Responses from John Cobb Class re
Whitehead's Process & Reality Readings
Session I
Question
Folks, I listened to Dr Cobbs explanation of the term, "vacuous actuality", but I still need some help. Does that refer to the idea that there is some kind of empty "space" in which "events" occur, but which is somehow separate from those events? Thx - Anon
Select Responses
Response 1
I was thinking it was the idea that a substance can exist without any properties. It's logically possible if you take the subject-predicate form to correspond to reality, but it's something we never encounter in the real world, which is why Whitehead took issue with the subject-predicate form. - Anon
Response 2
What I gathered was those who propound a “vacuous actualist” view of reality are akin to what me may today call dispositional essentialists or causal structuralists. It’s the notion that at bottom, the nature of something is really just it’s role within a large network of causal relations, but there’s no consideration of what substance is instantiating the structure. - Anon
Response 3
What Whitehead is rejecting is the notion that there is any such thing as "inert matter." For Whitehead, every actual occasion has a physical and a mental/conceptual pole. Therefore there is no such thing as an actuality that is without an internal constitution. All actualities are subjects of experience. - Anon
Response 4
It seems to me that he is also critiquing another instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, confusing our conceptual categories with actual things. - Anon
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Observation - R.E. Slater
For me, it's the idea that all things are relational, and on this basis are actualities. Which further means that nothing can exist alone by itself wholly independent of relationships. In this sense there can be no vacuous actualities in a process world of becoming. If there are no relationships to anything then that actuality is nonexistent and therefore no longer a part of a relational cosmos.
In another sense, building upon the above idea, a vacuous actuality might also be describe as a once connected actuality that came into existence, lived a moment, then unbecame like a momentary quantum particle here one moment and gone the next. Its birth came by the instantiation (?) of a passing relation, served its purpose, then as quickly passed away.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Intenet Reference - #1
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
Whitehead's monadological rejection of vacuous actuality - the idea that something can exist actually without any subjective mediation - without any connection to anything else - has implications for his rejection of the thesis that subject-predicate form is a suitable structure for a proposition. The idea of vacuous actuality, he remarks, haunts realistic philosophy (P&R, 29 [43]). Its rejection is the basis of Ewing's formulation of idealism implying no epistemological idealism: the interconnectedness of all things means no dependence of the cognized object to the cognizing subject. Ewing suggests that Bradley and Joachim are not really correlationists - they could be metaphysicians of subjectivity. This is maybe why Whitehead claims that at the end of the day he is not too far away from Bradley (P&R, xiii): both reject vacuous actuality - and none are epistemological idealists.
The rejection of vacuous actuality is also the rejection of the Aristotelian primary substance - the inherent qualities to a subject that makes it capable to hold predicates. The haecceitas of a subject that subsists independently of any actual entity (of any sponsoring, of any com possibility). If there is no vacuous actuality, there is no unconnected noumenon to a subject, independent of any of its predications. Whitehead welcomes the holism of Leibniz (and of Bradley, but also the semantical counterpart put forward by Quine and his followers: no meaning independent of use, no distinction between language and theory). To fix something to be a subject for a predication - and enable a proposition to have the form of a subject coupled to a predicate - is to postulate that something is disconnected from the network of relations that provide the content of predications [therefore, it cannot be - res]. To be sure, one can abstract something away of all changes, but this is a concerted effort undergone only by a subject. Whitehead claims that only in subjective forms the subject-predicate form expresses the content of a proposition.
Kant's note 24 to his Prolegomena: the structure of something fixed holding predication implies no substance, it is only an obligation imposed by the workings of predication. In my book (BUG, just finished), I claim that predication is possible because there are procedures of reference-fixing; that is, there are things that are contingently and yet knowable a priori. The operation of fixing something to receive the working out of a predication has to be done by a subject - it is only in the workings of a subjective form that a subject can be the guesthouse for passing predications. It is only then that anything can be deemed determinately individuated and sufficiently stable.
No comments:
Post a Comment