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Activity, Process, Continuant, Substance, Organism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2016

David Wiggins
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Abstract

This paper is a response to the suggestion that processes provide a better framework for interpreting science, biological science especially, than do substances. The philosopher of substance is ill-prepared, it has been suggested, for the question ‘how a combination of processes can maintain the appearance of stability and persistence in an entity that is fundamentally only a temporary eddy in a flux of change’. In response, I defend a plural ontology of process, activity, event and continuant, and show how a sortalist philosophy of substance that makes Hilary Putnam's distinction of ‘realism’ from ‘metaphysical realism’ can treat disputed questions concerning the identity and individuation of colonial siphonophores, slime moulds and plant-colonies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 91 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 269 - 280
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2016 

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References

1 See http.//thebjps.typepad.com/my-blog/2014/08/a-process-ontology-for-biology-john-dupré.html

2 Speaking for substance-theorists, let me insist that the words ‘remain the same thing’ be replaced by the word ‘persist’, unless our preoccupation is to be misdescribed.

3 See for instance Individuals Across the Sciences, ed. A. Guay and T. Pradeu (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). But these authors state their aims differently: ‘[We] suggest a shift from an ontology of substances, invariance and laws to an ontology centred on processes and change’.

4 Johnson defines a continuant to be ‘that which continues to exist throughout some limited or unlimited period of time, during which its inner states or outer connections with other continuants may be altering or may be continuing unaltered.’ Logic, Part III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), xx–xxi. It should go without saying that on these terms continuant is a determinable notion – the most that can be available in advance of empirical experience or inquiry.

5 See their contribution to the edited collection referenced at note 1.

6 See sections 8–10 of my ‘Identity, Individuation and Substance’, European Journal of Philosophy 20(1), March 2012 Google Scholar.

7 In a further effort to reconcile Guay and Pradeu to ‘substantialism’ in the form in which I have tried to present it, let me quote (yet again – see Sameness and Substance (1980), page vii) from a text I have long revered:

The essence of a living thing is that it consists of atoms of the ordinary chemical elements we have listed, caught up into the living system and made part of it for a while. The living activity takes them up and organizes them in its characteristic way. The life of a man consists essentially in the activity he imposes upon that stuff … It is only by virtue of this activity that the shape and organization of the whole is maintained. J. Z. Young, Introduction to the Sciences of Man. (Oxford: OUP, 1971).

Another text by which I might seek to distance Guay and Pradeu from their reading of substantialism comes from Aristotle himself (Metaphysics 1050b2):

Substance or form is energeia

Perhaps this is to say, not without some grammatical obscurity, that substance or form is active being. What I should like Aristotle to be saying here is that for x to be a substance is for x to have a principle of activity (in the sense I give these words in the article referenced in note 6). But it will be for the scholars of the Metaphysics to unwind the syntactical and interpretive intricacies of Aristotle's sentence.

8 Suppose the putative parts of a putative thing are all present but in the wrong array. Is the entity ‘cohesive’ or ‘unitary’? If not, why not? Well, constituted so, the entity cannot participate in the mode of activity that is proprietary to it and definitive of its kind. Is it not in the light of this that ‘cohesiveness’ has to be interpreted and determined?

9 A word more about the logical adequacy requirement upon principles such as P. It demands more than respect for symmetry, reflexivity, and transitivity. It demands that grounds for the identity of x and y be grounds for the indiscernibility of x and y. x and y must share all their properties. They must have the same life-history. If that seems implausible in a given case, then the fault (if there is one) lies with the conception of the kind that regulates the formulation of the principle P.

10 Compare my Sameness and Substance, pages 72–3 and Sameness and Substance Renewed, pages 74–5.