Do Particulars Exist?

Please leave this a separate thread as this question is slightly different.

I just pulled this off the web; it seems a quite straightforward & properly normative telling of the problem.

"In distinction from proper names of individuals, universals (like "human being," "dog," "horse") are class-names, a single term that applies to many. [uni-vers-al = literally one-to-other/many]. The individuals are the direct objects of our sense experience; the universals are the means by which these things are intellectually known, they are (or seem to be) the objects of our intellects or minds."

I think I know what the argument wants to say. I have never been able, however, to understand its force. Why is there any difference between a particular and a universal? If I say there is Socrates, don't I really mean there is a particular instantiation of, an instance of, Socrates? And so at once it comes clear this guy is not present, only one of his accidental manifestations in time. Or only one of the Socrates's in terms of what he is doing; whether making a remark about an infinite itch, watching Theatatus fly or standing still & plunged into contemplation.



Anyway, this is probably a blunder and wrongheaded but I can never understand it.

Reality is whole and continuous.
Universals and particulars are means of reducing reality to manageable sub-parts to facilitate communications and therefrom survival.

There is no problem with universal or particulars as long as we understand how and why they are created by human beings and not taken as entities independent of human interactions.

This doesn't sound like an argument so much as a postulate.

The individuals are the direct objects of our sense experience; the universals are the means by which these things are intellectually known, they are (or seem to be) the objects of our intellects or minds."

Translation: The people we meet in person (your friend john) is what you know of the universal name john(the particular). You know him by interacting with him by one of your biological senses (hear see smell touch taste). Others how ever may think first of the idea of another entity named john. Could be John from the bible, John from some tv show. Basically people we don't know (at all even) personally but know their name is john.

It's the difference between you counting 2 1 dollar bills and concluding that there are 2 bills there in fact; and doing the problem for a person on a peace of paper. One is the thing in it self, the other is how your see it.

This applies to all things we experience, be it only with our minds or with our minds and our bodies.

It's concision is merely stating that we name stuff. Not a big deal; unless you want it to be.

While I feel that Spectrum #2 has elucidated, I also wonder if a particular, given that it is mind dependent (and therefore language dependent), may be defined by alotting boundaries to it and measuring its mass .

I think wanabe wrapped this up quite nicely. I understand the quotation like this:

There are names of individuals (the particulars referring to that individual = James, Peter, Christina etc.), and there are universals that name the class the individual belongs to ('human being', 'dog', 'horse'). We experience James, Peter and Christina directly through our senses whereas the universals 'human being', 'dog', 'horse', are merely classes in our minds to separate the individuals from each other.

I think you can take the quote a step further though because it sounds like the person behind this wants to say that we can't experience universals. They only exist in our minds. So while we all have a picture in our mind when thinking about a horse because we know they do exist, we could have named the creature that we know as 'horse' 'monkey' instead. What we know as 'dog' could have been named 'mouse'. Would that change the individual (particular)? No, we would have just given it a different name. So a horse would still have 4 legs, the same size etc, we'd just call it 'monkey', which is why universals are in our mind and not objects of experience. So essentially, particulars are names of things you experience in your daily life while universals are like categories in your mind that help you order those names into groups.

I’m just arbitrarily engaging with this theme because it would precipitate a cascade to follow each & every answer.

“Its concision is merely stating that we name stuff.”

“Stuff” here seems to name a universal. So there is a minor paradox there at the start. (‘Sense impression’ likewise is a universal. Also, is not "mass" such a case as well?)

A helpful dichotomy is thematized in several responses that of name & sense impression. But it seems that the so called particular is something named and disappeared immediately (in the next paragraph I try to show this) and that it only lives on as a universal. Or put another way the so called particular immediately becomes an essence and never obtains (because it very quickly goes with time) on its own terms. So, this claim would have for an entailment that the dollar in front of us is the universal (& that the belief in particulars is false.)

If one sees and names a sense impression x. Let “x” be Socrates (and allow that there has never been any other Socrates so that we are not contaminated by connotations in the mind). This “x” immediately undergoes morphological change (i.e., moves, grows, etc.) or a change of appearance (due to the relation of this entity to other entities such as the setting sun) or some other kind of change. As soon as we name “x”it disappears (or, in fact, likely, is already gone before we name it).

“So a horse would still have 4 legs, the same size etc.” Yet these appear to be precisely universals, i.e., “legs”, “size.” And if every particular is immediately hurried away by time so that it can only obtain as a universal then there is simply nothing.

When I feel this must connect to reality it strikes me that something like hardness (the “hardness” of a brick) is a primitive (that is early but already underway) particular become universal. Visually, I suppose, there is a similar primitive that I can’t name at the moment, perhaps varieties of brightness or colour.

I may be in agreement with Spectrum, but without detailed analysis we have only a, perhaps vague, assertion or even merely an opinion before us - and this is difficult to operate with excepting if we turn to rhetorical persuasion.

All of "my dogs" are dogs. The particular belongs to the generic universal. Not all dogs are my dogs. It's theoretically possible that all dogs could be my dogs but whether or not I succeed in making it so isn't verifiable. I don't even know that I could accomplish it in my lifetime. I can, however, drink the beer I'm about to open.

As soon as we name “x”it disappears

This is incorrect. X changes to be precise. This is why context and tense are so important.

Yes, "what is in a name...".

I don’t see how you get to such an apodictic enunciation of your precision. It seems we must be more qualified as nothing yet, no term, has been delineated through discourse or agreed upon in its significance. Probably this should be neither the one term nor the other, but, in fact, what happens with naming is what is under question and so a mystery. But it is difficult to refer to a mystery without some commonplace stumbling block of a term.

For one thing you left out the succeeding statement that modifies (at least by adding provisionality) the one you have chosen . If you look at the whole paragraph you'll notice I name two processes. Change of form and change in position relative to other entities (like the change in light pictured by the impressionists); the latter I take to be in line with phenomenological practice and I designate as appearance and false appearance. If we play around with the etymology, even just using wikipedia, we can construct a little telling phrase (it is justified by the lexicon) such as ‘the removal of what comes forth’ or ‘the reversal of the visible.’

The purpose of this is that then we have something undamaged by practice and so not brittle and vulnerable to assaults such as yours. Since who is going to claim a term that has never been used is wrongly applied? And moreover it is wanted by the material since we do not know with deep concise exactitude just what we are talking about, if we did there would be entirely no point to the inquiry. Of course, if we are quite sure our knowledge of the subject is sound we might compose a little treatise about it, but then why come to the forum?

Hideousgrowl,

Change and movement in this case are equivocal. Movement is change. The point is it didn't disappear it changed.

If you throw a tennis ball it looses some its self and changes its position, but when I catch it, the tennis ball is still the tennis ball we started with, but it has undergone change. If you threw the tennis ball then neither of us could see it than it has diapered.

Do particulars exist? Yes, but we have to specify time/space and attributes(physical/chemical).

Hideousgrowl,
Change and movement in this case are equivocal. Movement is change. The point is it didn't disappear it changed.

If you throw a tennis ball it looses some its self and changes its position, but when I catch it, the tennis ball is still the tennis ball we started with, but it has undergone change. If you threw the tennis ball then neither of us could see it than it has diapered.

Do particulars exist? Yes, but we have to specify time/space and attributes(physical/chemical).

In a lesser particular consideration, i.e. common sense, 'particulars' are necessary.
It is messy and not efficient to deal to an entangled mass of matter, as such in one perspective it is necessary to break whatever into smaller manageable discrete units.

However, in a more particular consideration and refined perspective, 'it' was never there in the first place. There is no inherent "it" that changes or had been changed. Note Kant's no thing-in-itself, i.e. no tennis_ball-in-itself.

Particulars are what we experience. Who among us has experienced a predetermined or a generic generality.

I compose a song. You hear it several times, each time different. I've practiced it a bunch. I suppose there's an ideal or a goal I'm aiming for when I practice and perform it and perhaps I'm the only one to be able to talk about it because no one else has experienced it. Have I ever played one of my songs perfectly? Are there things I change if I tire of them? Does the ideal continually evolve as I continue to consider it and practice it.

This particular thing at this time in this context lived by me in this frame of mind.

wanabe

“If you throw a tennis ball it looses some its self and changes its position, but when I catch it, the tennis ball is still the tennis ball we started with”

Isn’t this only true in the case that “tennis ball” is already treated as an object? But, that is the very thing I’m questioning, whether there is such an object.

You're in a different register than me. I think that what you're saying is true if we presuppose something like a Newtonian view of nature; a sort of a 'mass (matter) point' (time) view. But I am operating without that presumption.

“Do particulars exist? Yes, but we have to specify time/space and attributes(physical/chemical).”

So this is a kind of qualified particular and and is based on a definition or convention & if we’re taking x y and zed coordinates and worried about the quivering of a magnetic field and in short trying to find out through physics how likely it is that a chair will stay put whilst we screw in a light bulb this will be useful, but it is not the only way to size up the world, but rather one among others.

To clarify. One approach is the Kantian, where we assume that with a ‘pure intuition’ (our immediate sense data), that we take a picture without picking out the individual objects; Kant thinks we must conceptualize (decide what a chair is for instance) in order to pick objects out as individuals. But once we see what Kant says here it may estrange the the familiar 'positivist' 'physicalist' view we probably grew up with in school sufficiently so that we can approach it also in other ways. Even without assuming that a kind of subject with sense perception is scanning information from the world; as this also involves a presumption.

Hideousgrowl,

There is "such an object", it exists, even if it's only in our minds, and yes, even if it's just an illusion in our minds. If it's some where else too; it really really really exists.

Your presumption is that things don't exist. You asked if particulars existed, even if its qualified, its still a "particular".

What you really want to say is things change, things will never stay or be the same, more or less. You're asking the wrong question, you really want to ask some question in regards to that. What you really want to ask I think is do things exist objectively? The answer is maybe, but we'll never know, because we are subjective beings that exist on a subjective plane.

I’m not talking about illusions nor the mind. Those would be presuppositions. I don't have a problem with the convention and the apparatus of objects, of course that functions in physics. Just as universals function in human understanding, otherwise language would fall out of use. The point of saying “exist” here is only to draw comparison to the investigation of the universal, otherwise we don’t know what “exist” means. Because we don’t presuppose a meaning. It’s true that in order to signalize we need to acknowledge some link to commonplace understanding, but this we try to minimize. We try to reach maximal mystery, that is not the same as a commonplace understanding of non-existence. It is just a necessary tactic.

What needs to be noticed is that “exist” is undefined, you seem to be arriving at it through a physical understanding of what an object is (although you stipulate that this may be only for us, only in the "mind"). I never say of particulars, whatever they may be, that they don’t exist, I ask if they do. But, my method of asking is suspension of certainty about what it is to exist.

I don’t really know what a particular is. If I do, and I say they don’t exist, it is an absurdity that can only be maintained for the sake of a paradox. That is by no means the attitude of my investigation.