| |
|
Most anglo-american philosophers who hold some form of the bundle theory about particulars are also scientific realists. They would agree that the properties of particular objects can be reduced to the the properties and relations of elementary scientific entities.
But bundle theory is supposed to explain the structure of things on a metaphysical, not scientific level. Perhaps the fact that these philosophers still have any faith in this kind of explanation is an indictment of analytic philosophy, but it would be unfair to say that everything they're trying to explain can just be accounted for by science.
Now we're talking about this as a general metaphysical theory, rather than just a description of the 'self'. Philosophers who do this are interested in the properties shared by various concrete objects. For example, an apple, a british post box and the pen next to me are all 'red'. What is this property, 'red', which they all share?
Lets just say we do decide that red is a property caused by the structure of the atoms that make up my apple, the light in the room, and the way my optical system works. There's still some property that we are ascribing to the apple, right? This 'structure of its atoms': let's call it @red@, to distinguish it from the colour we are familiar with in experience.
Now you can say that this property, @red@, is ultimately explainable in terms of the arrangement of atoms (and why stop there, physics has come a long way since the C17th - its probably reducible to the properties of sub-atomic particles, maybe even superstrings). But this type of scientific explanation isn't really what these philosophers are interested in.
There's still a property, @red@, that we're identifying with this particular type of arrangement of atoms, and if its properties we're talking about it doesn't really matter if you can explain this in terms of more basic entities. You're still going to need to talk about some arrangement of your fundamental particles which, when it occurs, leads to the object in question having the property @red@. You can't just say 'there's atoms there', you need to explain their arrangement, relations, etc.
And as I said, most bundle theorists would agree that the properties of the objects we are familiar with are explicable in terms of more basic scientific entities. The problem is that these entities must necessarily have properties themselves. If we take atoms as our most basic entities, how are we going to explain the properties they have (mass, charge, etc)?
The bundle theorist says that all particulars are (where particulars are your most basic ontological entities, and the things built up from them), are a group on compresent properties. Again, taking atoms as our most basic entities, the bundle theorist would agree that we can build any other properties we like out of them, but she would also claim that all the atom itself was was a collection of compresent properties. Obviously we know this is not the case (quarks, electrons, etc), but simply replace 'atom' with whatever you want your most basic entity or entities to be and you'll get the same result.
If you then step back and consider the objects of everyday experience, you're still left with the same problem. Just pointing to more basic scientific entities won't do the trick for these philosophers, because its not physics they're interested in. They'll agree to explain the properties we're talking about in scientific terms, and still insist that their metaphysical questions remain.
Bundle theories of this type are specific to a very particular area of anglo-american philosophy. I think they're pretty incoherent actually, and I find it very difficult to grasp the problems they are supposed to explain, as this post probably demonstrates. However I will say that I have no idea what bundle theories of this sort, rather than those simply concerned with the description of the 'self', could have to do with past lives or Idealism in the Berkleian sense. |
|
|
