Concepts/Descriptions and the Individuation of Objects

Introduction: Objects and Individuation

It is generally thought that an object must have at least one criterion of identity. It is said that a criterion of identity must come along with a principle of unity. An object must also have some kind of temporal longevity if it is to be deemed an object in the first place. How can an object have temporal longevity? It does so because it has a principle of unity. That principle tells us that certain properties of the object unify it and they do so because they also tell us what aspects of the object must remain in order for the object to remain as that very same object over time. The unity of the object is what makes it the thing it is over time.

It was traditionally thought that the object’s essence determined what we class as a criterion of identity. However, just as we had choices as to what could be criteria of identity, so we have choices as to what constitutes the essence of a single object. One set of essential properties may work for one group of individuals or one set of situations, and another set may work for another group of individuals or set of situations. Why assume that there is the real essence of an object and no more? Perhaps it depends on the ‘modes of presentation’ of that object. And each different mode of presentation will determine its own essence. Under the mode of presentation that is physics, an object may have an essence specified in terms of its molecular and atomic structure. This would be a constitutional or inherent essence. Under the mode of presentation of, say, people who relate to - or use - the object under scrutiny, the essence may be specified in terms of that object’s role/purpose or its relation to the scrutiniser/s.

Many people will have different ways of individuating the very same object. It may depend on how that object is seen - both literally and metaphorically. It may depend on our particular relation or lack thereof to that object. It may also depend on the cognitive baggage that we bring to the object under scrutiny. People with different beliefs and different sets of knowledge will individuate the very same object in different ways. We could have a God’s eye view of the object, but wouldn’t that view involve an infinite conjunction of the properties and the relations that belong to the object? Alternatively, perhaps a God’s eye view of the object would entail an infinite disjunction instead. An infinite set of possible characterisations or individuations of the object. In that case, mortal individuators could not use infinite conjunctions or disjunctions. Mere mortals could not even comprehend them. A God’s eye view of the object at hand would only be of use to the person with God’s eye – viz., God himself.

Demonstratives, Sense-Data and Individuation

It is the case that even the words ‘this’ and ‘that’ must rely on some kind of descriptive content, at least for the speaker or reference-fixer. Even if the reference-fixer doesn’t have a proper name or even an explicit description, he must have still individuated the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, otherwise, how would he know what it is that he is in fact referring to? ‘Which this? or ‘Which that?’ This is certainly the case for the hearers. How does the speaker himself distinguish various this’s from various that’s? After all, in an act of ostensive definition one could be pointing at, say, the brown on the table, or the cup on the table, or whatever. Ostension alone cannot individuate a this from a that. And if it’s all a question of sense-data (as it was for Russell, see Kripke, 1971), how does the speaker know that the hearer will have the same kinds of sense-data? And even sense-data for the speaker cannot in and of itself individuate a this or a that. Sense-data presuppose individuation; otherwise they wouldn’t be the data of something. Although, according to traditional sense-data theorists we move - or ‘infer’ - from sense-data to the objects in the external world. But without prior individuation how would the sense-data theorist distinguish between relevant and irrelevant bits of sense-data? Presumably when the theorist has sense-data of, say, a table, he will also have sense-data of, say, the things on the table, the colour of the table, and the objects in his general field of vision, etc.

One can see why Kripke (1971) was concerned to argue that proper names had no descriptive content because the definite descriptions of, say, Hesperus and Phosphorus did not coincide. It followed, to Kripke, that proper names must not rely on their descriptive content. Indeed, they have no descriptive content at all, otherwise how could they be deemed identical. And, similarly, how could we know that they are one and the same thing? Therefore proper names, Kripke argued, cannot rely or depend on any descriptive content.

We name or ‘baptise’ what is at the end, as it were, of the ostended point. But what is at the end of an ostended point? Take this view:

… demonstrative reference, one has reference without any description. But this is merely a myth. Suppose I point to a brown table, and say, ‘This is brown.’ It is not my pointing alone which fixes the reference of the occurrence of ‘this’, for my finger will also be pointing at the edge of the table, or a small brown patch on the table. Rather, a factor in fixing the reference of my demonstrative is that I intend to be demonstrating some object whose identity criteria are those of tables, rather than those of small brown patches or edges…[so we have] the massive indeterminacy of ostensive definition. (Stanley, 1997)

This is clearly derived from Quine’s points about ostension:

There is the question how wide an environment of the ostended point is meant to be covered by the term that is being ostensively explained…the question where one of its objects leaves off and another begins…It is meaningless to ask whether, in general, our terms ‘rabbit’, ‘rabbit part’, ‘number’, etc. really refer respectively to rabbits, rabbit parts, numbers, etc., rather than to some ingeniously permuted denotations. It is meaningless to ask this absolutely; we can meaningfully ask it only relative to some background language…Querying reference in any more absolute way would be like asking absolute position, or absolute velocity, rather than position or velocity relative to a given frame of reference. (Quine, 1969)

In order to name the object we need surely to know the object or be able to identify it. If the reference-fixer hasn’t got that far, how can he we even think about the object? How does he know what the object is he is thinking about? How does he know he is thinking about the object and not something else? The very reference to an ‘object’, even an object qua object, requires concepts to distinguish or individuate it. What is an object and how do we identify it? What is that object? In order to know and identify the object don’t we need to know the object and be able to identify it?

Proper Names, Naming-Baptisms and Individuation

… the role of the general term is to identify the referents – not to identify the ‘kind of identity’ asserted. (John Perry, 1970)

The first kind of identification referred to above is simply a matter of ostension, of pointing (which may include a Kripkean ‘naming-baptism’), whereas the other kind of identification is dependent on the ‘kind of identity’. Dummett expresses the first kind of identification thus:

A bare knowledge of the reference of the name a will consist…in knowing, of some object, that a refers to it, where this is a complete characterisation of this particular piece of knowledge. (Dummett, 1991)

But Dummett argues against this distinction. He says:

…there cannot be a proper name whose whole sense consists in its having a certain object as referent, without the sense determining that object as referent in some particular way. (Dummett, 1973)

Dummett must think that, say, the name ‘Tony Blair’ is a de facto rigid designator, a designator that denotes via the mediation of some concept or description. A de jure designation, on the other hand, is an ‘unmmediated’ reference. That is, a rigid de jure designator denotes what it denotes without the mediation by some concept or description.

Can we have basic naming (or the ‘identification of referents’), rather than the ‘kind of referent’, without the latter kind of identification? Again, what is at the ostended point? Doesn’t individuation, therefore sometimes the identification of kinds, come before the basic kind of Kripkean naming and identification? Wouldn't this be an epistemological question, rather than an ontological one? It would be a question about our knowledge of an object, rather than (the reality) of the object ‘as it is in itself’. It may still be the case, in conformity with Kripke, that we can only know an object to be the object it is through its ontological essence. Here again we see a philosopher making the same distinction:

Kripke did make a feasible distinction between a description giving the content of a name and merely fixing its referent. (Stanley, 1997)

According to Marcus

the causal theory of names elaborated by Kripke and others. Proper names, unlike definite descriptions, can be used by speakers to refer to objects without mediation of ‘concepts’ or descriptive clusters. They can be used to capture and institutionalise an act of ostension. (Marcus, 1978)

My argument is that without individuation we cannot have ostension. We need to bring along with us the concepts that will help individuate a given spatial region or physical mass. The concepts do not come from that spatial region or physical mass itself, otherwise we would have concepts that would not necessarily belong to the object within that spatial region or physical mass. Therefore an act of ostension does require conceptual ‘mediation’. How would we know when one object ends and another object begins? How would we distinguish an object as an object at all? The traditional problem was that if referents depended on concepts or ‘descriptive clusters’, then each person would bring along his own concepts or descriptive clusters. It was supposed to follow from this that a reference could not rely on a single concept or a single descriptive cluster. The referent would therefore be lost amongst rival or simply different conceptual contents of names. Why was it thought that if the reference could not rely on specific concepts that it could escape all concepts? Everyone would still be having causal contact with the same referent (see Davidson, 1989), but that causal contact alone would not tell us which concepts or descriptions were the correct ones (if there are correct ones). If everyone were still having the same causal contact with the same object, or the same spatial region or physical mass, then that would not matter. Different or even contradictory concepts would still be related to the same object or spatial region/physical mass. Thus, in an indirect sense admittedly, acts of ostension could still be ‘institutionalised’ (Marcus, 1978), but we could not guarantee uniformity of conceptual choices. The object would not be lost, but guaranteed uniformity of concept choices would be. And, of course, if different people brought the same conceptual baggage with them, then that in itself would/could generate a certain degree of conceptual uniformity. However, that would not be guaranteed. And it could be possible to generate agreement between different or contradictory concepts if the concepts of the object or spatial region referred back to the object as it is ‘standardly recognised’ (Moser, 1993). Of course, what is standardly recognised would still be a contingent matter. Even the standard conceptual description of the object would still not be the way the object describes itself. Therefore there is no reason to suppose that what is standard today will be standard next week.

Pollock: Nondescriptive Ways of Thinking and Individuation

Perhaps John Pollock, for example, makes a Kripkean distinction between an initial descriptive way of coming to know an object, and a later non-descriptive relation to that very same object:

I have a nondescriptive way of thinking of [Tony Blair]. Such nondescriptive ways of thinking of an object are parasitic on originally having some other way of thinking of the object (either perceptual or descriptive), but they are distinct from those other ways. I call these nondescriptive ways of thinking of objects de re representations… (Pollock, 1986)

I have a problem with the very notion of a ‘nondescriptive ways of thinking of’, say, Tony Blair. For example, how is an object individuated in the first place without a descriptive ‘way of thinking’? Perhaps we can accept simple Kripkean naming, but aren’t these ‘baptisms’ carried out in the presence of the object concerned (or a representation thereof)? We name what is at the end, as it were, of the ostended point. Again, what is at the end of an ostended point?

Pollock does not even talk about pure Kripkean acts of naming; he talks about ‘nondescriptive ways of thinking of objects’. In order to think about the object, he needs surely to know the object or be able to identify it. If he hasn’t got that far, how can he think about the object? How does he know what the object is he is thinking about? How does he know he is thinking about the object and not something else? The very reference to an ‘object’, even an object qua object, requires concepts, etc. to distinguish or individuate an object qua object, never mind Tony Blair qua the meta-sortal object.

A pure perception of an object is perhaps, therefore, not a thought about an object. Perhaps you can have a mental image or perception of an object that has no cognitive or propositional content. For example, say that Pollock has a ‘non-descriptive representation’ of Tony Blair (or a mental image of Tony Blair). This is what Fodor says about that:

…the [perception or image] showing [Tony Blair] to be tall must also show him to be many other things: clothed or naked, lying, standing or sitting, having a head or not having one…A [perception or mental image] of a tall man who is sitting down resembles a man’s being seated as much as it resembles a man’s being tall. On the resemblance theory [of thoughts and mental images] it is not clear what distinguishes thoughts about [Blair’s] height from thoughts about his posture. (Fodor, 1981)

David Lewis too (1996) makes a ‘fishy’ distinction that distinguishes the ‘propositional content’ of an ‘experience’ from the ‘experience itself’ (as it is used to eliminate possibility W), which somewhat parallels Pollock’s distinction between descriptive ‘ways of thinking’ and ‘nondescriptive ways of thinking’ of an object:

When perceptual experience E…eliminates a possibility W, that is not because the propositional content of the experience conflicts with W… The propositional content of our experience could, after all, be false. Rather, it is the existence of the experience that conflicts with W…Else we would need to tell some fishy story of how the experience has some sort of infallible, ineffable, purely phenomenal propositional content…Who needs that? Let E have propositional content P. Suppose even – something I take to be an open question – that E is, in some sense, fully characterised by P. (Lewis, 1996)

We could say here that although Lewis does not need ‘infallible, ineffable, purely phenomenal propositional content’, or even propositional content that is true (or false), he would still need some kind of propositional content of his experience E to carry out the epistemological task of eliminating possibility W. He seems to think of his ‘perceptual experience’ in the way that Pollock thinks of his ‘nondescriptive ways of thinking’ of an object. In Lewis’s case, we could say that he has ‘nondescriptive ways of thinking’ or ‘perceptually experiencing’ possibility W. I think that Lewis also makes the mistake that because E can escape particular propositional contents (those that are ‘infallible’, true, etc.), that E can escape all propositional content in this (epistemological) context. This is like the argument that because the same proposition, P, is supposed to be expressible by many different sentences, then that proposition P can therefore escape all sentential expressions. (And it is also like the argument that because certain truths or statements transcend particular conceptual schemes, then they can escape all conceptual schemes.)

I would argue that Pollock’s ‘nondescriptive ways of thinking’ of Tony Blair are not examples of thinking at all. And that’s why it is ‘nondescriptive’. You cannot have a mental image or perception or a representation of Tony Blair without cognitive activity. To say ‘X is of something’ implies cognitive or descriptive thought. In order to have a mental image of Tony Blair, a resemblance and connection has to be made between the image and what the image is of. This requires, surely, descriptive thought. Pollock’s ‘non-descriptive perceptions’ may not even be of something that is not itself a perception. He may have a non-descriptive mental image ‘of’ Tony Blair, and not know that it is of Tony Blair. If his perception or image were somehow intersubjectively available, others may indeed know that the perception is of Tony Blair, whereas Pollock’s non-descriptive perception ‘of’ Tony Blair was not actually of Tony Blair to him (but only to these third persons). Pollock’s non-descriptive mental image ‘of’ Tony Blair would therefore be equivalent to receiving sensory stimulation from a white wall even though one’s thoughts are not about the white wall. A perception of the white wall would indeed be within consciousness, but not a perception of a white wall qua white wall. The white wall perception, therefore, would indeed have non-conceptual content, but he would not be having a non-descriptive ‘thought’ about the white wall. Similarly with his perception or image ‘of’ Tony Blair. It would be non-conceptual, but it would not be of Tony Blair and therefore it would not be an example of ‘non-descriptive thought’. Again, the Kripkean account of the pure non-conceptual or non-descriptive naming of objects may work in the presence of the objects being named, but it wont work for Pollock’s non-descriptive ‘thoughts’ about objects that don’t occur in the presence of the concrete objects the thoughts are about.

On a Kantian account, Pollock’s non-descriptive mental states are not actually ‘experiences’ either. Experiences require the application of concepts (a priori ones in Kant’s case). Perhaps Pollock also misuses the term ‘non-descriptive perception’ if perceptions need to be perception of things that are not themselves perceptions. The question is: Can we have such non-intentional mental states? The answer is, Yes, if what I say about the white wall is correct. However, even in this case the white wall ‘perception’ would only be part of a larger mental state that includes thoughts that are not about the white wall. The white wall perception would, in a sense, be a simple background to thoughts not about the white wall. The white wall ‘perception’ would be part of the overall mental state. The white wall would not be the intentional object of the thoughts that go on against the background of a white wall ‘perception’. The white wall is not perceived as a white wall (or anything else). Nevertheless, it is still a part of a general mental state that includes the white wall ‘perception’, if we can use that word, and thoughts which are not about the white wall.

Kaplan on Descriptive Content

There is an example that, prima facie, seems to back-up Pollock’s position on ‘nondescriptive thought’. Take Kaplan on the case of a picture of a person and its ‘descriptive content’:

Those features of a picture, in virtue of which we say it resembles or is a likeness of a particular person, comprise the picture’s descriptive content. (Kaplan, 1968-69)

Clearly ‘descriptive content’ in terms of a picture of a person is dependent on concepts and statements. How could we talk of ‘resemblance’ or ‘a likeness’ without such things? Applying Pollock’s ‘nondescriptive thought’ to the picture example, I suppose we could say that resemblances or likenesses between the picture of a person and that person can be realised without concepts or statements. This assumes that concepts are entirely linguistic. Concepts, in contradiction to many views, can be partly realised by or based - and even dependent - upon mental images. A resemblance or likeness between the concept [Tony Blair], that is partly imagistic, and the person Tony Blair is cognised via the concept. The individualised concept [Tony Blair], in this case, but perhaps not others, is partly imagistic. However, the imagistic concept can only be communicated to others via sentential expressions containing concepts that are themselves fully expressible in sentential form. And even if a mental image is part of the concept [Tony Blair] for S at time t, or helps determine that concept for S at t, that particular mental image will still need to be explained, described and expressed using sentences (see Loar, 1990). I agree, of course, that a mental image alone cannot in and of itself be a concept of Tony Blair, for reasons I let Fodor explain earlier.

Even the non-sentential or non-conceptual propositional mental state that connects the picture of a person to that person is still an example of thought, unlike the Pollock example of ‘nondescriptive thought’ about a specific object. The non-sentential mental state is of a picture of a person that is itself of a person. As I said earlier, Pollock’s non-conceptual mental image of Tony Blair, and his non-conceptual ‘perception’ of the white wall, are not, respectively, of Tony Blair or of the white wall. And this is partly the reason why I think that it is not an example of ‘nondescriptive thought’ because it is not an example of thought simpliciter.

Also, in terms of the ofness of the picture and the ofness of Pollock’s mental state:

… we can say that for a picture to be of a person, the person must serve significantly in the causal chain leading to the picture’s production and also serve as object for the picture. (Kaplan, 1968-69)

Clearly there is no parallel ‘causal chain’ from Tony Blair to Pollock’s mental image or ‘nondescriptive thought’ of Tony Blair because, as Pollock himself says, such a thought occurs after the initial naming or identification of Tony Blair, which itself occurs in the presence of the object Tony Blair himself (or perhaps a Tony Blair representation of some kind). There is an ‘object for the picture’, a person, but no object for Pollock’s ‘nondescriptive thought’, which, as I’ve said, may not even be of Tony Blair (for Pollock).

References and Further Reading

Davidson, D. (1989) ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’ in Truth and Interpretation:  

                                   Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. LePore

Dummett, M. (1973) Frege: Philosophy of Language

                       (1991) The Logical Basis of Metaphysics

Fodor, J. (1981) ‘The Mind-Body Problem’ in Scientific American 244 (January)

Kaplan, D. (1968-9) ‘Quantifying In’ in Synthese, 19

Kripke, S. (1971) ‘Identity and Necessity’ in Identity and Individuation

Lewis, D. (1996) ‘Elusive Knowledge’ in Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74, 4

Loar, B. (1990) ‘Phenomenal States’ in Philosophical Perspectives, ed. J. Tomberlin

Marcus, R. B. (1978) ‘Nominalism and the Substitutional Quantifier’ in The Monist 61, 3

Moser, P. (1993) ‘Justification, Meta-Epistemology, and Meaning’ in his Philosophy After Objectivity

Perry, John. (1970) ‘The Same F’ in Philosophical Review 79

Pollock, J. (1986) ‘Epistemic Norms’ in his Contemporary Theories of Knowledge

Quine, W.V.O. (1969) Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

Stanley, J. (1997) ‘Names and Rigid Designation’ in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language