Re: SUO: Continuants and Occurrents in 4D
"John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
>Some people, notably Pat, have complained that Peter Simons' definition
>of the distinction between continuants and occurrents cannot be
>translated to the 4D point of view.
No, I think it can be translated (in fact I suggested a way to do
it). But it can't be just conjoined with it, since it refers to
things in ways that would be incoherent if interpreted directly in
4-d terms (continuants immediately violate Leibnitz' law if taken
literally in 4-d, which is why I thought Peter was crazy.)
> I don't fully agree with that
>claim, but in any case, I prefer the approach that Whitehead adopted
>with his process philosophy, which is presented in a rather formidable
>style in his book _Process and Reality_.
>
>Following is an excerpt from a lecture that Whitehead presented in
>1920 (nine years before he had time to invent lots of difficult
>terminology). It gives a good summary of his view that processes
>and events are the ultimate constituents of reality, and objects
>are "recurring event types".
>
>Whitehead's position, which he developed within a 4D framework,
>is my preferred view of how continuants should be defined.
I like the 4-d but not the idea of 'sense objects'. But you also know
what Peter, Nicola and others have said about continuants being more
fundamental than processes. For example, Nicola has often said that
the individuation criteria for a continuant must presuppose other
continuants; something must 'endure' from one moment to the next in
order to stitch the flickerbook together into a real continuant. (For
humans he suggests we might use same-DNA, for example.) One could
hardly find a clearer summary of the fundamental split involved here
than to contrast this view with Whitehead's idea of an object as a
recurring event.
The point of my flickerbook-set proposal was precisely NOT to
adjudicate on whether Simons or Whitehead is the more correct
world-view, but to provide a class of entities that they could both
agree on, that would provide them a way to communicate about all
relevant matters of practical fact, without feeling that they were
admitting to the other's particular ontological reductionism (of
things to events, or events to things). The idea was not to decide
who was right, but to provide a way to communicate without fighting.
Thanks for the paper, in any case. It is refreshing to read Whitehead
when he was still writing English.
Pat
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