Qua qua qua. Submission for Oxford graduate conference (4378 words)

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1 Qua qua qua Submission for Oxford graduate conference (4378 words) Abstract I will argue that qua objects exist, or, at least, that qua objects, if they existed, would solve a broad range of problems. Though they date at least as far back as to Aristotle, I will discuss their credentials under the form they got in Kit Fine s 1982 note Acts, Events and Things. I will show how they naturally arise in natural deduction, and how powerful a tool they are to explain all kinds of substitutivity failures and associated puzzles in the debates on material constitution, modes of presentation and belief ascription. I will show how they could be used to streamline ontology, while at the same time providing truthmakers galore and explaining, e.g., what essences are. I will criticize the only Ersatzist construal I know of and then finally try to sketch some ways in which qua objects might be given a place within one s favourite ontological picture, not offending our taste for desert landscapes. 1 What qua objects are Qua objects entered the contemporary philosophical stage in 1982, when Kit Fine wrote a short note entitled Acts, Events and Things. They have, though, a much longer history, dating back at least as far as to Aristotle, though this is not something that will concern me here. A qua object, according to Fine, is a special kind of intensional entity, consisting of a particular, say a (its basis ), together with a property, say F (its gloss ), and denoted by a qua F (Fine 1982: 100). For any particular a and any property F there is such a qua object, which exists at times and in worlds when and where a is F. Qua objects in Fine s sense are intensional entities: they are identical only if they have the same glosses and they are distinct from their bases, though they have them as constituents 1 and exemplify, at any given time and in any given world, all the properties of their bases which are not formal, i.e. which are not about the time or world in question. I propose to generalise Fine s idea, in order to accommodate my own ontological views, which I will sketch, though not try to justify, later. The crucial properties of qua objects, compared with their bases, are that they, on the one hand, have some privileged properties, properties which must be mentioned to give a full account of what that object is, while being impoverished in properties on the other hand. Qua objects are, in a sense to be made more precise later, description-relative. They are, however, existentially dependent on properties, not on predicates. So far, this does not tell us much about the ontological status of qua objects. Kit Fine, e.g., is wary not to assign them too high a grade of being: The acts, as qua objects, are in an obvious sense artificial and derivative. They are not genuinely out there in the world, but are formed from what is out there by means 1 This is not Fine s term: he says that the qua object should be regarded as some sort of amalgam of the given object and the property... (Fine 1982: 100). He later says that the basis is part of the qua object (Fine 1982: 101), but this commits him to the thesis that the whole of the basis and the gloss (the qua object) exists only if the basis has the gloss, which makes qua objects a rather special kind of whole. 1

2 of an alliance with a purely intensional element. (It is tempting to say that they are partly formed in our own minds, but this would be too psychologistic). (Fine 1982: 103) I would prefer a much more robust realistic construal. The usefulness, however, of qua objects does not depend on their ultimate ontological status, but one their following properties: a qua F is essentially F. a qua F has different modal and temporal persistence conditions than its base and any other qua object a qua G (for F and G not necessarily coextensive). a qua F depends existentially on the state of affairs of a s being F. For the present, I will call a qua object whatever satisfies these conditions. 2 Why qua objects are useful In this section, I want to show how useful qua objects are (or, if only they existed, would be) to solve a broad range of philosophical puzzles. This gives us some indirect and prima facie reason to believe in their existence. 2.1 Mathematics One place where qua objects naturally arise is in the application of the rules of universal generalisation and existential specialisation of natural deduction. The rule of universal generalisation (UG) allows us to infer x(f x) from F a for some individual constant a not occurring in F x. Existential specialisation (ES), in turn, justifies the move from x(f x) to F a for some individual constant a not occurring in F x. It seems natural to take UG to treat a in F a as a term denoting a qua object, for all we know, and all we are allowed to know, about the referent of a is that it is F. We have to make a choice, to be sure, but our choice is arbitrary, as long as it is a choice among objects qua F. The object we choose will have other properties as well: but none of them, intuitively, is a property of the object chosen as it is in itself. ES, in turn, introduces an individual constant a denoting one qua object in particular. Qua objects are also used in constructive mathematical proofs. Suppose I want to demonstrate that the sum of a triangle s interior angles is 180 degrees. I will draw a particular figure on the black board, say a. For my proof to be valid, I am not allowed to make use of any properties of a not mentioned in the definition I gave of a triangle. If I have defined, say, a triangle as a plane figure having three sides, I can make use of the fact that a has three interior angles only if I have shown how trilaterality implies triangularity. So I treat a as a qua object: the only thing I am entitled to presuppose about a is that it exemplifies its gloss. 2.2 Material Constitution Consider a particular statue, Goliath, and the lump of matter which constitutes it, Lump. They differ in their modal and temporal properties, while sharing a lot of other properties: how can this be? Qua objects provide an answer. What we call Goliath, in fact, is a (the thing which is the statue and the lump of matter) qua statue, while Lump refers to a qua lump of matter. They are one and the same in the sense that their bases are the same, but they differ in that Goliath is essentially a statue while Lump is not. If a therefore looses statuehood, say by our melting it down, Goliath ceases to exist while 2

3 Lump persists. It is true of Lump, but not of Goliath, that it might be melted down and still persist. We will later have to discuss what this sameness of bases consists in, but for the present it is enough to call it coincidence and to note that it falls short of identity tout court. 2.3 Modes of presentation It is well known that the following sentence might have been informative to a Babylonian: The evening star is the morning star. (1) The reason for this, the story goes, is that Babylonians used the morning star to refer to the last planet visible in the morning, while they used the evening star for the first planet appearing on the evening sky. But this is just to say that they used these terms to refer to qua objects: in order to know what the evening star is, a Babylonian would have had to know that it is the first planet on the evening sky. So (1) is informative because it says of two different qua objects that their bases are the same. On the strict identity conditions Fine gives, to be sure, (1) would not only be informative but false as well. Nothing, however, forces us to understand the is in (1) as the is of identity: it may also be taken to express predication or, even better, sameness of bases. It might be replied that this only works because the evening star and the morning star, despite Venus s being a planet, are definite descriptions. So let us then take Hesperus and Phosphorus and see whether we can account for the informativity of the following: Hesperus is Phosphorus. (2) Again, qua objects do the job: for if we are told by (2) that two naming chains end in two baptising acts which are directed towards the same object a and if we take the reference fixing descriptions to be the hesperizing object and the phosphorizing object respectively, we can take it to express that a qua hesperizing has the same base than a qua phosphorizing. Qua objects may also explain substitutivity failures in belief ascriptions. Take poor Pierre, believing that London, but not Londres, is ugly. He believes that it is ugly of the city qua containing such an ugly neighbourhood and that it is beautiful of the city qua containing wonderful Buckingham palace. Or take Ralph, believing that the shortest spy is a spy but not believing something at all about Ortcutt, the shortest spy. He believes something about Ortcutt qua (being) the shortest spy, but nothing about any other qua object having Ortcutt as its base. So qua objects are naturally taken to be the objects of propositional attitudes. 2.4 Substitutivity failures We can extend that account to all kinds of substitutivity failures. Take, e.g., the problem of substitutivity failures in so-called simple sentences (Saul 1997) like: Superman is more successful with women than Clark Kent. (3) Joseph G. Moore (1999: 103) tried to save substitutivity by construing Superman and Clark Kent as names of what he calls aspects, primitive, irreducible, and [...] somewhat indeterminate entities : For the moment we might think of these aspects as certain collections of Clark/Superman s properties (often temporary) features of physical appearance, character, reputation, and so on. (Moore 1999: 94) 3

4 The basic problem, however, is that collections of properties, even when taken as primitive, are not successful with women at all. The remedy, of course, are qua objects: Clark Kent is, in fact, more successful with Lois Lane qua Superman than qua Clark Kent, for she would not have kissed him were it not for his fancy dress. 2.5 Diagonal intensions Qua objects relate in the following way to the nowadays popular two-dimensional method of specifying what would once have been called the sense of a term. To determine Stalnaker s diagonal intension of a propositional concept or Chalmer s epistemic intension of a word, we are asked to determine the referents and extensions of our words or concepts under certain counterfactual circumstances we are supposed to imagine being actual. We are, e.g., to wonder what our word or concept water would refer to if it would turn out that the substance in our lakes has in fact the chemical structure XYZ. By this method, it is claimed, we find out something about our actual use of words and concepts. While Stalnaker takes this method to individuate the propositional concepts we actually use and Chalmers takes it to determine the notional, i.e. introspectively accessible and inferentially crucial, content of our words, I would say that we find out something about their reference: if in all possible utterance situations of water, we would refer by it to what is there the local watery stuff, then we use water to refer to water (that is H 2 O) qua watery stuff. Water qua watery stuff might have XYZ-constituted counterparts, while water qua H 2 O does not. So water is watery stuff, if it is a priori, is a priori because it has the logical form of a qua F is F. 2.6 Essences a qua F, we said, is essentially F, even if a tout court is not. Glossing, then, affects modal behaviour. A natural explanation of what essences are is that a property is essential to an object iff it is shared by all its counterparts (Lewis 1968: 35). This makes essences cheap: what counts as a counterpart may depend on the context; contextually salient features may narrow down the class of counterparts and we end up with spurious essences. Qua objects to the rescue: For F to be an essential property of a, we should require not only that all its counterparts are F but also that they are counterparts of a qua F. If Socrates is essentially a man, anything which resembles him resembles him with respect to manhood. There is reason to believe, however, that the criterion is still too weak: for there are non-essential properties resemblance with respect to which is cheap, for anything whatsoever has them. These are the necessary and universal properties like being self-identical, being such that = 4 and so on. But not only these: there may other properties be shared by all the counterparts of a qua object which are not specific enough to determine its base. 2 In such cases, glossing widens the similarity class, rather than narrowing it down. To exclude such non-specific properties, we have to require that any counterpart of a qua F is a counterpart of a tout court. Then we may define essential properties as follows. A property F is essential to a iff a and a qua F have the same counterparts. (4) This account of essences allows us to fix a loophole in our account of material constitution. The account we presented seemed to be symmetric, while constitution is not: lumps can fail to be statues altogether while statues are generically dependent on there being lumps. a qua statue, then, is essentially a lump, while a qua lump is only accidentially a statue. Everything that 2 In the tripartite distinction of Fine (1994: 68) between essential, accidential and definite properties, such properties constitute the third category. Fine draws an interesting analogy to definitions: essential properties of a are those that must, while definite properties are those that may, figure in an (adequate) definition of a. 4

5 resembles a qua statue, ipso facto resembles it with respect to lumphood, while there may be counterparts of a qua lump tout court which fail to be counterparts of it qua statue. This is just to say that there are more lumps than statues in modal space. 2.7 Truthmakers Qua objects provide us with all the truthmakers we ever thought we needed. What makes it true that a is F, most naturally, is a qua F, an entity necessarily such that it exists iff a is F. As David Lewis (2003) has shown in recent work, even the ontologically more scrupulous, restricting the formation of qua objects to properties which are exemplified intrinsically by their base, get enough truthmakers. Predications of relational properties are then made true by qua objects having the mereological sum of the relata as their base and a certain structural, hence intrinsic property of this sum as their gloss. Negative existentials like there are no unicorns are made true by the actual world qua lacking unicorns. 2.8 Ontology Qua objects, while themselves, at least at first sight, quite bizarre entities, streamline ontology: they allow us to dispense with other bizarre entities, namely properties, states of affairs and tropes. Qua objects not only depend existentially on states of affairs; they also allow us to get rid of them. a qua F exists (at a time, in a world) only if a is F (at that time, in that world). Whenever and whereever a is F, on the contrary, there is at least one corresponding qua object, whose existence (at that time and in that world) entails that a is F. Why keep states of affairs if they are not needed for the truthmaking job? The trope involved in a s being F, a s particular F -ness, is what, if added to a, gives us the new object a qua F. Properties may be taken to be sums, fusions or sets of their instances: F is what all and only the objects of the form a qua F have in common. 3 Qua objects allow us to draw us the following nice picture: The world is a world of things, objects, of different kinds. Some objects are incomplete, or dependent, but this does neither make them wholly qualitative. Everything exists in space-time. Every object has a property, and every property is had by an object. There is only one world, and every modal fact is made true by an object existing in that world. There are no forms, abstract objects, and senses dangling around in outer-space. We can even go further, though. Having qua objects, we do not need anything else. For any ordinary thing, say a, can be taken to be nothing but a qua F, where F is a supervenience base for all of a s essential properties. 3 Why qua objects won t go away Granted, one may reply, qua objects are indeed useful, if they exist, but this is not enough to show that they exist. Unfortunately, not everything potentially useful is at our disposition. It must be shown, in addition, that nothing else can do the job qua objects are good at. Maybe we can have the same benefits at a lesser ontological price. It is difficult to argue for negative existential claims. All one can do is to proceed case by case and try to show why the different Ersatzist proposals do not work. Fortunately, I know of only 3 But does not this give us only the property being essentially F? To this it might be replied that this property is (nothing but) F, exemplified in some particular way (which, if there are only qua objects, is the only way properties are exemplified). 5

6 one (of the same generality, at least). The proposal is that every predication involving (apparent) reference to qua objects can be analyzed by a locution involving because : a qua F is G a is G because a is F (5) Let us examine the credentials of this proposal. Beside a minor point about reflexivity ( a qua F is F, as we have seen, is trivially true, while... because is usually taken to be irreflexive), the main problem seems to me to be that the variable positions in F x because Gy are referentially transparent, while x in x qua F is G is not. So if Superman is successful with women because of his fancy dress, so is Clark Kent, contrary to what we saw about the two qua objects involved. It seems, therefore, that the benefits cannot be had for less. Perhaps, however, they cannot be had at all. 4 How qua objects might exist Even if qua objects are useful, many will be reluctant to admit their existence as long as they lack a precise idea how such bizarre entities might be part of the furniture of the world. This is why I will now try to sketch some ways one might accommodate qua objects within one s ontological framework. 4.1 Parts of ordinary objects The most straightforward way is to make them parts of ordinary objects, in the ordinary sense of part (which I think is the only sense of part). The details are somehow more complicated, however. Call a property F of an object a intrinsic to a iff a s being F is only a matter of how a is and not at all of how other objects are, a property a could have if it were the only existing thing. Being bent (under at least one reading), or talking are intrinsic properties of mine, while being a philosopher or being called Philipp are not. Intrinsicness is a relational term. If the particular involved is chosen large enough, every property and relation is intrinsic to some thing. If we allow for enough structural properties, e.g., relations are intrinsic to the mereological sum or fusion of their relata. My proposal now is that exemplification of intrinsic properties is ordinary parthood. So every property or relation is part of some thing, though not, of course, a spatio-temporal part, and a qua F for any property F intrinsic to a is just the mereological fusion of a s spatio-temporal parts with F. a qua F may still share other properties with a, but these will be extrinsic to it, with the exception of all the properties implied by it s being F Ordinary objects under competing descriptions Another possibility to accommodate qua objects is to stay content with ordinary, non-qua, things, but allow for different counterpart relations. Something b in a possible world v is a counterpart of a in w iff a would be b if w turned out to be v. Counterpart relations depend on overall intrinsic and extrinsic similiarity and sometimes on similarity-in-a-given-respect. 4 Given qua objects, the parthood analysis may perhaps be extended to all properties and relations. Take, e.g., a certain relation, say being in the same room as that holds between me and all of you. This relation may be taken to be a part of our mereological sum s. We would then have a qua object, s qua being in the same room. I, by being part of s, am a part of that qua object: the relational property being in the same room than all of you is this property that is a non-spatiotemporal part both of me and of the qua object s qua being in the same room. So I qua being in the same room than all of you is a part of me. 6

7 If we allow for different counterpart relations we might say that one and the same thing, e.g. the lump of matter and the statue, might have counterparts in one respect which are not counterparts of it in another respect, e.g. melted-down counterparts which are sufficiently similar to it with respect to lump-hood, but not to statue-hood. The difficulty is, of course, to say how such counterpart relations are selected and why their difference does not violate Leibniz s Law. Letting, as Lewis (1971: 53) does, the appropriate counterpart relation by the sense of the proper name used, not only riddles us with senses of proper names, but neither gives us a general procedure. 5 For sometimes, Lewis says, the appropriate counterpart relation is selected by a special clause like regarded as an F. We are very close to qua objects indeed. Different counterpart relations are distinguished by the fact that they derive from different properties of one and the same thing:... counterpart relations are a matter of over-all resemblance in a variety of respects. If we vary the relative importances of different respects of similarity and dissimilarity, we will get different counterpart relations. Two respects of similarity and dissimilarity among enduring things are, first, personhood and personal traits, and, second, bodyhood and bodily traits. If we assign great weight to the former, we get the personal counterpart relation. Only a person, or something very like a person, can resemble a person in respect of personhood and personal traits enough to be his personal counterpart. But if we assign great weight to the latter, we get the bodily counterpart relation. Only a body, or something very like a body, can resemble a body in respect to bodyhood and bodily traits enough to be its bodily counterpart. (Lewis 1971: 51 52) Because glosses of qua objects are precisely what constrains their similarity relations, it seems to me that the different-counterpart-relations theory is just a variant of the full-blown qua object theory, perhaps preferable to the ontologically cautious. As always where there is a trade-off between what Quine calls ontology and ideology, however, there is a price to pay: even de re modal predications, when couched in a multiple counterpart theory, will not be referentially transparent and the great advantage of counterpart theory in the first place will be lost. By accepting qua objects we will restore referential transparency and gain much more. 4.3 Modal continuants There is an attractive way to combine both proposals just sketched. Achille Varzi (2001) has shown that counterpart theory may be smoothly couched in terms of modal occurrents, 6 i.e. transworld individuals which have their worldy parts as modal stages in much the same way that perduring things have and consist of temporal stages. As counterpart relations, being a matter of similarity, are not equivalence relations, one and the same thing will be part of many different modal continuants. But given a multiplicity of counterpart relations, this was to be expected anyway. These trans-world individuals, I would like to argue, are nothing else than qua objects. Qua objects are partially identical, they may share stages, and these stages are the objects what we normally refer to. In modal, as in temporal, discourse, the wholes of which these stages are part matter: they are what makes true our modal and temporal predications. The vagueness of statements like Pavarotti might have been a ballerina, our uncertainty with respect to what will count as a counterpart of Pavarotti and our uncertainty about whether the person or the body is relevant, is assimilated to the case of Tibbles, the cat which is partly identical to many lumps of feline matter which might have been cats if Tibbles had not. So contingent and temporal identity is nothing but partial identity, of temporal and modal continuants respectively. 5 In Things qua Truthmakers, Lewis (2003) speaks of names evoking counterpart relations. 6 Lewis (1983: 40 42) misleadingly calls such trans-world individuals modal continuants. 7

8 5 Concluding remarks I hope to have shown you that qua objects, if they existed, might us do much good and to have indicated some ways in which they might indeed exist. It is obvious, however, that I have not offered you a general and unified theory of everything qua objects are good for, and there is much work left to be done. But I hope to have shown, however, that undertaking this work is to pursue a promising route which might even lead us to paradise. References Kit Fine, 1982, Acts, Events and Things, in W. Leinfellner, E. Kraemer, and J. Schank (eds.) Proceedings of the 6th International Wittgenstein Symposium, pp , Wien: Hölder- Pichler-Tempsky. Kit Fine, 1994, Essence and Modality, in James E. Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives 8: Logic and Language, pp. 1 16, Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell Publishers, the Second Philosophical Perspectives Lecture. Dale Jacquette (ed.) 2002, Philosophy of Logic: An Anthology, Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies, Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell Publishers. David K. Lewis, 1968, Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic, The Journal of Philosophy 65, pp , reprinted in Lewis (1983) and Jacquette (2002). David K. Lewis, 1971, Counterparts of Persons and Their Bodies, The Journal of Philosophy 68, pp , reprinted in Lewis (1983). David K. Lewis, 1983, Philosophical Papers, volume 1, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. David K. Lewis, 2003, Things qua Truthmakers, in Hallvard Lillehammer and Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds.) Real Metaphysics Essays in honour of D.H. Mellor, Routledge Studies in twentieth-century Philosophy, pp , london: Routledge. Joseph Moore, 1999, Propositions without Identity, Noûs 33(3), pp Jennifer M. Saul, 1997, Substitution and Simple Sentences, Analysis 57(2), pp Achille C. Varzi, 2001, Parts, counterparts, and modal occurrents, in Denis Miéville (ed.) Méréologie et Modalités Aspects Critiques et Développements, CdRS: Université de Neuchâtel. 8