Is the World Vague?

Either the world is intrinsically vague or our words and concepts are but the world is not. We say that “bald” is a vague predicate and bald is a vague concept. We don’t mean they are vague as such—that the predicate is a vague linguistic entity and the concept a vague psychological entity. We mean that they denote or express something vague: they themselves are determinate entities that determinately express something vague. What is this? A property of course: the property of being bald is a vague property (borderline cases etc.). So the question becomes whether this property is part of the world or is confined to language and the mind. Is it that the world is perfectly precise and our modes of representing it are not? Suppose we say that baldness lies in our representations (the properties we bring to the world) and not on the top of people’s heads. Then nothing we say or think involving this property will be true, since there is no vague property in the world corresponding to the property we mentally represent when we say “bald” or think bald. For we are attributing a property to things that they objectively lack—nothing is objectively bald. Similarly for other vague predicates or concepts. This means that there is an enormous amount of falsehood in our statements and beliefs. But that is surely absurd: surely some people are bald and some objects are red (etc.)! So we had better say that objects do have the properties they are said to have when we use such predicates, which is to say they objectively have the properties in question. Ergo the world is vague.

            But are these vague properties mind-independent? It might be maintained that they are all in some way dependent on the mind for their instantiation: experience-dependent, interest-relative, or pragmatically defined. In addition the world has properties that are not mind-dependent and these properties are never vague—say, the properties spoken of in fundamental physics (mass, spin, charge, etc.). Maybe so, but the point makes no difference to the argument, though it raises the interesting question of why there should be such a partition (is the mind inherently vague but the physical world inherently precise?). For we still have the result that a great many properties of things are vague: reality is still vaguely constituted, not a determinate realm, not a totality of precise facts. When God made the world he made it blurry at the edges, inherently fuzzy, not a mathematician’s paradise.  [1]

  [1] If you think that precision in a property is a necessary condition of its objective instantiation, you will end up denying the reality of many facts, leaving a skeletal world or no world at all. Anti-realism about vagueness leads to anti-realism tout court. On the upside, bald men will be able to proudly announce their non-baldness (philosophy as the cure for baldness).

Is Gravity a Mystery?

Gravity was certainly viewed as a mystery upon its introduction into the learned world, on account of its action-at-a-distance powers. How can one body affect another across great distances without any connecting medium? But that is not the aspect of gravity I want to focus on; my concern is with the idea that gravity is an attractive force. It is commonly said that bodies exercise a gravitational pull on other bodies: they draw other bodies towards them by means of an emanating force. An object strays into the earth’s gravitational field and feels the gripping power of gravity pulling it downwards, and down it goes ever more rapidly. The earth actively attracts it while it is held in gravity’s grip. Gravity is thus an attractive not a repulsive force. But what is it we actually observe about such motion? We observe one object moving towards another; we observe no attractive force. This is an interpretation of what we observe. Similarly for tidal motion, the motions of the planets around the sun, and any other gravity-induced motion. Two or more objects are observed to be in relative motion and we hypothesize that there is an attractive force acting between them. But why don’t we interpret what we observe differently—why don’t we say that one object is surging towards another, actively moving in its direction under its own power? Why aren’t the waters of the world reaching out to the moon, surging in its direction? People can be irresistibly attracted to other people, powerless in their grip, but they can also just move towards them of their own volition: so why can’t we say that that’s what objects do when the force we call gravity is operating? It isn’t that the earth has pull; rather, meteors (and the like) have thrust. Isn’t this hypothesis equally compatible with the observed motions? The concept of attraction clearly derives from human psychological attraction, but inanimate bodies don’t attract in this sense; so what grounds the idea of gravitational attraction? Isn’t this gratuitous anthropomorphism with no objective basis? If we must have an invisible force, why can’t it be a propulsive force possessed by bodies in relation to each other? The sun isn’t pulling the planets in their orbits; the planets are propelling themselves around the sun—they have that active power. They propel themselves faster the closer they get to the more massive object, according to an inverse square law; but the object towards which they move exercises no pull on them—nothing like being yanked by a rope. Gravity is the power of objects to move towards other objects not the power to move other objects: the moving objects have the power, while the stationary object lacks any power to influence the movement of remote objects. Couldn’t there be a world in which this was the actual situation—no pull but all thrust? We have got into the habit of describing the motions we observe by using the concept of attraction, borrowed from human interactions, but aren’t the motions equally describable by using the concept of thrust? The sun isn’t coercing the planets to orbit it in the way they do; the planets do this of their own volition, so to speak—it is in their nature to move this way. They move according to Newton’s laws but not for Newton’s reasons: the explanation of their movements is quite different. Newton had no account of what confers the power of attraction—no physical basis for this power  [1]—but it is a question why we should talk this way to begin with, given that the observed motions are compatible with the rival hypothesis just sketched. The ability of an object to propel itself is admittedly puzzling, but on this score the two theories seem on a par. Why posit attraction?

            My point here is not that the thrust theory is true, or preferable to the pull theory; it is that we don’t knowwhich is true. Of course, it can also be said that neither theory is true: maybe there are no such forces in the universe but just the motions we observe. Such a view has been held by some physicists, and the General Theory of Relativity can be interpreted as replacing forces with the structure of space. We know that gravity exists in the sense that there are universal laws of motion of the kind adumbrated by Newton and Einstein, but we don’t know what kinds of force govern it. This is a mystery, an area of deep ignorance: we don’t know whether the earth pulls or whether objects seek it out or neither. Or both: maybe the earth pulls a bit and falling objects thrust a bit. We don’t know what forces bodies intrinsically have, only how they are disposed to move. We don’t know how forces act over empty space, but we also don’t know how the forces are distributed. I notice that some physicists eschew talk of attraction and pull, no doubt sensing their empirical vacuity; but then they are left with no causal explanation of the movement of bodies. Either movement is a mystery or gravity is a mystery or both. Not only do we not know what grounds the (alleged) gravitational pull of the earth (Newton’s lacuna); we don’t even know that it has any such pull. The whole thing starts to seem pretty damn mysterious, not to say spooky. We don’t know how gravity operates over the void; we don’t know what confers it; and we don’t know whether the force is attractive or propulsive. It is as if we observe a group of people moving around each other, some moving towards some central person, and we assume a force of attraction emanating from that central person—while it could be that they are all moving of their own accord with nothing coercive emanating from the center. The truth is that we are simply ignorant of the underlying causal structure of things.

            Now consider those billiard balls that so fascinated Hume. Here the causal nexus is one of propinquity—no action-at-a-distance (allegedly). We tend to assume that the cue ball carries the power to move the target ball: its motion is “transferred” to that ball. It has a pushing power, while the target ball just passively receives this power and is propelled in a certain direction with a determinate velocity. Hume was very concerned about this nexus, but he assumed that the cue ball has the coercive power. But is this the only possibility—what about the idea that the target ball has the power to move off when touched by the cue ball? It is the occasion of the movement but not the cause of it (Occasionalism without God): that is, the target ball propels itself away when triggered to do so by the cue ball. The case is like a person being given permission to do something and thereupon acts in a certain way: all the causal power comes from within the person not from the permission. Why isn’t this the way causality works? So-called causes don’t have causal power; so-called effects do. The triggering object has no power by itself to bring about a change in the affected object; rather, the latter object has the power to change when impinged upon by the former object. Contact causation is not a matter of a transfer of power (“energy”) from impinging object to impinged-upon object; it is a matter of the latter object having the power to move itself when certain conditions obtain involving the former object. This is an ignition-and-thrust model of causation (like rockets) not a transfer-of-power model. Active power is located in the effect object not the cause object (so-called). Again, the point is not that this model is the true theory of causation; it is that we don’t know it’s not true. We don’t know how causation works, even in this fundamental respect. Causation is thus a mystery. We talk in certain ways, probably deriving from human experience, but we have no justification for this way of talking over other ways—none that is warranted by the observable facts. Hume was right about how little observation of causal sequences tells us about the nature of causation; and it turns out that it doesn’t even tell us in which objects causal power is located. We are deeply ignorant of causation, even of the contact kind, i.e. causation is a mystery. We don’t know what is going onwith causation even in the simplest cases (which is why Occasionalism is even a theoretical possibility). The cause-effect nexus is like the mind-body nexus—an area of profound ignorance.

            Electromagnetic causation is also deeply mysterious. Here we are said to have attractive and repulsive forces (related to so-called positive and negative charge). But why employ the concepts of attraction and repulsion (pull and push)? All we observe are movements of particles towards or away from other particles; it is a further claim that attractive and repulsive forces govern these movements. Maybe particles propel themselves in the direction of other particles instead of being attracted by them (similarly for repulsion): there is no active pulling force, but rather a spontaneous tendency to move towards other particles. Or maybe there are no such forces but just brute motions, or maybe a bit of both. We don’t know. We just talk in a certain way because it makes intuitive sense to us given our psychology; there is no objective evidential basis for this mode of talk. So again, electromagnetic causation is mysterious—far from transparent. We try to summarize the motions we have observed with concepts drawn from common sense and originating in human agency, but really we are flailing in a sea of ignorance. Even so-called mechanistic causation is full of mystery, as Hume pointed out in the case of those careening billiard balls.

  [1] Note that mass could equally be the variable with respect to which a repulsive force is proportional. In a possible world in which massive objects repel other such objects, instead of attracting them, we could equally find a lawlike correlation with mass. There is no intrinsic necessary connection between mass and attraction—or none that we can discern.

Organs and Organisms

At first sight the distinction between organs and organisms looks clear and principled: an organism is an individual animal or plant while an organ is a functional part of an organism. An organ functions on behalf of an organism while an organism functions only on behalf of itself. But this apparent clarity begins to blur once we examine the matter more closely. Consider symbiosis: here one organism uses another as an organ, in effect. If the symbiosis is mutually beneficial, each organism uses the other as an organ, since the other functions as an aid to survival for its partner. It may even be a vital organ, if one organism can’t live without the presence of the other. If the benefit goes only one way, then one organism functions as an organ for the other but not vice versa (e.g. a spider using a plant to anchor its web). Some parasites function as organs inside the host organism, as with those bacteria that aid digestion. If we think ant colonies are organisms in their own right, then each ant is an organ within the whole colony. Why aren’t parent organisms effectively organs that help offspring organisms survive? Why aren’t the trees that birds live in organs of birds? The concept of an organ is functional and many things act functionally to aid the organisms they interact with: there are organs within animal bodies and there are organs outside of them (bird nests, beaver dams, spider webs, etc.). Come to think of it isn’t the whole environment of an organism one of its organs, at least in so far as it affects the survival prospects of the organism? Symbiosis is defined simply as (unlike) living things living together, and this is ubiquitous. Many organisms are simultaneously organs for other organisms. In addition, if we follow selfish gene theory, each organism functions as an organ for the survival of the genes: the organism is a “survival machine” enabling genes to be passed onto the next generation—not different in principle from hearts and kidneys.  [1] And isn’t what we call the self or mind really an organ of the biological body, enabling it to reproduce itself? Persons are organs with respect to reproducing bodies (not only that of course). Being an organ is defined functionally and the concept allows for a very wide extension, including whole organisms. Perhaps every organism is an organ of some other organism (e.g. fleas and lice).

            But what about the other way round—are organs also organisms? Not as the terms are customarily used: we don’t normally speak of the heart or kidneys as organisms in their own right. We know that some organs are organisms by the above reasoning, but are all?   Are there theoretical reasons that could justify extending the label “organism” to all organs? How, indeed, are organisms to be defined so as not to generate this consequence? Merriam-Webster defines “organism” as follows: “A complex structure of independent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole”. But doesn’t this apply straightforwardly to organs within the body? They too are complex structures made up of functionally interacting parts (think of the heart). We can’t add “and is not an organism” because some organs are organisms. The OEDoffers the rather unhelpful, “An individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form”: this is irredeemably disjunctive and fails completely to say what animals, plants, and single-celled life forms all have in common that makes them organisms. It is instructive that the term “organism” was only introduced in 1774 and is not part of natural language: it is clearly intended to cover and unify a wide variety of cases (“animal” is not general enough). It expresses a cobbled together concept designed to fill a taxonomic gap. It is obviously derived from “organ” and carries some of its sense: an organ is precisely an integrated discrete biological structure that behaves in a unified way. True, organs typically exist inside whole bodies, but this is not a necessary truth and is hardly part of the very definition of an organ. Organs could be organisms in some possible world (as mitochondria in cells were once independent bacteria): the organs constituting bodies could be organisms that have come together to form a more complex organism, perhaps leaving the collective when the time is ripe. Couldn’t it turn out that animal bodies on earth are all composed of organisms that have joined together: they may each have their own pocket of sentience and their own evolutionary agenda. In effect, they function as parasites or symbionts in relation to the rest of the body. But even supposing this not to be the case, there are good theoretical reasons for classifying organs as organisms, i.e. as not fundamentally distinct from what are usually called organisms. For the organism-centered view of biology is really an out-of-date anthropocentric approach to biological phenomena. Natural selection selects primarily for organ-types—that is what the survival of whole animals and plants depends on. The genes have to build good hearts and kidneys and brains, so that their own survival will be ensured: these are the true units of natural selection. These are what compete in the battle for survival. Ultimately this is because traits are the essential entities, and organs have traits.  [2] Natural selection operates over traits of organs, selecting hearts and kidneys that perform their function better than other hearts and kidneys. Organisms survive because their organs are well designed, not because they have properties that somehow go beyond the properties of their organs. We tend to focus on organisms because we are organisms ourselves, with consciousness and intelligence; but nature has no special interest in those traits of (some) organisms. In the case of insentient organisms we have a bundle of organs and the entire process depends on how well they function: they are what survive (or don’t) into the next generation—along with the genes that make them. The evolutionary process is gene-centered and trait-centered, with organs carrying the selective burden; whole organisms are just vehicles for these entities (the true replicators). The organism, as traditionally conceived, is a secondary player; the organs are the elements of the evolutionary mechanism. The species or group is made up of individual animals or plants and has no evolutionary significance apart from that (there is no species or group selection), but the whole animal or plant is made up of its organ parts and has no evolutionary significance apart from this. Thus we may as well homogenize the field and classify organs as organisms, i.e. as the functional units of natural selection. The distinction between them is artificial from the point of view of scientific theory, reflecting as it does an anthropocentric view of the biological world. What we really have are genes, biochemical molecules, cells, organs, and collections of organs (“organisms”): these are the true natural kinds of biology—the entities with objective existence and nomological relevance. Biology need not employ an ontology of organisms at all, as organisms are traditionally conceived.  [3]

            I think clarity is served by instituting another terminological revision (dated 2021): let us introduce the neologism “biocule”, based on the familiar “molecule”. Cells, organs, and organisms are all biocules—life forms of various types, biological entities. The evolutionary process operates over biocules, these being the true natural kinds of biology. We can certainly carry on speaking of cats and cabbages, hearts and kidneys, but we retire the organ-organism distinction, save as a vernacular convenience. Clarity is served by collapsing that distinction, thus rating organisms as organs and organs as organisms, so far as biological science is concerned. The official designation is “biocule” construed as a more general and abstract type of biological entity. The term “organism” has outlived its theoretical usefulness, and it was always rickety (what about viruses?). It really is, as the OED concedes, a disjunctive concept with no unitary overarching meaning. Animals and plants and single-celled life forms are really very different, and using “organism” for all of them is misleading in suggesting a common essence. Up to 1774 people got by with more restrictive nouns like “animal” and “plant”, which are perfectly kosher; the neologism “organism” came from a craving for generality (Wittgenstein’s phrase) that has no real basis in nature. Now that we are used to identifying other entities as the units of natural selection (notably genes) we can move away from the focus on individual organisms. Organs and organisms are not importantly distinct from the point of view of biological science, and hence from an accurate vision of how nature is objectively organized.  [4]

            Let me end with a fun thought experiment designed to nudge intuition in the direction I am recommending. Suppose some entrepreneurs decide to market internal organs as pets. They detach the organs and put them in tanks, still alive, still glistening. Hearts still pump, kidneys still filter, brains still think (or send nerve impulses around). Customers keep these organs in tanks like fish and give them pet names. They grow fond of them. They put decorative plants next to them. Wouldn’t they come to regard them as like whole organisms? After all, they are composed of living biological tissue and have a definite structure, just like regular pets. The organs have become organisms—units of life with their own separate existence. It’s only because we don’t normally see organs that we refuse to see them as organism-like; once we get to know them we might shift our attitudes towards them. Surely the brain is very like a typical organism in that it houses sentience—a whole species might just consist of brains floating in vats!  [5] The deep similarities between organs and the bodies in which they are located are sufficient to warrant a classificatory scheme in which no deep distinction between them is recognized. We just have biocules at different scales: from cells (and their constituents) to organs (and their parts) to organ systems to totalities of organ systems (organisms). The organ-organism distinction is really an untenable dualism. We may keep it for pragmatic reasons, but it is no part of a properly scientific conception of biological reality.  [6]

  [1] The phrase “survival machine” is from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976). I am presupposing a good deal of his appetite for terminological innovation in the light of new theory.

  [2] I have discussed this elsewhere: see “Trait Selection” in Philosophical Provocations (2017).

  [3] Does biology need to worry about whether caterpillars and butterflies are identical organisms? Does it matter to biology whether organisms exist over time? Does biology need to distinguish organisms from ensembles of traits?  

  [4] I haven’t discussed whether genes are also organisms. The question brings up the issue of whether genes are living things. I am inclined to say yes, because of their role in the generation of life and their propensity to replicate. They function symbiotically in relation to the body, coexisting with it to their mutual benefit. Are they also organs? Some might say they are organs of the organism, enabling it to reproduce itself in offspring; but this is really the wrong way round—it is more that animal bodies are organs of the genes, enabling them to reproduce themselves. Questions of taxonomy are theory-dependent, so taxonomic labels may have to be altered when theory changes. We are now at the point at which genes, organs, animals, and plants are all rightly grouped together as biocules, with the notion of organism used promiscuously or not at all.

  [5] Is the mind an organism? The brain is, given that bodily organs are. The idea is not outrageous, ordinary speech notwithstanding: it is a biological organ like other biological organs and has many biological properties (hereditary, functional, vulnerable to sickness and accident). It’s an organic unity, a biocule, a chunk of biological real estate (among other things).

  [6] We make a distinction between tables and chairs but that distinction is no part of physics: its natural kinds don’t coincide with the kinds distinguished in ordinary discourse. Similarly for “organ” and “organism”.