Intrinsic natures

Following up on his post about the simplicity argument for panpsychism, Philip Goff went on to defend  the idea that physical things must have an intrinsic nature. Actually, it would be more accurate to say he attacks the idea that they don’t have intrinsic natures.  Those who think that listing the causal properties of a thing exhausts what we can say about its physical nature are causal structuralists, he says, committed to the view that everything reduces to dispositions; dispositions to burn, to attract, or to break, for example.

But when we come to characterise these dispositions, we find we can only do it in terms of other dispositions. A disposition to burn may involve dispositions to glow, get hot, generate ash, and so on. So we get involved in an endless circularity. Some might argue that this is OK, that we can cope with a network of mutual definitions that is, in the end, self-supporting; Goff says this is as unsatisfactory as making our living by taking in each other’s washing.

There’s a problem there, certainly. I think a bit more work is needed to nail down the idea that to reject intrinsic natures is necessarily to embrace causal structuralism, but no doubt Goff has done that in his fuller treatment. A more serious gap, it seems to me, is an explanation of how intrinsic natures get us out of this bind.

It seems to me that in practice we do not take the scholarly approach of identifying a thing through its definition; more usually we just show people. What is fire? This, we say, displaying a lit match. Goff gives an amusing example of three boxes containing a Splurge, a Blurge, and a Kurge, each defined in terms of the next in an inescapable circle. But wouldn’t you open the box?

We could perhaps argue that recognising the Splurge is just grasping its intrinsic nature. But actually we would recognise it by sight, which depends on its causal properties; its disposition to reflect light, if you like. Those causal properties cannot have anything to do with its intrinsic nature, which seems to drop out of the explanation; in fact its intrinsic nature could logically change without affecting the causal properties at all.

This apparently radical uselessness of intrinsic properties, like the similar ineffectual nature of qualia, is what causes me the greatest difficulty with a perspective that would otherwise have some appeal.