Abstract
G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us.
I should have never expected so sensible an election for Oxford
the way they have been going on lately.
(McTaggart on Stout, 1899)
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This remark is drawn from the Gifford lectures ( God and Nature) that Stout had delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1919–1921. The lectures were only published posthumously in 1952.
- 3.
Stout’s works on psychology include his Analytic Psychology (1896) and Manual of Psychology (1898). It is a further part of Mulligan’s diagnosis (that unfortunately remains unpublished) that Stout qua psychologist was heavily influenced by the writings of two pupils of Brentano: especially Stumpf’s book on spatial perception (1873) and Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (1901), on which see Mulligan (1995). See Valentine (2001) for an account of the contribution made by Stout to the development of cognitive science.
- 4.
It would be going too far to say that this shift in key had never been noticed by anyone. D.C. Williams heard it but only as a disharmony. About Stout, Williams remarked, “His theory of abstract particulars…is almost identical with the one I am defending; if there is a difference it is in his obscure idea of the class as a unique form of unity not reducible to similarity” (1953, p. 12). O’Connor heard the shift in key too, “Every philosophical theory has to take certain concepts as basic and unanalysable, just as every logical system has to assume certain primitive ideas and unproved postulates”, but he questioned whether distributive unity conceived as a primitive concept contributed towards an ideologically economical theory (O’Connor 1949, pp. 64–5).
- 5.
So I read Stout as anticipating Peter Simons’ “nuclear trope theory”, according to which an ordinary thing that is constituted from a bundle of essential tropes, a “nucleus”, acts as the substratum of a looser bundle of accidental tropes (see Simons 1994).
- 6.
This is essentially the view of determinates and determinables advanced by Campbell (1990, p. 83), although his analysis takes resemblance rather than distributive unity as primitive.
- 7.
Although even the principle that that a particular cannot be wholly present in different places at the same time is open to question. What about the possibility of extended atoms, bi-located saints, Dr. Who meeting himself and so on? (see MacBride 1998, pp. 220–7).
- 8.
Towards the end of his life, Stout was to remark in a paper that grew out of correspondence with Kemp Smith: “If distributive unity is a category, it ought to be possible to give a ‘transcendental proof’ of its formula, analogous to those given by Kant for causality and the other so-called principles of judgement” (1947, p. 16).
- 9.
The argument that Armstrong attributes to Stout is really one to be found in Russell (1911–12) who had filched it from Moore (1900–01). Stout was doubtless aware of Russell’s argument; he alludes to it in his Gifford lectures (1952, p. 78). But although there is a family resemblance between them, Stout’s argument, as will become apparent, exhibits key differences. See Hochberg (1978, pp. 129–33) for discussion of Russell’s argument.
- 10.
- 11.
Compare the semantic version of the Context Principle that Dummett sketches in his 1973, pp. 496–8.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jane Heal and Frédérique Janssen-Lauret for comments upon a final draft, to Maria van der Schaar for sending me a copy of her 1991, and to Kevin Mulligan for a memorable conversation about Stout in a Geneva café some years ago. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council whose funding made it possible to complete this paper.
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MacBride, F. (2014). The Transcendental Metaphysic of G. F. Stout: His Defence and Elaboration of Trope Theory. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04199-5_10
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