[lit-ideas] 'Cambridge' changes
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:23:04 -0800
JL wrote
"[S]ome of Geach’s phrases became the common coin of philosophers, such as
a “Cambridge change”. This is the notion suggested by Bertrand Russell’s
thought: that Socrates changes if something can be predicated of him that
could not be predicated before. Thus if Socrates’s son grows bigger than
him, it becomes true to say Socrates is shorter than his son, and so
Socrates
would have changed. But this is not a real change, only a “Cambridge
change”
*This is quite a thin account of 'Cambridge' changes, and the trouble they
caused for some important Cambridge philosophers, notably Russell and
McTaggart. (Russell and McT did not use the expression 'Cambridge' change,
nor, I'm sure, were they aware of it. I say 'the trouble they caused,' but
neither Russell or McTaggart ever 'responded' to it; nor, I'm sure were
aware of Geach's coinage or his use of it.
*Donal is certainly well justified in wondering what's going on:
Surely someone as logically acute as Russell did not open himself to this
kind of rebuttal? Would not Russell say that "being shorter than" is not a
true predicate but a relational variable (or some such)? I mean "there's
one born every minute" and that means every minute Socrates changes in his
relation to the numbers born after him - but surely only 'one born every
minute' in the colloquial sense would suggest each new birth changes
Socrates?
I am especially interested because being in this thread may buy me more
time to rustle something up on CTP.
*A note on Geach on ‘Cambridge’ changes, from Section 10.3, ‘God and the
World,’
in *Logic Matters*, Blackwell 1972, pp. 319 and 321-322. The second excerpt
does follow the first, but not immediately. The material between them is
more technical.
As I have said, the question of ‘real’ relations is a question of *how* a
true relational property latches on to reality. I must begin by refuting a
false view as to the logical syntax of relational propositions: the view
that such propositions do not admit of subject-predicate analysis. This is
a narrowly logical point to make; but the acceptance of such a view would
prevent us from accepting or even understanding the Thomistic doctrine of
‘real’ relations. If a relational proposition indeed made no predications
about A or B, but only affirmed a relation ‘between’ them, then it would be
quite unintelligible how, if true, the proposition could correspond to a
reality in A rather than to a reality in B; and as the two converse
relations, alike holding ‘between’ A and B, one could not very well be more
‘real’ than the other. So we need to see why the ‘between’ account of
relations is wrong.
I have thus tied up ‘real’ relations with real changes. I have written
about the problem of ‘real’ changes elsewhere (cf. The index to my recent
collection *God and the Soul*); I have urged that we need to distinguish
‘real’ changes, processes that actually go on in a given individual, from
among ‘Cambridge’ changes. The great Cambridge philosophical works
published in the early years of this century, like *Principles of
Mathematics* and McTaggart’s *Nature of Existence,* explained change as
simply a matter of contradictory attributes’ holding good of individuals at
different times. Clearly any change logically implies a ‘Cambridge’ change,
but the converse is clearly not true; there is a sense of ‘change,’ hard to
explicate, in which it is *false *to say that Socrates changes by coming to
be shorter than Theatetus when the boy grows up, or that the butter changes
by rising in price, or that Herbert changes by becoming an ‘object of envy
to Edith’; in these cases, ‘Cambridge’ change of an object (Socrates, the
butter, Herbert) makes no ‘real’ change in that object.
Robert Paul
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