Abstract
Descriptions can seem unrelated, but after further analysis, it can turn out that they describe the same thing. For example, ‘the death of Socrates’ and ‘Xanthippe becoming a widow’ seem unrelated, but when we know that Xanthippe is Socrates’ wife, we realise they are about the same event. Ullin T. Place (1999) disagrees. He argues that there are two events in which Xanthippe’s becoming a widow is caused by Socrates’ death. In this post, it is argued that he is wrong. Place himself has become famous for another example. Descriptions of our inner life (consciousness) are, according to him, descriptions of brain processes. What is described are not two processes but just one: consciousness is a brain process. This is known as the Mind-Brain Identity theory. In this post, it is claimed that, in general, descriptions of macro and micro processes are about the same processes. The relation between dispositional statements and descriptions of their underlying basis is more complicated.
According to Place (1999), the death of Socrates and Xanthippe’s becoming a widow are two separate events that are causally related. I will argue that these two events are the same with two different descriptions. In the second part of this contribution, I will place this issue in context: When do two apparently unrelated descriptions have the same referent?
The reason that becoming a widow is different from your husband’s death is, according to Place, from now on to be referred to as UTP, the following:
Becoming a widow is a matter of acquiring a social status with distinctive legal and social rights and obligations, a status which a woman acquires on and by virtue of the death of her husband.
Note that a difference exists between becoming a widow and being a widow. Becoming a widow is what UTP calls an instantaneous event. For Xanthippe, her becoming a widow is the event that happens when she stops being Socrates’ wife and starts to be his widow. The event of becoming a widow is at the same time that her husband dies. The events not only coincide, but they are also the same event because according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary and, no doubt, all other English language dictionaries, a widow is a woman who has lost her husband by death (and the COD adds, is not married again, but this is inessential; the woman stays the widow of the first husband even when she marries another man). So, there is a semantic/conceptual connection between the description of Socrates’ death and the description of Xanthippe becoming a widow. More precisely, this connection is between the descriptions ‘the husband of Xanthippe (= Socrates) dies’ and ‘Xanthippe becomes a widow’.
Rockwell (nd) objects that if Socrates’ death and Xantippe’s becoming a widow were two different descriptions of the same event, not two different events, we could have saved Socrates’ life by having him divorce Xanthippe. But we cannot draw this conclusion. What the divorce would have prevented is the death of Socrates as a man married to Xanthippe. Given the earlier divorce, this was impossible. But this does not prevent him from dying at the same time for the same cause (drinking the hemlock) but with a different marital status. This is one plausible story that can be told about what would have happened if Xanthippe had divorced Socrates. Another possible story is that Socrates became so embittered by the divorce that he withdrew from public debate, and there was no reason to force him to drink the hemlock, which led to his death. So, in this story, Socrates did not die at the time and from the cause as he did in reality. If Xanthippe divorced Socrates, what would have happened afterwards is unclear.
For UTP, the reason that the death of Socrates is the cause of Xanthippe becoming a widow is that the following counterfactual is true:
‘If Socrates had not died when he did, Xanthippe would not have become a widow when she did.’
UTP states this is a causal counterfactual, but the following counterfactual is also true.
‘If Xanthippe had not become a widow when she did, Socrates would not have died when he did’.
This is so for the same reason that we are dealing here with one event: by definition, it is not possible to become a widow without your husband dying. It is clear that Xanthippe becoming a widow is not a cause of the death of her husband, as the converse is also not true.
Note that the death of Socrates does not necessarily change Xanthippe. Suppose she lives independently from Socrates without having any contact with him and without their marriage being dissolved. In this case, Xanthippe becomes a widow without knowing it. Socrates’ death and her becoming a widow do not affect her and her life. That is because there is no causal connection between Socrates’ death and Xanthippe becoming a widow.
This case can be compared with the case where the British monarch ennobles by tapping someone on the shoulder with a sword. Is the ennobling another event than tapping the shoulder with the sword? Is the tapping of the shoulder the cause of the ennoblement? The only difference I see is that tapping the shoulder is intentional, in contrast to Socrates’ death. But both have meaning in their respective social context that makes tapping the shoulder and Socrates’ death the same event as being ennobled, respectively, becoming a widow.
Kim (1973) also thinks that Xanthippe’s husband dies at t, represented as [(Xanthippe’s husband, t), dies], is a different event from the event that Xanthippe becomes a widow at t, represented as [(Xanthippe, t), becomes a widow]. The reason is that for Kim, an event [(x, t), P] is identical to an event [(y, t’), Q] if and only if x = y, t = t’, and P = Q. In our case, x is ‘Xanthippe’s husband (= Socrates)’, y is ‘Xanthippe’, P is ‘dies’, and Q is ‘becomes a widow’. Thus, according to this identity condition, the two events are different. Kim admits that the biconditional ‘[(Xanthippes’ husband, t), dies] exists if and only if [Xantippe, t), becomes a widow] exists’ is necessarily true, “[b]ut this has no tendency to show that we have one event here and not two.” However, the dyadic events, ‘Brutus stabs Ceasar at t’ and ‘Ceasar is stabbed by Brutus at t’, are identical. Stabbing and being stabbed are, as each other’s inverse, the same event types or properties as Kim calls them. Dying and becoming a widow are not the same event types or properties. Kim uses here a special notion of events that he characterises as follows.
We think of an event as a concrete object (or n-tuple of objects) exemplifying a property (or n-adic relation) at a time. (Kim, 1973/1993, p. 8 )
This position has become known as the property exemplification account of events. Thus, if events are property exemplifications, then the death of Socrates and Xanthippe’s becoming a widow are different events because different properties (event types) are involved in exemplifying different objects. To oppose this conclusion, we have two options: showing that the property exemplification account is false or arguing that becoming a widow is not the kind of property that can be exemplified in the right way by an object for an event to exist. Discussing the first option would take me too far, but for the second option, I refer to my observation that Socrates’ death does not need to change Xanthippe. Geach (1969) distinguishes between real changes and what he calls ‘mere Cambridge’ changes. The following passage suggests that if events are real changes, then these are changes in intrinsic properties[i].
As P. T. Geach (1969) noted, the fact that some object a is not F before an event occurs but is F after that event occurs does not mean that the event constitutes, in any deep sense, a change in a. To use a well-worn example, at the time of Socrates’s death Xanthippe became a widow; that is, she was not a widow before the event of her husband’s death, but she was a widow when it ended. Still, though that event constituted (or perhaps was constituted by) a change in Socrates, it did not in itself constitute a change in Xanthippe. Geach noted that we can distinguish between real changes, such as what occurs in Socrates when he dies, from mere changes in which predicates one satisfies, such as what occurs in Xanthippe when Socrates dies. The latter he termed ‘mere Cambridge’ change. There is something of a consensus that an object undergoes real change in an event [if and only if] there is some intrinsic property it instantiated before the event but not afterwards. (Marshall & Weatherson, 2023; emphasis in the original)
If events are real changes in an intrinsic property and if Geach is right, Xanthippe becoming a widow is a mere Cambridge change (not a change of an intrinsic property). Xanthippe becoming a widow is not an event.[ii] But this conclusion is, according to me, too strong. Indeed, Xanthippe becoming a widow does not constitute a (real) change in her. But that is not what is happening. What is happening is that Socrates dies, which is a change in Xanthippe’s husband, not in her. The death of a husband is, in our culture, the event by which his wife becomes a widow. Like so many events in our culture, it has a symbolic meaning. It is related to how we, as social beings, live together. This makes being a widow or a nobleman extrinsic, mere Cambridge properties, properties that we acquire through the roles we play in our communities, properties we have not because of the persons we intrinsically are.
[i] For a property F, being F is intrinsic if and only if, necessarily, for any x, if x is F, then x is F in virtue of how x and its parts are and how they are related to each other, as opposed to how x and its parts are related to other things and how other things are or in short x is F in virtue of how x is intrinsically. See Marshall & Weatherson (2023) for a discussion of the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic properties.
[ii] Kim (1974) also thinks that Xanthippe becoming a widow is a mere Cambridge change, but his conclusion is that Xanthippe becoming a widow depends in a non-causal way on Socrates’ death: “Xantippe’s becoming a widow is a [mere] Cambridge event, [mere] Cambridge-dependent on the death of Socrates.” (Kim, 1974/1993, p. 29). For Kim this means that events are not only determined causally, but that there are alternative ways that determine events. What mere Cambridge determination really is remains vague in Kim (1974).
For Place (1999), the real issue is when two descriptions have the same reference, especially when these descriptions are at different levels. UTP’s most influential contribution to philosophy is his argument that consciousness can be a brain process (Place, 1956). No contradiction is involved when claiming that a description of a conscious experience refers to the same process as a description of a brain process. The theory that consciousness is a brain process is known as the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. For UTP, this theory was restricted to mental processes. For him, mental dispositions, also known as mental states, are not identical to their structural basis[i] in the brain. States and processes belong to different ontological categories.
[i] UTP explains his use of ‘structural basis’ in footnote 1 on p. 31 of Place (2000).
I will give a short introduction to UTP’s ontological views. Everything that exists belongs to three basic categories. In the first category are the “concrete particulars, or physical ‘substances’ to use Aristotle’s term, space-time worms which are extended and bounded in three dimensions of space and one of time” (Place, 1991, p. 3; emphasis added). In the second category are the properties of the concrete particulars and their relations with other particulars. The third category consists of processes which involve continuous change of a property or relation with other things over time, instantaneous events, which are changes of a property of a thing or a relation of a thing with other things which occur at points or instances of time but are not extended over time, and states or states of affairs which, like processes, are extended over time, but in this case without change of a (dispositional) property or a relation with other things. Processes, instantaneous events and states of affairs are all situations. These are what simple sentences like ‘the cat is mean’ (state of affairs), ‘the cat died at 9h 32 am’ (instantaneous event), and ‘the cat is spinning’ (process) describe. These different situations are reflected in the aspect a verb or verb phrase can take.
By the ‘aspect’ of a verb or verb phrase is meant those variations in the tense of the verb or verb phrase as it occurs within a sentence which serve to indicate more subtle relations between a situation and its temporal context than the simple relation of past, present or future relative to the now of utterance. (Place, 1991, p. 6).
The aspects that can reflect ontological differences are the continuous, habitual and punctual aspects.
Ontological differences […] emerge in the case of distinctions of aspect such as that which we have in English, but not, so far as I am aware, in other European languages,[i] between the continuous and habitualaspects. In this case, the continuous aspect marks a continuous ongoing activity, whereas the habitual aspect signifies a propensity to do something intermittently from time to time. (Place, 1991, p. 7)
[i] TP: I think that other languages also use these aspects; I will not elaborate on this here, but see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preterite.
An example of the continuous past is the sentence ‘Jane was swimming’ and of the habitual past, ‘Jane used to swim’.
There is also another distinction of aspect which is of ontological significance on the opposite side, as it were, of the continuous aspect from that occupied by the habitual aspect. This is the distinction between the continuous and punctual aspects. On contrast to the continuous on-going activity signified by the continuous aspect and the intermittent repetition signified by the habitual aspect, the punctual aspect signifies an isolated instantaneous event. (Place, 1991, p. 7)
An example of the punctual past is the sentence, ‘Joe struck his fist on the table’.
So, for UTP, there is an intimate connection between the structure of sentences and the different situations in the world. He defended the view that, in a certain way, not to be elaborated here, sentences are picturing the world.
UTP’s next step is applying his ontological classification to psychological verbs. Ryle (1949) had already classified psychological verbs, which strongly influenced UTP’s thinking. His classification of psychological verbs can be seen as a further systematisation of the classification started by Ryle. The main categories are
- Mental Activities
- Mental Processes (Passive Experience)
- Instantaneous Mental Events (Onsets of Dispositions)
- Mental States (Dispositions)
I have divided those verbs and verb phrases which take the continuous aspect into two: ‘mental activity verbs’ and ‘mental process verbs.’ The distinction is between those ongoing processes in which it makes sense to talk of human beings and other living organisms ‘being actively engaged’ and those which we describe them as ‘passively undergoing’ (their experiences). This is not a distinction which is marked by aspect in the strict sense. Nevertheless the criteria on which the distinction rests are syntactic. Not only is it a matter of what one can be said ‘to engage in’ versus what one can be said ‘to undergo.’ Another mark of the language used to characterize mental processes (experiences) as distinct from mental activities is the use of impersonal verbs, as in the sentences such as It hurts or It was as if I were falling from a great height. (Place, 1991, p. 10)
In UTP’s view, the Mind-Brain Identity Theory applies to mental activities like enjoying doing something, contemplating something or thinking about something and passive experiences like feeling a glow of pleasure, having a hallucination or feeling a sensation. These mental activities and experiences are identical to certain brain processes. In the psychological domain, states are dispositions.
[They] are a matter of what would happen, if certain hypothetical conditions were to be fulfilled, but which persist without change in the absence of those conditions. (Place, 1991, p. 8)
Wanting, believing and knowing are examples of mental dispositions, and they can not, like mental processes, be identified with the underlying structural basis in the brain. A disposition can be described by the conditional statements that connect the conditions and manifestations of the disposition. Describing the structural basis of a disposition involves describing the constituting parts and how they work together to make it possible for a person to behave as specified in the conditional statements that characterise the disposition. It is generally assumed that there is a dependency relation between the disposition and its structural basis; the former is for its existence dependent on the latter. About what this dependency is are different views. Some say the disposition is grounded in the structural basis; others that the disposition is supervenient on the structural basis; and still others, like UTP, say that the disposition is caused by its structural basis. It goes too far to discuss these views in detail. It is important to note that they agree that a disposition and its structural basis are different things and that, as a consequence, their descriptions do not have the same referent.[i] Dispositions based or grounded in underlying brain structures or mechanisms give them an intrinsic character. Some say their structural bases are intrinsic properties of the person or organism. This would make clear that Xanthippe’s becoming a widow is not related to a change in an intrinsic property; see the discussion above.
[i] As already noted, UTP restricted the Mind-Brain Identity Theory to mental processes (mental activities and experiences), but for other fellow Identity Theorists like Armstrong and Smart, dispositions are also identical with their structural basis. For them, describing dispositions is describing the same thing (referent) when describing their structural basis in the brain.
In his classification of mental or psychological properties, UTP does not mention behaviour or actions, which is astonishing for a behaviourist. I proposed in Place (2021) and Place (2022) that UTP should emphasise that mental activities and behaviour are conceptually related; both are activities or doings of a person or an animal; in other words, mental activities are behaviour, too. In many cases, internal and external activities form one overall activity. Playing chess is a mixture of thinking, an internal mental activity (although a player can also think aloud), scanning the pieces on the chessboard, which involves internal mental activities and external eye movements, and external behaviour in the form of moving chess pieces and pushing the clock. The real distinction is between activities or doings and the passive experiences and feelings a person overcomes. It will not be disputed that passive experiences are phenomena belonging to consciousness. The subjective properties of experiences are called qualia and are unique to consciousness. Qualia do not apply to mental activities. Mental activities can be accompanied by experiences and can cause them, but they do not have themselves qualia. When UTP claims that consciousness is a brain process, he means both mental activities and passive experiences. But it is the qualia of the latter that make this claim hard to swallow for many. It is probably best to restrict consciousness to experiences and feelings. However, conscious experiences belong to the same ontological category of processes as mental activities and behaviours or actions. But if UTP is right that consciousness in the restricted sense of passive experiences and feelings is just a brain process, it is probably also true that all processes can be described at different levels of reality. Cognitive processes like thinking (in our head) are brain processes. Behaviours and actions are bodily movements.
There is also another way that actions can have several descriptions. In the same paper, in which he discusses the case of Socrates’ death and Xanthippe becoming a widow, UTP writes:
To take Kim’s stabbing and killing case, I would certainly want to agree that in so far as Brutus’ stabbing Caesar caused Caesar to die, the stabbing and the killing refer to the same action on the part of Brutus. But whereas the ‘stabbing’ mentions only what Brutus did, ‘killing’ mentions the effect of what he did, namely the event whereby Caesar died. There is no contradiction involved in saying that Brutus stabbed Caesar but failed to kill him. This is just another case of a particular of which more than one predicate is contingently true. (Place, 1999)
For Kim, the stabbing and killing of Caesar by Brutus are two different actions because of his property exemplification account of events as discussed earlier. UTP is here following Anscombe (1957), for whom an action can be described in various ways. Davidson is another well-known philosopher who defended what Goldman (1970)[i] called the Anscombe-Davidson identity thesis of acts. Actions or acts are processes which can have several properties. Each description of the same process can denote a different property. But the killing by Brutus is an extrinsic property of Brutus when the death of Caesar was an unintended effect of his stabbing. The bodily movements of Brutus, on the other hand, are intrinsic to the process that is described as Brutus stabbing Caesar.
[i] Goldman (1970) is an extensive defence of the property exemplification account applied to human actions.
The third category, besides processes and dispositional states, are the instantaneous events.
The status of instantaneous events such as the death that ends the process of dying is, of course, a problem for a view such as mine that construes the reductionist issue differently in the case [of] processes and dispositional states. For it would seem that in the biological and mental cases instantaneous events are constituted by the temporal interface between an antecedent process and a subsequent and consequent dispositional state. That means that, on my view which holds that processes are, but dispositional states are not, identical with their structural composition/underpinning, no simple answer can be given to the question ‘Are instantaneous biological/mental events identical with the structures that underlie them?’ (Place, 1999)
If an instantaneous event is the end of a process and a macro process is identical to the underlying micro process, then the end of the macro process must be identical to the ending of the micro process.[i] However, it is unclear how this micro process relates to the subsequent and consequent dispositional state and its underlying structure, which are not identical. Prima facie, the end of a macro process causes the start of a dispositional state, and the end of the same process as a micro process causes the underlying structure of this state. Given the identity of the micro and the macro process, this would mean that the macro process also causes the underlying microstructure of the macro state. Place denies that the macro level influences what happens on the micro level. A way out could be that the process causes the underlying structure to change, reflected at the macro level in the new dispositional property.[ii] A possible proposal could be the following analysis.[iii] A dispositional state means that a property remains unchanged for a certain period. With respect to the property, there is stability or an equilibrium in the system (substance, person, object). There must be a (feedback) process of continuously correcting deviances (changes) of some norm that we call the equilibrium state. This process is at the micro level, and the equilibrium state is at the macro level by which we can ascribe dispositions to the system. For example, the solidity of a material object is maintained by the forces that the molecules and atoms are exercising on each other. In general, the (dispositional) properties of the whole are maintained by internal processes at the level of the parts. This analysis needs further elaboration, but this is not the place to do this. But when it is on the right track, an instantaneous event is a change in the underlying processes by which a new dispositional property at the macro level emerges (UTP would say: is caused) and is maintained for a certain period. But how a disposition can ‘emerge’ in this equilibrium process is the next thing that has to be explained by a defender of this position. The identity of a macro and a micro process is, strictly speaking, not an identity of processes but of descriptions of the same process, where some descriptions are from an outside perspective, and others are descriptions of what is happening internally. What is happening inside has outside or external manifestations or appearances. For example, the glowing of a piece of metal heated to a high temperature is the outside manifestation of what is happening inside the metal. In the case of mental processes, the descriptions are themselves the outside or external manifestations of the mental processes. Can we now say that having a disposition is a process identical to an underlying equilibrium process that, in its outside appearance, is a regularity in the behaviour of the whole (showing particular behaviour under certain conditions)?
[i] ‘Macro’ refers to the level of the whole, and ‘micro’ to the level of the parts.
[ii] Another way out would be to deny a macro-process to be at the macro level. The process is only at the micro level. It is said that mental process reports describe internal processes (within a person). This is accord for passive consciousness processes (what a person experiences), but not for active mental processes like thinking and problem solving that are not always internal. We can add numbers in our heads, but we can also write them down and do the addition “externally” on a piece of paper. The latter is at the macro level.
[iii] This analysis must fill in what is missing in Place’s publications: how dispositional states are causally dependent on the underlying microstructure.
There is also another way we can analyse the relationship between dispositions and the underlying bases. What happens when a disposition is activated? Certain conditions are realised, but how is not important. In particular, there will be a triggering event that we call the input that starts a mechanism that produces the manifestation of the disposition, the output. The input as a triggering event is an instantaneous event that ends a process (the realisation of the conditions of the disposition or short the production of the input), which in turn starts a process in the mechanism underlying the disposition. The output of the mechanism is also a process controlled by the mechanism. A dispositional statement relates conditions and a manifestation; in other words, it relates input and output. What is important is to realise that processes at the level of the parts of the mechanism, including instantaneous events, can also be described from the outside perspective of the whole that contains the mechanism. Take the triggering or starting event. In the case of a car, an ignition key turns, or a start button is pushed, which is identical to the closing of an electric circuit. We see, hear, smell and feel the engine running, which is just the outside manifestation of the same process that can be described in much more technical detail from the perspective of the internal functioning of the engine. The behaviour of a system, the output, can, in the same way, be described from an outside perspective, but also in all its mechanical details. The behaviour of an organism can be described internally as the contracting and relaxing of the muscles and the control exercised by the nerves. So long as the underlying mechanisms stay unaltered, the system will show the same regularity in its behaviour, in the way input and output are related, which we describe in terms of its dispositions, tendencies and capacities. Further analysis would require a discussion of the ‘new’ mechanistic philosophy that became popular this century by authors like Bechtel, Craver, Darden, and Krickel, which I will postpone until another occasion.
We started with the descriptions of Socrates’ death and Xanthippe becoming a widow. These are two unrelated descriptions until it is realised that Xantippe is Socrates’ wife. And even then, there is disagreement about whether the same or different events are involved. UTP became famous for his thesis that consciousness is a brain process. Here, semantically unrelated descriptions are, according to UTP, about the same thing. I proposed to extend this idea to all processes. The same process can be described from a macro and micro perspective. A disposition and its structural basis are different things for UTP, and their descriptions are, therefore, about different things. It is unclear how a disposition is related to the underlying structural basis. The relation is causal for UTP, but this is undoubtedly not the generally accepted view. As a final point, it is generally accepted that Venus, the morning star and the evening star refer to the same star. In the same way, we do not have a problem with a person being known by many very different descriptions. So why can not this also be true for our inner life?
References
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