The rise of Aristotle

Many of those with whom I encounter through comments on the internet usually turn their nose up when confronted with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (Scholastic) philosophy that I espouse. To them, Scholasticism is simply a relic of an antiquated and outdated philosophy. It was what a group of people were forced to think about the world before the advent of science, before we became “enlightened.” They say that terms like actuality, potentiality, final causality, essence or form, have long been relegated to the dustbin of failed and superfluous philosophies, especially since science no longer has any use of them. As physicist Sean Carroll has said, “This kind of Aristotelian analysis of causation was cutting edge stuff 2,500 years ago. Today we know better.” Moreover, others also claim that the only people who even resurrect these antiquated and esoteric ideas and concepts are apologists, trying to mask their arguments in obscure and archaic terminology so as to confuse their interlocutor—while simultaneously making their philosophy seem sophisticated.

I maintain that all this is false. First, the individuals I know who are Thomists espouse this philosophy precisely because they genuinely find it to be the only valid metaphysic, and not because they simply want to prove God’s existence. I myself was sincerely enamored with the Thomistic concepts that I read in Edward Feser’s book Aquinas, and found said concepts and philosophy to be a convincing and necessary ontological description of reality.

Second, and more importantly regarding this post, it is actually the case that Scholastic philosophy is seeing a major revival as of late. Now this might not seem like a big deal to the “skeptic” currently reading, since the number of adherents of a position does nothing to entail the validity or efficacy of said position—and I would agree. However, what’s interesting about this resurgence is the fact that most of the individuals who are returning to the concepts inherent in Scholasticism are not theists, and are not really in the Scholastic “camp” at all. Rather, this revival is mostly led by philosophers of science (yes, science) who see that a return to certain Aristotelian concepts is a necessary step towards a valid ontology.

Let us survey this resurgence. First, there are philosophers who claim that efficient causality necessitates that objects must have intrinsic dispositional properties—what they call “powers”—that are directed towards the generation of certain effects. While they don’t refer to this as final causality, this is essentially a return to that very notion. This has been promulgated by analytic philosophers like John Heil, in From an Ontological Point of View, C. B Martin, in The Mind in Nature, George Molnar, in Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, and Stephen Mumford, in Getting Causes from Powers and Dispositions. Furthermore, biologist J. Scott Turner, in The Tinkerer’s Accomplice, and philosophers of biology Marjorie Grene and Andre Ariew, in The Understanding of Nature, argue for a return to an Aristotelian notion of inherent teleology.

Second, essentialism—the belief that things have an inherent nature or essence that accounts for them being what they are—has seen a revival among secular philosophers as well. Philosopher of science Brian Ellis, in The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism, and philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, in Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations, put forward an Aristotelian essentialist interpretation of the results of the hard sciences like chemistry and physics.

Moreover, in recent analytic philosophy there has been talk of what are called categorical and dispositional properties (see here). As Edward Feser notes, these are really just different names for act and potency. The categorical properties of a thing being the properties that it actually instantiates—that is, the way it actually is—and where dispositional properties of a thing are properties that will manifest under certain conditions—that is, the way something can potentially be. These properties are discussed at length by Ellis, Mumford, Martin, and Molnar, all mentioned above, as well as analytic philosophers Galen Strawson and D.M. Armstrong,

Note again that these philosophers are secular and are not Scholastics, Thomists, or even Aristotelians. They are simply analytic philosophers who see that something like an Aristotelian philosophy—though they use different jargon than Aristotelians—of nature is a necessary framework for intelligibility of reality. The claim, then, that Scholasticism is nothing but an outdated and antiquated philosophy, mostly promulgated by apologists and charlatans, is blatantly false. Aristotelianism is on the cusp of a resurgence, and the naysayers would do well to sit up and take notice.

Embodied Realism Part I: Correspondence Theory of Truth

After much prodding from Mike D over at The A-unicornist—which he has now stopped writing for, unfortunately—to read his Holy Bible on embodied cognition, namely Philosophy in the Flesh, I have begun to do just that. And rarely does a page goes by where I don’t find myself scribbling in the margins regarding the things I find fallacious. With that in mind I felt the need to write up a series of posts regarding the parts I vehemently disagree with as I read along. So stay tuned for many posts to come regarding Embodied Realism.

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Embodied Realism (or Embodied Cognition), as articulated by Lakoff and Johnson, is predicated on a few themes: 1) The mind is embodied, 2) reason is mostly unconscious and 3) is structured by neural connections that conflate conceptual domains which lead to metaphor—which means that most of our concepts and cognition are metaphorical. Embodied Realism does not simply say that we need a body to reason, but, rather, that our reason itself is shaped and structured in unconscious ways by our embodiment.

My first bone to pick with Embodied Realism is its jettison of the correspondence theory of truth. The correspondence theory of truth basically says that a statement—what is called a truth-bearer—is true if it corresponds to an actual state of affairs—what is called a truth-maker--or obtains, in reality. As an example, the statement “There is a computer in front of me” is true if, in reality, there is actually a computer in front of me, and false if there is not.

It is this very theory that is called into question because of the supposed embodiment of cognition promulgated by embodied realism. To argue against the correspondence theory the authors attempt to demonstrate that concepts are embodied at the neural level, the phenomenological level, and the cognitive unconscious level. Let me illuminate these as best as I can, so we can articulate where the asserted difficulty arises.

The neural level basically regards the physical circuitry that characterizes, grounds, and structures all cognition and conception. The phenomenological level is the level that we are consciously aware of, and the level where we experience all of our qualia. And the cognitive unconscious level is the level of cognitive operation that evades our conscious subjective experience; that is, it is what structures our conscious experience, but is something that we have no internal access to—hence the term unconscious.

So, how does positing these different levels of embodiment call into question the theory of correspondence? Well, Lakoff and Johnson explain that “Truth claims at one level may be inconsistent with those at another.” In order to illustrate this problem, the authors discuss the embodiment of color concepts.  For example, consider the statement “Grass is green.” Surely we experience greenness inhering in grass, and thus this statement would seem to be true based on the correspondence theory of truth. However, the authors argue, this is only true at the phenomenological level of embodiment. On the neural level of embodiment “greenness” does not “inhere” in objects or things; rather, it is created by reflected light, our retinas, and our neural circuitry etc. The authors further articulate the alleged difficulty:

 At the neural level, green is a multiplace interactional property, while at the phenomenological level, green is a one-place predicate characterizing a property that inheres in an object. Here is the dilemma: A scientific truth claim based on knowledge about the neural level is contradicting a truth claim at the phenomenological level. The dilemma arises because the philosophical theory of truth as correspondence does not distinguish such levels and assumes that all truths can be stated at once from a neutral perspective.

 It is here where I believe the authors are mistaken, on multiple levels (see what I did there?).

Effects, formal and virtual

First, even though a Scholastic, like myself, would utter a proposition like “Grass is green” and indeed say that such a proposition is true, what they mean by such a statement is utterly foreign to what the authors attribute to any type of metaphysical realism—namely, that color is a single thing or property that inheres in substances. Thomist Peter Coffey illustrates:

 When, for instance, the normal perceiver apprehends snow as white, and spontaneously asserts that “snow is white,” he means not that the color-quality in question is wholly independent of the nature, structure, and conditions of his visual sense organs for its specific character as present to his consciousness.

 The point here is that when us Scholastics say “Grass is green” we don’t mean that there is a single property of greenness that inheres objectively in objects or things—that is, we do not say that color exists formally or actually. Rather, we would say that color exists virtually, or potentially. Therefore a Scholastic would agree with the authors when they say the following: “Colors are not objective; there is in the grass or the sky no greenness or blueness independent of retinas, color cones, neural circuitry, and brains.” Thus, to say that color exists virtually is to say that when all the necessary prerequisites are conjoined—the reflective properties of objects, our bodies and brains etc.—then and only then can we have the actuality of color. Upon taking this into account, proposing that color does not exist would only be true if effects could only obtain formally, which is something the Scholastic would not concede. For, to reiterate, effects can exist formally, but they can also exist virtually. And therefore to claim that only formal effects can obtain is to beg the question against the metaphysical realist.

Now, the significance here is that the statement “Grass is green” is still in fact objectively true, as long as what we mean by this statement is that grass is virtually, and not formally, green. However, the authors would still say that this cannot be an objective truth, because the property of greenness does not inhere objectively in the world. But to do so would be to conflate objective truth with truth obtaining objectively. That is to say, since color requires the existence of human embodiment for it to obtain, then color does obtain objectively, by definition. However, this doesn’t mean that the truth “Grass is green” is therefore not objective. Remember that all that’s required for the correspondence theory is for a truth-bearer to correspond to a truth-maker—again, either formally or virtually. And since grass is in fact (virtually) green, then the statement “Grass is green” is objectively true.

Levels of embodiment

Unfortunately (for the reader still awake at this point) this has all only constituted the first objection to the claims of Lakoff and Johnson. For the authors would still fire back that all my musings above assume a neutral perspective from which to promulgate my supposed truth. That is to say, my arguments above about the reality of color are all predicated on only one level of embodiment (or are they?) and to do so is to erect one level of embodiment as superior over another, thereby doing an injustice to the other levels. The authors articulate:

 Both the phenomenology-first and science-first strategies are inadequate in one way or other. If we take the phenomenology-first strategy, we miss what we know scientifically is true about color. We get the scientific metaphysics of color wrong. Our “truth conditions” do not reflect what we know to be true. If we take the science-first strategy, we do violence to the normal meaning of the word and to what ordinary people mean by “truth.”

 This is all to say that by claiming color exists virtually is to do damage to the phenomenological level of embodiment upon which color seems to exist formally. But my retort is this: so what? On the phenomenological view we can only talk about how we perceive sense qualities, and just because we perceive something does not mean it is there, or that it’s there in the fashion we perceive it to be, or that it inheres in the world. A perfect example to knock down the authors’ claims here is the experience of hallucinations. At the phenomenological level a hallucination is very real, in that we experience qualia with regards to said hallucination. But it is only at the neural level that we know that the hallucination is not actually real. And the crucial point is that everybody, including the authors, would take a "science-first strategy" here and claim that when somebody hallucinates a dead relative (for instance), the statement “my dead relative appeared to me” is unequivocally false. And the really unreasonable thing to do here would be to say that the existence of the dead relative is true at the phenomenological level, but just not at the neural level! Hence, it seems that, contrary to the authors, we must, and do, utilize certain levels of embodiment over and above others in different circumstances. Thus, there is no dilemma when one level of embodiment contradicts another.

So, the authors are simply mistaken to say that the correspondence theory is false for not distinguishing the different levels of embodiment. For the levels of embodiment do not at all call truth, as classically conceived, into question. In fact, we’ll see next post that this conception of truth is unavoidable, and that it is the truth of Embodied Realism that runs into various difficulties.

On final causality

Aristotle famously argued that in order to exhaustively comprehend an object or substance, you need to know the four causes of it. First there is the material cause, namely that which the object is made out of. Then there is the efficient cause, which is what brings the object into being—this is the type of causation that is commonly referred to when using the word “cause”.  Next there is the formal cause, which is the form, essence, or nature that the object has. Lastly, there is the final cause, which is the end, goal or purpose that something exists for, or that something tends towards.

Now, most contemporary philosophers, and scientists for that matter, admit the reality of efficient causation as well as material causation—though, again, they wouldn’t call the latter a cause—but will not admit the reality of formal and final causes. One reason for this is that final causes are commonly tied with the word “teleology,” and this word is strictly taboo in the scientific domain.

Anyway, it is final causes that will constitute the focal point of this post, and it will be demonstrated that one cannot coherently deny the reality of said causes.

Let me begin by illuminating the nature of final causes—what they are, and are not--so as to avoid confusion. When most individuals hear of final causes and their subsequent tie-in with” teleology,” they tend to think of William Paley’s design argument. That is, they tend to think that the teleology spoken of here is analogous to the teleology imposed upon artificial machines. If artificial machines exhibit complexity coupled with purpose, then other natural objects that exhibit similar complexity must also have been extrinsically endowed with purpose—think here of Paley’s watchmaker illustration. But this is not what is meant by something having a final cause.

Rather, for something to have a final cause simply means for it to have inherent dispositions to reliably bring about a range of effects. That is to say, if an object A regularly brings about B, C or D, then generating B, C or D is the final cause of A. This is what is meant by an end or goal of an object. For example, an acorn reliably generates an oak tree, rather than, say, a weed, or a dog, and thus the oak tree is the end or goal that the acorn is directed towards—that is, the oak tree is the final cause of the acorn. (Note that “directed towards” does not entail that a cause is consciously directed toward an effect. Final causality does not mean that an object is consciously trying to reach said effect, but only that the object tends to produce certain effects reliably.)

Now, although this seems to be intuitive, final causes are nevertheless commonly seen as superfluous. Science, and physics, it is said, makes no use of attributing final causes to things, and therefore we have no reason to believe that such things exist. However, remember 1) that this is completely false, unless one assumes that only science gives us knowledge of reality; 2) the fact that final causes are not pragmatic for science is also irrelevant since final causes are an ontological reality, and thus we’re not looking for them to be pragmatic for science; 3) science does not even enlighten us regarding the intrinsic nature of substances—of which final causality would be a part—but rather only how substances tend to behave; and 4) science actually presupposes final causality, though the substantiation of this assertion will be forthcoming below.

More importantly, science does indeed affirm the reality of efficient causality, and efficient causality actually presupposes final causality. You see, science discovers regularities in nature, hence the formulation of scientific laws. Science works by discovering conditional propositions such as “if A occurs under certain conditions, then B occurs”, or that A’s tend to bring about B’s. But, as Edward Feser says, “there is no way to make sense of these regularities apart from the notion of final causation, of things being directed toward an end or goal.” That is to say, if A reliably brings about B, then producing B is the final cause of A. Now, if substances did not exhibit final causality then one effect would not follow any more than another. Remember also that science doesn’t say that A’s simply happen to be followed by B’s. Rather, it is said, A is a sufficient condition for B, and thus A is inherently directed towards generating B. Again, if there were no final causes then A would not be a sufficient condition for B. Final causality then, far from being superfluous, is a necessary condition for causal regularity.

Again, if substances have final causes, this entails that these substances have certain dispositions to bring about certain effects. And this is what philosophers of science have been saying for quite some time now—that is, that substances have inherent “powers” or dispositions. Edward Feser illuminates my point:

Actual experimental practice indicates that what physicists are really looking for are the inherent powers a thing will naturally manifest when interfering conditions are removed, and the fact that a few experiments, or even a single controlled experiment, are taken to establish the results in question indicates that these powers are taken to reflect a nature that is universal to things of that type.

Again, philosopher of science Brian Ellis:

Scientists today certainly talk about inanimate things as though they believed they had such powers. Negatively charged particles have the power to attract positively charged ones. Electrostatic fields have the power to modify spectral lines. Sulfuric acid has the power to dissolve copper.

That is to say, what science is looking for is precisely what inherent dispositions or powers a substance will produce in ideal circumstances. And this presupposes that there are in fact certain dispositions inherent in these substances that tend to produce a range of effects, and thus it presupposes final causality.

Final causality, then, cannot coherently be denied. That is, unless one wants to deny efficient causation, causal regularity, and science itself. This is why Aquinas called final causes “the cause of causes.”