Meditation IV

Here we go again (for a while).

If relations are things only in our minds, but not real at all, maybe then there is no problem of 'reaching down to the relata' at all? My (only?) reader gans suggested something like this when she asked me to not think of relations as things, or objects, but to think of them as properties of their relata. Relations maybe are only ways in which our minds represent what are only properties in real but really unrelated things. Instead of being real, or even holding between real things, relations would hold between symbols that represent collections of phenomena. For example we have had many perceptions of a certain kind which we magically bundle up with an unknown number of unknown and somehow similar future perceptions in the symbol 'our broiler king' and in the same way we came to have or use a symbol for the book Leibniz' final System, that is 'the book about Leibniz', and now at a moment when the book is lying on the broiler king, where it certainly shouldn't ever be, if not for the sake of making another weird picture for this blog, we relate these two symbols with another symbol 'on', and the conjunction of the 3 symbols 'the book about Leibniz', 'on', 'the broiler king', in our mind, then is the relation between 'the book about Leibniz' and 'the broiler king', and this is the only relation that there is. Let's call such a relation an ideal relation. No real relation holds between the broiler king and the book, just an ideal relation.

The medievals or so called scholastic philosophers had, just as I, many problems in getting an grasp on the world, and of course they had an extra problem: what they wrote had to be in acoord with the bible and Aristotle, no prisoners taken. And specifically with respect to the notion of relation this was tricky. According to Aristotle (or the subselection of his writings the earlier  medievals knew, mainly the Categories and some of his Physics) reality consists of just two types of objects: the primary, real objects: substances and secondary objects, accidents. Substances are unalterable individuals (not ideas, but real individuals, a certain man, a certain horse), the accidents their varying properties. Substances account for the stability of the universe, accidents for its dynamicity. It's not easy to think of a substance, since when we take the accidents away, what remains for us to think of? The accidents are, in the end, what we perceive, since our senses are registers of dynamicity. Aristotle tried to answer this in his Metaphysics, which was not available to the earlier medievals, and the answers do not concern us here at the moment. We assume for the time being, that even if it's hard to think about substances we all roughly understand what they are, individuals, the things that have properties but are not properties themselves, somehow identifiable and distinguishable from other individuals, and we'll ignore the problem of aggregates for a moment.

Where do relations dwell in such a world? Some of the worries from a previuos mediation, with its imaginative metahpysics of branches and washing lines, are echoes of the medieval arguments against the reality of relations. In the anti-realist school (e.g. Auriol) which claimed that all relations were only in the intellect, the main arguments were: a) relations cannot be real things because we can't perceive them, or as they express it, nature doesn't produce them and b) a relation is something between two substances rather than in them, i.e. it's not an accident or a floating property on either one or the other substance related by it, and hence, in an Aristotelian world, it cannot be real. Therefore, the anti-realists conclude, relations exist only in the mind, where the strictures aren't so tight, where, in our dizzy heads, the unreal and the fantastic mingle, where the relations grow and glow. While in reality, relations would have to reach down, somehow, which is absurd and impossible, in our heads anything goes and the problems disappear. A major stumble-stone for the anti-realists was the trinity, which in their system could only exist in the mind of the believer, but we, as non-believers, try to tackle the problem differently.

We would want to assume that our ideal relation is not just due to fantasy or a dream, but somehow founded in reality. Otherwise its hard for us to explain why our ideal relation does not hold between and 'the book about Leibniz' and a unicorn galloping through our back alley instead, or for that matter, anything else, or why it can't be reversed, i.e. to 'the broiler king is on the book'. So we would have to explain how certain perceptions somehow arise from certain properties of really totally isolated real objects. And that is not only difficult, but arguably impossible. 

The problem with the relations is, of course that they depend on both their relata. If our ideal relation is founded by the independent properties of some two substances, then if the accidents of one substance change, those of the other would mysteriously have to change simultaneously, randomly, though there is no connection between them at all (amazingly the occasionalists, disciples of Descartes, defendend this idea!). Simply said, if we put the book under the grill, the grill changes too, because it is now above the book. Of course the grill doesn't move, so how is it possible that its 'positional accident' changes? Note that on is not a purley positional accident but a complex more relation that also implies contact between the related objects. Now try to translate contact into an accident, a property of a substance. The only possible property we can come up with is is in contact with the book or is in contact with the broiler. Obviously these 'properties' are just badly disguised relations. The unconvinced anit-relationist might now try to say that on and contact are only seondary, parasitical, relations, ultimately derived by our mind from the perception of a single property, namely the position of an object, or its coordinates, maybe, for simplification taken as the coordinates of its center of gravity. But this immediately fails, because position is a relational property itself, just as the 'contact' property construed above. A position is always relative to some point of reference, absolute, or dependent on the perceiver. Anti-realism is only tenable for the solipsist, and as neither we nor the medivals are such we both dismiss it as gogle mogle.