Bundle theory and bare particulars

[Magical Realist]

I was thinking in bed last night about how everything is real and present in our experience only as particular properties/qualities. That any attempt to get at the thing behind the properties, the "entity" possessing the particular properties we experience it thru, only turns up more properties and nothing like a substance or object holding them all together. But how can there be for instance the color red without a something that possesses the property of redness? An "in-itself" that all its properties entail but never directly reveals? Come to find out others have pondered these mysteries long before me. Here's a concise line of thought I found illuminating:

From bundles to bare particulars and back again

"Here's a compelling narrative. Start with the bundle theory of substance: substances are nothing but bundles of properties. Then observe that this suffers from serious problems. If a substance is nothing but a bundle of properties, it is unclear how a substance could have had other properties than it does. Further, intuitively it should be possible to have two indiscernible substances--ones with all the same properties. This motivates a move to bare particular theory. According to bundle theory, substances were constituted by one kind of thing: properties. Bare particular theory makes substances be constituted by both properties and a special entity, the bare particular. Introducing the bare particular solves the modal problem, since we can say that the identity of substances is grounded in the identity of the bare particulars, so you can have a substance in one world with different properties than the very same substance in another world, as long as the same bare particular is found in both. Further, there is no difficulty with indiscernibles, as long as you have two bare particulars.

Note that this narrative isn't quite the standard narrative about bare particulars. The standard narrative introduces bare particulars to solve the problem of predication, by making the bare particular be the subject of predication. That standard narrative, however, falls prey to a problem that Andrew Bailey points out: we don't want to say that the bare particular has the ordinary properties of the host substance (for then we get reduplication), but if it does not, then it's not the subject of predication.

So let's stick to my from-bundles-to-bare-particulars narrative. But at this point there is a really interesting move possible, one that was pointed out in my undergraduate metaphysics class by a brilliant freshman, Rose Brugger. According to bare particular theory, substances are constituted by two kinds of things: properties and a bare particular. But Brugger suggested that we take the bare particular to just be an individuating property. Namely, a haecceity.

The result is a really interesting theory. It is a kind of bundle theory. However, first, the motivations for bare particular theory continue to be satisfied: we can ground identity between substances in identity of the haecceity. Second, we solve the puzzle of the mysterious "bareness" of the bare particular: the haecceity isn't some weird propertyless individual, but just a property, albeit a special one. Third, the resulting theory is more parsimonious, because it posits one fewer fundamental category: all it needs are substances and their constituent properties, without a separate category of bare particulars.

The resulting theory is superior to both standard bundle theory and standard bare particular theory, being only slightly more complex than standard bundle theory but solving a number of problems."

Posted by Alexander R Pruss at 11:40 AM
Labels: bare particulars, bundle theory, haecceities, substances

https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2016...cular.html

[Magical Realist]

Found the other thread addressing Hume's bundle theory and panphenomalism. Good information and thought about the same subject...

https://www.scivillage.com/thread-12635.html

[C C]

Mach was influenced by Hume's views -- encountering them after Kant, and prompting his rejection of scientific realism about molecules, atoms, etc (the "superfluous" nature of then metaphysical matter). And we know, of course, how Lenin -- outraged by the Russian segment's deviation from Marxist materialist propaganda -- attacked the Machian movement in the 1909 publication Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Even going so far as suggesting solipsism.
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Ernst Mach (The Analysis of Sensations): For us, therefore, the world does not consist of mysterious entities, which by their interaction with another, equally mysterious entity, the ego, produce sensations, which alone are accessible. For us, colours, sounds, spaces, times . . . are provisionally the ultimate elements, whose given connexion it is our business to investigate.

I have always felt it as a stroke of special good fortune, that early in life, at about the age of fifteen, I lighted, in the library of my father, on a copy of Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. The book made at the time a powerful and ineffaceable impression upon me, the like of which I never afterwards experienced in any of my philosophical reading. Some two or three years later, the superfluity of the role played by "the thing in itself" abruptly dawned upon me.

On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view. I had still to struggle long and hard before I was able to retain the new conception in my special subject.

With the valuable parts of physical theories we necessarily absorb a good dose of false metaphysics, which it is very difficult to sift out from what deserves to be preserved, especially when those theories have become very familiar to us. At times, too, the traditional, instinctive views would arise with great power and place impediments in my way. Only by alternate studies in physics and in the physiology of the senses, and by historico-physical investigations (since about 1863), and after having endeavoured in vain to settle the conflict by a physico-psychological monadology (in my lectures on psycho-physics, in the Zeitschrift fur praktische Heilkunde, Vienna, 1863, p. 364), have I attained to any considerable stability in my views.

I make no pretensions to the title of philosopher. I only seek to adopt in physics a point of view that need not be changed the moment our glance is carried over into the domain of another science; for, ultimately, all must form one whole. The molecular physics of today certainly does not meet this requirement.

What I say I have probably not been the first to say. I also do not wish to offer this exposition of mine as a special achievement. It is rather my belief that every one will be led to a similar view, who makes a careful survey of any extensive body of knowledge.

[...] It is precisely in this that the exploration of reality consists. In this investigation we must not allow ourselves to be impeded by such abridgments and delimitations as body, ego, matter, spirit, etc., which have been formed for special, practical purposes and with wholly provisional and limited ends in view.

On the contrary, the fittest forms of thought must be created in and by that research itself, just as is done in every special science. In place of the traditional, instinctive ways of thought, a freer, fresher view, conforming to developed experience, and reaching out beyond the requirements of practical life, must be substituted throughout.