The problem of 'universals'
- When you see a small feathered
creature perched in a tree, how do you know it's a bird?
- When you see a fluffy long-eared creature vanishing down a hole, how do you know it's a
rabbit?
- When you taste a cold, sweet vanilla-flavored food with a smooth texture, how do you
know it's an ice-cream?
This is the philosophical problem of 'universals', of how our minds assign individual
things to general categories, types or kinds.
These categories, types and kinds of things
are known as 'universals', whereas the individual examples are known as 'instantiations'
or 'particulars'. Thus Mungo Jerrie and Rumpelteazer are both instantiations of the
universal form of cats.
 |
| Types, kinds, categories, species |
The problem of universals can be split into two questions:
(i) How and where do these universals exist (assuming they even do exist)?
(ii) If universals do exist, how does our mind interact with them, to access and recognize
the correct category in which to place individually observed objects?
There are three different views on how (and if) these universals exist: Essentialism, Conceptualism and Nominalism:
1 Essentialism
Essentialism (sometimes known as
'Platonism' or, rather confusingly, as 'Realism') states that universals really do exist
outside the mind of the beholder. There is an ideal form of 'cat' in which Mungo
Jerrie and Rumpelteazer participate. Their inherent 'cattiness', which is derived from the
ideal form of cat, is essential to them being what they are.
When applied to animals and their
evolution, the essentialist view is very much linked to the creationist
doctrine of separate unchanging and unchangeable species.
2. Conceptualism
Conceptualism states that universals do
exist, but only in the mind of the observer.
Thus if you cut the sides of a box down a millimeter at a time, at
some arbitrary time it will cease to appear as a box and suddenly become a tray.
Similarly, Milinda's
chariot came into and went out of existence depending on Milinda's arbitrary
recognition of its stage of assembly and disassembly
As regards kinds, types and species of living things, conceptualism regards species not as
distinct unchanging categories, but as overlapping evolving populations.
They are not objectively real, independently of a human observer. This view was
illustrated by Richard
Dawkins' famous Granny Chain thought experiment, where ancestral humans and ancestral
chimpanzees hold hands all the way back to their common ancestor.
3. Nominalism
Nominalism states that universals only
exist as names, and are completely dependent upon our use of language. Thus the Samis have 52
different words for types of snow and hence 52 different snowy universals.
An argument against nominalism is that we can have perfectly valid concepts of universals
without the use of language. Some of us may be able to remember early
childhood when we first learned the name of a class of object, but had a concept of its
type before we knew what is was called. I can remember asking my mother 'What's that?' as
she reached a pan down from the kitchen shelf, and on being told it was a pan, I knew the
word 'pan' applied to all the similar utensils on the shelf.
And as the years advance, we occasionally
revert to being pre-linguistic, with the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon, where we have a
very clear concept of a thingy, or what-not, or what-d'you-call-it, but just can't
remember its name.
So maybe the reason the Samis have so many different words for types of snow is they need
to communicate these concepts as a result of their environment and livelihood, and not
because the pre-existing structure or richness of the Sami vocabulary created these
different categories of snow out of mere words.
Buddhist Conceptualism
As usual, Buddhism takes the middle way
between essentialism and nominalism. The Madhyamaka ('Middle Way') rejects essentialism
but nevertheless regards universals as more than mere words, they are known as 'generic
images' or 'generally characterized phenomena'. They exist in the mind, but only in the
mind.
So how does our mind construct, access and recognize generic images as the correct
categories in which to place individually observed objects?
There are two possible ways for the mind to assign a newly observed phenomenon to a
category:
(i) Look through a mental catalog of everything that is known, and find
the closest match.
(ii) Use a taxonomic
or cladistic approach of following a decision tree and rejecting everything that is
not relevant to identifying the unknown object. This is exemplified by the game of 'Twenty
Questions', where every known object can be identified by a process of exclusion using
twenty or so mental operations.
a 'logical hole' corresponding to a generic image.
"The game suggests that the
information (as measured by Shannon's entropy statistic) required to identify an arbitrary
object is at most 20 bits. The game is often used as an example when teaching people about
information theory. Mathematically, if each question is structured to eliminate half the
objects, 20 questions will allow the questioner to distinguish between 2**20 or 1,048,576
objects. Accordingly, the most effective strategy for Twenty Questions is to ask questions
that will split the field of remaining possibilities roughly in half each time. The
process is analogous to a binary search algorithm in computer science or successive
approximation ADC in analog-to-digital signal conversion." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Questions
Obviously a search mechanism that can reach
its target in twenty or so operations is going to be preferable to one that on average is
destined to plough through half of a catalog containing everything that there is in order
to find a match. (The catalog has no index, since this would be begging the question: the
mind would need to already know the name of what it was looking at in order to use an
index)
The evolutionary advantages are clearly
with the fewest steps. In the catalog method, by the time you've recognized the long
coiled thing at your feet as a snake, you're already dead.
Of course there is a trade-off. The catalog
approach is more accurate than the taxonomic method, so with the fast method you may
occasionally mistake a coiled rope at dusk for a snake.
Buddhist philosophers claim that this
binary exclusion method is in fact how generic images work. Generic images (or generally
characterized phenomena) are logical structures formed by eliminating everything
that does not have the general properties of the category, rather than being a perfect
description of the 'ideal form' of the category.
Thus a generic image is what's left after all else is excluded. It is a
Boolean data structure consisting of about twenty YES/NO answers to simple questions.
The generic image is a double-negative. To quote Geshe
Kelsang Gyatso in Understanding the Mind, page 24:
"When we think of
or remember an object, say an elephant, there appears to our conceptual mind an object
that is the the opposite of non-elephant. This appearance is the generic image of
elephant. Even though there is no actual elephant in front of us, nevertheless there is a
generic image of elephant appearing to our mind. Thus our conceptual mind apprehends
elephant through the generic image of elephant. We can apply this to all other
phenomena"
The generic image is therefore the
appearance of a non-non-elephant.
Like a toddler with one of those wooden peg puzzles, it's almost as if when I produce a generic
image of an elephant, I do so not by producing a stand-alone positive image of an
elephant, but by producing an image which is specified to fit into an elephant-shaped
mental hole.
We can also think of non-elephant and the generic image of an elephant as being logically
complementary, just as the same stencil can produce a light figure on a dark background or
dark figure on a light background, with the information content being exactly the same in
both cases.
 |
| Produced from the same stencil - bunny and non-bunny are informationally equivalent. |
From Debate in Tibetan
Buddhism by Daniel Perdue p 299 - 300
"Thought consciousnesses are not collective engagers but eliminative engagers.
Thought does not comprehend its object together with all of its uncommon characteristics (the full catalog description - S.R.), but understands its
object in a general way by a process of eliminating all that is not that object. The
thought consciousness apprehending a table does not comprehend a table just as it is, for
it comprehends a mere mental imputation which is an elimination of non-table...
"...The appearing object of a thought consciousness is necessarily
a generally characterized phenomenon, a permanent phenomenon. Generally
characterized phenomena are so called because their characters are realized not by way of
their own entities but by way of a generality. They are realized in a general way. For
instance, the thought-consciousness apprehending ice cream understands it though the
elimination of non-ice cream by way of the appearance of a mental image of something which
is the opposite of non ice cream. By this process ice cream is not understood
together with all of its specific qualities but merely in a general way, as the
elimination of non-ice cream. Thus, a conceptual consciousness can know something in only
a general way rather than appreciating its object's freshness and fullness."
So our mind identifies an object by means
of a mental generic image of that object, where the generic image, not the object itself,
is the appearing object of our conceptual mind.
A conceptual mind knows its object 'for
what it is' through the appearance of a generic image of that object, not by seeing the
object directly.
However, the generic image is the negative
of a negative, a kind of 'logical hole'.
 |
| A generic image of ice cream is the opposite of non-ice cream, both visually and in other ways |
And we also need to remember that we are
making visual analogies of what is fundamentally a Boolean datastructure, in the form of
branch points of a taxonomic tree, for example many of the identifying qualities of
ice-cream are non-visual.
Madhyamaka Philosophical aspects
In terms of the Madhyamaka's rejection of all
forms of essentialism, the taxonomic method clearly demonstrates how the mind
recognises objects without recourse to mapping them on to some Platonic 'ideal form' or 'inherently existing other'. In fact, the
generic image is a complete opposite of a Platonic Ideal Form. For whereas the Ideal Form
is inherently existent, the generic image is totally and completely empty, being derived
from a 'logical hole' formed by exclusion of everything else.
Platonic forms are believed to be complete
and perfect descriptions of the universals, of which individual instances are imperfect
instantiations. In contrast, generic images are minimalistic specifications
containing just enough information to categorize every particular instance of an object.
A positive-to-positive matching of a
perceived elephant to a Platonic image of an ideal elephant would require tedious
bit-by-bit matching (how many bits of information do you need to positively specify an
elephant?). The method of elimination is more efficient.
