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If you try and think about some of the thoughts you have had to day you will find I think that they involve categories.
Think of this thought as an example: 'That's the bus just disappearing!':
This thought surely involves categories.
'Bus' is surely a category for a start? I'm talking about a particular thing, the thing I see in the distance and which is about to disappear, but if I am thinking about it as a bus I am categorising it.
Is 'disappearing' much the same? I am thinking of this particular thing passing out of sight, and this will be, when it happens, a particular event. But in referring to that particular event as 'disappearing' I am placing it in a category.
Another example: 'I should have gone to bed before I passed out last night'.
I am thinking about the time I went to bed last night. This is a particular event. But if I think of that particular event under the description 'going to bed' I am thinking of that particular event as falling under a category, a category to which lots of other events also as a matter of fact belong.
The thought that one event should have been 'earlier' also involves a category, surely. Lots of events are related in time in the way I am thinking of the two events last night - going to bed and passing into oblivion. If I think of one as earlier than the other I am seeing them as falling under the same general category.
The great run of our thoughts are like that you may think - they involve categories. You may find it a challenge to think of a thought which doesn't.
Perhaps when I think 'I' I am not categorising, so if I can treat the thought 'I' as a distinct thought we might have an example there - ??
So there is a real question: Can I have a thought of something without categorising it? We normally perhaps categorise a tree as we think about it. But if we just look at a particular tree, can we count this as a thought, and if so, is it possible to have it without categorising this particular thing as a tree?
So far I have tried to say that in thought at least very often categories are in play. The question I want to raise is: is there a philosophical problem here?
You may think that for the empiricist there is. Roger Scruton expresses the thought when he says: experience is irremediably particular (Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy, London, 1981, Routledge, p.90). We can have a go at understanding this. Though we can look at this cat or that cat, we never see the category cat. - Is this what is meant? Similar points could be made perhaps for each of the different senses. We can touch the cat, but not the category cat. But the empiricists hold that all our knowledge must be built out of what our senses provide us with. So if we use categories in our thinking and in our developing knowledge those categories must somehow be built by us - built out of the raw material of particular experiences that our senses provide.
This perhaps isn't yet a problem for empiricism. It is a challenge that empiricists must address. For all we have said so far, they may be able to explain how the job may be done. But if you look at the various answers that empiricists have given to the question of how the categories we use are constructed you may well think none of them are terribly convincing. In that case you will think that empiricism does have problem. It has no terribly good answer to a question that for them certainly arises.
(For example, you may not be convinced by Locke's explanation, that we construct a category by linking together all the ideas that a set of ideas of particular things have in common.)
Familiar in biological classification, the two notions of 'species' and 'genus' (plural 'genera') are two ways of referring to categories. It is common to speak of a set of individual animals as a species and a set of species as a genus. So, understanding 'species' and 'genera' as referring to categories, we can understand the words of Pophyry which launched a great medieval debate about categories. Porphyry lived in the 3rd Century AD and wrote an introduction (in Greek) to Aristotle's Categories. It was called the Isagoge. The Isagoge impacted on medieval philosophy two centuries after it had been written, via a thinker called Boethius. He translated the Isagoge and offered his own commentary on it. (In this and in other ways Boethius was a key channel of communication between the classical world and the medieval.) Here is the brief, almost throwaway, passage which exerted via Boethius so much influence:
The question suggested and taken up by medieval philosophers was the question of the existence of categories. Did they exist, and if so in what way? Were they actual bodily things, or things but not bodily things, or perhaps they didn't really exist independently at all?
If this is the question, Plato is usually interpreted as answering: categories do indeed exist. Their existence is actually superior to the existence of bodily things, rather in the way that bodily things have a superior existence to that of shadows. But they don't exist in the world to which we have access through our senses. These categories as he thought of them are sometimes called Forms and sometimes Ideas, and they belonged he taught to a world of their own.
Of course there had to be connections between the world of Ideas and the world we have access to via our senses. What is it that makes this animal that we see in the world of sense a horse? The answer that Plato's theory gives is that it is somehow a horse in virtue of there being an Idea of Horse in the world of Ideas, and in virtue of the animal that we see somehow being 'informed' by that. So on Plato's view there are categories and they are the 'things' which populate the World of Ideas.
Aristotle disagreed. There was no World of Ideas. In what sense could there be 'species' or 'genera' then? It is not easy, and not uncontentious, to say quickly what Aristotle's answer was.
At any rate he drew a distinction between what we can still call the 'form' of a thing and the matter of which it is made up. It would be possible to pile up in a heap all the flesh and bones and sinews and organs that in other circumstances could make a living horse. The heap wouldn't be a horse, but it would collect together all the materials that could make a horse. What is the difference between such a heap and a horse? Aristotle said: form. The heap would be transformed into a horse if the matter in the heap were organised by the form of a horse.
For all that has been said so far, Aristotle's notion of 'form' needn't be thought of as any kind of explanation or theory. It could be Aristotle putting words to a distinction which fundamental ways of thinking - which we still have - force us to acknowledge if we think about it. We still see the force of the question: what is the difference between the heap of horse material and a horse?
If we then allow ourselves to survey the world (the world that is accessible to sense) it is not absurd to suggest that we will conclude that there are a limited number of forms that matter gets subjected to. We can perhaps begin to imagine what it would be like (leaving ourselves out of the picture) if matter were not subject to form at all. It would be a radical mess. There would be no things, just a big heap. Different, but something we can perhaps begin to imagine as well, would be a universe in which matter did fall under form, so that there were things, but there were as many different forms of matter as there were things. No two things then would be alike.
Our world appears to be different from both of these. There seem to be many things, but they fall into a limited - large, but limited - number of categories. As we look about us we see lots of things, but some are animals and some are not. We see lots of animals, but some are horses and some are badgers and some are worms.
So at least you could take this from Aristotle: just as a matter of observation we can see that matter is parcelled up in our world in a limited number of ways - for example there are a limited number of forms of animals out there.
This isn't all there is to the Aristotelian thought about categories, but it allows the question to be put: if it was, would it commit Aristotle to the thesis that there really are categories?
Does an austere Aristotelian concept of form entail the existence of categories?
My own thought on this is that it depends on how he thinks the categories he is recognising are produced, on what he thinks brings it about that things fall into one or other of a limited number of categories.
Maybe in Aristotle himself, but at any rate more clearly when Aristotelian ideas get seized on and worked up into Scholasticism, there is the theory that what makes a parcel of matter a thing of a particular sort (i.e. a thing that falls under a particular category) is a sort of quasi-component which is somehow 'in' the matter.
This comes into focus more when we think of another feature of the world as it appears to the serious observer: lots of the things in it develop according to a predictable pattern. For example, acorns, when they develop at all, develop into oaks. So widespread is this feature of living things that to find exceptions one has to think of very simple forms of life indeed.
In Scholastic thought, and maybe in Aristotle, when the attempt was made to think about this impressive phenomenon of natural development the notion of the form of the plant or animal, of whatever sort it was, was pressed into use. The form is thus thought of also as encompassing a representation of the end state of development, and as providing the drive which initiates and then moves development forward.
(You have the ultimate degradation of an initially acute and helpful, empirically sensitive, articulation - Aristotle's notion of 'form' - in the Scholastic identification of form with soul. The animal is seen as the temporary quarters of an independent entity, which is what the form has ultimately, under Thomist influence, become.)
So although you can understand the form as it plays its part in Aristotle's philosophy as articulating the distinction between a bit of matter lacking organisation and the same bit of matter organised into a distinct thing, in Scholastic hands it has become a mysterious something which an individual has within it, which is the 'essence' of that thing, which guides and powers its development.
In a way what the Scholastics are doing is to miss the difference between philosophical and scientific theses. Aristotle's was not an attempt to explain anything, but just to say clearly how things were. The Scholastics take him to be explaining - explaining what brings about and maintains sorts. The existence of sorts is explained by realizing that part of every individual thing is a form, and everything of the same sort has a copy of the same form. It is this form which produces the adult plant or creature.
But though there is a gesture here towards understanding mechanisms, the mechanism gestured towards is not meant to be understood. We are not meant to understand how the agent intellect abstracts the form of a thing and thus provides us with understanding. We are just meant to understand that there must be such a mechanism.
At any rate, if you think of each individual thing as having a form which produces its mature organisation, then your concept of a form is of a thing that exists. And if your account of categories is that forms produce them, your theory of forms involves you thinking that categories exist.
On the other hand, if you refuse to allow the austere notion of form to be carried away by the medievals and turned into a quasi-component of a thing, it is possible to retain the idea that categories do not exist. You would probably feel obliged to address the question: what explains the fact that there are a limited number of forms or things? But this needn't invoke the existence of categories, which the Scholastic elaboration of form in effect does.
But this would require further discussion.
Rejecting the state thought had got into under Scholasticism, the Modern John Locke is as aware as Aristotle had been that the things in the world appear to fall into a limited number of sorts and of faces afresh the question: what is their ontological status? These sorts that things appear to fall into - do they somehow 'exist'? Are there categories?
His answer - a famous one-liner - is that categories are 'the workmanship of the understanding'. What our sense experience provides us with are lots of ideas of individual things. Locke sometimes suggests that we get these straightaway just by looking or otherwise having sensory experience of a thing, but he also suggests that we construct them out of sensory experiences of different modalities. Anyhow, he thinks sense gives us ideas of individual things. He thinks each of these ideas is complex, consisting of several component simpler ideas. For example my idea of an individual table that I have just worked at may contain the simple idea of hardness and the simple idea of brownness, as well as lots of others. My 'understanding' generates a category out of a number of ideas of individual things by identifying all the component ideas which the ideas of individual things have in common. This collection of ideas which are common to all the ideas of individual things that my understanding is considering constitute the 'essence' of the category I am in this way constructing. (He calls this its 'nominal' essence.)
If this is Locke's account of how there come to appear to be categories in nature, what is his answer to Porphyry's question of whether (and in what sense) those categories exist?
In saying that our understanding constructs them, Locke is making the point that in his view there aren't any Scholastic forms. A thing is the sort of thing that it is, according to Scholastic thought, in virtue of its possessing a form, be it the form of a horse, or the form of a worm or whatever. Locke is rejecting this. There aren't forms in this sense, and the appearance the things we observe present to us of existing in limited variety is not due to there existing a limited number of forms.
What is it due to then?
Locke's answer is that it is due to the 'atomic' constitution of things.
He was a 'corpuscularian', one who believed that individual physical things were made up of configurations of tiny hard particles, too small to see directly, but through their various shapes and motions and the fact that they occupied space (and perhaps some more properties) endowed the everyday-sized objects they made up with whatever properties they possessed. So if a table was flat-topped, that would be because of the configuration its constituent particles had entered into, if it made a noise when tipped over, it would be because the accident would have created disturbances in the particles of air adjacent to the particles that made up the table, disturbances which would ripple through the air until they impacted upon the ear drum and 'so' come to be heard as sound.
So the properties of individual things were down to the properties of the particles that made them up and their configuration. And if those properties exhibited patterns - another way of putting the point that individual things appeared to fall into a limited number of categories - the patterns would be explicable in terms of the properties of their constituent particle as well.
We look at the world and see things fall into categories. This is not down to forms, it is down to the atoms that make individual things up. So Locke's position is that sorts are human constructs, but they are human constructs which reflect the real state of the world - the real properties of atoms, and the real state of their configuration.
(Locke's view has therefore nothing to do with the notion that human beings can construct whatever sorts they like.)
Aaron calls Locke's position 'conceptualism', distinguishing it from what he calls 'nominalism'. Nominalism is taken to be the view that there aren't forms, and there aren't general concepts (Locke calls them 'abstract' ideas) constructed by the understanding. It recognises that there are words that appear to refer to categories (for example 'cat' in the sentence 'the cat has too many orifices') but says that there is nothing more to generality than this - words.
The suggestion is that we can explain all that needs to be explained regarding categories, as distinct from individual things, by recognising a certain type of word.
In the sentence 'This cat is smiling' 'cat' naming an individual. In the sentence 'Cats don't often smile' 'cat is not.
Berkeley is often said to be a nominalist in this sense, and perhaps he was one. But it is difficult to work out what positive defensible doctrine he has to offer. Much more developed and trenchant is his attack on the claims about generality he thought he had identified in Locke.
Aaron argues that what remains is a question about thinking. We don't yet have a 'theory' of thinking, and understanding the nature of the categories we employ in thought (i.e. what is sometimes known as 'universals') must be an important step towards that: ''to understand universals is to begin to understand thinking'. (Aaron, TU, p.vii)
If understanding thinking is taken to be a matter of psychology (of the best kind) I agree: for one enormously suggestive way of posing this question would then be: how can we program a machine to handle categories with human sophistication?
VP
Last revised 030103
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