Aristotle on Homonymy: Dialectic and Science

As Aristotle sets them out, these problems take the form of puzzles, or aporiai , regarding whether and if so how time exists Phys. If we say that time is the totality of the past, present and future, we immediately find someone objecting that time exists but that the past and future do not. According to the objector, only the present exists.

If we retort then that time is what did exist, what exists at present and what will exist, then we notice first that our account is insufficient: We further see that our account already threatens circularity, since to say that something did or will exist seems only to say that it existed at an earlier time or will come to exist at a later time. Then again we find someone objecting to our account that even the notion of the present is troubling.

After all, either the present is constantly changing or it remains forever the same. If it remains forever the same, then the current present is the same as the present of 10, years ago; yet that is absurd. If it is constantly changing, then no two presents are the same, in which case a past present must have come into and out of existence before the present present. Either it went out of existence even as it came into existence, which seems odd to say the least, or it went out of existence at some instant after it came into existence, in which case, again, two presents must have existed at the same instant.

In setting such aporiai , Aristotle does not mean to endorse any given endoxon on one side or the other. Rather, he thinks that such considerations present credible puzzles, reflection upon which may steer us towards a deeper understanding of the nature of time. In this way, aporiai bring into sharp relief the issues requiring attention if progress is to be made. Thus, by reflecting upon the aporiai regarding time, we are led immediately to think about duration and divisibility, about quanta and continua , and about a variety of categorial questions.

That is, if time exists, then what sort of thing is it? Is it the sort of thing which exists absolutely and independently? Or is it rather the sort of thing which, like a surface, depends upon other things for its existence? When we begin to address these sorts of questions, we also begin to ascertain the sorts of assumptions at play in the endoxa coming down to us regarding the nature of time. Consequently, when we collect the endoxa and survey them critically, we learn something about our quarry, in this case about the nature of time—and crucially also something about the constellation of concepts which must be refined if we are to make genuine philosophical progress with respect to it.

What holds in the case of time, contends Aristotle, holds generally. This is why he characteristically begins a philosophical inquiry by presenting the phainomena , collecting the endoxa , and running through the puzzles to which they give rise. Whereas science relies upon premises which are necessary and known to be so, a dialectical discussion can proceed by relying on endoxa , and so can claim only to be as secure as the endoxa upon which it relies.

This is not a problem, suggests Aristotle, since we often reason fruitfully and well in circumstances where we cannot claim to have attained scientific understanding. Minimally, however, all reasoning—whether scientific or dialectical—must respect the canons of logic and inference. Among the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the first systematic treatment of the principles of correct reasoning, the first logic. Of course, philosophers before Aristotle reasoned well or reasoned poorly, and the competent among them had a secure working grasp of the principles of validity and soundness in argumentation.

No-one before Aristotle, however, developed a systematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference; and no-one before him attempted to codify the formal and syntactic principles at play in such inference. Aristotle somewhat uncharacteristically draws attention to this fact at the end of a discussion of logic inference and fallacy:.

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Generally, a deduction sullogismon , according to Aristotle, is a valid or acceptable argument. His view of deductions is, then, akin to a notion of validity, though there are some minor differences.

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For example, Aristotle maintains that irrelevant premises will ruin a deduction, whereas validity is indifferent to irrelevance or indeed to the addition of premises of any kind to an already valid argument. Moreover, Aristotle insists that deductions make progress, whereas every inference from p to p is trivially valid. In general, he contends that a deduction is the sort of argument whose structure guarantees its validity, irrespective of the truth or falsity of its premises. This holds intuitively for the following structure:. This particular deduction is perfect because its validity needs no proof, and perhaps because it admits of no proof either: Aristotle seeks to exploit the intuitive validity of perfect deductions in a surprisingly bold way, given the infancy of his subject: He contends that by using such transformations we can place all deduction on a firm footing.

The perfect deduction already presented is an instance of universal affirmation: Now, contends Aristotle, it is possible to run through all combinations of simple premises and display their basic inferential structures and then to relate them back to this and similarly perfect deductions. It turns out that some of these arguments are deductions, or valid syllogisms, and some are not. Those which are not admit of counterexamples, whereas those which are, of course, do not.

There are counterexamples to those, for instance, suffering from what came to be called undistributed middle terms, e. There is no counterexample to the perfect deduction in the form of a universal affirmation: So, if all the kinds of deductions possible can be reduced to the intuitively valid sorts, then the validity of all can be vouchsafed.

To effect this sort of reduction, Aristotle relies upon a series of meta-theorems, some of which he proves and others of which he merely reports though it turns out that they do all indeed admit of proofs. His principles are meta -theorems in the sense that no argument can run afoul of them and still qualify as a genuine deduction.

They include such theorems as: He does, in fact, offer proofs for the most significant of his meta-theorems, so that we can be assured that all deductions in his system are valid, even when their validity is difficult to grasp immediately. In developing and proving these meta-theorems of logic, Aristotle charts territory left unexplored before him and unimproved for many centuries after his death. Aristotle approaches the study of logic not as an end in itself, but with a view to its role in human inquiry and explanation. Logic is a tool, he thinks, one making an important but incomplete contribution to science and dialectic.

A deduction is minimally a valid syllogism, and certainly science must employ arguments passing this threshold. Still, science needs more: By this he means that they should reveal the genuine, mind-independent natures of things. That is, science explains what is less well known by what is better known and more fundamental, and what is explanatorily anemic by what is explanatorily fruitful. We may, for instance, wish to know why trees lose their leaves in the autumn.

We may say, rightly, that this is due to the wind blowing through them. Still, this is not a deep or general explanation, since the wind blows equally at other times of year without the same result. A deeper explanation—one unavailable to Aristotle but illustrating his view nicely—is more general, and also more causal in character: Importantly, science should not only record these facts but also display them in their correct explanatory order. That is, although a deciduous tree which fails to photosynthesize is also a tree lacking in chlorophyll production, its failing to produce chlorophyll explains its inability to photosynthesize and not the other way around.

This sort of asymmetry must be captured in scientific explanation. Science seeks to capture not only the causal asymmetries in nature, but also its deep, invariant patterns. Consequently, in addition to being explanatorily basic, the first premise in a scientific deduction will be necessary.

For this reason, science requires more than mere deduction. Altogether, then, the currency of science is demonstration apodeixis , where a demonstration is a deduction with premises revealing the causal structures of the world, set forth so as to capture what is necessary and to reveal what is better known and more intelligible by nature APo 71b33—72a5, Phys. If we are to lay out demonstrations such that the less well known is inferred by means of deduction from the better known, then unless we reach rock-bottom, we will evidently be forced either to continue ever backwards towards the increasingly better known, which seems implausibly endless, or lapse into some form of circularity, which seems undesirable.

The alternative seems to be permanent ignorance. In sum, if all knowledge requires demonstration, and all demonstration proceeds from what is more intelligible by nature to what is less so, then either the process goes on indefinitely or it comes to a halt in undemonstrated first principles, which are known, and known securely. In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the process by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory to experience empeiria —which is a fairly technical term in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single universal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from experience to a grasp of first principles.

This final intellectual state Aristotle characterizes as a kind of unmediated intellectual apprehension nous of first principles APo. Scholars have understandably queried what seems a casually asserted passage from the contingent, given in sense experience, to the necessary, as required for the first principles of science. Perhaps, however, Aristotle simply envisages a kind of a posteriori necessity for the sciences, including the natural sciences. In any event, he thinks that we can and do have knowledge, so that somehow we begin in sense perception and build up to an understanding of the necessary and invariant features of the world.

Not all rigorous reasoning qualifies as scientific. As he recognizes, we often find ourselves reasoning from premises which have the status of endoxa , opinions widely believed or endorsed by the wise, even though they are not known to be necessary. Still less often do we reason having first secured the first principles of our domain of inquiry. This method he characterizes as dialectic. In fact, in his work dedicated to dialectic, the Topics , he identifies three roles for dialectic in intellectual inquiry, the first of which is mainly preparatory:.

The first two of the three forms of dialectic identified by Aristotle are rather limited in scope. By contrast, the third is philosophically significant. In these contexts, dialectic helps to sort the endoxa , relegating some to a disputed status while elevating others; it submits endoxa to cross-examination in order to test their staying power; and, most notably, according to Aristotle, dialectic puts us on the road to first principles Top.

If that is so, then dialectic plays a significant role in the order of philosophical discovery: Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, Aristotle evinces a noteworthy confidence in the powers of human reason and investigation. However we arrive at secure principles in philosophy and science, whether by some process leading to a rational grasping of necessary truths, or by sustained dialectical investigation operating over judiciously selected endoxa , it does turn out, according to Aristotle, that we can uncover and come to know genuinely necessary features of reality.

He relies upon a host of loosely related locutions when discussing the essences of things, and these give some clue to his general orientation. Among the locutions one finds rendered as essence in contemporary translations of Aristotle into English are: In speaking this way, Aristotle supposes that if we wish to know what a human being is, we cannot identify transient or non-universal features of that kind; nor indeed can we identify even universal features which do not run explanatorily deep.

Rather, as his preferred locution indicates, he is interested in what makes a human being human—and he assumes, first, that there is some feature F which all and only humans have in common and, second, that F explains the other features which we find across the range of humans. Importantly, this second feature of Aristotelian essentialism differentiates his approach from the now more common modal approach, according to which: Aristotle rejects this approach for several reasons, including most notably that he thinks that certain non-essential features satisfy the definition.

Thus, beyond the categorical and logical features everyone is such as to be either identical or not identical with the number nine , Aristotle recognizes a category of properties which he calls idia Cat. Propria are non-essential properties which flow from the essence of a kind, such that they are necessary to that kind even without being essential. For instance, if we suppose that being rational is essential to human beings, then it will follow that every human being is capable of grammar. Being capable of grammar is not the same property as being rational, though it follows from it.

Aristotle assumes his readers will appreciate that being rational asymmetrically explains being capable of grammar , even though, necessarily, something is rational if and only if it is also capable of grammar. Thus, because it is explanatorily prior, being rational has a better claim to being the essence of human beings than does being capable of grammar. Accordingly, this is the feature to be captured in an essence-specifying account of human beings APo 75a42—b2; Met. Aristotle believes for a broad range of cases that kinds have essences discoverable by diligent research.

He in fact does not devote much energy to arguing for this contention; still less is he inclined to expend energy combating anti-realist challenges to essentialism, perhaps in part because he is impressed by the deep regularities he finds, or thinks he finds, underwriting his results in biological investigation. On the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others are prepared to embrace it. One finds this sort of denial prominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato. Indeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for Aristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and invariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity , or homonymy in his technical terminology.

In the opening of the Categories , Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy and homonymy later called univocity and multivocity. All these locutions have a quasi-technical status for him. The least complex is univocity:. In cases of univocity, we expect single, non-disjunctive definitions which capture and state the essence of the kinds in question.

Let us allow once more for purposes of illustration that the essence-specifying definition of human is rational animal. Then, since human means rational animal across the range of its applications, there is some single essence to all members of the kind. Very regularly, according to Aristotle, this sort of reflection leads to an interesting discovery, namely that we have been presuming a univocal account where in fact none is forthcoming. This, according to Aristotle, is where the Platonists go wrong: In one especially important example, Aristotle parts company with Plato over the univocity of goodness:.

Rather, goodness is different in different cases. Consider the following sentences:.

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Among the tests for non-univocity recommended in the Topics is a simple paraphrase test: So, for example, suitable paraphrases might be:. If that is correct, then Platonists are wrong to assume univocity in this case, since goodness exhibits complexity ignored by their assumption. Importantly, just as Aristotle sees a positive as well as a negative role for dialectic in philosophy, so he envisages in addition to its destructive applications a philosophically constructive role for homonymy. To appreciate his basic idea, it serves to reflect upon a continuum of positions in philosophical analysis ranging from pure Platonic univocity to disaggregated Wittgensteinean family resemblance.

One might in the face of a successful challenge to Platonic univocity assume that, for instance, the various cases of goodness have nothing in common across all cases, so that good things form at best a motley kind, of the sort championed by Wittgensteineans enamored of the metaphor of family resemblances: Aristotle insists that there is a tertium quid between family resemblance and pure univocity: Aristotle assumes that his readers will immediately appreciate two features of these three predications of healthy.

First, they are non-univocal, since the second is paraphraseable roughly as promotes health and the third as is indicative of health , whereas the first means, rather, something more fundamental, like is sound of body or is functioning well. Hence, healthy is non-univocal. Second, even so, the last two predications rely upon the first for their elucidations: That is, any account of each of the latter two predications must allude to the first, whereas an account of the first makes no reference to the second or third in its account.

So, suggests Aristotle, health is not only a homonym, but a core-dependent homonym: So, he is right that these are not exhaustive options. The interest in this sort of result resides in its exportability to richer, if more abstract philosophical concepts. Aristotle appeals to homonymy frequently, across a full range of philosophical concepts including justice , causation , love , life , sameness , goodness , and body.

His most celebrated appeal to core-dependent homonymy comes in the case of a concept so highly abstract that it is difficult to gauge his success without extended metaphysical reflection. This is his appeal to the core-dependent homonymy of being , which has inspired both philosophical and scholarly controversy. One motivation for his reasoning this way may be that he regards the notion of a genus as ineliminably taxonomical and contrastive, [ 12 ] so that it makes ready sense to speak of a genus of being only if one can equally well speak of a genus of non-being—just as among living beings one can speak of the animals and the non-animals, viz.

Since there are no non-beings, there accordingly can be no genus of non-being, and so, ultimately, no genus of being either. Consequently, since each science studies one essential kind arrayed under a single genus, there can be no science of being either. Subsequently, without expressly reversing his judgment about the existence of a science of being, Aristotle announces that there is nonetheless a science of being qua being Met.

Although the matter is disputed, his recognition of this science evidently turns crucially on his commitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being itself. Of course, the last three items on this list are rather awkward locutions, but this is because they strive to make explicit that we can speak of dependent beings as existing if we wish to do so—but only because of their dependence upon the core instance of being, namely substance. So, exists in the first instance serves as the core instance of being, in terms of which the others are to be explicated.

If this is correct, then, implies Aristotle, being is a core-dependent homonym; further, a science of being becomes possible, even though there is no genus of being, since it is finally possible to study all beings insofar as they are related to the core instance of being, and then also to study that core instance, namely substance, insofar as it serves as the prime occasion of being.

In speaking of beings which depend upon substance for their existence, Aristotle implicitly appeals to a foundational philosophical commitment which appears early in his thought and remains stable throughout his entire philosophical career: In what is usually regarded as an early work, The Categories , Aristotle rather abruptly announces:. Aristotle does little to frame his theory of categories, offering no explicit derivation of it, nor even specifying overtly what his theory of categories categorizes.

If librarians categorize books and botanists categorize plants, then what does the philosophical category theorist categorize? Aristotle does not say explicitly, but his examples make reasonably clear that he means to categorize the basic kinds of beings there may be. If that is correct, the entities categorized by the categories are the sorts of basic beings that fall below the level of truth-makers, or facts. The constituents of facts contribute to facts as the semantically relevant parts of a proposition contribute to its having the truth conditions it has.

If it is a fact that Socrates is pale , then the basic beings in view are Socrates and being pale. Importantly, these beings may be basic without being absolutely simple. After all, Socrates is made up of all manner of parts—arms and legs, organs and bones, molecules and atoms, and so on down. The theory of categories in total recognizes ten sorts of extra-linguistic basic beings:.

Although he does not say so overtly in the Categories , Aristotle evidently presumes that these ten categories of being are both exhaustive and irreducible, so that while there are no other basic beings, it is not possible to eliminate any one of these categories in favor of another. Both claims have come in for criticism, and each surely requires defense.

Nor, indeed, does he offer any principled grounding for just these categories of being, a circumstance which has left him open to further criticism from later philosophers, including famously Kant who, after lauding Aristotle for coming up with the idea of category theory, proceeds to excoriate him for selecting his particular categories on no principled basis whatsoever.

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Philosophers and scholars both before and after Kant have sought to provide the needed grounding, whereas Aristotle himself mainly tends to justify the theory of categories by putting it to work in his various philosophical investigations. These may be revisited briefly to illustrate how Aristotle thinks that his doctrine of categories provides philosophical guidance where it is most needed.

Thinking first of time and its various puzzles, or aporiai , we saw that Aristotle poses a simple question: He answers this question in the affirmative, but only because in the end he treats it as a categorically circumscribed question. By offering this definition, Aristotle is able to advance the judgment that time does exist, because it is an entity in the category of quantity: Time thus exists, but like all items in any non-substance category, it exists in a dependent sort of way.

Just as if there were no lines there would be no length, so if there were no change there would be no time. A question as to whether, e. This helps explain why Aristotle thinks it appropriate to deploy his apparatus of core-dependent homonymy in the case of being. If we ask whether qualities or quantities exist, Aristotle will answer in the affirmative, but then point out also that as dependent entities they do not exist in the independent manner of substances.

Thus, even in the relatively rarified case of being , the theory of categories provides a reason for uncovering core-dependent homonymy. Since all other categories of being depend upon substance, it should be the case that an analysis of any one of them will ultimately make asymmetrical reference to substance. Aristotle contends in his Categories , relying on a distinction that tracks essential said-of and accidental in predication, that:. If this is so, then, Aristotle infers, all the non-substance categories rely upon substance as the core of their being.

So, he concludes, being qualifies as a case of core-dependent homonymy. Be that as it may, if we allow its non-univocity, then, according to Aristotle, the apparatus of the categories provides ample reason to conclude that being qualifies as a philosophically significant instance of core-dependent homonymy. Indeed, the theory of categories spans his entire career and serves as a kind of scaffolding for much of his philosophical theorizing, ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of nature to psychology and value theory.

Judged in terms of its influence, this doctrine is surely one of his most significant philosophical contributions. Like other philosophers, Aristotle expects the explanations he seeks in philosophy and science to meet certain criteria of adequacy. Unlike some other philosophers, however, he takes care to state his criteria for adequacy explicitly; then, having done so, he finds frequent fault with his predecessors for failing to meet its terms.

He states his scheme in a methodological passage in the second book of his Physics:. One way in which cause is spoken of is that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists, e. In another way cause is spoken of as the form or the pattern, i. Further, the primary source of the change and rest is spoken of as a cause, e.

Further, the end telos is spoken of as a cause. This is that for the sake of which hou heneka a thing is done, e. A bronze statue admits of various different dimensions of explanation. If we were to confront a statue without first recognizing what it was, we would, thinks Aristotle, spontaneously ask a series of questions about it. We would wish to know what it is, what it is made of , what brought it about , and what it is for. According to Aristotle, when we have identified these four causes, we have satisfied a reasonable demand for explanatory adequacy.

More fully, the four-causal account of explanatory adequacy requires an investigator to cite these four causes:. In Physics ii 3, Aristotle makes twin claims about this four-causal schema: Each of these claims requires some elaboration and also some qualification. As for the necessity claim, Aristotle does not suppose that all phenomena admit of all four causes.

Thus, for example, coincidences lack final causes, since they do not occur for the sake of anything; that is, after all, what makes them coincidences. If a debtor is on his way to the market to buy milk and she runs into her creditor, who is on his way to the same market to buy bread, then she may agree to pay the money owed immediately. Although resulting in a wanted outcome, their meeting was not for the sake of settling the debt; nor indeed was it for the sake of anything at all.

It was a simple co-incidence. Hence, it lacks a final cause. Similarly, if we think that there are mathematical or geometrical abstractions, for instance a triangle existing as an object of thought independent of any material realization, then the triangle will trivially lack a material cause.

Patrick Madigan, Aristotle on Homonymy: Dialectic and Science. By Julie K. Ward - PhilPapers

In non-exceptional cases, a failure to specify all four of causes, is, he maintains, a failure in explanatory adequacy. The sufficiency claim is exceptionless, though it may yet be misleading if one pertinent issue is left unremarked. By this he means the types of metal to which silver and bronze belong, or more generally still, simply metal. That is, one might specify the material cause of a statue more or less proximately, by specifying the character of the matter more or less precisely. Both Socrates' paleness and Socrates are said to be, but each in a different way.

Socrates' paleness is a secondary instance of being related to a primary instance of being, that of the substance Socrates. The other two cases which Ward analyses, nature and friendship, produce further evidence for core-related homonymy. The first one, nature, does not pose problems. Aristotle points out, Ward says, that there is a primary use of physis , signifying that which has in itself a cause of motion and rest.

He also says that physis is non-univocal. The secondary instances of physis are all connected to this primary instance.

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The second case, friendship, has the difficulty of apparently lacking a primary instance which is causally connected to the other two. The utility and pleasure friendships are not called friendships because of a causal connection they have with complete friendship.

Ward attempts to resolve this problem by considering the basis of each of the three types of friendships. They all appear to have as their purposes a good. The difference is that complete friendship is based on the real good, as Ward calls it, while the other two on what appears to be good, namely utility and pleasure. In order to provide a causal analysis of friendship, then, one needs to have an analysis of the good. The definitions of everything that appears to be good depends on the account of what is good indeed, giving thus to the good a priority in logos.

For Ward, then, the good itself is the primary instance, while utility and pleasure and everything else that appears to be good are secondary instances. Returning to the types of friendship, their connection would be now seen by considering the kind of good that they are based on. Since the complete one is based on the real good, it is the primary instance of friendship, while the other two, based on what appears to be good, are secondary instances.

At the end of the book, Ward returns to the contribution of homonymy in scientific inquiry. She explains that homonymy provides a useful tool for the classification by division. Used as a method, homonymy can reveal accidental homonyms so as to avoid equivocation, but it can also show the "inter-connection among the uses of the terms that possess the shared feature to point to the primary instance" Julie Ward's book is well conceived and an important contribution on a difficult topic. Her treatment of homonymy is partly indebted to Shields , and she does a good job pointing out both their agreements and their differences.

The study moves from a clear explanation of what Ward takes to be homonymy in Aristotle, to showing it at work, and to deciphering its contribution in constructing definitions. This progressive form helps the reader go through a difficult topic but might also be the source of some repetitive claims. Without a doubt, the book will generate fruitful discussions. One of the main questions that this volume raises is the connection between Aristotle's theory of homonymy and Plato's treatment of the subject. The connection between Plato and Aristotle is important for Ward, since she begins the book by pointing it out and ends it with an afterword in which she brings the two philosophers together again.

But one may reasonably wonder whether she brings them too close. Consider, for instance, the notion of primary instance. When analyzing the non-univocity of the good in order to make sense of the core-dependence of friendship, Ward says that the real good is the primary instance while those things which appear to be good are secondary instances.

But one might wonder what this real good as a primary instance really is. Certainly, the good is not univocal. A good human is not good in the same way a good dog is. In the case of the human, the primary instance is the human's real good, while the secondary instances are what appear to be good.

But the same analysis can be done in the dog's case. Susanne Bobzien - - In D. Essays in Ancient Philosophy. Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle. Christopher Shields - - Oxford University Press. One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Ward - - Ancient Philosophy 31 2: Lang - - The Classical Review 50 Ward - - Apeiron 28 3: Dialectic as Inter-Personal Activity: Hallvard Fossheim - - In Jakob L. Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle.