Privative properties?
- Astro Cat
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Privative properties?
What do you think is going on when someone says, “the towel is dry,” “the room is dark,” or “the drawer is empty?”
Is “the towel is dry” equivalent to “the towel is not-wet?” Is there a difference between that and “the towel is-not wet?”
--Richard Feynman
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Re: Privative properties?
But the way we humans use language (and a depressingly large amount of philosophy seems to revolve around how we use language) is often to do with comparisons against some sort of expectation or norm.
So I might comment that the towel is dry, meaning drier than I'd expect given that you had a shower only 5 minutes ago. Or comment that the towel is wet, meaning wetter than I'd expect given that it's been on the radiator since yesterday. With the difference in moisture content between "dry" and "wet" in that sense being fairly small, because such utterances say as much about expectations as about reality.
Conversely, if the moisture content is well within the expected range, one might say it's neither wet nor dry, but in-between. Moist ? Damp ?
Whereas if dry is the absence of wetness, one might expect that something is only dry if there is not one molecule of water present...
But maybe I'm missing the point of the question ?
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Re: Privative properties?
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Re: Privative properties?
Consul wrote: ↑June 28th, 2022, 11:51 pmI'm convinced that there are no negative or "privative" entities of any ontological kind: Existence is positive!
Absences, lacks, and omissions aren't entities.
Someone might object: Wait a minute! Can't an absence or lack of oxygen kill me? If it can, it must be something rather than nothing, since nonentities cannot cause anything.
Well, although a person's death can depend counterfactually on an absence of oxygen—in the sense that the person wouldn't have died if oxygen hadn't been absent—, there is no efficient causation by the absent oxygen in terms of chemical/physical force or energy. For what causes your death in the event of an absence of oxygen is not the absent oxygen (as a negative entity) but the collapse of your life-sustaining functions which depend physiologically on oxygen.
It is first important to distinguish privation from absence. Privation is the absence of something that is due, whereas absence is just absence simpliciter. That my car does not have wheels is a privation. That my car does not have teeth is a mere absence. As Aquinas says:
As was said above (Article 1), evil imports the absence of good. But not every absence of good is evil. For absence of good can be taken in a privative and in a negative sense. Absence of good, taken negatively, is not evil; otherwise, it would follow that what does not exist is evil, and also that everything would be evil, through not having the good belonging to something else; for instance, a man would be evil who had not the swiftness of the roe, or the strength of a lion. But the absence of good, taken in a privative sense, is an evil; as, for instance, the privation of sight is called blindness. (Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Question 48, Article 3)
(Note that for Aquinas goodness maps to being and evil maps to non-being, and evil is defined as a privation of being)
Now I would not consider the dryness of the towel a privation. The towel is an artifact, and although artifacts can have privations secundum quid, both wetness and dryness are proper to towels (neither one being privative). Thus a towel can have an absence but not a privation of wetness. The further complication asks whether "dry" merely means "not wet," which is not a given. I believe it is this latter complication that makes the towel case curious.
Regarding the question of truthmakers, it seems clear to me that an absence can make a proposition true, and that the proposition will yet not be true in virtue of any positively existing entity. In the case of mere absence we would seem to be asserting that some counterfactual has not obtained.
In the case of both absences and privations we attribute being or existence only in an analogical or metaphorical way (e.g. "There was thick darkness," is something like a poetic way of expressing a very complete absence of light). In the case of privation the property (or pseudo-property, if you wish) has a firmer analogical existence than in the case of absence. For example, "The man is blind," expresses a privation rather than an absence, and the blindness--although not a being in itself--will always be able to be traced back to being. That is to say, privations like blindness have causes, whereas absences need not have causes.
As the Philosopher says (Metaph. v, text 14), being is twofold. In one way it is considered as signifying the entity of a thing, as divisible by the ten "[Categories]"; and in that sense it is convertible with thing, and thus no privation is a being, and neither therefore is evil a being. In another sense being conveys the truth of a proposition which unites together subject and attribute by a copula, notified by this word "is"; and in this sense being is what answers to the question, "Does it exist?" and thus we speak of blindness as being in the eye; or of any other privation. In this way even evil can be called a being. Through ignorance of this distinction some, considering that things may be evil, or that evil is said to be in things, believed that evil was a positive thing in itself. (Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Question 48, Article 2, Reply to Objection 2)
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Because not-wetness and softness are two different things, and it is a special property of towels that wetness and softness cannot inhere simultaneously. There are some fabrics on which moisture is very difficult to detect, but towels are made of fabrics which correlate softness to non-wetness, and this is why it is very easy to detect not-wetness on towels. Yet what you find desirable about a "dry" towel may well be its softness rather than its not-wetness.Astro Cat wrote: ↑June 29th, 2022, 1:35 am @Consul
I guess what I'm wondering is that normally when we make statements like "a is F," we're observing a property and reporting it. When I touch a towel I report that it's not wet, I don't know how to ask this, but why does this seem like I'm doing the same thing that I would do when I touch the towel and report that it's soft?
Beyond that, it seems to me that Consul's analytic philosophy is importing some subtle psychological theories about cognition and perception. Logically speaking an empty room is not something we experience, but it is not so clear that the human psyche or human cognition cannot positively identify an empty room. Logically we might explain this in terms of things like spatial awareness or air flow, but one must argue for the conclusion that the psychological perception is reducible or filtered through logical reasoning, rather than take it as an assumption. This is an example of one of the places where analytic philosophy becomes fraught, even in spite of its merits.
Socrates: He's like that, Hippias, not refined. He's garbage, he cares about nothing but the truth.
- Pattern-chaser
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Re: Privative properties?
I'm not sure if I'm heading in the direction you want to go, but my first reaction to your words is no, "dry" and "not-wet" are not really synonymous. I say this for the very simple reason that these two words seem to leave no space in between themselves for "damp", for example, which is neither wet nor dry, meaning-wise.
So nothing profound from me, just a bit of not-binary thinking.
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Re: Privative properties?
- thrasymachus
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Re: Privative properties?
Grasp the "same" thought? But they don't. Clearly my thought is not yours, though we may agree. Agreement is never about rigorous sameness, but proximity to the extent that a nod of agreement is possible. But such nods are never about the same thing. What I have in mind is socially variable and existentially unique, just as all trees and fence posts are unique, regardless of the universal that attempts to possess them. Remember that universals are OUR imposition on the world, and actualities conform as entirely "other" than what is actual. Even if one wanted to allow that the concept is part and parcel of the tree actuality, my concept of the tree would not be yours or anyone else's.The Beast wrote
A theory of meaning may explain it. How is possible for different people to grasp the same thought? The referent is the light, and the mode of presentation is the absence or the presence of it. Bertrand Russell spoke of definite descriptions. Dark is a variable spectrum that could improve by adding a predicate containing quantity. The same for light.
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Re: Privative properties?
- Consul
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Re: Privative properties?
Stephen Mumford defines "privation" as follows:Leontiskos wrote: ↑June 29th, 2022, 1:04 pm It is first important to distinguish privation from absence. Privation is the absence of something that is due, whereas absence is just absence simpliciter. That my car does not have wheels is a privation. That my car does not have teeth is a mere absence.
QUOTE>
"A privation is understood as a deficiency, where something could, should, or ought to have a certain power or capacity, which it does not (Aristotle, Categories 12a28–33). This differs from simply not having a power or capacity. For example, we can say of an idea, or of the number 6, that it is not soluble, since it does not have a capacity to dissolve in liquid. But it would not be right to say that these things are insoluble since they are not the sorts of things to which solubility could apply. It would not simply be false but also a category mistake to think of them as soluble, for which reason calling them insoluble is also inappropriate. However, it does make sense to say of a rock that it is insoluble since rocks belong to a category of things—solid physical objects or substances—to which solubility could sensibly be applied. Indeed, there are many solid physical objects or substances that are soluble, such as sugar cubes. We might judge, therefore, that it is appropriate to say insoluble, in the case of rocks, because it indicates what we might call a meta-level privation or meta-privation. It is not that the rock is lacking something qua rock, when it is insoluble, since rocks in general have no tendency to dissolve. But at a higher level of abstraction, a rock is a kind of thing—a solid physical object—where some things of that higher kind are soluble.
The distinction between internal and external negation can be used to separate privations from non-privations, where it is desirable to do so. Hence, we might say, using external negation:
(1) It is not the case that a rock can see
But we would use internal negation when we say:
(2) The man is unseeing.
A person typically can see but some have a privation of this capacity, which the internal negation indicates. The rock has no (first-order) privation of this ability since rocks do not ever have a capacity to see.
The notion of a privation is not strictly defined but nor is it useless. Indeed, with the above account we can find the answer to some putative counterexamples. Horn (2001 [A Natural History of Negation]: 7) objects that on Aristotle’s account, we cannot say that a human baby is toothless since babies are not supposed to have teeth. Yet toothless the baby surely is. ‘-Less’, as a suffix, seems ambiguous between internal and external negation, though. On the above account, it is permissible to externally negate, in this case: the baby is toothless since it’s not the case that she has teeth. Whether or not it is right to internally negate here (the baby is ‘untoothed’?), this is enough for a toothless baby.
What should we say of privations? Are they things? Shortly, we will look at a specific case of something that seems to be real but also a privation: a shadow. What makes shadows seem thing-like is that you can see their distinct boundaries. But can you see things like toothlessness or insolubility? Are they any kind of entity? Pre-empting a topic that will also figure later (…), note that in both (1) and (2) we deny that something can see, even if they fail to do so in different ways. In pointing to a privation, then, we are saying that something is not: that something does not have a certain power. But not having a ‘positive’ power does not entail having some kind of negative power. This response of treating ‘not’ as a denial, does not explain the difference between (1) and (2). We are not, however, yet offering a reductive analysis of ‘not’. We are merely trying to show that attributions of privations are not attributions of negative causal powers."
(Mumford, Stephen. Absence and Nothing: The Philosophy of What There is Not. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. pp. 48-9)
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Re: Privative properties?
By the way, this enjoyable book also contains chapters on negative properties and causation by absence.
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Re: Privative properties?
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Re: Privative properties?
QUOTE>Leontiskos wrote: ↑June 29th, 2022, 1:04 pm Let me repost what I said in the other thread where this discussion began, with a few redactions:
Consul wrote: ↑June 28th, 2022, 11:51 pm …
Someone might object: Wait a minute! Can't an absence or lack of oxygen kill me? If it can, it must be something rather than nothing, since nonentities cannot cause anything.
Well, although a person's death can depend counterfactually on an absence of oxygen—in the sense that the person wouldn't have died if oxygen hadn't been absent—, there is no efficient causation by the absent oxygen in terms of chemical/physical force or energy. For what causes your death in the event of an absence of oxygen is not the absent oxygen (as a negative entity) but the collapse of your life-sustaining functions which depend physiologically on oxygen.
"The void is deadly. If you were cast into a void, it would cause you to die in just a few minutes. It would suck the air from your lungs. It would boil your blood. It would drain the warmth from your body. And it would inflate enclosures in your body until they burst.
What I’ve said is literally true, yet it may be misleading. When the void sucks away the air, it does not exert an attractive force on the air. It is not like a magnet sucking up iron filings. Rather, the air molecules collide and exert repulsive forces on one another; these forces constitute a pressure that, if unresisted, causes the air to expand and disperse; the void exerts no force to resist the pressure; and that is why the air departs from the lungs.
Likewise, when the void boils the blood, there is no flow of energy from the void into the blood. It isn’t like a stove boiling a kettle of water. The blood is already warm enough to boil, if its vapor pressure is unresisted; the void exerts no counterpressure; and so the boiling goes unprevented.
Likewise, when the void drains your warmth, what happens is that your thermal energy, left to itself, tends to dissipate; and the void provides no influx of energy to replace the departing heat.
And when the void inflates enclosures, again what happens is that the enclosed fluids exert pressure and the void exerts no counterpressure. So nothing prevents the outward pressure from doing damage.
In short, you are kept alive by forces and flows of energy that come from the objects that surround you. If, instead of objects, you were surrounded by a void, these life-sustaining forces and flows would cease. Without them, you would soon die. That is how the void causes death. It is deadly not because it exerts forces and supplies energy, but because it doesn’t."
(p. 277)
"[W]henever any effect is caused by an absence of anything, we have the problem of the missing relatum. (And likewise whenever anything causes an absence.) A void, being the absence of any objects at all, is just the most extreme case of an absence.
Faced with the problem of the missing relatum, we have four possible lines of response.
(1) We could deny, in the face of compelling examples to the contrary, that absences ever cause anything. We could deny, for instance, that the void is deadly. (Likewise, we could deny that anything ever causes an absence. In other words, we could deny that there is any such thing as prevention.) Simply to state this response is to complete the reductio against it.
(2) We could reify absences nonreductively. A void, so we might say, is a sui generis entity, but it is none the worse for that. It is eligible to serve as a causal relatum. It springs up automatically and necessarily whenever, and only whenever, all else goes away; it is conceptually impossible not to have a void between the walls and not to have anything else there either. So much the worse, says the reifier, for the combinatorial principle, which claims that existential statements about distinct things are independent.
(3) We could reify absences reductively. We could identify absences with comparatively uncontroversial objects that, as others would say, are somehow associated with those absences. For instance, we could identify a hole with the hole-lining that, as we’d normally say, immediately surrounds the hole. (Strange to say, some holes are made of cheese and some of limestone! Strange to say, no holes are exactly where we would have thought they were!) Or we could identify an absence with a bit of unoccupied spacetime, if we were not such uncompromising combinatorialists as to countenance an absence of spacetime itself. One way or another, we can cook up ersatz absences to serve as relata of the causal relation—though surely they will seem to be the wrong relata, since we don’t really think of these ersatz absences as having the same effects (or causes) as the absences they stand in for. We might, for instance, imitate the identification of holes and hole-linings on a grander scale. Take the most inclusive void of all; and take the mereological fusion of all objects of whatever kind. On the principle of identifying hole with hole-lining, and void with surrounding objects, we might identify this greatest void with the greatest object.
(4) The best response is to concede that a void is nothing at all, and that a lesser absence is nothing relevant at all and therefore cannot furnish causal relata. Yet absences can be causes and e.ects. So I insist, contra Menzies, that causation cannot always be the bearing of a causal relation. No theory of the causal relation, neither Menzies’s theory nor any other, can be the whole story of causation.
The intrinsic character of causation is not our present problem. I do indeed fear that the intrinsic character of causation is more a hasty generalization than an a priori desideratum. But even if we struck the intrinsic character of causation off our list of folk platitudes, we’d still be trying to characterize the causal relation, so we’d still be in trouble. Any relation needs relata, whether it is intrinsic or not. So the problem of missing relata hits any relational analysis of causation.
But does any analysis escape the problem of missing relata?—Yes; a counterfactual analysis escapes. We do not have to reify the void in order to ask what would have happened if the void had not been there. The void causes death to one who is cast into it because if, instead, he had been surrounded by suitable objects, he would not have died. (Here we must assume that if the victim had not been surrounded by the void, he would instead have been surrounded by the life-sustaining objects that normally surround us—not by liquid nitrogen, or clouds of nerve gas, or a hail of bullets.) Likewise for lesser absences. If the cause is an absence, then to suppose away the cause counterfactually is not to attend to some remarkable entity and suppose that it does not exist. Rather, we need only suppose that some unremarkable entity does exist. Absences are spooky things, and we’d do best not to take them seriously. But absences of absences are no problem.
Note well that in defending a counterfactual analysis, I am not claiming that all causation consists in a relation of counterfactual dependence between (distinct) events. That theory would not escape the problem of missing relata. A relation of counterfactual dependence is still a relation, a relation still needs relata, and absences still fail to provide the needed relata. The counterfactual analysis escapes the problem because, when the relata go missing, it can do without any causal relation at all."
(pp. 281-3)
(Lewis, David. "Void and Object." In Causation and Counterfactuals, edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, and L. A. Paul, 277-290. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.)
<QUOTE
- Consul
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Re: Privative properties?
We can distinguish between absolute insolubility and relative insolubility.
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Re: Privative properties?
Solubility is a coefficient. As per the previous: Somewhat a theoretical vacuum that has a value. A trip to Space? Somehow the extension (absolute) gets lost in the irrelevancy of what it is said. Moreover, it is a correlation if properly addressed. So, we arrive to intention in the missing relata. Or is it not?
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Re: Privative properties?
The OED defines "dry" as "destitute of or free from moisture; not wet or moist", but it is not the case that a towel is either completely/totally dry or completely/totally wet (i.e. maximally soaked with some liquid such as water).Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑June 29th, 2022, 1:13 pmI'm not sure if I'm heading in the direction you want to go, but my first reaction to your words is no, "dry" and "not-wet" are not really synonymous. I say this for the very simple reason that these two words seem to leave no space in between themselves for "damp", for example, which is neither wet nor dry, meaning-wise.
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