Abstract
A widely held view has it that sometimes there is more than one thing in exactly the same place, as is the case, allegedly, with a clay statue. There is the statue, but there also is a piece of clay—both obviously in the same place yet distinct in virtue of their differing properties, if only modal ones. Those holding this view—pluralists—often describe the relation between such objects as one of constitution, with the piece of clay being said to constitute the statue. In the first part of this paper I consider ways in which the supposed relation of constitution may be understood. I conclude that the only coherent interpretation of ‘x constitutes y’ is one on which it is presupposed that x and y are identical. While this does not, by itself, show that pluralism is false, it is something that should make us suspicious of it. In the second part of the paper I propose a simple way with the temporal and modal facts the pluralist appeals to, showing that they do not force us into accepting his puzzling doctrine.
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Notes
Putting things this way leaves open not only whether we are speaking of one thing or two but also what sorts of thing can instantiate the variables. As we will see, much turns on this.
Johnson seems to equate "the piece of matter that… constitute(s) the object" and "the matter which constitutes" it. (in Rea: 48). While noting the difference between these, Fine claims that the arguments for pluralism go through either way. (I discuss this claim below.) Evnine begins his discussion of constitution by asserting that "[C]onstitution is the relation between something and what it is made of." of speaks of "puzzles about how a bit of stuff constitutes the thing that is made of it" (2010: 251). Sometimes we find ‘formed’ doing the work of ‘made,’ as in Yablo's "…a bust of Aristotle… formed of a certain hunk of wax" (1987: 294). The points just made apply equally. (Puzzlingly, Yablo also says that the bust is composed of the hunk of wax.) By contrast, ‘a hunk of clay in the form of a bust of Aristotle’ makes eminent sense. But that is clearly identity talk.
I shall discuss Wilson’s fourth candidate for a (near)-synonym of ‘constituted by’, viz., ‘is made of,’ below.) Elder appears to be alone in recognizing that one thing cannot make up another in denying that there is "[an] individual object such that it composes the statue." But he also says that "there is a kind of stuff…such that the statue is composed of it" and that "[t]here are objects, in the plural, [atoms] which together constitute [it]." (1998: 14) This has things exactly backwards. While a thing is made of a kind of stuff, it is not composed of it, and while it is composed of parts, these do not constitute it.
Gibbard is, of course, no pluralist. But he also says (more than once: 1975: 93, 96) "that a clay statue is identical with the piece of clay of which it is made." (My emphasis).
Whether composition is identity, as some think, is not something I need to take a position here. On the one hand, while there is a sense in which a thing is more that the sum of its parts, that is not eo ipso to say that the thing and the parts are not identical. It is to agree only that the thing is more than a mere sum of the parts, not that it is more than the parts arranged in a particular way. In saying that the ship is more than its parts, we should not be taken to be saying that what we have when the parts are arranged ship-wise is more than just the parts that are so arranged. On the other hand, saying that one thing can be many things is hardly un-problematical. As van Inwagen urges, an identity sentence with a singular term on one end and a plural referring expression on the other is "syntactically radically defective." (1995: 287) (For a detailed discussion of the topic, see Yi 2014) Cameron seeks a middle way in arguing that what grounds the existence of a thing is not just what parts compose it but also how they compose it, how the parts are arranged. (2014: 105).
While to say that x constitutes y is to presuppose that x and y are identical, it is not to assert it. What we are saying when we say this is that a property such that if something has it it necessarily has a certain other property is in fact instantiated by a certain thing. (This is what, according to Jubien, victims of what he calls object fixation overlook).
Whether a piece of some stuff remains the same piece if its shape changes, as the pluralist's argument assumes, may be questioned. The fact that it is the same clay, which it unquestionably it is, does not entail that it is the same piece of clay. (Cp. Thomson: "I don't myself find it obvious that a piece of house-shaped ice could have been a piece of ship-shaped ice." (1997: 209)) I can leave this open here, except for remarking that the pluralist's argument requires the assumption that statues have their shape essentially. But given that resemblance is not necessary (and, of course, not sufficient) for representation, is it obvious that the piece of clay squeezed into a ball cannot be a statue of Goliath? Suppose that our sculptor is not only not pleased with the life-like statue but decides that a ball-shaped piece represents the subject better. (It helps to imagine him working on a monumental scale).
Here is Brian Pickel: "I defend the view that ordinary objects like statues are identical to the pieces of matter from which they are made." (2010: 147) Noonan—who also thinks that constitution is identity, but for reasons different from both Pickel's and those on offer here—has "Goliath is a statue and Lumpl is the piece of clay from which it is made." (1993:) Taken literally, saying ‘identical to the piece from which it is made’ is to say that the statue is identical to the piece of clay we have before the sculptor begins his work. Of course, that piece cannot be Lumpl, who shows up only when Goliath does. But with ordinary cases in which a statue is made from a pre-existing piece of clay piece of clay, the claim is true if pieces of clay do not have their shape essentially. If they do, it is false. But even if we think that pieces do not have their shape essentially and thus that the piece of clay from which the statue is made and the piece of clay we have once it is made are the same piece, there was no statue for that piece to be identical with before the sculptor got his hands on it. There is no mystery about how the statue and the piece of clay from which it was made are related: the latter becomes the former through the labours of the sculptor.
Fine holds that while the form of a thing is not a part of it in a straightforward mereological sense, it is still a component of it. (1999: 65) Cameron argues that this commits Fine to "a new, mysterious way in which something can be a part." (2014: 105) I think Fine is right to recognize, along with Aristotle, that the notions of part-hood and composition are more general and admit of relata of different ontological categories. (Being red is part of what makes something a red flag.) But this does not make Fine immune to the objection I am raising. For a pluralist conclusion to follow, the relata must be of the same category, namely, things.
Granted, the same expressions can be used to refer to individual things, as in ‘the pound of flour in this cake.’ But the thing thus referred to is not something from which the cake is made. (A different example of the mistake of taking expressions of this sort to be always referring expressions is discussed in Biro 2010).
He is not alone in this. Even Almotahari, who defends monism against Fine’s argument against it, accepts a characterization of the position as "thinking that an artifact (a statue, say, or a door) and its constituent matter (a piece of alloy, for example, or a hunk of plastic) are one and the same entity,” (2014: 397)—where it is clear that ‘its constituent matter’ is to be understood as a thing, not as a parcel of a kind of stuff.
It has been put to me that our use of ‘constitute’ and ‘compose,’ is more permissive than I take it to be: in the OED we find ‘to constitute’ defined as ‘to make up, form, compose; to be the elements… of which the thing … consists,’ and ‘compose’ as ‘to constitute, make up; to be the constituents … of a thing’ (predicated of elements)’. At first sight, this makes it appear that ‘constitute’ and ‘compose’ are interchangeable. But note that in both definitions we are talking about the relation between a thing and its parts and not about one between a thing and another thing. Suppose that saying ‘the team is constituted by eleven players’ is as acceptable as ‘the team is composed of eleven players’ (as it is not to my ear), that shows nothing about the acceptability of either ‘the statue is constituted by (of?) the piece of clay’ or ‘the statue is composed of the piece of clay.’ Both of the latter are unacceptable because the things said to be so related are single things. When placed between two singular terms, both ‘compose’ nor ‘constitute’ yield ungrammatical expressions. When placed between a singular and a plural term, they both have the sense of ‘comprise,’ obviously of no use to the pluralist. When Shoemaker says “While the statue is composed of bronze, and of a particular portion or quantity of bronze, it does not seem right to say that it is composed of a piece of bronze,” (1971: 531) he has it only half right: neither is the right thing to say.
I essay one that may be elsewhere (Biro 2016).
As we may imagine Moore doing while sculpting the various works he described as a two-piece or a three-piece figure.
Which does not mean that we have to put the point by saying that they are identical, a misleading way of speaking monists sometimes adopt. As Lewis notes, that “…is a nonsense of grammar” (1986: 249) I am not sure what he means by ‘nonsense of grammar,’ though. If he means just that ‘they are identical,’ taken literally, is nonsense, I am with him: two things cannot be one thing. But if he means that (English) grammar somehow forces or traps us into uttering such nonsense, I am not. ‘Goliath and Lumpl are identical’ can – and should – be understood in the same way as ‘Hesperus and Phosphorus are the same star’ (or ‘The evening star and the morning star are the same heavenly body’) not as saying that two things are one thing but (Frege's second thoughts notwithstanding) as a misleading way of saying that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ (or ‘the evening star’ and ‘the morning star’) denote the same thing. (We can say, if we like, that they do so via different descriptions or modes of presentation.) So, too, ‘Goliath’ and ‘Lumpl’ (or ‘the statue’ and ‘the piece of clay’) denote the same thing, even if they do so by way of different properties of it. (Jubien 2009). Nor is this special to linguistic representations. There can be two (or more) sightings of the same thing – of a fugitive, of the Loch Ness Monster, or of celestial body.
On this, see Jubien (2009: 16–22).
Elder takes his story about sea-water turning a sunken wooden table into stone to show not only that the table can continue to exist when the piece of wood (it once was) no longer does but also that even being made of wood is not essential to its being the same table it was before sinking (1998: 326). He does, however, also say that "…the mass of copper… manages to outlast the statue with which it temporarily coincides, when the statue gets flattened." (1998: 320) If ‘mass of copper’ means ‘piece of copper,’ he is endorsing pluralism; if it means ‘the copper the statue is made of,’ to say that it temporarily coincides with the statue can be to say only that a certain portion of copper is for a time a statue. That, however, is not a case of co-location.
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Biro, J. Constitution and Identity. Erkenn 83, 1127–1138 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9932-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9932-0