What is the Bundle Theory? (Philosophical Defintions)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- A description of the Bundle Theory of properties and substance. This theory eliminates the idea of some substance separate from properties altogether and just posits that objects are simply bundles of properties. This video briefly touches on four different versions of the bundle theory along two different dimensions of the theory (properties as universals or particulars and objects as relations of properties or just bundles of properties). The bundle theory of self is coming soon!
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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and more!
Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and more!
Before continuing watching the video, currently at 1:42. It’s the case that color isn’t an aspect of the external world, but it’s a subjective experience. So to imply “brownness” is in the chair that is referred to is an inaccurate statement.
5 minutes in: does bundle theory support that reality is equivalent to perspective? I mean a blind person wouldn’t consider the redness of an apple, so their bundled experience would be different from non blind ppl. This has to mean that reality isn’t dependent upon perception, which is what bundle theory supports…
Personally, I think there are such things as substances, but these substances are synonymous with essences (I guess this standpoint is Aristotelian). There are a couple advantages to this. For one, I don't run into the problem at 2:45 -- the underlying substance of a chair is just a chair. It still raises the question of what a chair is like devoid of its color and material and all its other accidental properties, but that's a much easier problem to solve.
One other thing I want to mention. The problem at 8:15 seems like a red herring, depending on how it's interpreted. On one hand, I can read it as saying that properties are inconceivable on their own. They have to exist in certain combinations in order to be understood at all. For example, it's impossible to imagine a triangle-as-such, isolated from being scalene, isosceles, or right; or to imagine the color red, without imagining some red shape or an indefinite cloud of redness or our entire field of view colored red. This would lead to the conclusion you give; namely that an object is a single property consisting of all the properties we would normally associate with that object.
However, it's founded on a mistake. Individual, isolated properties like triangularity, redness, etc. can't be conceived by the imagination -- this is true. But the imagination is not the only mental faculty we have. We also have intellect, and while isolated properties are unimaginable, they are fully intelligible. Otherwise, the phrases you use, like "shape without color" and "mass without size" would be self-contradictory in the same way as "a square circle" or "bigger than itself".
The problem can also be interpreted as saying that properties can never be found isolated in the world. They always appear in certain characteristic combinations. This much is true, and explains why it is that we can't imagine shape without color or the like. But this isn't really an argument for master properties. Properties (at least if construed as universals) are entirely capable of existing as separate entities. This only limits the ways in which they can be instantiated. It seems that, in the world, there's always an instantiation of a particular kind of object, and a set of accidental properties that can be traded out without changing the kind of object in question. Though I suppose there are alternate ways of conceiving this that don't center around kinds of objects.
Language is a tool that we use to pass information between each other. Asking about the properties of things like mass, weight, morality, numbers, time, etc., is irrelevant. A square is not a real thing, but the 90 degree edge of a table is said to be square. It's all descriptive language. If a thing is made of "substance" then that "substance must be measurable. Brownness is measurable. The word brownness is an inaccurate way of describing the wavelength of light reflecting off the surface of an object.
I think it's very important to make these distinctions when we are talking about morality. The conversation can quickly fall into epistemological nihilism nut-baggery. (metaphorically being and having the substantive properties of a bag of nuts).
This video series is dramatically improving my quality of life just so you know.
Writing as an endpoint rationalist, I don't see how one can entertain properties, tropes, relations, substances and so forth. Each is so vague. For example a red ball will appear blue if I am moving very quickly toward it. Is red and blue the same property? If so, how does the ball know I am moving toward it so it can change its presentation, and can it be red for one person but blue for another at the same time? How to I even know the ball is a ball, not some other shape seen from end on, or perhaps there is no ball at all; I am dreaming. One can't step out of Plato's cave, without stepping into a space that may be a cave of a different sort.
How about how often a property can be in existence? Maybe some kind of entropy for properties? Can everything be blue?
If essence is just the bundle of properties, then nothing has those bundle of properties. So, the bundle of properties are properties of nothing. But, nothing has no properties; only some existing thing can have properties. Hence, there must be some subject or essence that is the source or ground of the properties. How does a bundle theorist respond to this?
What about the idea that only the underlying substance is real and properties are just propositions about that substance
@@joop6463 Well, then I would say that the propositions need a truthmaker in reality. For example, the properties of an apple include its redness, its sweetness, its roundness. But, there needs to be something in reality in virtue of which such propositions about the apple can be made. So, both the underlying apple substance is real and so are its properties.
@@anonymousperson1904 are all underlying substances qualitatively identical to eachother? Apart from their properties
@@joop6463 It depends what you mean by "qualitatively identical". I am inclined to an Aristotelian theory of substance where natural kinds are composed of substantial form and prime matter. So, all humans would have the same substantial form, and all apples would have the same substantial form. And it is this substantial form which allows them to have all the similar properties that they do.
You might ask how they are differentiated. This is in virtue of their prime matter which is the principle in virtue of which a thing is here and not there, differentiating it from all other things in material reality.
I love your videos! Thanks for all the work you put into them. You're obviously a professor or grad student somewhere. Would you describe Locke as someone who believed in substrate theory (even if he didn't know what 'it' is') or do you think he was a contented Bundle Theorist? Thanks for your time.
How do properties relate to propositions? It seems like for every property that we can detect, there is a predicate. Are there any contingent propositions that can be phrased without reference to properties? It sounds like the different ways of defining "sameness" might leave room for contingent predicates that can be phrased without reference to properties in some but not all of these theories.
Fyi, many widely-used programming languages have two concepts of sameness -- selfless values where x and y are the same when they have the same properties, and values with an extra "self" property where x and y are the same when the "self" property is the same and the rules of the system ensure that no test ever observes two objects with the same self property and different other properties. Mixing the two has not complicated analysis of program behavior much.
I don't really understand the distinction between universal and particulars.
Yeah, I didn't really get it either, but he made a video explaining those too. th-cam.com/video/XNz110GE-FM/w-d-xo.html
You have particular things (like a particular cup) and the corresponding universal thing (the "cupness" all cups share)
Wouldn't this take you to mereological essentialism? If only one property changes then the thing is a new thing, because there is no underlying substance that can have different properties through time.
I think that the the sum of something's properties and the substance is the same because a substance without properties is nothing and properties without substance too. Take the following proposition "something is red". Now remove the "something". What is the proposition now? Even if you take a form of property platonism and say that redness exists out there it still wouldn't make sence because once you admit redness exists out there you're already accepting it as a thing. As a noun. As a substance. I didn't think too much about it but it sounds weird to separate a substance from its properties.
Bundle theorist can be skeptics about the persistence of identity (i.e. they bite the bullet that if you change one property, a thing is no longer the same thing, or more accurately, they don't think there was a thing to begin with, just a bundle of properties. Some solve it with mereological essentialism, others think that the bundle theory does not commit them to a mereological position as H. Robinson does in his SEP article:
"One objection often made against the theory is that bundles are mereological sums, rather like Locke’s ‘masses of matter’, and that, therefore, any change of property is a change in the identity of the object. Various forms of essentialist solutions to this problem have been suggested, for example, by Simons (1994), and Barker and Jago (2018). I must admit to having difficulties seeing why the view that objects are constituted solely out of property-instances should commit one to a mereological view, any more than the theory that they are constituted solely from material particles would, so I do not see this as a special problem for the bundle theory."
I think your example goes against the point that "the sum of something's properties and the substance is the same". When you say "something is red", redness would be the property, and "the thing" that is red would be the substance that has that property. In other words, if you accept that there is something that is red, then there must be an underlying subject or substance of that property, contra bundle theory.
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Kermit? I did not know you taught Philosophy!
+Layth Kal "It's not easy being green..." It seems no one can decide what my voice sounds like, some are onvinced it is Homer Simpson, others Kermit the frog. Lacking evidence, the only solution is to be skeptical. :)
There "...IS a range.."
the thing is, we can only know an object through our senses, so everything we experience is only an interpretation of energy.
our minds are geared to identify patterns in the energy. everything around us is patterned energy. opposed to, say, random static on a tv.
that static will never be the same any time you look at it, but, because it's random, our minds lump it all together under one label.
the stuff around us have distinct energy signitures though and are easily labeled and distinguished, and frequency of exposure to particular patterns will decree normalcy.
for example, you see red apples of a certain size all your life, then one day you see a green apple. it has all the energy patterns of a red apple but the color. that is noted as unique until more data is collected about it. such as if you ask someone about it and they say they eat green apples all the time. that intel is also part of the energy interpretation in the mind.
Sourcedrop Plato and Descartes would like to have a word with you
Tayjas Rajaraman I camt remember what they say on the subject.