Noam Chomsky - The Essence of Things

who killed at the old practice many many sharp engineers expense yeah maybe I didn't pick the best terms but what is intended as a short sensation the social factors have to do with the interaction of people in communities okay the real-world factors have to do with the essence of things okay so what I mean by real-world factors is what I just mentioned in case of Putnam the essence of things determines what the word refers to so you take a word Aristotle say what it really refers to is the essential nature of the theme Aristotle we may be wrong on all our beliefs with room broom well that's the problem yeah that's the problem that arises with artifact they in fact Kripke in his discussion of his early discussion of this and maintenance esse T he does discuss artifacts and he discusses a table I think and he says if this thing is a table it is necessarily a table that is it's the essence of this thing to be a table an essential feature of it that it is a table he does say that at least collect ROM but it sort of comes out of his way of looking at things so artifacts also have an essence in my opinion Aristotle had a better idea there namely that you know that that having a certain function is a factor that enters into the meaning of things or the nature of things as he put it having a certain function enters into the nature of thing like being a table is one of the function so that's thing and that enters into its nature now if we take that view and we divorce it from the metaphysics which doesn't make any sense then we make it epistemological we take the whole alien view and transfer it up in the mind so instead of you know the world being divided into these various qualities and so on we say well that's what our minds are like and our minds impose that structure in the world then it all quickly makes sense it's perfectly true I think that we characterize objects in terms of their constitution their function and so on and so forth but that tells us nothing about the essence of things I mean this thing is what it is if we have to be using for a table at the table somebody else uses a bed it's a bit you know somebody else uses a key it's a key there's an I mean the effort if some Martian divides things into the world on the basis of whether they nailed to the floor or not that's his categorization it's nailed to the floor goes into one category it's not no but before it goes to another category then for the Martian this is essentially something not nailed to the floor and accidentally a table and if it was nailed to the floor which shift essences but of course you know what the thing is doesn't depend on whether I'm thinking about it or the Martians thinking about it may change your go-to fossil record well not the well you know yeah they would so the externalist would claim but I don't think so it seems according that do you the essence would change on the basis of social factors in fact this has led to contemporary contemporary philosophical essentialism which is a big field that came out of this is trying to find the essential nature of things and in my opinion it's constantly leading to paradox constantly leading paradox like the idea that this really is a table not a thing not nailed to the floor because I'm looking at it not a Martian how can that affect what this is or take take a case from a recent one of most recent articles I've seen at least in the journal philosophy by Joseph Pell mode there's a very good young philosophy that it's about a general philosophy it's a couple of months ago it's about essentialism you know it's a big topic and he starts off by taking as an example some mountain you know I forget what it was so whatever the mountain is he picked a real one and he wants to sort of tease out your intuitions about this and then you know draw something big philosophical conclusions uh and he he argues of course that that mountain is essentially a mountain it couldn't be anything else and still be the same thing they couldn't be anything other than a mountain and still be the same thing so I don't know about your intuitions but mine are quite different so here's this object you know on the Earth's surface and he says that thing that very thing must be amount because it's a necessity it is a mountain sort of follows from the general framework please my intuition is that if you if the water level rises up to this point then this thing is an island not if it's not a mountain and it's still the same thing now in fact islands are mountains it's just that most of them is underwater or if you if you dump earth around this thing up to say you know a millimeter away or something something less than is perceptible but you leave little miniscule space in there below the level of perception then you haven't changed the thing at least in my intuition it's the same thing it was before but now it's part of a plateau and so on for many other things I mean I don't have any of those information but my intuitions are quite different so at least if we're doing folk psychology which is what we're supposed to be doing it's essentially people are being radically this way and there's nothing here about the essence of thing I mean it's what it is if I call it a mountain it's because of its it's relationships for me between you know its height and other low thing but that doesn't make it essentially a mountain that's a way of viewing the world it's a way of viewing the world which comes out of keep the human mind which makes that thing now a mountain but doesn't say anything about its essence I don't think there are you know there are no essence things are just what they are I mean every property is as essential as every other property or as accidental as every other program the the talk about essences I think is a mistake that comes from taking our mental categories and introducing them into the world and they're not in the world they're in our minds they're in our ways of conceiving the world I think in fact you know if you take Aristotle's whole corpus and you rephrase it from metaphysical to epistemological it makes a lot of sense you know the levels of reality and all this kind of stuff if you forget the idea that those are the constituents of nature and if you say eliminate the idea that science proceeds by moving up through the parts of nature you know then you say well look that's the way our minds work when we look at things it makes a fair amount of sense kind of it would sit well except the victims stuff it's a little not quite I think because victim Stein always says he's stopping before explanation because when I get an explanation of anything he just wants to give enough of a description and accurate enough description so you don't enter into error and this is going beyond into explanation maybe you know right away yeah I think it lies in fraud actually you know yeah I think it's consistent with Lisa

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 42,295

Rating: 4.9473686 out of 5

Keywords: Chomsky, Philosophy, Essence, Reference, Philosophy of mind, Noam Chomsky, Essence of things, concept, epistemology, Kripke, Aristotle, Meaning, Essentialism, Joseph Almog

Id: GqF9gXbWiLg

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/armin199]

Noam Chomsky discusses "the essence of things" from an internalist perspective, while contrasting it with the externalist view point, and critiquing essentialism.

Edit: Some clarification regarding the jargon-laden text above:

• Externalism: Externalist conceptions of justification assert that facts external to the believer can serve as the justification for a belief. According to the externalist, a believer need not have any internal access or cognitive grasp of any reasons or facts which make her belief justified.The externalist’s assessment of justification can be contrasted with access internalism, which demands that the believer have internal reflective access to reasons or facts which corroborate their belief in order to be justified in holding it. Externalism, on the other hand, maintains that the justification for someone’s belief can come from facts that are entirely external to the agent’s subjective awareness.
• internalism: internalist conceptions of epistemic justification require that one’s justification for a belief be internal to the believer in some way.
• Essentialism is the view that every entity has a set of attributes that are necessary to its identity and function, meaning every object has something that makes it what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing" The contrary view, non-essentialism, denies the need to posit such an "essence'".

Chomsky is an internalist, who rejects essentialism, meaning

1)he believes most epistemic justifications is internal to the believer, and

2)does not believe that objects have any "essence" whatsoever.

Here Chomsky is making the case that humans characterize objects in terms of their constitutions, their functions, and their other aspects, and for that reason these categorizations are not essential descriptions of the objects, but are rather structures our brains impose onto objects.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Dom0]

It's actually fun to think that objects in computer games are almost 100% essence of things, as opposed to the real world, where they're just giant blobs of atoms.

[u/Pessimisticoptimist0]

Thanks for posting this, fascinating and quick video

[u/kadeevan]

It wasn't until the example of the mountain that I got it.

[u/Fluff_e_159]

Is this man and his theory responsible for the Gnome Chomsky acheivment in Half-life?

[u/[deleted]]

It was unnecessary to shit on the "young philosopher" as he did. "Ha ha, that guy is such an idiot, amirite? Here, let me write his name on the board so you don't forget it."

Meanwhile Chomsky says nothing new here, he is regurgitating Kant. Yes, mental categories impose order on the world -- we figured that out over 200 years ago.

What remains unresolved is the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics. How does it happen that some guy sitting alone in his room, manipulating symbols on a piece of paper, predicts things never before observed? Why should nature deign to conform to the human use of reason? One feasible explanation is there is essence in the world, not in objects but in relations.

That is, yes, the mind organizes the world. But that does not preclude the possibility of order being an inherent property of things. Chomsky himself has come close to this view in his criticism of machine learning techniques applied to scientific problems. He complains that they don't give us understanding or insight, but he may as well say they fail to capture the concise, elegant, and comprehensible laws of nature.

[u/b4nthc]

Two points:

1. It's not clear from this if Chomsky goes in for relativism or skepticism about essences and categories. Does he grant that mountains exist and certain things are essentially mountains, but only for some creature insofar as it views those things as mountains--or does he just think the existence of mountains and particular things' being mountains are (useful) illusions?

2. His argument concerns only particular concrete objects insofar as categories apply to them. But this naturally leads one's thoughts to two other possible locations for essentialism: (a) The essences of categories themselves and (b) the essences of particular concrete objects themselves. For (a): Even if no particular object is essentially a mountain, might there not be some essential condition(s) for a thing being a mountain, i.e. an essence of what it is to be a mountain? For (b): Again, even if no particular object is essentially a mountain, why would there not nevertheless be any essence of what it is to be that particular object, i.e. something without which the object would not exist and given which the object does exist? If there is nothing which, if it ceased to exist, the object would thereby cease to exist, and by which, as long as it exists, the object exists, then it could be difficult to account for the object's identity over time, its possibility of change and destruction, and its very existence. The object in Chomsky's example may not be a mountain essentially--i.e. even if it were not a mountain, it might still exist--but in virtue of what is it a mountain if not by meeting the essential criteria for mountainhood (that's issue (a)), and is it not possible for it--that very object--to cease to exist, i.e. (plausibly) for the essential criteria for its existence to fail to be met (that's issue (b))?

I'm also not sure his argument in raising the water level around his example mountain or burying it in earth makes sense. He even says himself that islands are mountains, which seems to not help his point that the object could continue to exist even though it ceased to be a mountain. And burying it might easily remove it from existence e.g. by removing its borders.

[u/[deleted]]

Happy Noam Chomsky day!