On Drawing Lines across the Board
Achille C. Varzi
Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York
[Final version published in Leo Zaibert (ed.), The Theory and Practice of Ontology, London,
Palgrave Macmillian, 2016, pp. 45–78.]
1. A geographic preamble
In his celebrated Romanes Lecture of 1907, George Curzon of Kedleston—former British Viceroy of India under Queen Victoria and King Edward VII and
future Secretary for Foreign Affairs under King George V—emphasized the
overwhelming influence of political frontiers in the history of the modern world.
The majority of the most important wars of the [last] century have been Frontier
wars. Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandisement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition—wars in which the personal element was often the predominant
factor—tend to be replaced by Frontier wars, i.e., wars arising out of the expansion
of states and kingdoms, carried to a point, as the habitable globe shrinks, at which
the interests or ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision
with those of another. (Curzon 1907, p. 5)
He knew what he was talking about. At the time of his lecture, the determination
of the geopolitical frontiers of the British Empire was a major source of diplomatic preoccupation, if not of international danger, and Curzon himself had just
returned from a continent where he had been responsible for the security of a
land frontier 5,700 miles in length (“the most diversified, the most important,
and the most delicately poised in the world”, p. 4). It was not without authority,
therefore, that he would see his lecture as an opportunity to urge British foreign
ministers and ambassadors to concentrate their efforts on frontier policy, in the
conviction that many sources of political discord could be removed through the
adjustment of rival “interests and ambitions” at points where the relevant territorial borders adjoin.
Frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modem issues
of war or peace, of life or death to nations. […] Just as the protection of the home is
the most vital care of the private citizen, so the integrity of her borders is the condition of existence of the State. (p. 7)
1
As Curzon himself pointed out, at the time of his lecture no comprehensive
work had ever been devoted to the subject of frontiers as a whole. The formulae
of frontier policy were hidden “in the arcana of diplomatic chancelleries”; its incidents and drama were in the hands of a few silent men “in the clubs of London, or Paris, or Berlin” (p. 5). His 58-page text may therefore be considered the
first sustained attempt to fill in that important gap, not only from the perspective
of political history and “the science of government”, as he would call it, but also
in the theoretical foundations of geopolitics as we know it today. In fact, Curzon’s text is admirable for the rich supply of historical and political examples
with which he illustrates his main thesis about the overwhelming importance of
frontiers. However, what makes it a truly groundbreaking contribution is precisely the theoretical framework in terms of which Curzon articulates his thesis.
And what makes the framework powerful, today as in 1907, is that it rests entirely on a single, fundamental conceptual distinction. It is the distinction between those frontiers, or boundaries, that are afforded by “the natural features of
the earth’s surface”, such as mountain ranges, ravines, coastlines, river banks,
desert barriers, etc., and those boundaries which, not being dependent upon any
such landmarks for their selection, have instead been “artificially created by
man” and find their origin “in the complex operations of race, language, trade,
religion, and war” (p. 13).
To us, this may sound like an obvious distinction to draw.1 Any atlas will
contain maps of two sorts, physical and political, and any history book will reveal that the history of boundaries is to a great extent a chronicle of the progressive need to supplement or to replace natural boundaries of the first kind by artificial boundaries of the latter kind as the human population increased, commerce
and industry grew, and naval and military forces (along with imperialism) developed. Yet what seems obvious to us was not as plain and clearly understood
at the time of Curzon’s lecture. More importantly, Curzon did not simply codify
the distinction; he also showed that the natural/artificial opposition is of great
significance from a broader theoretical perspective. For precisely insofar as the
“condition of existence” of a political unit lies in the “integrity of its borders”, it
1
The natural/artificial opposition was fully endorsed by the next two major writers on the
topic of geographic frontiers, Holdich (1916) and Fawcett (1918), and soon became standard lore
(see Prescott 1969). Curzon himself introduced it as “generally recognized, and scientifically the
most exact” (p. 13), and it is indeed present in eminent treatises of his time, most notably Friedrich Ratzel’s Politische Geographie (1897), §361, “Natürliche und künstliche Grenzen”, and
Lassa Oppenheim’s International Law (1905), §198, “Natural and Artificial Boundaries”.
2
makes a big difference whether the borders themselves have been robustly fixed
by Nature or simply drawn conventionally by people through political agreement, unilateral stipulation, or warfare. Again, this may sound like a truism, and
Curzon himself seemed to think it was:
That a country with easily recognized natural boundaries is more capable of defence and is more assured of a national existence than a country which does not
possess those advantages; that a country with a sea Frontier, such as the British
Isles, particularly if she also possesses sea-power, is in a stronger position than a
country which only has land Frontiers and requires a powerful army to defend
them; that a mountain-girt country is the most secure of internal States—these are
the common-places of political geography. (p. 10)
The fact remains, however, that the point had never before been made and articulated so explicitly, and for this reason alone, if not for Curzon’s actual use
of the distinction in the course of his long political career,2 his Romanes Lecture
should be regarded as a milestone in the foundations of modern geopolitics.
Indeed, Curzon’s point bites even deeper than that. It bites deeper and wider,
for boundaries are not a prerogative of geography. Boundaries are at work in
articulating every aspect of the reality with which we have to deal. They stand
out in every map we draw of the world—the world of geography as well as the
world of human experience at large, beginning with the contents of perception.
There is, at bottom, a map in every child’s line drawing. And this ubiquity of
boundaries goes in concert with the pervasiveness of the natural/artificial distinction, the apparent contrast between objective and subjective demarcations,
the opposition—in Barry Smith’s more recent terminology3—between bona fide
joints of reality and fiat articulations that lie skew to any factual differentiations
on the side of the world and simply reflect, in whole or in part, human practices,
decisions, and cognitive operations. In short, Curzon’s distinction betokens the
2
Among other things, at the end of World War I Curzon was responsible for drawing the
eastern frontier of the lands in which the Allies would recognize the right of the newly independent Poland to form an administration. Known as the Curzon Line, the project did not materialize and the Polish-Russian conflict continued until 1921, when the Treaty of Riga settled on
a border some 160 miles east of Curzon’s proposal. During World War II, however, Stalin insisted on reviving the original project and in 1945 the Curzon Line, only slightly altered, became
the permanent border. For a detailed historical reconstruction, see Eberhardt (2012).
3
From Smith (1994a). Smith does not mention Curzon; instead, he notes that the bona fide /
fiat opposition is analogous to the one drawn by Frege (1884), §26, between the ‘actual’ [wirklich] and the ‘objective’ [objectiv].
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general opposition between what is found or discovered and what is made or created, and this opposition has ramifications that go far beyond the “commonplaces of political geography”; they take us straight to the fundamental metaphysical opposition between realism and antirealism. For the question of realism
is, in an important sense, the question of what are the natural boundaries, those
that “carve at the joints”. And in this sense, antirealism may be seen as the radical stance enticed by the limit case: What if there aren’t any? What if, pace Lord
Curzon, all boundaries are on closer look of the fiat, artificial sort?
2. From geography to metaphysics
Let me elaborate on the thesis that boundaries, and the natural/artificial distinction that they elicit, are not a prerogative of the large-scale geographic world
that we find depicted in ordinary maps and atlases. In this regard, Barry Smith’s
work over the years has been enormously influential, and thoroughly comprehensive, but the point it is still worth stressing.4
To some extent the thesis is self-evident. Consider, for instance, the smallerscale world featured in cadastral registries, a domain amply studied by Smith
himself in his joint work with Leo Zaibert. Here it is immediate that the parceling of land into real estate is a twofold boundary business of the sort described
by Curzon. In some cases the parceling may reflect physical discontinuities to
be found in the land itself, such as ditches, cliffs, creeks, etc. More often, however, it is just a matter of fencing off a plot of land by fiat, and the ownership of
the plot does not depend on its physical properties and associated natural rights;
it is entirely an institutional affair, a matter of social and legal agreements.
The act of fencing alone is not sufficient for such object-creation. [It] requires also
the existence of what John Searle calls collective intentionality, that is, it requires
that other persons (simplemindedly or not) believe that the land is indeed the property of he who fenced it off. (Smith and Zaibert 2001, p. 162)5
Or consider the partitioning of the ecological environment effected by what
biologists call niche construction (Odling-Smee 1988).6 Here, again, we have a
4
Here I rely also on some joint work, particularly Smith and Varzi (2000).
See also Smith and Zaibert (2003), p. 36. The point about collective intentionality refers to
Searle’s theory of social objects in (1995). On the metaphysical issues underlying the practice of
cadastral mapping, see also Zaibert (1999) and Bittner, von Wolff, and Frank (2000).
6
Standardly, ecological niches are defined as abstract “hypervolumes” in a many-dimen5
4
clear illustration of the pervasiveness of boundaries in the organization and representation of the space around us, and again Curzon’s distinction applies immediately (though obviously without recourse to explicit conventions or legal
agreements). There are niches that are fully enclosed within a physical retainer,
such as an egg, a closed oyster shell, or a larval chamber; niches that, like a kangaroo pouch or a bear’s cave, are bound partly by a physical boundary and partly by an immaterial boundary marking (more or less vaguely) the opening
through which the organism is free to leave; niches that are bounded by a physical retainer to a very low extent, as with the niche of the oxpecker removing
ticks from the back of an African rhinoceros (bounded by a part of the rhinoceros’s hide); and, finally, niches that lack a physical retainer altogether and are
bordered entirely by boundaries of the fiat sort, as with a fish orbiting underwater or a falcon in the sky circling above the area where its prey is to be found. It
is indeed remarkable how closely such a variety of niche structures mirrors the
geopolitical variety described by Curzon. His “common-places of political geography” are also confirmed, for obviously the prima facie strength and protective
function of any particular niche—what Gibson (1979) calls its “affordance-character”—is to a large degree determined by the sort of boundaries that delimit it.
And just as the history of geopolitical boundaries is, to a great extent, a history
of the progressive need to supplement natural boundaries with artificial ones, so
the history of evolution is, in many ways, a history of the growth in complexity
of the organism-environment relations. As Richard Lewontin famously put it:
Unless there is some preferred or natural way to subdivide the world into niches the
concept loses all predictive and explanatory value. […] There is a constant interplay of the organism and the environment, so that although natural selection may
be adapting the organism to a particular set of environmental circumstances, the
evolution of the organism itself changes those circumstances. (1978, p. 215)
Now, it is not an exaggeration to say that this sort of considerations apply
across the board, including the mapping of reality that emerges from the cognitive acts of single individuals. I mentioned, for instance, the contents of perception. We know that these are structured for the most part in terms of figure-
sional space determined by environmental variables—such as temperature, soil fertility, foliage
density, proximity of predators, etc.—pertaining to the survival of organisms of a given species
(Hutchinson 1957). When it comes to individual organisms, however, such niche types can exist
only through a corresponding token, viz. the actual physical space that the organisms occupy,
and it is tokens of this sort that I have in mind here. See Smith and Varzi (1999) and (2002).
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ground organization (Rubin 1921), which is to say the organization of the visual
field into objects that stand out from their surroundings. This is entirely a matter
of drawing boundaries. And here, too, we find the same mix of bona fide and
fiat components that is so central in geographic representations7 (which may explain why Kant, of all people, was so keen on teaching geography throughout
his career8). On the one hand, we tend to see and track the middle-size objects in
our immediate environment on the basis of the natural boundaries they seem to
possess. The use of edge-detection techniques for object recognition in computer vision is motivated precisely by this fact, for in normal circumstances such
boundaries correspond to salient discontinuities in the depth and brightness of
the perceived scene.9 The very fact that humans, from the time they are infants,
tend to reify and quantify over such non-entities as holes and shadows just as
easily as they do with regard to material objects, as developmental psychology
and the psychology of perception have amply shown,10 is another proof of the
importance of “natural” discontinuities in the segmentation of the visual scene:
the possession of a boundary is a sign of objecthood. On the other hand, it is also true that sometimes we parse the visual scene in terms of boundaries that involve the creative contribution of our perceptual apparatus, which, as we know
from Schumann’s work on illusory contours, tends to articulate reality in terms
of continuous borders even when such borders “are objectively not present”
(1900, p. 14). Kanizsa’s triangle (1955) is perhaps the example that best epitomizes this phenomenon. But the same could be said of many other ways in
which fiat boundaries emerge from the figure-ground organization of the visual
field through the basic factors studied by Gestalt theorists, such as proximity,
continuity, closure, color and texture similarity, good form, etc. (Wertheimer
1923). There is no bona fide boundary in a pointillist painting, except perhaps
around each individual color spot; yet we see each “figure” as though it possessed a regular contour.
7
Smith himself mentions “the complex and subtle fiat organization” of the visual field in
his (1995a). See also (1999c).
8
Kant taught geography at Königsberg from 1756 to 1796 for a total of forty-nine times,
more frequently than any of his other subjects except for logic and metaphysics. In his own
words upon retiring, such teaching was “aimed at knowledge of the world” (1798, p. xiv), though
he thought that a published version of his lectures was “scarcely possible” (his notes were “hardly legible”). A four-volume edition, unauthorized, was nonetheless published very soon as Kant
(1801–1805); a separate two-volume edition, authorized, appeared as Kant (1802).
9
For a survey, see e.g. Davies (2005).
10
See e.g. Giralt and Bloom (2000) and Nelson and Palmer (2001).
6
And perception is just the beginning. As Smith has argued since (1994a),
similar considerations apply at any level of representation or organization of the
spatial world around us. We think of a boundary every time we think of an object as of something separated from or distinct within its surroundings. There is
a boundary (a surface) enclosing this apple. There is a boundary marking off my
body from the environment. There is a boundary around every water droplet. In
cases such as these, it is intuitive to speak of natural demarcations, as with the
boundaries of an island: they are, Smith says, “boundaries in the things themselves” (1995a, p. 476),11 which exist and would exist even in the absence of all
delineating or conceptualizing activity on our part. Yet in many other cases the
demarcations are clearly artificial or human-induced. The boundary delimiting
my part of the office from my colleague’s, Tibble’s tail from the rest of her body,
the header from the text area in the page layout—these are boundaries that we
draw by fiat in order to partition a larger whole into proper parts, exactly as with
the geographic border that separates Lesotho from South Africa or Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic. Conversely, just as certain agglomerations may, in
the geographic world, have a principle of unity, as with Benelux or Polynesia, so
fiat boundaries are at work whenever we circumclude a number of smaller objects into larger wholes:12 we represent the world as consisting of trees, bees,
and stars but also of forests, swarms, and constellations (and schools of fish,
flock of birds, herds of cattle, decks of cards, encyclopedias, bikinis, tokens of
the letter ‘i’, etc.).13
Temporal entities, too, such as events and processes, have boundaries, viz.
beginnings and endings;14 and Curzon’s distinction appears to apply to this domain equally well. A person’s birth and death, the instant when a ball begins to
roll, the point in the splitting of an amoeba when one animal suddenly becomes
two: these would be temporal boundaries of the bona fide sort. A person’s turning twenty-one years old, by contrast, or the subdivision of baseball games into
innings and of innings into frames, are clear examples of fiat discriminations
that are driven entirely by human conventions and purposes. Similarly for the
boundaries through which a complex of actions and events is singled out and
described as a wedding, a conference, a revolution, a war, etc., which is but the
11
The phrase returns in (1997b), p. 120, (1999c), p. 320, (2001a), p. 142, and (2001b), p. 76.
This parallel is fully articulated in Smith (1999a).
13
Cf. the literature on scattered objects, beginning with Cartwright (1975).
14
They also have spatial boundaries, even though these are typically affected by a much
higher degree of indeterminacy. See Varzi (2002) and Borghini and Varzi (2006).
12
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temporal analogue of the sort of boundary whereby an agglomeration of smaller
spatial entities is circumcluded by fiat into a larger whole. This is a phenomenon
that is actually quite common also in relation to the simpler and more private
events that make up our normal day-to-day lives. To use one of Smith’s favorite
examples,15 whenever we comprehend the apparent contact between two bodies
as a kiss or a handshake we rely on our fiat lassos to carve out from a congeries
of physical processes (relating to surface tension, fluid exchange, etc.) and associated psychological phenomena (of tactual and emotional feeling, etc.) a conventional and neatly demarcated unit.
Finally, even abstract entities (if such there be) may be said to have boundaries. This is obvious when it comes to the abstract figures studied by geometry.
But the same applies, for instance, to such abstracta as sets and classes, or concepts, witness Euler’s popular method for representing the former by means of
simple closed curves “within which all the [elements] are confined” (1768, p.
98) or Frege’s demand that in logic every concept “must have a sharp frontier”
(1903, p. 69).16 And here, too, the natural/artificial opposition appears to play an
important role. Those sets or concepts that are expressed by projectible predicates, substance sortals, or so-called natural-kind terms, such as ‘emerald’,
‘horse’, or ‘gold’, would have genuine bona fide boundaries; those that are expressed by disjunctive predicates such as ‘emerose’ and ‘grue’, or by phase sortals such as ‘colt’ and ‘teenager’, would by contrast come with artificial, fiat
boundaries that do not support lawlike generalizations (Goodman 1954). Ditto
for the corresponding universals, if such there be. For another example, literary
and musical compositions (construed as abstract types) typically come as
bounded entities, and just as we partition them into chapters and movements, or
extract quotations, so we collect them by fiat into larger wholes: Kant’s Opus
Postumum, the Harry Potter saga, Wagner’s Ring, etc.
So much, then, for the claim that boundaries are not a prerogative of geography. They definitely aren’t. Call them frontiers, borders, edges, contours, margins, surfaces, beginnings and endings, limits, or what have you—it is a fact that
boundaries stand out in every map of the world, at any level of representation,
and so does the natural/artificial distinction that they elicit across the board. And
if things are so, then it is a short step now to see in what sense Curzon’s distinc15
From Smith (1999b), p. 289, revisited in Smith and Varzi (2000), p. 404, and Smith
(2001a), p. 135.
16
Today it is also common to speak litreally of conceptual spaces, and of the geometry and
topology of thought that they represent. See Gärdenfors (2000).
8
tion bites much deeper and wider than he himself might have thought, to the
point of raising fundamental metaphysical issues. For,
Lo! Once fiat outer boundaries have been recognized, then it becomes clear that the
genuine-fiat opposition can be drawn in relation to objects also. (Smith 1994a, p. 17)
If a certain entity is fully enclosed by a natural, self-connected boundary of the
appropriate sort, then it is reasonable to suppose that its existence and persistence conditions do not depend on us; it is a bona fide entity in its own right. For
Smith this is actually the central mark of genuine substances (1992, §6). By contrast, if its boundaries are, in whole or in part, artificial, then the entity itself is to
some degree a fiat entity, a construct, a product of our worldmaking. Clearly this
is a big difference. And the question of which entities are of which sort becomes
the fundamental metaphysical question of which entities are there to be discovered and which, by contrast, are created by us.
3. Realism vs. antirealism
As I mentioned, this way of framing the question takes us straight to the traditional opposition between realism and antirealism. Smith puts it thus:
We might distinguish, in the range of possible ontologies, between:
— Extreme idealism: the doctrine that all objects are created, or in other words that
all objects exist exclusively as the products or figments of human cognition.
— Moderate (or ‘creationist’ or ‘Ingardenian’) realism: the doctrine that some objects are created, some discovered.
— Extreme (or ‘platonist’ or ‘Meinongian’) realism: the doctrine that all objects are
discovered, or more particular that all objects are found and not made.
I shall dismiss immediately the extreme idealist alternative (or is there really some
extreme idealist who believes sincerely that the ground on which he stands, or the
meteor speeding towards the building in which he sits, is a mere product of human
cognition?). The important debate, I would argue, is that between extreme and
moderate realism. (1995b, p. 192)17
There is indeed a good reason why the range of possibilities should in principle include all three alternatives listed by Smith. The opposition between bona
fide and fiat boundaries, hence between discovered and created entities, is first
17
See also (1995a), p. 477. For the rationale behind the reference to Ingarden and to Meiniong in the nomenclature of the last two options, see Smith (1980).
9
and foremost a conceptual distinction; and while instances of both types suggest
themselves easily, as in the many examples given above, there is of course room
for disagreement and nothing rules out that, upon reflection, one of the two categories will be found empty. As the quotation makes clear, Smith immediately
rejects one such possibility, to the effect that there are no bona fide entities
whatsoever, as utterly untenable. Eventually he also rejects the opposite extreme
—no fiat entities—so in the end he sides with the moderate option, or some particular version of it, recognizing entities of both sorts. This is in line with traditional wisdom. It corresponds to the agenda set out by Plato in the Phaedrus,
where Socrates famously recommends that we carve the world along its “natural
joints”, trying “not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do” (265d).18 And
Smith would emphasize that this is also the right way to think about science. As
he writes elsewhere:
The very idea of science as a meaningful enterprise—an idea whose validity is made
manifest in successful applications—presupposes […] that some, but not all, conceptual distinctions track real divisions in the world. (1999a, p. 278)
Now, moderate realism is such a broad view, covering all sorts of intermediate positions, that it is hard to deny its overall force vis-à-vis its two extreme
competitors. It still leaves it open which things belong to which category, the
bona fide or the fiat, but so be it: that is precisely the fundamental metaphysical
question raised by the distinction, and moderate realists will make it their business to address it with the seriousness it warrants. Nonetheless the two doctrines
labeled as “extreme” deserve a hearing, too. Are they really utterly and irredeemably untenable?
Smith is right, I think, in drawing this conclusion with regard to the second
case, extreme realism. There are several ways of articulating that view. One
could, for instance, insist that (i) deep down fiat entities are mere talk of no genuine ontological significance, or (ii) fiat entities are mere potential entities that
do not, as such, enjoy actual existence, or (iii) fiat entities are not strictly speaking created by merely selected from the pre-existing totality of all relevant geometrically determined possibilities. None of these accounts, however, does full
justice to the way in which fiat entities are supposed to emerge from the drawing
of fiat boundaries in the sense here understood. Option (iii) is in fact the one tar18
Plato’s metaphor (which returns in the Statesman, 287c) was, of course, just metaphor.
But see Franklin-Hall (2009) for a detailed account and for explicit connections with the bona
fide / fiat dichotomy.
10
geted by Smith, and I agree that it fails insofar as the drawing of fiat boundaries
may, in some cases, result in perfectly coinciding entities, as with HamburgStadt and Hamburg-Land (whose non-identity is seen in the fact that the two
might in principle diverge, as with the city and state of Bremen).19 Option (ii) is
perhaps best seen as rooted in Aristotle’s conception that “no part even exists
otherwise than potentially” (Physics VII, 5, 250a24–25).20 Strictly speaking, this
would only apply to those fiat entities that are carved out on the surfaces or
within the interiors of larger wholes, but it seems plausible to extend the view
also to those entities that are obtained by fiat agglomeration of smaller parts.21
As a general metaphysical theory of parts and wholes, the view is certainly not
idle and not one that can be quickly dismissed.22 Yet, again, it hardly captures
the full strength of our fiat practices. As Curzon’s geopolitical examples show
all too well, the drawing of artificial boundaries may result in entities whose
conditions of existence (and persistence) may be weaker in comparison to entities protected by robust, natural boundaries; yet both sorts of entity have full
claim to actuality when it comes to our social and political lives, to the point that
in each case people are willing to give their lives—and administrators to spend
huge sums of money—to defend them. Perhaps not all (undetached) proper parts
exist, and perhaps not all (scattered) agglomerations exist, as some philosophers
have argued.23 But to draw a boundary is not merely to pinpoint a part or a whole;
it is to engage in a fully-fledged performative act whose creative force delivers
something well outside the pure realm of possibilia. This is also why option (i)
doesn’t seem credible. I can see its strong appeal from a nominalist perspective.
But there is a big difference between mere talk and illocutionary speech (in the
sense of Austin 1962), and the drawing of fiat boundaries belongs squarely to
the latter. In carving out a fiat entity we do not simply redescribe a portion of
reality with different words, or just enrich our language with new names for
things we already had. We literally bring those entities into being, with all that
19
The example is from Smith (1995a), p. 480, also in (1999c), p. 323.
See also Metaphysics, VII, 16, 1040b10–16: “all the parts must exist only potentially,
when they are one and continuous by nature”.
21
Smith (1994b), §3.5, treats both cases as equally covered by Aristotle’s “mereological
potentialism”.
22
Ultimately, however, I do find it metaphysically incongruous. See Varzi (2013).
23
See, respectively, van Inwagen (1981) on the “doctrine of arbitrary undetached parts” and
the debate on the “special composition question” prompted by van Inwagen (1987). For the record, I subscribe to classical extensional mereology, so I take all parts and wholes to be on equal
ontological footing, with no restriction on either side. See Varzi (2014a).
20
11
comes with them. And here, again, the geopolitical examples discussed by Curzon are instructive. As Smith himself concludes,
If it can be accepted that clear examples of fiat objects are provided by the Jeffersonian entities with which we began, then it will follow that not the least important
reason for admitting fiat objects into our general ontology will turn on the fact that
most of us live in one. (1995a, p. 478)24
What, then, about the opposite extreme doctrine, the doctrine that all boundaries are of the fiat sort, hence all entities are created? Is it also as untenable as
Smith suggests? To me, it is here that the “important debate” takes place, not
between the second and third doctrines listed by Smith but between the first two.
For while we can hardly be wrong in classifying a boundary as being of the fiat
sort, since such boundaries are drawn by us, in some cases we may be under the
impression that a boundary is of the bona fide sort when, on closer inspection, it
turns out to be a product of our own making. And if this is true in some cases,
then it is not obvious why it couldn’t be true in all cases.
That it is indeed true in some cases is, I think, not only possible, but evident.
We are animals of a certain size and all our everyday perceptions and actions
take place at the mesoscopic level, which is to say the level at which we and the
world are, in Gibson’s terms, “comparable” (1966, p. 22). But precisely for that
reason, precisely because it is our level, the boundaries that strike us as “natural” are likely to reflect for the most part our cognitive limitations. Thus, earlier
I mentioned the surface of an apple as an instance of a bona fide boundary that
exists and would exist even in the absence of all delineating or conceptualizing
activity on our part. The example suggests itself. Physically speaking, however,
we all know that an apple is not the solid, continuous substance that it seems to
be. It is a smudgy crowd of tiny particles frantically dancing in empty space, and
speaking of its surface is really like speaking of the surface of a swarm of bees,
the outline of a constellation, a figure’s contour in a pointillist painting. There
are no such boundaries in the bona fide world. All involve a fiat demarcation
whereby a plurality of smaller things are circumcluded and assembled by our
cognitive system, bridging the gaps and connecting the dots. And what goes for
apples goes for human bodies, water droplets, rocks, trees, chairs, and so on—
24
The phrase “Jeffersonian entities” refers to the states of the Union established by the
Northwest Ordinance, whose boundaries followed in large degree the straight pencil lines in
Thomas Jefferson’s “Add-a-State” Plan of 1784. This is Smith’s main example in (1995a) as
well as in several other writings, including (1997a), p. 398, (1999b), p. 290, and (2001a), p. 121.
12
for all sorts of material bodies that to us seem to enjoy a natural boundary of
their own. Smith takes it as obvious that meteors are bona fide objects, for no
idealist can be so foolish as to pass over the objective, devastating effects a meteor may cause. Yet surely fiat objects can be devastating too, as the one we are
living in has been in many a military conflict. Causally speaking, fiat and bona
fide entities are on a par. So, physically speaking, meteors may still be like apples, just as moons, planets, and even stars may, in this sense, resemble constellations. In the memorable words of Goodman:
As we make constellations by picking out and putting together certain stars rather
than others, so we make stars by drawing certain boundaries rather than others.
(1983, p. 104)
Of course, this is not by itself enough to conclude that all material bodies are
fiat objects. After all, if an apple consists of tiny particles (as a swarm consists
of bees), then at least those particles (bees) ought to exist and be what they are
independently of our cognitive paraphernalia. Even a hard-core physicalist might
therefore concur that at some level, possibly a level way beneath our everyday
ken, bona fide objects exist. This is certainly a possibility, and one that would
suffice to dismiss the doctrine of “extreme idealism”—not the meteors, but the
tiny particles. On the other hand, even this line of reasoning may be found wanting, for obviously it depends on a naive corpuscularist conception of matter that
is just as controversial today as it was in Democritus’ time. Surely things are
more complex than that. And if it turned out that, on closer look, our apple is
gunky, which is to say composite all the way down, and if this were true of all
material bodies alike, then one might indeed conclude that all material bodies
are, on closer look, fiat all the way down.
This is just one example, and it only concerns boundaries in the domain of
material bodies. As I have argued elsewhere (2011), however, similar concerns
may be extended to the other domains in which the natural/artificial opposition
arises. For instance, above I mentioned a person’s birth and death as obvious
candidates for bona fide boundaries in the realm of temporal entities. These are
examples Smith himself finds emblematic (1994a, p. 2). But are they really?
What we truly have are streams of physical, biological, and psychological processes that do not by themselves determine when a person begins to exist, or
ceases to exist. That is why philosophers have felt the need to supplement their
own theories, which in fact turn out to be quite diverse (theological ensoulment
and desoulment doctrines, developmental/metamorphic views, biological lifecycle accounts, “personhood” definitions, etc.) We can base our theories on as
13
many factors we like, including formal-ontological conditions and advanced scientific findings,25 but theories they are, to the point that even the U.S. Supreme
Court had to acknowledge the impossibility of settling the issue.26 And if things
are so, then the relevant boundaries lose their “natural” character and even a person’s life may become, to some extent, a fiat business. Similarly for the other
cases mentioned above, including the all-important category of “natural kinds”.
Surely there is a difference between, say, a wholly arbitrary zoological classification, such as Borges’s Chinese Encyclopedia,27 and the sorts of taxonomy that
we actually find in the biological sciences. Yet we all know that the latter, too,
are the product of theoretical criteria that are constantly in flux, reflecting cultural circumstances and practical concerns of various sort. It is telling, for instance, that less than two centuries ago some zoologists would still attribute taxonomic value to the distinction between “domestic” and “savage” animals;28 and
even today we may wonder, to use Catherine Elgin’s example (1995, p. 297),
whether a taxonomy that draws the line between horses and zebras where we do
is truly tracking bona fide worldly differences. No doubt the thought that biological taxa are, on the whole, mere fiat constructs may sound extreme, if not “totally inconsistent” with “the objective reality of evolution” (Stamos 2003, p. 131,
n. 35) But then, again, it is worth recalling that Darwin himself seems to have
felt otherwise:
It will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of
convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does
not essentially differ from the term variety. (1859, p. 52)
25
For example, Smith and Brogaard (2003) argue that, in the course of normal fetal development, the conditions for being a person are first satisfied at the end of the gastrulation process,
which occurs precisely at sixteen days after fertilization.
26
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). More precisely, the judiciary acknowledged the impossibility of determining the beginning of life “at this point in the development of man’s
knowledge”, given that “those trained in the respective fields of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus” (p. 159).
27
Where animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) domestic, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i)
trembling as if mad, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera,
(m) that have just broken the vase, (n) that from a distance look like flies. See Borges (1942). It
is noteworthy that precisely this passage is the starting point of Foucault (1966).
28
See e.g. Swainson (1835), where certain quadrupeds are classified according to their “innate propensity to live by free choice near the haunts of man, or to submit themselves cheerfully
and willingly to his domestication” (p. 137).
14
Indeed, even Curzon’s original distinction in the geopolitical sphere is, on
closer look, vulnerable to this sort of concerns. For just what, one may ask, are
the “features of the earth’s surface” that define natural boundaries? There are at
least two worries to be registered. One is that even here there is an obvious granularity problem. It is understandable that the British Lord would speak of the
glorious sea frontier of Britain. But what is that frontier, exactly? Where exactly
is it? There is a big difference between the coastline that we see from an airplane, or that is reproduced on a map of Britain, and the messy seashore that we
actually find when we go there, ground-level: except perhaps by the cliffs of
Dover, the neat demarcation between land and water turns out to be an abstraction, an idealization, and cartographers need to fix on some artificial criteria to
decide where and how to draw the line.29 The German geographer Friederick
Ratzel, whose work on boundaries must have been familiar to Curzon, knew this
well: “Der Grenzraum ist das Wirkliche, die Grenzlinie die Abstraktion davon”
(1897, p. 448). Ditto for the rock-hard boundaries afforded by mountain ranges,
such as the much extolled Alpine barrier demarcating Italy from the rest of Europe. Giuseppe Mazzini would not hesitate to describe it as “the most sublime,
undeniable boundary the Almighty could have given us” (1859, p. 167); yet as
recently as 2008 Italy and Switzerland were still working on a conventional
agreement to define that boundary and determine its exact location in view of
the continual weathering transformations of the crest and watershed lines (rock
erosion, glacier melting, etc.).30 This is not to deny that the mighty Alps offer
stronger protection than a frail Jeffersonian border. But it is indicative of their
ontological fragility qua bona fide geographic boundaries which exist in complete independence of human collective intentionality.
The second worry is even more important. For as Curzon himself took pain
to acknowledge, what counts (and works) as a natural frontier is oftentimes determined by our own attitudes. Surely the sea has repeatedly protected England
29
Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency for Great Britain, records the coastline of
the main island as 11,072.76 miles, calculated as the length of the mean high water mark line on
a digital map; the British Cartographic Society is adamant that the length of the coastline “depends on the scale at which you measure it”. See Darkes (2008). It may also be recalled that
Mandelbrot (1967) took the question ‘How Long Is the Coast of Britain?’ as a starting point for
the development of fractal geometry.
30
“Ratifica ed esecuzione dello Scambio di Note tra la Repubblica italiana e la Confederazione svizzera relativo ai confini ‘mobili’ sulla linea di cresta o displuviale, effettuato a Roma il
23 e il 26 maggio 2008”, Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, Serie Generale, n. 143
(June 23, 2009), S.O. n. 97, pp. 18–22.
15
against the fury of the Continent, as the Alps have shielded the Italians from
more than one great and well appointed army; but quite as many instances can
be found in which the peoples on two sides of a stretch of water or of a mountain range have been on friendly terms. Surely, we may add, the fact that Ireland
is an island explains IRA’s fierce opposition to its partition into separate national jurisdictions (“Ireland cannot shift her frontiers. The Almighty traced them
beyond the cunning of man to modify”31); but then, again, the artificial border
between Portugal and Spain is the oldest and most resilient one in Europe. What
truly matters, it seems, is not just whether the relevant boundaries are natural or
artificial. It is whether they are regarded as being of one type or the other, and
whether their status is equally recognized by the peoples on both sides. And
when it isn’t, there is war, as the conflicts in the Middle East illustrate all too
well. Curzon tried to account for this phenomenon—and for its huge impact on
the history of humanity—by drawing attention to the difference between real
and alleged natural boundaries. This occurs towards the end of his lecture:
There is also a class of so-called Natural Frontiers which I have been obliged to
omit, as possessing no valid claim to the title, namely those which are claimed by
nations as natural on grounds of ambition, or expediency, or more often sentiment.
The attempt to realize Frontiers of this type has been responsible for many of the
wars, and some of the most tragical vicissitudes in history. (1907, p. 54)
It remains to be shown, however, that not all frontiers are of this sort. Indeed it
is symptomatic that exactly at the time when the Britons were absorbing the natural/artificial dichotomy from Curzon’s Romanes Lecture, in France the readers
of Élisée Reclus’s L’homme et la terre were invited to ponder precisely this
point, questioning the whole notion of a natural frontier along with the sense of
“geographic predestination” that it evokes (Reclus 1907, pp. 307f). And while it
is a fact that Curzon’s dichotomy, “scientifically the most exact”, would soon
become standard lore among geographers, it is also true that many historians
would rather follow up on Reclus’s misgivings and direct their concerns towards
its tenability. Lucien Febvre’s criticisms of the Ancien Régime rhetoric, retained
in Danton’s proclamation that the borders of France had been “marquées par la
Nature”,32 says it all:
31
From a pamphlet by Arthur Griffith, founder of the Sinn Féin party (cited in Bowman
1982, p. 11).
32
In his Convention speech of January 31, 1793, advocating the annexation of Belgium to
France (cited also in Smith, 1997a, p. 399).
16
For, at bottom, the whole problem is, or appears to us to be, a question of boundaries. Within us, so deeply implanted that we no longer notice its hold on us, there is
a certain idea of the “natural limits” of the great States which causes us to think of
their boundaries as things in themselves, having an actual value, a kind of mechanical virtue, and a compulsory and at the same time creative power. […] A whole
philosophy of history [is] comprised in that word “natural”. (1922, pp. 360–361)
4. A fiat world?
To sum up, then, there are many a reason and plenty of evidence to think that in
several cases we may be under the impression of dealing with natural boundaries when, on closer inspection, those boundaries are a cognitive or social artifact. Certainly this is not enough to vindicate the extreme idealist view rejected
by Smith. Yet the challenge is reasonably serious: if we are wrong in some cases—indeed many cases—might we not be wrong in all cases? Is it really so implausible to think that all entities are, at bottom, fiat entities?
I do not intend to engage directly with this question here. The point is primarily metaphilosophical and concerns the force of the question itself: it is not a
question that can be quickly dismissed at the outset. As I said, I actually think
that the “important debate” takes place right here—not between moderate and
extreme realism (which must indeed be rejected), but between moderate realism
and extreme idealism. So let me conclude with some remarks on why I think the
debate is an open one.33
The first remark concerns the very epithet “idealism” with which Smith labels the extreme doctrine in question. I can see why the (moderate) realist may
want to use this language. Strictly speaking, however, the doctrine that all entities are the product of human fiat delineations does not amount to a form of
idealism, at least not the sort of subjective idealism according to which the
world itself would be an offspring of our produktive Einbildungskraft. Perhaps
there is a sense in which our world is limited by our language, as Wittgenstein
proclaimed (1921, §5.6), but strictly speaking the world as a whole has no
boundaries, so its status is not at issue. The debate concerns exclusively the status of its citizens, and whether they come in two sorts. Indeed, not only is the
doctrine in question compatible with the existence of an autonomous, mindindependent world; it presupposes it. For all fiat boundaries are, in geography as
elsewhere, boundaries that we draw on some pre-existing underlying reality.
33
Here I expand on some remarks I first made in my (2011), §4, and (2014b), §§3–4.
17
When, for instance, Jefferson called into being the states of the Northwest Ordinance, he did so by tracing lines on a map, and the effectiveness of his creating
act was crucially dependent on the map being a map of the world. His pencil
lines were meant to delineate portions of an actually existing territory. Likewise,
and more generally, when we create an object, an event, or anything else by fiat,
we do not engage in creative magic; we do so by drawing lines on some relevant
factual material. Smith himself makes the point as follows:
The interiors of fiat objects are […] autonomous portions of autonomous reality.
Only the respective external boundaries are created by us; it is these which are the
products of our mental and linguistic activity, and of associated conventional laws,
norms and habits. (1995a, p. 479)34
Of course, Smith also thinks that this sort of creative activity presupposes more
than the mere existence of autonomous reality. As he writes elsewhere:
How would fiat demarcation be possible if there were no genuine landmarks which
we (or the first fiat demarcators) were able to discover, and in relation to which fiat
demarcation becomes possible and objectively communicable? (1996, p. 300)
In other words, fiat entities are not, for Smith, carved out arbitrarily by us from
an otherwise indistinct totality; they are, rather, “functions of affordances”, and
this reason alone should convince us that it is “a confusion” to suppose that all
objects might be of the fiat type.35 But this is already to engage in the debate. It
is to argue against the extreme view. And to resist the argument one need not be
an idealist; one only needs to resist the assumption that the relevant affordances
—the landmarks—cannot themselves be fiat constructs. This may well be an
extreme task, a desperate way to save the picture of reality as an “amorphous
lump”, as Dummett calls it (1973, pp. 563ff). It may well be an extreme form of
constructivism, or conventionalism, or conceptual antirealism. But it isn’t idealism (and even less irrealism, as Goodman 1978, p. x, would have it36).
34
Reiterated in Smith (2001a), p. 143. Cf. also (2004), p. 230, where the point is made in the
context of a more general theory of fiat partitions: “A partition […] is an artifact of our perceiving, judging, classifying or theorizing activity […] The reality partitioned, in contrast, is what
and where it is, and it has all its parts and moments, independently of any acts of human fiat.”
35
See again Smith (1995a), p. 479, and (2001a), pp. 142f, from where both phrases in quotation marks are taken. The relevant notion of affordance is Gibson’s (1979), on whose relevance see also Smith (2001b) and (2009).
36
I mention this because the erlier quotation on starmaking might suggest identifying the
view in question with Goodman’s. In fact his view is significantly more radical. For Goodman, a
18
The second remark I want to make is that this extreme doctrine—let us now
call it “constructivism”—does not entail the epistemological nihilism that it
might suggest. That all boundaries might be of the fiat type does not mean that
“anything goes”, as if the difference between knowledge and belief were entirely up for grabs and truth itself became an empty notion. One can see why the
realist might press charges. For the realist there is something called fundamental
science, and its job is perfectly well defined: it is to move us in the direction of
the bona fide “joints of reality” (Smith 2001a, p. 142). All other inquiry supervenes on this, for “all fiat objects are supervenient on bona fide objects on lower
levels” (p. 143). However, there is no room for fundamental science in the world
envisaged by the constructivist. If everything were the product of our fiat organization, if the joints along which we “carve” the world were a feature solely of
the artificial categories that we employ in drawing up our maps, then all science
would pertain only to those maps, “to how we talk and think about things”
(Smith 1997b, p. 122). The world itself would seem to make no objective contributions, except perhaps for some basic mereological truths. And if things are
so, then anything goes: no facts, just interpretations. This is obviously a legitimate concern. Yet the conclusion does not follow. And it does not follow precisely because the drawing of fiat boundaries is not an empty activity, a mere
play of the imagination. As Frege says in a passage often quoted by Smith:37
The objectivity of the North Sea is not affected by the fact that it is a matter of our
arbitrary choice which part of all the water on the earth’s surface we mark off and
elect to call the ‘North Sea’. (1884, §26)
Correspondingly, the truth or falsity of what we say about the North Sea is not
affected by its status as a fiat entity:
If we say “The North Sea is 10,000 squares in extent” […] we assert something
quite objective, which is independent of our ideas and everything of the sort. If we
should happen to wish, on another occasion, to draw the boundaries of the North
Sea differently or to understand something different by “10,000”, that would not
make false the content that was previously true. (Ibid.)
“world-version” (or “world-representation”, we could even say “world-map”) need not be a version of the world any more than a “Pickwick-picture” need be a picture of Pickwick (1968, §1.5).
Thus, while all we learn about the world is contained in right world-versions, “the underlying
world, bereft of these, […] is perhaps on the whole a world well lost” (1978, p. 4).
37
The passage already occurs in (1994a), p. 17. See also (1997b), p. 121, (1999b), p. 290,
(2001a), p. 134, as well as Smith and Varzi (2000), p. 403.
19
None of this depends on the existence of bona fide lower levels, and on their
traits sufficing to fix the values of traits at the higher fiat level. Nothing depends
on there being some bona fide boundaries somewhere. More simply, as long as
constructivism is distinguished from idealism, truth and falsity work in the presence of fiat delineations exactly as they are supposed to work in the presence of
bona fide boundaries. Every predicate term has an extension and every singular
term has a referent, arbitrarily demarcated as these may be. And a subject-predicate sentence is true if and only if the referent of the subject term falls within
the extension of the predicate term. Period. To put it differently, truth and falsity
work the same way in the realm of what Searle (1995) calls “brute facts”, which
would be fixed entirely by the world, and in the realm of “institutional facts”,
which require collective intentionality. The realist acknowledges facts of both
sorts, and she may want to keep track of the difference by distinguishing between laws of Nature and laws of Right, bona fide laws and fiat laws. But a law
is a law no matter where it comes from. If the traffic code sets a certain speed
limit, and we drive faster, than it is a fact that we break the law and we deserve a
fine. We can’t dispute that. It is a fiat law, and as such it is both arbitrary and
ephemeral; but a law it is, for the realist and the constructionist alike. The extreme constructionist just says that all laws are of this kind.
Finally, there is something positive, too, to be said on behalf of the extreme
conception of reality that this doctrine proffers. For once the spectre of epistemological nihilism is dispelled, the idea that it is a matter of our arbitrary choice
to draw certain boundaries rather than others shifts sign. Indeed “arbitrary” does
not mean “anything goes”; it means that it is entirely up to us—in arbitrio nostro—to draw the relevant lines, to affect the articulations that we think are best
suited to our needs. Now, this is by no means an easy business. As Curzon knew
well, Jefferson’s arbitrary “pencil and ruler” method does not always pay:
It is said in America that many men reside in one State and do their business in another, and there is no reason why so artificial a device should not have even more
inconvenient consequences. (1907, p. 35)
In fact he should have known better. The partition of Africa during the years of
New Imperialism, with the European powers literally slicing up the continent
like “a magnificent cake” (in the words of Leopold II 38), is one of the darkest
periods in our history. Likewise, and more generally, classifying people on the
38
In an 1876 letter to his Belgian ambassador in London (cited in Pakenham 1991, p. 22).
20
basis of their skin color, sexual orientation, or IQ scores has produced way more
damage than any Borges Encyclopedia. Yet precisely here, in their arbitrary
character, lies all the potential of fiat boundaries. If we realize that they work
poorly, we can change them. If they fail to measure up to our needs, we can try
and replace them with better ones, or get rid of them altogether. It is much more
difficult to revise our maps if we think (or pretend) that some boundaries have
been drawn by Nature. Here Curzon’s passing remark about “so-called natural
frontiers”, claimed exclusively on grounds of expediency or sentiment, is sadly
instructive. For just as the attempt to realize frontiers of this type in the geopolitical world has been responsible for some of the most tragic vicissitudes in history, so has any attempt to claim as “natural”, as “beyond the cunning of man”,
boundaries that possess no valid claim to the title. Our history is replete with
horrible things that we have done and justified on such grounds. Slavery, the
Inquisition, ethnic cleansing, genocides, holy wars, safaris: we have perpetrated
discriminations and massacres based on canons of our own choice as though
these reflected genuine ontological divisions. We stigmatized and persecuted as
“brute” or “heretic” whoever held views that did not fit into our map of knowledge. Even today one often hears certain forms of conduct, such as the use of
contraception, or interracial and homosexual relationships, condemned as being
“against nature”, and the locution “crime against nature” is still used as a legal
term in the statutes of many U.S. states.39 All of this is disgraceful and there is
no need to explain why. But philosophically it is disgraceful precisely because it
rests on a fraud: the fraud of pretending that the world is on our side. This is
something political geographers eventually came to realize:
One of the most powerful arguments to make a frontier seem just is to stamp it as a
natural frontier. (Broek 1941, p. 8)40
We may of course do more than just stamp and pretend. We may buttress our
artificial lines with walls, palisades, barbed-wire fences, etc., literally as well as
39
Idaho (I.C. §18-6605), Louisiana (R.S. 14:89), Massachusetts (MGL 272, §34), Michigan
(MCL §750.158), Mississippi (M.C. §97-29-59), North Carolina (G.S. §14-177), Oklahoma (Ok.
Stat. §21-886), Rhode Island (§11-10-1), Virginia (Va. Code §18.2-361).
40
I said that Curzon’s distinction has become standard lore for geographers, if not for historians. Yet critiques may be found and are numerous also among the former, beginning at least
with Ancel (1938). For surveys and discussion, see Fall (2010) and Rankin and Schofield (2004),
which ends by quoting Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary: “BOUNDARY, n. In political
geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from
the imaginary rights of the other” (originally in Bierce 1881, p. 323).
21
metaphorically. Yet this is just adding to the fraud; such markers can be very
robust, even inviolable, but not so inviolable as to turn the artificial into the natural, as shown by the fact that Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank has
not been recognized by the International Court of Justice.41 Now, this is not to
say that the (moderate) realist is bound to perpetuate the disgrace. Nonetheless it
is hard not to feel the strain, especially insofar as the idea of naturalness is, as
Febvre put it in the passage quoted earlier, “so deeply implanted” that we may
not notice its hold on us. By contrast, in the world of the extreme constructivist
the fraud is simply not an option. We are free to draw and fight for the boundaries we find most reasonable, but we know their status and we cannot dismiss
the alternatives as unnatural. We are doomed to make mistakes, but we can always try to make amends and revise our maps. Indeed, for the extreme constructivist we must do so, it is our responsibility.
Let me stress that none of these remarks is meant to vouch for the doctrine
of extreme constructivism as such. As I mentioned, the point here is primarily
metaphilosophical and concerns the prima facie tenability of the doctrine. Once
properly stripped of all false idealistic and nihilistic connotations, there is, I
think, a lot to be learned from the debate that opposes it to the moderate realist
option, and it goes to Curzon’s and Smith’s credit to have shown that so much
depends on framing the debate itself in terms of boundaries. Not only are these
the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern political issues of war
and peace, of life and death to nations; they are the razor’s edge on which hangs
suspended no less than the metaphysical dispute between realism and antirealism, between the found and the created, between nature and nurture. In the end
Smith may be right: this way of resetting the debate may uncover the serious
risks of fraud that hide beneath the realist stance, but it also reveals the ultimate
challenge that the antirealist constructivist must face:
41
‘Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,
Advisory Opinion’, July 9, 2004, endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly on July 20, Resolution ES-10/15. For another example, on April 1, 2008, the US Secretary of Homeland Security
used congressionally-granted power to “waive in their entirety” the Coastal Zone Management
Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird
Treaty Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, and thirty other state
and federal laws to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers along the US/Mexico border
through the Tijuana River estuary (‘Determination Pursuant to Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996’, Fed. Reg. 73 FR 18294, Bill. Code
4410-10-P, effective April 3, 2008); a few months later, the San Diegans were playing volleyball
with the Tijuanans using the barrier at the beach border as a net.
22
How would the thesis that all objects are fiat objects be applied to the conceptualizers themselves, the demarcating subjects who construct the relevant systems of fiat
boundaries? (1996, p. 299f).42
Here, however, I prefer to end on a different note, and with a different quotation.
For while Smith emphatically refuses to consign everything to the realm of fiat
delineations, he has, more than anyone else, explored its width and descended
its depths. He has seen it all. And there is, really, no better picture of that vast
and prodigious realm than the one we find in his own travel journals.
Delineation is, be it noted, an immensely powerful faculty of cognition; the scope
of delineatory intentionality, the effortlessness with which we can comprehend
highly complex wholes—which may be scattered throughout the length and breadth
of the universe, in both space and time—with a simple delineatory act (‘the legacy
of the Renaissance’, ‘the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states’, ‘English poetry’) is wondrous to behold, and bears comparison with the magic of singlerayed intentionality, whereby, on the basis of a list of entries which might be drawn
up entirely at random, we can be directed, in succession, to mountains in Siberia,
teapots in Halifax, and black holes in the galaxy of Mog. (1997b, p. 122)
References
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Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words (ed. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisà),
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Bierce, A. (1881) ‘The Devil’s Dictionary – B’, The Wasp, May 21, p. 323 (then edited
and included in Bierce’s The Cynic’s Word Book, New York, Doubleday, 1906).
Bittner, S., von Wolff, A, and Frank, A. U. (2000) ‘The Structure of Reality in a Cadaster’, in B. Brogaard (ed.), Rationality and Irrationality (Papers of the 23rd International Wittgenstein Symposium), Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, pp. 88–96.
Borges, J. L. (1942), ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’, La Nación, February 8, pt. 2,
p. 1 (then in Borges’s Otras inquisiciones, ed. F. Rodríguez Amaya, Buenos Aires,
Sur, 1952).
42
Smith doesn’t like Kant, but it is worth noting that the challenge raised here is in line with
Kant’s reaction to Hume’s idealism in the second edition of the Critique: “It must be possible
for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.” (§16, B131–132).
23
Borghini, A., and Varzi, A. C. (2006), ‘Event Location and Vagueness’, Philosophical
Studies, 128: 313–336.
Bowman, J. (1982) De Valera and the Ulster Question, 1917-73, Oxford, Clarendon.
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Frontiers of the Future. An Examination of One of the Root Causes of War: The
Unsettled Frontiers, Berkeley, University of California, pp. 3–20.
Cartwright, R. (1975) ‘Scattered Objects’, in K. Lehrer (ed.), Analysis and Metaphysics.
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