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies has postulated
what he calls "memetic selection criteria". These criteria opened the way to a specialized
field of applied memetics to find out if these selection criteria could stand the test of
quantitative analyses. In 2003 Klaas Chielens carried out these tests in a Masters thesis
project on the testability of the selection criteria.

In Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution, Austrian linguist Nikolaus Ritt has attempted
to operationalise memetic concepts and use them for the explanation of long term sound
changes and change conspiracies in early English. It is argued that a generalised
Darwinian framework for handling cultural change can provide explanations where
established, speaker centred approaches fail to do so. The book makes comparatively
concrete suggestions about the possible material structure of memes, and provides two
empirically rich case studies.

Australian academic S.J. Whitty has argued that project management is a memeplex with
the language and stories of its practitioners at its core. This radical, some say heretical
approach requires project managers to consider that most of what they call a project and
what it is to manage one is an illusion; a human construct about a collection of feelings,
expectations, and sensations, cleverly conjured up, fashioned, and conveniently labeled
by the human brain. It also requires project managers to consider that the reasons for
using project management are not consciously driven to maximize profit. Project
managers are required to consider project management as naturally occurring, self-
serving, evolving and designing organizations for its own purpose.

Swedish political scientist Mikael Sandberg argues against "Lamarckian" interpretations

of institutional and technological evolution and studies creative innovation of information
technologies in governmental and private organizations in Sweden in the 1990s from a
memetic perspective. Comparing the effects of active ("Lamarckian") IT strategy versus
user–producer interactivity (Darwinian co-evolution), evidence from Swedish organiz-
ations shows that co-evolutionary interactivity is almost four times as strong a factor
behind IT creativity as the "Lamarckian" IT strategy.

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Terminology
• Memotype – is the actual information-content of a meme.

• Meme-complex – (sometimes abbreviated memeplex) is a collection or grouping

of memes that have evolved into a mutually supportive or symbiotic relationship.
Simply put, a meme-complex is a set of ideas that reinforce each other. Meme-
complexes are roughly analogous to the symbiotic collection of individual genes
that make up the genetic codes of biological organisms. An example of a
memeplex would be a religion.

• Memeoid – is a neologism for people who have been taken over by a meme to the
extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential. Examples include
kamikazes, suicide bombers and cult members who commit mass suicide. The

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term was apparently coined by H. Keith Henson in "Memes, L5 and the Religion
of the Space Colonies," L5 News, 1985 pp. 5–8, and referenced in the expanded
second edition of Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene (p. 330). But in the
strict sense all people are essentially memeoid, since no distinction can be made if
one uses language, or memes use their host. As William S. Burroughs puts it: "the
word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable
symbiosis with the host."

• Memetic Equilibrium – refers to the cultural equivalent of species biological

equilibrium. It is that which humans strive for in terms of personal value with
respect to cultural artefacts and ideas. The term was coined by Christopher
diCarlo.

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