Realisms Interlinked

Objects, Subjects, and Other Subjects

Arindam Chakrabarti

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350044487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

This book brings together over 25 years of Arindam Chakrabarti's original research in philosophy on issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Organized under the three basic concepts of a thing out there in the world, the self who perceives it, and other subjects or selves, his work revolves around a set of realism links. Examining connections between metaphysical stances toward the world, selves, and universals, Chakrabarti engages with classical Indian and modern Western philosophical approaches to a number of live topics including the refutation of idealism; the question of the definability of truth, and the possibility of truths existing unknown to anyone; the existence of non-conceptual perception; and our knowledge of other minds. He additionally makes forays into fundamental questions regarding death, darkness, absence, and nothingness. Along with conceptual clarification and progress towards alternative solutions to these substantial philosophical problems, Chakrabarti demonstrates the advantage of doing philosophy in a cosmopolitan fashion. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of a thing, and ending with an analysis of the concept of nothing, Realisms Interlinked offers a preview of a future metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind without borders.

Part One

Objects

Introduction: Do You See What I See?*

What is that thing a boy, a young man, and a monkey are intently looking at in El Greco’s painting An Allegory (Figure 1)? It is something fiery from which the boy is trying to light a candle, by which all three faces are lit up. It is also the target of their joint attention. It is a thing, an object. One of the Sanskrit words for object “artha”—which happens to mean money too—is also the word for purpose and meaning. Even the English word “object” retains a connection with the concept of an end or purpose: the objective, as it is sometimes called. But meanings or purposes are never self-standing independent entities. They are always meanings of something or someone. A purpose or intended object is always someone’s goal, intended by someone. Without someone consciously looking or aiming at it, it is not an object. Yet, an object, as we all understand it to be, has an opposite pull toward being a stand-alone independent thing, something which does not need anyone to look or aim at it for it to exist. If one is a realist about objects, taking external physical things that many of us perceive directly to be independent of our perceptions, then, this book argues, one is logically committed to being a realist about subjects, selves as enduring substances owning mental states. Buddhist or Humean phenomenalists, insofar as they embrace reductive anti-realism about persistent selves, thus, get logically committed to anti-realism about physical objects: ending up denying anything “permanent in perception” (to use the language of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism)¹. Similarly, if one is a realist about objects and subjects, one would be logically committed to realism about some universals or repeatable properties out there. A persistent self, over and above fleeting mental states which it owns, secures one kind of unity; and without that unity of a subject of experience, there is no objectivity of the object of experience which demands another kind of unity across different sensory modes of perception. With interconnected realisms about the self and the external object of perception in place, the chocolate candy my eyes see, my tongue and hands can claim to taste and touch, and you and I can correctly claim to touch the same thing on separate occasions. But universals such as tigerness and lotushood secure another kind of unity or property-identity across all the particular beasts we see as tigers, and all those flowers blooming in the water we call “lotus,” arguably independently of the usage of the words for tigers and lotuses in any particular language. Besides such linking claims connecting metaphysical positions one can occupy in perennial debates concerning the world, the self, other selves, and common features that form natural kinds, this monograph also deals with classical Indian and modern Western refutations of idealism, the question of definition of truth and the status of truths unknown to anyone, and with the possibility or impossibility of non-conceptual perception and our knowledge of our own minds and of other minds.

Figure 1 El Greco—An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool (Fábula). The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

The three parts of the book are divided according to the three basic concepts presupposed by the simple question: “Do you see what I see?” which one asks in order to check if one is seeing right. One does not need any special training in philosophy to understand that this question involves the concepts of an object, of myself, and of other subjects of experience. The reason why the concepts of objects, the self, and other selves deserve a fresh set of inquiry, even if my positive agenda of motivating interlinked realisms concerning them faces insuperable difficulties, is that each of these concepts comes already wrapped up in some cross-culturally shared sense of puzzlement.

Objects are of experience but not constituted by experience. They are mind-independent yet mind-intended things. The Sanskrit concepts of “artha” and “viṣaya” both bear the marks of this dual pull. In analyzing the concept of a material object (rūpa), an ancient Buddhist text (The Path of Purification²) states that the object of visual sensation puts up a resistance to (“objects to?”) the eyes while coming within the range (gocara) of the eyes.³ It claims to be both outside and given inside the content of perception. The object has to fit a cognition, but cannot be tucked inside the cognition in such a way as to be reduced to just an aspect of the cognition.

Besides this puzzle, there are other conceptual tussles at the heart of the concept of an object. Swarms of objects—including our own and non-human living bodies—constitute a common world in space and time that many of us at widely different moments and from widely different places can all be part of and observe. The world of events and processes that we suffer, enjoy, or simply undergo in which those objects participate gives rise to other puzzles of relation and constitution of facts and happenings. Then there are puzzles regarding objects and their properties permitting us to correctly or incorrectly arrange them into true and false propositions. Are we to regard those propositions as a distinct class of objects bearing truth-values as their properties? Such are the puzzles that the concept of an object comes wrapped up in.

The concept of the self as a subject of experience and the bearer of self-conscious thoughts brings with it its own share of puzzles. The singular term “I” which picks out nothing and none other than myself, without changing its sense, seems also to pick out distinct particular persons, one at a time, as the utterer changes. And yet, without flouting Frege, we cannot let a singular term with a single sense pick out distinct particulars as referents. Distinct senses but same reference are possible, as in the case of “The author of War and Peace” and “Leo Tolstoy”; but single sense determining many distinct references is not allowable except in case of a predicate expression such as “is a flower.” (and even there the predicate refers to a single concept) Yet “ … am an I” is not a legitimate predicate expression, although one twentieth-century Indian philosopher ended up saying that “I” is a common noun like the word “unique”! While each of us can understand “I”-sentences uttered by others, the full cognitive significance, the token mode of presentation through which each of us refers to herself or himself, is not entirely sharable. The meaning/sense of “I” seems to be at the same time public and private.

Finally, whichever addressee—another person—we may call by the commonest pronoun “you” in the singular, she is a self but not myself yet the very concept of a “second self other than myself” seems to smell of a contradiction. Our deepest concept of the self comes with a natural pull toward singleness which draws some philosophers toward a non-dualism of the purely subjective: the questioning of all otherness or difference as illusory. Yet it makes no sense to say that inner mental states, person-predicates such as “angry,” “loves,” or “is not feeling any pain” are only applicable to the single subject which is me, the speaker/writer of this token word “I.” One cannot forget Strawson’s mantra: “If only mine, then not even mine” which contraposed means that mental states are self-ascribable only if they are other-ascribable. Thus begins the puzzles surrounding the concept of a second person or other subjects.

Both in ancient Indian thought and in seventeenth-century and early twenty-first-century English thought, the concept of God has been invoked as a shock-absorber for these puzzles regarding objects, selves, and other selves. If we have to have the fundamental realist conception of how objects are in themselves, quite independently of how humans or birds or bats or worms find them to be, and yet preserve the connection between objectivity and availability to some (all-inclusive) perspective of a consciousness, then there must exist one Super-Consciousness, knownness to which constitutes objective reality and truth. But can an omniscient timeless spaceless consciousness have any perspective at all? Such a highly contentious claim about how God sees it all, if it could be defended, would connect all the above realisms with realism about God, at once taken to be the source of all objects, subjects, and other subjects. This transcendent yet immanent, bodiless yet personal, Thou, who may turn out to be identical with the soul, as it were, of the universe, generates its own puzzles. However riddled with contradictions this concept of God may seem, our examination of the interlinked realisms cannot afford to ignore Michael Dummett’s claim that “the price of denying that God exists is to relinquish the idea that there is such a thing as how reality is in itself” (Dummett 2010, p. 44).⁴

Before we plunge into the actual battlefield of arguments back and forth between realists and anti-realists about physical objects, persons, and universal properties, let us examine perhaps the most general of all concepts that we use to make sense of the world and ourselves. This is the concept of “a thing.” Let us see in how many distinct ways we can access the concept of “a thing,” the blandest synonym of “an object.”

An object is something, over which we can existentially quantify—it is what is denoted by a singular term. The most basic notion of an object, thus, makes it the semantic correlate of a singular, definitely identifying substantival linguistic expression—something P. F. Strawson would like to call a “basic particular.”⁵ To put it in only apparently paradoxical terms, whatever it is that a logical subject-term of a singular statement stands for is an object.

Then, in its most common use, a thing is a material body occupying a location in space with a more or less clear boundary. (But what about clouds? Rainbows? Shadows? Reflections in the mirror?) Such natural physical substances as a rock, a tree, a fruit, and such manmade artifacts as a table, a cell phone, a pencil-sharpener are all things. Second, a thing is the target of intentional attitude or awareness, and a common object of many people’s perceptions or thoughts, something demonstrated as a “this” or “that.” Even if what is pointed at with a deictic pronoun is an event or process, it can be loosely called “a thing.” Third, in old German or English, (a Ding or thing) it is a meeting of different people, a cluster of human beings, a crowd. Fourth, it is a topic or subject of controversy, although it feels odd to say that an object is a subject-matter (is there a tension within this phrase “subject-matter” or is the tension all within the term “subject”?). Fifth, a thing is a personal style which is a distinguishing signature of an individual. For example: “It is Donald Trump’s thing to repeat a word such as ‘tremendous’ or ‘disaster.’” Sixth, a thing is something that exists (or existed) independently of our perception, knowledge, or thought. This sixth sense will occupy us in much of the first part of this monograph. Seventh, a thing is an object re-identifiable across different times, different perceivers, different sensory modalities of perception, and so on: a diachronically same-staying focus of interpersonal attention.

When we think of a thing, more narrowly, as an object, we find seven more negative criteria of what a thing/object is not. First, an object is not a thinking, feeling, and experiencing subject. I am not a thing, and I should not treat you or another person as a thing/object. A thing/object is usually not a predicated property, but a particular substance which is made the subject of a judgment. This criterion goes back to the “topic” sense of the fourth positive criterion: it is that about which we make a statement or judgment, not the predicate. A thing/object is not a concept, which harks back to Frege’s classic object (Gegenstand) versus concept (Begriff) distinction. A thing/object by itself is not a fact or what-is-the-case. (Could the object itself be a proposition? Could the proposition that Trump is psychologically unstable itself be the object of our consideration or conjecture or denial or even knowledge?)

A thing may be material, but the amorphous stuff or uncountable mass out of which things may be made cannot be called “a thing,” just as the class of all dogs is not a dog. Thus, water or clay, iron or oxygen is matter but not a thing or object. A drop of water, a lump of clay, etc. can be an object/thing. An event or process is not a thing, although on certain occasions it can be spoken of as “a thing.” It hardly seems apt to describe the First World War or the 2011 Earthquake in Japan as an object. Finally, a relation is not a thing, but what may subsist between things. Treating a relation itself as an object/thing tends to lead to a notorious vicious regress. (But can there be abstract objects? Non-particular individuals? Are subjects one kind of objects? When I think of myself, do I turn myself into an object of thought? Some of these questions will be discussed in the book later on).

Perhaps, instead of “thing,” the concept of “reality” or “entity” should be taken to be the concept of the widest generality. It is surely more general than the concept of a substance or the concept of a particular. Everything that exists can be said to possess reality or be a real, or be an entity. But the concept of an object seems to be of even wider generality. Even an unreal, doubtfully real, or a non-existent thing is an object. The Cheshire Cat is one object, and Humpty Dumpty and Charlotte the altruistic spider are other objects, although how many unicorns there are may be an unanswerable question, each of them would have to count as a distinct object. According to some, the I, being a subject, is not an object—not because it does not exist or because its identity criterion is vague—but because it is never just an object of knowledge. Was that what the Buddha or Wittgenstein was getting at by proving that the I is not an entity in the world?

One way in which the concept of a thing, via the concept of our experience of a thing, leads to the concept of an experiencer or subject, is by the contrast between how a thing appears (in a certain lighting, from a certain distance, or through a certain medium or in a certain state of the mind and the body) and how it really is. There is no objectivity without the contrast between appearance and reality, and no appearance without someone to whom it appears.

When looking at a schematic line-drawing of a prism or cube, one seems to have a choice of thinking either that one is looking at those lines on paper, or that one is looking at how the lines come across to oneself, the appearance of those lines. But if appearances are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Objects
• Part 2: Subjects
• Part 3: Other Subjects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint