The argument from relatives and pragmatic homonymy:
A possible motivation of Plato for the Form theory
and a possible misunderstanding of it by Aristotle
1/25/2011 uploaded
Arguments_from_relatives.doc | |
File Size: | 79 kb |
File Type: | doc |
Comment (1/26/2011, revised, 1/29)
The "argument from relatives" mentioned in the title of this paper is one of a series of arguments for the existence of Platonic Forms complied in a lost essay of Aristotle, "On ideas." In this essay, Aristotle reconstructs these arguments and rejects each. (Since the essay itself is lost, all we know about these arguments is based on an existing commentary on this essay.)
In this paper of mine, I ignore the interpretive complications due to the facts that the text we have access to is only someone's commentary on the original essay of Aristotle's and that even the argument given in the original essay is at best Aristotle's reconstruction. That is, I treat the argument given in the commentary text as more or less correct representation of Plato's own argument that Aristotle reconstructs correctly in "On ideas."
In this paper, I attempt to (i) identify and clarify the argument itself, both its logical structure and the meanings of its premises (assuming that the remaining text of the commentary represents an inferentially valid argument, given by Plato and understood by Aristotle) and (ii) speculate a possible error of Aristotle in one of his objections to this argument.
This paper uploaded here is one I wrote for the course "Ancient Philosophy" last year. I was originally thinking to upload another paper. I uploaded this instead because in one course I'm taking now ("Greek Philosophy"), this argument was recently discussed (so many of my friends are now familiar with this). After all, my interpretation of the argument itself contains my diagnosis of this sort of linguistically motivated imperfection argument as exhibiting the semantic-centric way of thinking (about one thing we do with language, predication). Hopefully, the relevance of this part of this paper to the re-thinking of "mind" (the theme of this website) is self-obvious to anyone who has read the paper itself and the "Outline" of this theme (see the navigation bar on the left).
But, even a greater reason why I put this paper first is that this paper also contains one idea that is a major component of my re-thinking of "mind." It is the difference between two opposing ways of identifying something: the intensional/relational way and the extensional/monadic way. This is an idea that is most directly treated in the paper I originally planned to upload here first. But, I hope this paper can serve as an introduction to this topic.
This idea shows up in my discussion of Aristotle's objection. As you can see in the paper, I'm speculating that Plato's concept of Form (and its "being" as opposed to "becoming") is to some extent motivated by the intensional/relational way of identification when it comes to "what is" of such time-less imperceivable "beings" (and that Aristotle is missing this point due to his extensional/monadic bias, so to speak).
One thing I have to confess in this regard now, though, is that I've come to suspect that probably Plato did not have such a sophisticated view of or approach to the identity ("what is") of Forms. Possibly, I was only projecting my own philosophical theme onto him, over-interpreting what are really severely underdetermining textual evidences. The more I read Plato, the less I became confident about this "relationalist" or "inferentialist" reading of Plato's rationalism (Form theory + recollection theory).
However, I'm still inclined to think that the history of "rationalism" may have some deep connection with some sort of "relationalism" or "inferentialism." This is because I think that such is a natural result for sufficient practice of axiomatic mathematics, such as the one exhibited in the "Elements" of Euclid, in which, although there are definitions of the basic terms, the proofs of propositions are (said to be --- I have studied only the first few proofs, and am in no position to claim this) mostly carefully carried out so as to solely rely on, ultimately, what are stated in postulates (or axioms, in the modern term), without reliance on the meanings of the terms due to the definitions. As well-known in mathematical logic and mathematics, this kind of formal practice leads us to the distinction between theory and model: the realm in which the "meaning" (in some sense) of each term (predicate) is identified through the total mutual relations among terms one another (which are determined by the total set of axioms) and the realm in which the meaning of each term is given individually by what it stands for (which is provided by an interpretation). Arguably, the latter realm tempts a characterization such as the sense-based realm, and the former, in contrast to the latter, the intellect-based realm. I'm suspecting that in general, thinkers who were attracted to a "rationalistic" view of knowledge might have tended to look down upon sense-based knowledge because of some incipient awareness of this theory/model distinction achievable through training in (axiomatic) geometry, among other abstraction techniques in mathematics.
I am aware that the so-called parallel postulate was finally solved by the achievement of this distinction --- by the discovery that there is an alternative postulate that is incompatible with the original parallel postulate, which can still stand with the rest of the postulates "consistently" in the sense that there is a model that satisfies the new (non-Euclidean) theory. In some sense, this distinction had not been discovered by mathematicians at least until this point. But, there seems to be another sense in which we can attribute some incipient awareness of this distinction to thinkers even before this.
Anyway, this was one reason why I originally suspected that Plato too was incipient "relationalist." At least this seems to fit his strong emphasis on mathematics in his view of ideal education for (future) philosophers. But, my confidence is eroding these days.
More comments are to come.