Your morning metaphysics

The Castalia House blog has an essay by Anthony Marchetta on the objective reality of predicates of value, analyzing primarily the reality of artistic merit. I'm with Anthony here in holding that these qualities have objective reality, which seems to be a minority viewpoint nowadays; it was refreshing to read his thoughts on the matter.

The philosophical issue, as I remember from my days studying such things, is over what is the real nature of a "predicate" (like "is a chair", or "is red", or "is beautiful": anything that can be attributed to an object). Plato advanced the theory that predicates have a real existence of their own (Realism), independent of any observer: hence, it's possible to believe an object to be a chair, for example, and to be simply wrong in that belief, or to believe an object to be beautiful and to be simply wrong (or right). Another school of thought is Nominalism, which holds that predicates are simply names that people are taught to apply to certain objects, or Conceptualism, which declares predicates to be concepts in our minds which we apply to objects.

The arguments I've heard against Realism usually come down to some variation of what Anthony presents (tongue-in-cheek, I think) in the caption in his first illustration: "Quick, think of an anime literally everyone agrees is awesome." Heh. I decline to try to think of an anime literally everyone agrees is awesome, but that doesn't mean "is awesome" has no objective existence... But the argument usually runs, especially in dorm rooms late on Friday nights, that if there is disagreement about whether object X has quality Y, and there seems to be no way of resolving the disagreement, why, then quality Y must be a subjective quality: Y is in the eye of the beholder.

I believe this argument is fatally flawed, in that it grossly magnifies the difficulty to Realism of explaining how disagreement about predicates could exist. Suppose we lived before the invention of the telescope, and consider a star whose apparent magnitude is +6, just barely bright enough to be seen with the naked eye (by a person with good eyesight). Some people can see this star and some cannot. Does this make the star's existence doubtful? Would anyone (even in those times) have declared the star's existence to be a matter of opinion? Certainly not: and similarly, a Realist can posit that an object really has a quality, but that not everyone is able to perceive it. Proposing this usually brings the response, "But then how do you know whether it's there?"--which quite misses the point. Our difficulties in resolving arguments are not the issue. Whether we would like the argument to be over so we can move on to ordering our pizza is not the issue. Whether we can resolve the disagreement at all is not the issue. The matter under discussion is not how we are to know whether or not an object is (just to pick a predicate of value that usually leads to disagreements) beautiful; the issue is whether saying an object is beautiful is really saying anything about the object itself, or only something about the mind of the person speaking about the object, or about the language the speaker is using to refer to the object.

The argument against Realism based on the supposed impossibility of explaining disagreement, in fact, ignores the far greater difficulty that the subjectivity-based theories have with explaining consensus.

Consider a thought-experiment. Suppose you place an object, X, on a table in a room with two doors. You get a hundred people, none of whom has ever seen object X before, and parade them one by one through the room, allowing each one to observe X. Then each observer leaves the room by the other door, and is asked whether object X had quality Y. Each observer answers "yes" or "no" without communicating with any of the others. Afterward, we apply statistical tests to determine whether the tabulated result confirms or refutes the hypothesis that their answers were equally likely to be "yes" or "no".

I argue that no one can seriously expect that the result of such an experiment would prove "is beautiful" to be a mere 50-50 chance, for all objects X. Maybe you're thinking you could find some object X where the result would be pretty close to 50-50; and maybe you could, but the fact that you would have to select X carefully to get an ambiguous result, and the fact that you already can think of what kind of object would be a suitable choice, already shows that "is beautiful" is a statement about objective reality.

For consider: the hundred observers have never seen the object in the room before. Sorry, Nominalists: they cannot have been taught to call that particular object by a certain name, because they've never seen it. Or were they taught to call objects like that one by a certain name? That's possible, but you just gave up the game. If we call objects "beautiful" because they are like one another, then "beauty" is that quality that they all share, the quality in respect to which they are alike. Sorry, Conceptualists: did a broad consensus of our observers all decide to apply (or not to apply) the concept of "beauty" to the object in the room, just from the whims of their own separate and non-communicating minds? It won't do. We can continue parading people through the room and collecting results until this explanation is as implausible as saying that smoking is associated with lung cancer by mere coincidence. If you flip a coin a million times and get heads 60% of the time, no reasonable person can maintain that the coin is itself unbiased.

Similarly, an astronomer with mediocre-to-poor eyesight who worked before telescopes had no difficulty believing in the existence of stars too dim for him to see. If one of his colleagues makes a star chart and said there was a faint star at a certain spot, and our myopic stargazer had any reason to doubt it, he could ask another clearsighted buddy to plot the same section of the constellation, and if he also puts a faint star in the same spot, the first report has confirmation. The logic he would be employing is the same as collecting a consensus in our viewing-room experiment, and both arguments are strong.

And that is the cardinal problem with claiming that predicates of value (or any predicates that lead to a broad consensus in this kind of situation, but predicates of value are the ones people usually call subjective--that's why I'm picking on "beauty" here) are subjective: if such predicates are based on a quality of the object itself, then they are by definition objective; but if they have no component that belongs to the object itself, then there should be no consensus between people who independently observe the object. As Anthony points out, this flies in the face not only of common sense, but of the whole mission of the critic of drama, literature, or art: if there is nothing in a work of art itself that will tend to make different people evaluate it in the same way, then why should anyone be interested in a critic's evaluation in the first place?

Anthony Marchetta is the editor of TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, the anthology in which my first story, "The Kings of the Corona", appeared. (By the way, more than one Amazon reviewer has called it pretty good, though I have no way of confirming that they made that evaluation independently...) And without giving any spoilers, my second story, "The Hyland Resolution", happens to touch on the theme of Platonic realism. That story has been accepted to one of the Superversive Press Planetary anthologies, and will probably appear later this year.