The Indeterminacy of the Distinction between Objects and Ways of Being
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The Indeterminacy of the Distinction between Objects and Ways of Being Julio De Rizzo1,2,3 Received: 15 January 2020 / Accepted: 9 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Few if any distinctions are more easily recognisable and assented to than that between objects, that is, things which are some ways, and that which they are, that is, ways for objects to be (‘ways of being’ for short). In this paper I present an argument designed to show that this distinction is indeterminate in the sense that the truth-conditions of predicational sentences leave open what should count as an object and a way of being. The bulk of the argument is inspired by the celebrated permutation argument advanced by Quine, Wallace, Putnam and others. The story has it that the people of Yesmar, a small island in South America, spoke a language curiously distinct from ours. For Yesmarish didn’t have a device corresponding to our copula: to state a simple monadic predication, a Yesmarian would simply list two words. Importantly, the order would not affect meaning. When stating time tense, plurals, or simple quantifications, one would simply add a device to either of the two words, again without a change of meaning between both choices. Besides, Yesmarians didn’t have a procedure for deriving singular terms from general terms, as we do by means, for example, of the suffixes ‘ness’ or ‘ity’, which allows us to form ‘redness’ and ‘simplicity’ from ‘red’ and ‘simple’, respectively. As a matter of fact, linguists of the time claimed to have conclusive evidence that no distinction between a singular term and a general term would make sense to a Yesmarian in the first place. Thus, faithful translators of Yesmarish into English would always face a choice between various formulations. Confronted with a white rabbit, a Yesmarian would utter a construction strictly comparable to ‘rabbit white’, ‘white rabbit’, ‘whiteness rabbithood’, ‘rabbithood whiteness’, ‘white rabbithood’, ‘rabbit whiteness’, and so on, all meaning simply that a certain rabbit is white. * Julio De Rizzo [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2
Department of Philosophy, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
3
Fachbereich Philosophie, Universität Hamburg, Überseering 35, Hamburg 22297, Germany
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J. De Rizzo
Of course, the story of Yesmar is probably nothing more than a curious fiction. But the possibility of such a language, if it can be established, would be of obvious philosophical interest. For Yesmarians who came to know English and learn about the singular and general term distinction would seemingly not hesitate to insist that it is not a substantive matter which of ‘This rabbit is white’ or ‘This whiteness rabbitises’ fares better when it comes to a description of what goes on in reality.1 To put this in other terms, to ask of the obtaining fact rendering both sentences true whether it has the rabbit or the particular instance of white as objects, and the being white of the former or th
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