Q&A: The Ability to Distinguish and Thinking
The Ability to Distinguish and Thinking
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask a somewhat strange question. It seems that Adam, or even any newborn baby, is endowed with a remarkable ability to understand the world. For example, if we were in a forest and looked merely at the picture our eyes paint for our consciousness, then there would not seem to be any real distinction between stones and trees, or between sand and the sun and the stars. All these things exist out there, but we are the ones who call them by names (a stone “stone,” sand “sand,” etc.) and divide the world into its particulars. I do not think we can understand anything in the world without this act, and moreover I think that definitions and their analysis are an essential part of thinking.
Now, even if we call stone A a stone, it seems that we still could have called stone B by a different name and not connected it to the concept “stone” that we used for stone A, since it has somewhat different characteristics. Or perhaps the other way around: we might get confused and call a tree a stone. Maybe to us this seems like a funny thought because it is so elementary and obvious, but I do not think it is all that obvious… after all, there are enough differing characteristics between all things, so how do we manage to gather them under names? And moreover, we also manage to derive successful predictions from those names about other things as well (or perhaps that itself is part of how we operate).
Likewise, it does not entirely seem that the act of definition is so simple for us, because very often (and perhaps always?) we do not really know how to provide a very sharp definition of things, especially in borderline cases. For example, if we try to define a dog, there are many kinds of dogs, and at some point the dog also becomes a wolf. So maybe it is easy enough to say what a wolf is and what a dog is, but there is some broad range that is “unclear.” And yet it still seems that we know how to point to a single thing in the middle of that range (say, a poodle) and identify it well, even though the definition does not really exist. Following from this, the conclusion that seems reasonable to me is to say that the name we defined is simply a collection of all sorts of particulars. But that really sounds jarring to me, because the fact is that as soon as we identify an Amstaff, we understand that it too is a dog. It is not as though we suddenly throw it into the bag of all words. Or what is the definition of life, or of time? It is much easier to point to people and animals than to define things. But if so, how are we capable of pointing to something from the class of animals if we do not know how to define it at all?!
As a believing person, I do not think you are especially troubled, because you can simply anthropomorphize God a bit and say that God also “thinks” in definitions, and therefore when He created the world He indirectly caused us to understand it by creating us with an ability to recognize patterns or something like that. That is, He created human beings with such an ability, and also made the world indeed fit that ability. Just as if two people agree between themselves on the definitions of mathematics, then they can create a whole clear world together. But that is a bit like using God as a crutch, if not worse than that—it’s a God of the gaps!
So I would really be happy to hear what you think about this. Because it feels to me so elementary, and yet on the other hand it is completely elusive.
Answer
Not strange at all. You wrote perceptive and beautiful things.
Briefly, I would say that in my opinion this is not specifically connected to faith. I think, precisely for the reasons you laid out here, that there are Platonic ideas in the world that define things. By comparison to them, the definition emerges that this is a stone and that is a tree, and likewise the comparisons between one tree and another. Without that, these really would be arbitrary determinations.
The world of concepts as well (not just objects) has a similar problem. There too I am an essentialist (I think concepts have existence and essence) and not a conventionalist (someone who holds that a concept is a social agreement and has no real existence in the world). Otherwise all the definitions of concepts (and not only objects) would be arbitrary.
As I said, in my opinion this is not necessarily connected to God, but it does assume the existence of entities that are not material (ideas and concepts). Materialists presumably will not accept this.
Discussion on Answer
I am not trying to avoid a God of the gaps. It’s just that God is not needed here.
Since secular people also think this way, I conclude that they too see what I see: that there are such definitions in reality itself—essentialism.
In principle, whenever there is a difficulty X and you arrive at conclusion Y in order to resolve it, one can always claim that this is a “God of the gaps.” The problem with a God of the gaps is that it is an unnecessary evasion, not that I introduce something new in order to resolve a difficulty. After all, that is what we always do. I see a painting and conclude that someone painted it. Is that conclusion a God of the gaps? It is a compelling conclusion, because a painting without a painter is not plausible.
So too with our definitions. If we view them as something arbitrary, then there is no problem. But if someone understands that there is no arbitrariness here, he has to understand that this rests on essentialism.
Of course one can argue against him that he should give up the perception that definitions are not arbitrary, and then he will not need essentialism. But if a person is convinced that his definitions are not arbitrary, I see no reason at all for him to give that up. By the same token, you can tell a person that his assumption that what he sees really exists is unfounded, and therefore he should give up the assumption that his senses are reliable. I trust my senses, and I see no need to give that up. In the same way, I trust my perception of concepts. I have more than once discussed the fine line between this line of argument and pragmatism (see the fourth conversation in my book The First Existent, the first book in the trilogy. An initial version is in the fourth notebook here on the site).
The materialist will find himself with a problem here. He has to decide whether to give up materialism or the assumption that definitions are not arbitrary. But I do not have that problem. I have written more than once that an atheist who believes in morality is a covert believer in God. Perhaps one can say here too that a materialist who accepts his definitions as something essential (and not mere conventions) is a covert dualist.
Interesting, but I have a feeling that materialist explanations are preferable because in the end, many times these explanations turn out to be correct, as opposed to dogmatic religious or philosophical views. For example, in the period when philosophy and religion flourished least, science grew strongest.
Also, from looking online it seems that essentialism is considered a rather extinct theory. For example, Wikipedia says that Wittgenstein presented a decisive criticism in his “presentation of the concept of family resemblance as a way to connect different objects belonging to the same category. That is, there is not necessarily a set of features common to all the objects in the category, and the resemblance between them passes through other objects.
Wittgenstein used the example of a game—between chess and an individual playing alone with a ball it is hard to find points of resemblance, but the resemblance is clear if we go by way of basketball.”
Personally, to tell the truth, I did not entirely understand the claim, because someone who understands the meaning of the concept of a game does not see any difficulty in this. And one can always say that “game” is a complex and non-primitive category. But even more clearly, buying something in a store does not look like a game, even though it is a transfer of an object between two people, and according to his words one could call it a game. They also bring the classification of animals in biology as proof that what people once thought was essential turns out generally not to be so in light of evolution.
It is just strange for me to think that I am the only crazy one who sees a problem in an approach that claims everything is arbitrary, without my having found good answers.
Things are not arbitrary. Things are distinguished on a very coarse level. There are many trees and many kinds of trees. And even from the same tree, no tree is identical to another, and still we call it by the name tree. And there are things that are on the border between a tall bush and a tree.
We perceive the things our brain evolved to perceive, for evolutionary survival reasons.
Of course, once there is a good perceptual infrastructure (a flexible operating system), it is easy to expand it to things not connected to survival at all.
There is nothing essential in objects. Only properties that we perceive. Also in terms of the temporal order of our perception, we perceive things on scales of tenths of a second and not below that. And we are also not good at perceiving long-term things.
Everything is based on what is useful to us in day-to-day life.
Platonic ideas are nonsense, like demons that come to explain noises that are not clear.
There is a brain, the brain has abilities, and the brain and the structure of the brain and the technology of the brain must be investigated in order to understand how we perceive things.
Thank you very much. Even to myself it is not clear.
Your suggestion is interesting, but it feels to me that in order to solve the problem you replaced one problem with another, because in order to avoid a God of the gaps you brought in countless unclear concepts. Maybe it is not really endless, because I think everyone agrees that some definitions we produce on the basis of previous definitions—for example, a mattress is a soft bed—and in general everything connected to things human beings create is much easier to say that the definitions are newly invented things. But still, this is entering a whole foreign world.
So if you are religious, and you hold that God created the world and everything, then why not simply assume that He created for us tools of thought that fit the world, and adapted the world to them? Why add an unclear world?
In any case, how would a materialist interpret this? Would he say everything is arbitrary?
But if he has no sharp definition of things—for example, what a stone is—and on the other hand when he encounters stone C, which is a bit different from A and B, he is not going to redefine the concept of stone, but will simply put it into the bag of the definition of stone, so how does he manage to understand that C is a stone?
Moreover, even if he did put it into the definition, why did he choose specifically stone C to put in and not tree B? Clearly, from the outset he already knew in a general way that this was a stone…
And even more so: if we have no grasp of concepts, and all our definitions are arbitrary, then how can we even begin to create definitions, since they themselves are always built on other concepts? It is obvious to us that we have at least axiomatic definitions, and they are not arbitrary. But if a materialist holds that everything is arbitrary, then you cannot define anything as a new definition—you do not even have words that are themselves definitions of anything, aside from a long silence.