Categorical Essences

May 3rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The concept of the essence, whilst rightly dismissed from empirical science, is nevertheless a staple of several other systems of thought including folk or naive sciences, theology, and metaphysics.

The concept of the essence is closely related to that of the category. An essence can be seen as the metaphorical physicalisation of the ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ which must be met for inclusion of any entity within a specific category. It could be argued that such conditions are routinely met without recourse to essentialism, as for example where the conditions for inclusion in the category of ‘birds’ is the possession of functioning wings. This argument for classical categories has been dismissed however by writers from Wittgenstein to Rosch in favour of a view of categorisation based on the prototype or on ‘family resemblance’ rather than necessary conditions. Despite this critique, the organisation of experience according to the necessary and sufficient conditions required by classical categorisation still obtains, to the extent that it may be an innate human tendency.

A product of this innate tendency to assume that such conditions exist is the formulation of an imaginary set of such conditions which, whilst they may have no literal existence, nevertheless are assumed to exist in some transcendent form. So it becomes possible to identify a bird, with or without functioning wings, as nevertheless belonging to the category birds, because of an essential birdness which is possesses, and which are its defining feature qua bird. This transcendent feature is the categorical essence of the bird, and is shared by all members of the category of birds.

This paper will consider the ontological status of these categorical essences, suggesting that such essences are best read as metaphorical or metanymic.

Posted in Category, Conference Abstract, Essence, Rosch, Eleanor, Wittgenstein, Ludwig | No Comments »

Liquid Essence

May 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The human tendency to allocate all experience to classical (non-prototypical) categories results in an essentialism in which the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a category are metaphorically (or metanymically) applied to an intangible essences.

An extended property of the urge to categorise is that we also tend to group categories into larger categories whose members possess more general properties, the ultimate category being the category of everything under which all other categories are subsumed, a summum genus which subsumes all other categories. An implication of this is that this ultimate category must itself have an essential condition for its own membership. This condition has been variously named as being, dasein, Tao, etc. However, such an abstract concept as being is outside the grasp of embodied cognition and can only be understood by the application of a metaphor. It will be demonstrated here that the dominant metaphor which is used in the understanding of the ultimate essence is that of the liquid. Thales was right, in its essence, all is water.

Posted in Category, Essence, Liquid | No Comments »

Polycentric Prototypical Performance

May 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

This paper will report on a study recently carried out in which subjects were assessed on their strategies for identifing prototypical members of the category performance (see Rosch, 1983). Subjects were presented with a range of descriptions of both actions and inanimate objects and were asked to give each example a mark out of 10 according to how well they felt it fitted the description of performance. It was found that, from a wide range of possible candidate activities and entities, those which rated highest as performance were either highly stereotypical, matrixed activities (conventional plays etc), and natural inanimate objects (a rock being the most highly rated of this set of examples).

The first of these selection is easily explainable according to familiar conceptions of theatricality and it relationship to performing as an artform. The other chosen example, the rock which exhibits prototypical performativity, clearly requires a different order of explanation, an explanation which emerges from analysis of the discussion among the respondents on completion of the survey and comparison of results. It is revealed that the interpretation which some respondents were placing on performance with regard to this example was significantly different to the more theatrical prototypes indicated, (although it will be shown that there is a salient relationship). The rock, by doing nothing other than simply ‘being itself’ is regarded as exhibiting one of the key elements informing an ontology of performance, which is being fully and entirely present.

Eleanor Rosch, “Prototype Classification and Logical Classification: The Two Systems,” New Trends in Conceptual Representation: Challenges to Piaget’s Theory?, ed. Ellin Kofsky Scholnick (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1983) 79.

Posted in Category, Conference Abstract, Rock, Rosch, Eleanor | No Comments »

Essence Metaphors

May 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Folk theories of categories, combined with the fact that human beings seem to be ‘natural born dualists’ (Bloom) results in the concept of the essence, an intangible defining property which gives an entity its unique identity. Because this concept of an essence is inherently ineffable and abstract (not to mention objectively non-existent) it can only be conceptualised through the application of metaphors sourced from the concrete domain of lived and embodied experience. The dominant metaphors for the ontology and location of the essence are;

  • light
  • liquid
  • void
  • centre
  • interior (of the body)

References to the body often combine these metaphors or their entailments.

Posted in Bloom, Paul, Category, Essence, Metaphor | No Comments »

Things and Nothings

September 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie

“Thingness’ is total containment is all dimensions.

“Nothingness’ is total exclusion from all categories in all dimensions.

Posted in Category | No Comments »

Evolution, Embodiment, Perennialism

September 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie

  1. All humanity has a common evolutionary history, facing largely the same challenges and finding the same opportunities.
  2. Our common evolutionary history is expressed in the genome.
  3. Our evolutionary history, and the genomic record of this ancestry, is echoed in our common embodiment.
  4. Our common embodiment includes all of the mechanisms of sensation and of mind
  5. The commonality of our physical and cognitive embodiment is echoed in the wide range of identical features found in all human cultures, the ‘human universals’.
  6. The commonality of cultural, embodied, genomic, and evolutionary experience is echoed in the common philosophies and mysticisms of Folk Science and Perennialism.

For example, the universal cognitive process which allows us to conceive of categories, based on the common embodied conceptual metaphor of the container, leads inexorably to the idea of a universal category. The universal category, the conceptual vessel in which everything is contained, is one possible formulation of a monotheistic deity, as is found in Plato and the neo-Platonist philosophers of the early Christian church.

Posted in Category, Embodiment, Evolution, Naive Physics, Perennialism, Science, Universals | No Comments »