[lit-ideas] Re: 'Cambridge' changes
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 21:32:44 +0000 (GMT)
The following seems to be vital to Geach's argument:
"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".
But this is unclear to me and so unclear as an argument. For example, the
notion of how a "proposition could correspond to a reality in A rather than to
a reality in
B" is unclear to me: it is understandable enough that a proposition could
correspond to reality but it is unclear to me how might it correspond "to a
reality in A rather than to a reality in
B"?
DnlLdn
On Wednesday, 22 January 2014, 21:15, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Anyhow, this seems to me to be a case of working on pre-conceived assumptions.
There is a sense in which Socrates changes when his previously little son is
taller than him, and that the butter changes when the price goes up or down
etc. It's just that, since we have no means of accounting for this change, we
must conclude that no change occurred. Splendid.
O.K.
On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 9:41 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Would there be some links to your publications ? O.K.
On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 9:23 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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