Fundamental Determinables

Wilson, Jessica

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Fundamental Determinables

Jessica Wilson

January 2012, Volume 12, No. 4, pp. 1-17

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0012.004

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Abstract

Contemporary philosophers commonly suppose that any fundamental entities there may be are maximally determinate. More generally, they commonly suppose that, whether or not there are fundamental entities, any determinable entities there may be are grounded in, hence less fundamental than, more determinate entities. So, for example, Armstrong takes the physical objects constituting the presumed fundamental base to be “determinate in all respects” (1961, 59), and Lewis takes the properties characterizing things “completely and without redundancy” to be “highly specific” (1986, 60). Here I’ll look at the usually cited reasons for these suppositions as directed against the case of determinable properties, in particular, and argue that none is compelling (Sections 1 to 3). The discussion in Section 3 will moreover identify positive reason for taking some determinable properties to be part of a fundamental (or relatively fundamental) base. I’ll close (Section 4) by noting certain questions arising from the possibility of fundamental determinables, as directions for future research.

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What other options might there be? For the strategy (of grounding the modal facts constitutive of determinable properties in some complex determinate property) to work, it has to be plausible that the complex determinate is constructed from resources that don’t tacitly presuppose that this determinate is glued together, so to speak, by the determinable. Besides broadly Boolean resources, we might consider those of set theory or mereology. But to the extent that we can even make sense of grounding constitutive facts about determinable properties in sets or fusions of determinate properties, the latter again are arguably less natural than the determinable properties they are supposed to enter into grounding, in again failing to make for as much objective resemblance (in particular, among determinate properties) as the associated determinables. That’s it, so far as I can see, for complex determinate properties that have any chance of grounding determinable properties, rather than vice versa. So, for example, one might suggest that the constitutive modal facts about determinables are grounded in the existence of an abstract “state space” of some sort — e. g., in the case of color, a color cube. But first, such a space simply registers the modal facts whose grounding is at issue, leaving open what grounds these facts; and second, insofar as points are in the space if and only if they are determinates of the determinable, if anything it appears that the space is grounded in the constitutive modal facts about the determinable, rather than the constitutive modal facts about the determinable being grounded in the space.

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