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8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 5. Natural Properties

[properties which constitute the natural world]

30 ideas
For Aristotle, there are only as many properties as actually exist [Aristotle, by Jacquette]
     Full Idea: In Aristotle's metaphysics of substance, there are only as many properties as actually inhere in existent spatiotemporal particulars.
     From: report of Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], props) by Dale Jacquette - Ontology Ch.2
     A reaction: This would mean, oddly, that squareness ceased to be a property if the last square thing vanished. But then how do we establish the existence of unrealised properties? Is 'bigger than the biggest existent object' a property?
Physical properties are those relevant to how a physical system might act [Ellis]
     Full Idea: We may define a physical property as one whose value is relevant, in some circumstances, to how a physical system is likely to act.
     From: Brian Ellis (The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism [2009], 2)
     A reaction: Fair enough, but can we use the same 'word' property when we are discussing abstractions? Does 'The Enlightenment' have properties? Do very simple things have properties? Can 'red' act, if it isn't part of any physical system?
There is no property of 'fragility', as things are each fragile in a distinctive way [Ellis]
     Full Idea: There is no natural property of 'fragility'; glasses, parchments, ecosystems and spiders' webs are fragile in their own ways, but they have nothing intrinsic or structural in common.
     From: Brian Ellis (Scientific Essentialism [2001], 3.06)
     A reaction: This is important (and, I think, correct) because we are inclined to say that something is 'intrinsically' fragile, but that still isn't enough to identify a true property. Ellis wants universals to be involved, and even a nominalist must sort-of agree.
The naturalness of a class depends as much on the observers as on the objects [Quinton]
     Full Idea: The naturalness of a class depends as essentially on the nature of the observers who classify as it does on the nature of the objects that they classify. ...It depends on our perceptual apparatus, and on our relatively mutable needs and interests.
     From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat')
     A reaction: This seems to translate 'natural' as 'natural for us', which is not much use to scientists, who spend quite a lot of effort combating folk wisdom. Do desirable sports cars constitute a natural class?
Properties imply natural classes which can be picked out by everybody [Quinton]
     Full Idea: To say there are properties is to say there are natural classes, classes introduction to some of whose members enables people to pick out others without hesitation and in agreement.
     From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat')
     A reaction: Aristotle would like this approach, but it doesn't find many friends among modern logician/philosophers. We should go on to ask why people agree on these things. Causal powers will then come into it.
Genuine properties are closely related to genuine changes [Shoemaker]
     Full Idea: Our intuitions as to what are, and what are not, genuine properties are closely related to our intuitions as to what are, and what are not, genuine changes.
     From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causality and Properties [1980], §02)
     A reaction: A simple but brilliant insight. Somehow we must hack through the plethora of bogus properties and get to the real ones, cutting nature at the joints. Here we have the principle needed for the task.
Properties must be essentially causal if we can know and speak about them [Shoemaker]
     Full Idea: Only if some causal theory of properties is true can it be explained how properties are capable of engaging our knowledge, and our language, in the way they do.
     From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causality and Properties [1980], §05)
     A reaction: Exactly. This also the reason why epiphenomenalism doesn't make sense about consciousness (Idea 7379). The fact that something has causal powers doesn't mean that it just IS a causal power. A bomb isn't an explosion.
To ascertain genuine properties, examine the object directly [Shoemaker]
     Full Idea: There is a plausible way of distinguishing genuine and mere-Cambridge properties. To decide whether an emerald is green the thing to do is to examine it, but a mere-Cambridge property is settled by observations at a remote time and place.
     From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causality and Properties [1980], §06)
     A reaction: Scientific essentialism is beautifully simple! Schoemaker is good at connecting the epistemology to the ontology. If you examined a mirror, you might think it contained reflections.
Humeans see predicates as independent, but science says they are connected [Harré/Madden]
     Full Idea: The connectivity of ensembles of predicates is characteristic of natural science, while the independence of empirical predicates is the requirement of the Humean position.
     From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 7.I)
     A reaction: This is yet another excellent reason for getting rid of the hyperempirical Humean view of these things. The best explanation of the world is that its ingredients are clearly not 'independent' of each other.
Natural properties give similarity, joint carving, intrinsicness, specificity, homogeneity... [Lewis]
     Full Idea: Sharing of [perfectly natural properties] makes for qualitative similarity, they carve at the joints, they are intrinsic, they are highly specific, the sets of their instances are ipso facto not highly miscellaneous.
     From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5)
     A reaction: All this sounds like just what I want, but when I read Lewis he seems to be arriving at these natural properties by the wrong route. Too much Hume, too much extensionalism.
Defining natural properties by means of laws of nature is potentially circular [Lewis]
     Full Idea: Shall we say that natural properties are the ones that figure in laws of nature? - Not if we are going to use naturalness of properties when we draw the line between laws of nature and accidental regularities.
     From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5)
     A reaction: Personally I wouldn't dream of defining anything by saying that it figured in laws of nature. The laws, if there be such (see Mumford) are built up from more fundamental components, such as (perhaps) properties.
We can't define natural properties by resemblance, if they are used to explain resemblance [Lewis]
     Full Idea: Shall we say that natural properties are the ones whose instances are united by resemblance? - Not if we are going to say that resemblance is the sharing of natural properties.
     From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5)
     A reaction: The target of this appears to be the proposal of Quinton. By now I have totally given up on so-called 'natural' properties. Lewis says the circularity (also in Idea 15743) is a reason to treat 'natural' here as primitive (though he rejects that).
I don't take 'natural' properties to be fixed by the nature of one possible world [Lewis]
     Full Idea: Some people suppose my natural properties are distinguished by nature, and hence natural in one world and not another. I intend properties to be natural or unnatural simpliciter, not relative to one or another world.
     From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5 n44)
     A reaction: This is an important warning for the likes of me. I've have begun to doubt the utility of the term 'natural' property, and this reinforces my view.
We might try defining the natural properties by a short list of them [Lewis]
     Full Idea: We might try defining the natural properties by a short list, of the mass properties, charge properties, quark properties and flavours...
     From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5 n47)
     A reaction: He rejects this because of possible natural properties in other possible worlds. Defining anything by a list seems like cheating. Does John, Paul, George and Ringo 'define' something?
Sparse properties rest either on universals, or on tropes, or on primitive naturalness [Lewis, by Maudlin]
     Full Idea: Lewis surveys three accounts of sparse properties: a set of objects instantiating a single universal; a set of objects having as parts duplicates of some trope; and a set distinguished by a further unanalyzable, primitive characteristic of naturalness.
     From: report of David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], p.60-) by Tim Maudlin - The Metaphysics within Physics
     A reaction: The very idea of suggesting that a property is some set of objects strikes me as bizarre. I present you with a table full of objects and say that is the complete set of some property. You then have to study the objects to find out what the property is.
I assume there could be natural properties that are not instantiated in our world [Lewis]
     Full Idea: It is possible, I take it, that there might be simple natural properties different from any that instantiated within our world.
     From: David Lewis (Against Structural Universals [1986], 'Uninstantiated')
     A reaction: Interesting. Fine for Lewis, of course, for whom possibilities seem (to me) to be just logical possibilities. Even a scientific essentialist, though, must allow that different stuff might exist, which might have different intrinsic properties.
Lewisian natural properties fix reference of predicates, through a principle of charity [Lewis, by Hawley]
     Full Idea: For Lewis natural properties are important for their role in making language and thought determinate: principles of charity or humanity tell us to attribute natural properties to predicates wherever possible, break underdetermination of their reference.
     From: report of David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983]) by Katherine Hawley - How Things Persist 3.8
     A reaction: Lewis always seems to find reasons in semantics or logic for his metaphysics, instead of in the science. Lewis ends up with 'folk' natural properties, instead of accurate ones.
Natural properties figure in the analysis of similarity in intrinsic respects [Lewis, by Oliver]
     Full Idea: Lewis argues that there are natural properties, which makes various analyses possible, especially of similarity in intrinsic respects. Naturalness comes in degrees, with perfectly natural properties being the limiting case.
     From: report of David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983]) by Alex Oliver - The Metaphysics of Properties 4
     A reaction: This sounds to be the wrong way round. We don't start with similarities and work back to natural properties. We encounter natural properties (through their causal action), and these give rise to the similarities.
Reference partly concerns thought and language, partly eligibility of referent by natural properties [Lewis]
     Full Idea: Reference consists in part of what we do in language or thought when we refer, but in part it consists in eligibility of the referent. And this eligibility to be referred to is a matter of natural properties.
     From: David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], 'Cont of L')
     A reaction: This is a surprising conclusion for Lewis to reach, having started from properties as any old set members (see Idea 8572). There are references to intentional objects, such as 'there should have been someone on duty'.
Objects are demarcated by density and chemistry, and natural properties belong in what is well demarcated [Lewis]
     Full Idea: Where my cat (Bruce) ends, there the density of matter, the relative abundance of chemical elements, abruptly change. Bruce is also a locus of causal chains, which traces back to natural properties. Natural properties belong to well demarcated things.
     From: David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], 'Cont of L')
     A reaction: This is an amazingly convoluted way to define natural properties in terms of the classes they generate, but it seems obvious to me that the properties are logically prior to the classes.
Natural properties tend to belong to well-demarcated things, typically loci of causal chains [Lewis]
     Full Idea: One thing that makes for naturalness of a property is that it is a property belonging exclusively to well-demarcated things (like my cat Bruce, who is a locus of causal chains).
     From: David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], 'Cont of L')
     A reaction: Compare Idea 8557. Well-demarcated things may also have gerrymandered properties that are parts of 'arbitrary Boolean compounds' (Lewis). Why not make use of the causal chains to identify the properties?
For us, a property being natural is just an aspect of its featuring in the contents of our attitudes [Lewis]
     Full Idea: The reason natural properties feature in the contents of our attitudes is that naturalness is part of what it is to feature therein. We aren't built to take a special interest in natural properties, or that we call them natural if they are interesting.
     From: David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], 'Cont of L')
     A reaction: Evolution never features in Lewis's metaphysics. I would have thought we were very much built to focus on natural properties. This sounds odd, and gives no help in distinguishing natural properties from all our other daft contents.
All perfectly natural properties are intrinsic [Lewis, by Lewis]
     Full Idea: Lewis proposed that all perfectly natural properties are intrinsic.
     From: report of David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], p.355-7) by David Lewis - Defining 'Intrinsic' (with Rae Langton) IX
     A reaction: Depends what you mean by 'natural', 'property' and 'intrinsic'! Presumably there are natural extrinsic facts, in naturally necessary relationships. If all natural properties are powers, they would have to be intrinsic. Extrinsics would be derivative.
Natural properties fix resemblance and powers, and are picked out by universals [Lewis]
     Full Idea: Perhaps we could call a property 'perfectly' natural if its members are all and only those things that share some one universal, ...where the natural properties would be the ones whose sharing makes for resemblance, and the ones relevant to causal powers.
     From: David Lewis (New work for a theory of universals [1983], 'Un and Prop')
     A reaction: This is Lewis fishing for an account of properties that does a bit better than the mere recourse to set theory (which he intuitively favours) seems to do. He remains neutral about the ontological status of a universal (though he prefers nominalism).
'Being physical' is a second-order property [Molnar]
     Full Idea: A property like 'being physical' is just a second-order property. ...It is not required as a first-order property. ...Higher-order properties earn their keep as necessity-makers.
     From: George Molnar (Powers [1998], 1.4.2)
     A reaction: I take this to be correct and very important. People who like 'abundant' properties don't make this distinction about orders (of levels of abstraction, I would say), so the whole hierarchy has an equal status in ontology, which is ridiculous.
Functionalists in Fodor's camp usually say that a genuine property is one that figures in some causal laws [Heil]
     Full Idea: Functionalists in Fodor's camp usually say that a genuine property is one that figures in some causal laws.
     From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.4)
     A reaction: The problem is that anything which can't figure in a causal law will therefore be undetectable, so we could only speculate about the existence of such properties, never know them.
There are only first-order properties ('red'), and none of higher-order ('coloured') [Swoyer]
     Full Idea: 'Elementarism' is the view that there are first-order properties, but that there are no properties of any higher-order. There are first-order properties like various shades of red, but there is no higher-order property, like 'being a colour'.
     From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.1)
     A reaction: [He cites Bergmann 1968] Interesting. Presumably the programme is naturalistic (and hence congenial to me), and generalisations about properties are conceptual, while the properties themselves are natural.
Scientific properties are defined by the laws that embody them [Psillos, by Ladyman/Ross]
     Full Idea: For Psillos, properties in mature science are defined by the laws in which they feature.
     From: report of Stathis Psillos (Scientific Realism [1999]) by J Ladyman / D Ross - Every Thing Must Go 3.5
     A reaction: This is a perfect example of the Humean approach getting everything the wrong way round. Laws are not primitives from which we derive our account of nature - they are generalisations built up from the behaviour of prior properties.
A property is fundamental if two objects can differ in only that respect [Maudlin]
     Full Idea: Fragility is not a fundamental physical property, in that two pieces of glass cannot be physically identical save for their fragility.
     From: Tim Maudlin (The Metaphysics within Physics [2007], 2.5)
     A reaction: Nice. The best idea I have found in Maudlin, so far! This gives a very nice test for picking out the fundamental physical and intrinsic properties.
Causal essentialism says properties are nothing but causal relations [Ladyman/Ross]
     Full Idea: Causal essentialism is the doctrine that the causal relations that properties bear to other properties exhaust their natures.
     From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.5 n50)
     A reaction: [They cite Shoemaker, Mumford and Bird for this] Personally I don't see this view as offering relations as fundamental. The whole point is to explain everything. The only plausible primitive notion is of a power - which then generates the relations.