Individual natures

Philosophia (United States)

Volumn 26, Issue 1-2, 1998, Pages 3-21

  De Sousa, Ronald ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62549165097     PISSN: 00483893     EISSN: 15749274     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02380055     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. For one influential argument to this effect (among many others) see Charles Taylor, Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, " in Human Agency and Language., vol 11, p.15-57 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
2. Versions of this objection are found in Hampshire, Freedom of the Individual, (Harper and Row, 1965).
3. Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
4. See also J. Fodor, "Special Sciences, " in Representations (Cambridge: MIT-Bradford, 1981)
5. See Tyler Burge, "Individualism and the Mental", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 4:73-121 (1979).
6. Robert Kraut. "Love de Re, " in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 10:413-430.
7. Another characteristic that is sometimes cited to explain the difficulty of finding laws that describe human behaviour is their complexity. But as far as I can see complexity is not a priori an obstacle to being subject to natural law. In some cases, indeed, complexity is a necessary condition of the applicability of natural law. This can be illustrated by any of the laws, such as Boyle's laws, or the laws of thermodynamics, that are in effect stable statistical consequences of large numbers of elementary events.
8. See the papers in Part Vll of Elliott Sober, ed., Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge: Bradford-MlT, 1984).
9. Kitcher in Biology and Philosophy, vol. 2 no. 2 (April 1987).
10. Alexander Rosenberg in "Human Science and Biological Science: Defects and Prospects, " in Scientific Explanation and Understanding: Essays on Reasoning and Rationality in Science, ed. Nicholas Rescher, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983).
11. See also Alexander Rosenberg, Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science, Oxford.
12. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3.2 The Dubrovnik Papers: Philosophy of Biology 19-135.
13. This seems to be roughly the strategy followed by Kripke and Putnam.
14. See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980).
15. Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of Meaning. " In Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975).
16. This is the stance rather casually adopted in Ronald Giere's Understanding Scientific Reasoning (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.)
17. I've gone on record elsewhere as arguing that there are no such kinds. See "The Natural Shiftiness of Natural Kinds, " Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14:561-580 (1984).
18. It is a separate question, about which I shall have nothing to say here, to what extent our individual nature is necessarily constant and to what extent we can have a succession of such natures. On a Parfitean view of the self, only a relatively short temporal slice of a person could strictly have a nature. On more traditional views, our nature might be precisely that which once formed could not be changed, though perhaps it could be perverted by traumatic experience.
19. How to interpret possible combination? Strictly speaking, given infinite time only that is guaranteed to happen which has non-zero probability; but in an infinite domain that is not equivalent to possibility. Pick a point on a line: the measure of the probability of picking a particular point is zero, yet picking it is not impossible. Given that we have already posited a finite number of possible combinations, however, possibility and non-zero probability can be considered equivalent, for Nietzsche's intents and purposes.
20. See Ian Hacking, "The Autonomy of Statistical Law, " in Scientific Explanation and Understanding: Essays on Reasoning and Rationality in Science, ed. Nicholas Rescher.
21. The set-theoretic method is essentially the traditional requirement of total evidence for statistical reasoning. See Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1965) pp. 397 ff.
22. Nancy Cartwright, "Causal Laws and Effective Strategies, " in Why the Laws of Physics Lie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
23. Nancy Cartwright, "Causal Laws and Effective Strategies, " in Why the Laws of Physics Lie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
24. We might express absolute risk R with respect to any proposition p with a number normalized between 0 and 1:R-4 prob(p) * prob (-p).
25. As did an anonymous referee for an earlier version of this paper. Could individual natures be discovered by performing repeated experiments on a single individual? A more generally shared characteristic of biological organisms makes this difficult: any repeated experiment is likely to change the properties of the organism so tested. Still, some properties having essentially to do with that very fact might be explored in this way: an individual's characteristic learning or habituation curves, for example.
26. Donald Davidson, "Mental Events, " in Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1980).
27. That fact gives rise to the tragedy of solidarity, which I have discussed in "Emotions and the Conduct of Life, " chap. 12 of The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT-Bradford, 1987)
28. Rough and ready approaches to such knowledge are exemplified by psychoanalysis, in which the chief source of knowledge is supposed to be the clinical experience of particular cases. Such clinical experience is, of course, open to easy objections: solid knowledge about individual natures is, for the reasons I have given, impossible. But if we take the notion of individual natures seriously, we'll think somewhat differently about the issue of clinical evidence. The way it's usually discussed (see, e.g., Adolph Griinbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, and discussions by 38 commentators in "open peer commentary" in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9:228-284, 1986) the question concerns whether it's any good to get evidence from the clinical situation. But one could profitably turn the question about and ask, is there anything in the individual case (not just in psychoanalysis but in medecine generally) that might at best show up in the clinical situation but is inevitably inaccessible otherwise'? If there are individual natures, clinical experience might be one partial and unsatisfactory method of access to properties otherwise quite unknowable.