Necessities Within Content

You're confusing two different kinds of relation. Logical relations are timeless, connecting essences or characters. Causal relations are temporal, and connect events. Hence in reasoning, logic is not the cause of the outcome. Logic is not a series of causes and effects, whether physiological or psychological.

Logic is simply the fact of the consistency of one statement with another. It's the knowledge of these consistencies and inconsistencies which is to some slight extent the cause. Causality links events and the events in the case being considered are first my acceptance of the conclusion, then my apprehension that the premises entail the conclusion, and my acceptance of that conclusion.

It is between these events, or psychical facts, that the causality holds, and it's as meaningless to say that one such event entails another as it is to say the premises cause the conclusion.

An attractive view, for the moment. You're trying to draw a line horizontally through a train of events, and say that above that line are the characters or universals of logic, and below that line are the existences or occurrences of causality.

But that kind of line can't be drawn. Even if it could, causality would have no necessity or meaning. The characters dealt with by logic do enter into the causal process. An event without characters is no event at all.

If what happens is nothing, then nothing happens.

When a hammer drives a nail, the cause in part is the motion of a certain mass at a certain velocity. These characters are an integral part of the cause. It's because of their presence that this effect rather than some other is produced, and no statement of what caused the effect could disregard them.

In the same way, the psychical event called the occurrence of a judgment in a mind is not a naked act or event. It's always a presentation of this rather than that.

And the character of this content enters vitally into the causation.

Now if the contents or characters of the events enter into the process, we can't say that the relations between these characters are irrelevant to it. Maybe no one would deny that there is a fact such as association by similarity. And however difficult it may be to construe the mechanism at work, it would be futile to deny that the similarity of content sometimes has something with the appearance of an associate. That relations within the content play a part in causation is even clearer when the relation is logical necessity.

In explicit inference we have a process in which we can directly see not only that one event succeeds another, but in large measure why one event succeeds another. It would be absurd if after the presence in our minds of the judgments, 'the squire was the abbe's first penitent' and 'that first penitent was a murderer', and the conclusion, 'the squire is a murderer', that we said we didn't have the slightest notion of why this conclusion emerged rather than a judgment about Florida grapefruit.

The fact that this was the logical conclusion to draw is relevant to its appearance as an event. And this does not commit us to say that necessary relations, connecting the content now before us with something else that is not before us, have something to do with the development of this content in one direction rather than another, that necessities within the subject-matter lay under some degree of compulsion the temporal path of thought. You may not accept the metaphysical theory I offered earlier to explain this compulsion, but the compulsion is an undeniable fact.

32.12

Logical Necessity in Inferential Causality

Consider any instance of reasoning, for example the case of the abbe and the squire. "Ladies", says the abbe, "do you know that my first penitent was a murderer?" "Ladies,", says the squire, entering shortly afterward, "do you know that I was the abbe's first penitent?"

Of course a conclusion was produced in the ladies' minds, and the question is about the nature of the causation that produced it. Now the ladies' entertainment of the premises had something causally to do with the emergence in their minds of the conclusion. The question is whether, when we say that the one contributed causally to the other, our only proper meaning is that whenever the first appears the second one does, or whether we must also say that the special logical relation in which the content of the premises stands to the content of the conclusion had something to do with the appearance of that conclusion. It did have something to do with it.

According to the regularity theory, our only reason for expecting the judgment that arose rather than some other judgment, such as that Florida raises grapefruit, is that thoughts of the first kind have regularly been followed by thoughts of the second. The question why what followed did follow is one which we cannot answer. The connection between the events is no more intelligible than the connection of lightning and thunder for a savage.

If the ladies were asked how they came to have the belief, they would say that it was because this belief was implied by what they were thinking in the previous moment, and this is the natural and correct answer. Other causes could have contributed to the result. We are not saying that causality reduces to logical necessity. But when one passes in reasoning from ground to consequent the fact that the ground entails the consequent is one of the conditions determining the appearance of this consequent rather than something else in the thinker's mind.

32.11

Causality Assumes Logical Necessity

Causality involves an element of logical necessity.

There's nothing in causal law except regular antecedence and consequence. All we are justified in meaning when we say that a causes b is that neither is ever found without the other.



But we mean more than this by causality, and there's more to it. One of those factors is logical necessity.

32.10

Causal Implies Internal

All things are causally related, directly or indirectly. And being causally related involves being logically related.

Consequently, everything in the universe is related internally to everything else.

But is everything really related causally to everything else?

If they are not, it could only be because either some events are not caused or that if all events are caused, they are not all related causally to all the others.

In fact, the ulitmate components of matter are not governed in every detail by causal law.

There is the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle, that a particle may have position or velocity but not both in any exact sense.

There is also the view that the macroscopic objects with observable behavior are all enormous aggregates of sub-atomic particles, that the regularity of their behavior is merely the statistical stability displayed by other large aggregates, and that this regularity is as consistent in the one case as in the others with caprice among the ultimate components.

The theory that there is something in the situation of a radium atom determining it to break up at one moment rather than another is without evidence.

Well, some physicists have not been persuaded that the new results point validly to any suspension of causality, such as Einstein, Planck, Lodge, and Rutherford. So whichever side you take, you will at least have it on some good authority.

Also, some who have examined the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle believe it confuses indeterminacy in our knowledge with indeterminism. The use to which the principle of indeterminacy has been put is largely due to an ambiguity in the world 'determined'. In one sense a quantity is determined when it is measured. In the other sense, an event is determined when it is caused.

The principle of indeterminacy has to do with measurement, not causation. The velocity and position of a particle are declared by the principle to be undetermined in the sense that they cannot be accurately measured. This is a physical fact causally connected with the fact that the measuring is a physical process which has a physical effect on what is measured. There's nothing in the principle of indeterminacy to show that any physical event is uncaused.

So it would be precipitate to assume the principle of causality has been falsified. Of course you don't prove it true by showing that certain objections to it are questionable. But since apart from such objections, the principle holds the field, a constructive argument for it is perhaps unnecessary at this point.

But granting universal causality, there are areas of causal influence that are closed to each other. So what is happening now in the sun can be neither cause nor effect of anything now happening on earth, because no causal agency, not even gravitation, can travel faster than light, and it takes light an appreciable time, about eight minutes, to make the journey from sun to earth.

There's nothing in such facts to challenge universal causality. Everything is not directly  connected to everything else, so that you could pass from any event to any other by following a single line of causation forward or backward. But everything is connected directly or indirectly with everything else. Events now happening in the sun are traceable to causes occurring only a few minutes ago which in turn did affect the course of events on earth.

So events in the two regions, even when neither is the cause of the other, are connected through common causes. And there is no region or event that is cut off from any other. Every body pulls every other towards it, no matter how distant it may be. Newton's apple not only exerted its pull on the earth, but every star in the sky, and the motion of every star was affected by its fall. We cannot move a finger without disturbing all the stars.

So the causal relation is universal, and causal relation includes indirect causal relation. Consequently, every existing thing is causally related to every other thing.

32.09

Abstract and Natural Attributes

But what are the limits of the internal relations theory? It can't be applied to relations between abstract universals, such as the relation of equality between the pure number 4 and 2 + 2. And this is because we can't talk about the possibility of an abstract universal being different from what it is, but only to relations between concrete terms.

That's true in a sense. If an abstract universal means an abstracted universal, which is a universal considered separately from its context in nature, then it will not depend on its relations because we have defined it that way.

But using universals as if they were independent does not prove whether they are independent. My argument is that they are not independent as they exist in nature.

So in a sense the internal relations theory applies only to concrete terms. It applies only to things, attributes and relations taken in the natural or original situation, although this does not necessarily mean that the entire concrete context has to be exhausted before the internality is apparent. The theory does not apply to objects taken in that abstraction which would beg the question, but in their real or natural habitat.

We mentioned being red-headed because it's trivial. The attribute at first seems so clearly 'external' to its subject that it makes the issue extremely difficult. Hence, it's a crucial instance for the theory of internal relations.

If you could have a perfect relational knowledge of the total, you could go from the nature of red-headedness to these other characters which qualify it, and from the nature of red-headedness you could reconstruct all the red-haired people. With this perfect knowledge you could start internally from any one character in the universe, and pass to all the other characters. In each case you would go more or less directly or indirectly, and with unimportant characters the amount of indirectness would be enormous, but no passage would be external.

Such knowledge is out of our reach, and possibly out of the reach of any mind that has to think relationally. But if knowledge is perfected in the Absolute, as we believe, then the purpose of such knowledge is realized in a higher form, and along with ignorance and chance, the last trace of externality has vanished.

32.08

Universal References Depend on Relations

Even if your argument is valid for unique things, it's not valid for universals. And your view of internal relations has to apply to both. On your view, not just things but terms are what they are because of the way they are related to things. And there's no reason to think that an abstract characteristic is so connected with other things that none of its relations to those things could be different without that characteristic itself being different. Many believe that to say fully what something is, you have to know everything about how it's related to other things.

But notice they don't demand this for universals. Having red hair may occur in many people with different temperaments, histories, and states of health. Therefore, having red hair is related to all those characteristics as well as all others. If having red hair was not having red hair unless it was related this way, then no one could know what having red hair was without first knowing all its relations to the mental and bodily traits of those who had red hair.

We do not know all these relations. But we do know what red-headedness is. We have knowledge which on this theory would be impossible. Hence the theory is wrong.

Yet this argument does not prove what it tries to prove. It proves that we can have some knowledge of red-headedness without knowing all the relations of redheadedness. What it ought to prove is that we can know red-headedness fully and as it really is without such knowledge.

And there's a big difference between these two statements. It would be absurd for the theory of internal relations require that we deny that we can have knowledge of red-headness without knowing all the relations of redheadedness. Because it's obvious that we do attach some meaning to red-headedness even though we do not know all its relations. No defense of internal relations has ever denied that, because it would imply that every bit of knowledge we have is illusion, since nothing ever comes before us whose relations we know exhaustively.

The fact that all knowledge is a matter of degree does not imply knowledge nihilism. We can and do have some knowledge without an exhaustive grasp of relations. When we use the term 'red-headedness', we use it with a meaning and we have some knowledge of the attribute it names, even though we don't know all the relations of that attribute.


But is that equivalent to saying that the red-headedness now explicitly in our thinking is all there is to that attribute as it exists in the nature of things?


Well that's what is implied in the criticism, because unless the criticism means that we can know the real nature of an attribute without knowing its relations, it is saying nothing we disagree with. But to assume that what is now presented in idea gives the whole nature of what is referred to us begs the question and adopts a position we've already shown is false. An idea always points beyond itself. It always means more than it is. It always refers to more than it includes within the circle of its explicit content. That's what makes it an idea. This difference comes under the head of immanent and transcendent meaning (See 1.2.18).

That there is such a difference is undeniable. It's the difference exemplified (though of course not perfectly, since transcendent meaning can never be captured completely) by the interval between what presents itself to the schoolboy when he thinks of Napoleon's loss of Waterloo and what presents itself to the historian. Both refer to the same thing, but by general admission the historian's explicit grasp is nearer to the fact than the school-boy's (2.4.27.4 - 2.4.27.5).


What makes the the second grasp better than the first?  It's the fuller grasp of context, that is, of the antecedents, methods, and bearings of the engagement. The schoolboy must understand these things to be able to understand the defeat as it really was, and as he apprehends the context more fully, his thought immediately remolds itself internally and approximates to the external fact.

Similarly of the more trivial thought we have used to illustrate. For everyday interaction on the level of common sense, the ordinary notion of it suffices. Therefore, does our notion at this level exhaust the nature of the object? There is no more reason for thinking that than there is for thinking that our ideas of anything else on this level are truly adequate to their objects.

As little as might be the point of reflecting on it ordinarily, it's still a fact that red-headedness is an integral part of an organism, and is so bound up, for example, with the structure of hair fibers and this in turn with all kinds of constitutional factors determining racial and individual differences that our common notion of it supplies scarcely more than a sign-post to its real or ultimate nature., that is, to what is as embedded in its own context.

As we grasp those further relations, our explicit thought o fthe attribute is modified while our reference remains the same. We see that we are advancing toward the character as it really is.

In such a series of ideas, our reference is the following: In such a series of ideas, our reference is the same throughout. Our comprehension of what we refer to changes throughout. The changes in comprehension arise from grasping our original content in a fuller context of relevant relations. Our Comprehension at the end of the series is a closer approach to the real character than our comprehension at the beginning. Further advance must be assumed to lie along the same line. And no limit can be set beforehand to the context that complete comprehension would demand. This is what can be verified as fact in any process of improving knowledge.

32.07

Unique Terms and Relations

By introducing these functions and relations into the essence, you're begging the question for internal relations in the same way the abstractionists do for external relations.
But it's impossible not to introduce these functions and relations if we are going to deal with the objects of actual thought. But even if we were to cut off from what is meant by 'the Capitol' all these entangling alliances, the conclusion would be the same.

Although it's strictly impossible, let's try to strip away from the object all of its associations and leave only the brick and mortar. Of course, this arrangement and bricks are what is in question.

Now this arrangement and location were not an accident, but part of the larger Washington-Jefferson plan for the city. And if this arrangement of the bricks and their rleations to their nearer surroundings are part of this larger design, selected with reference to its aesthetic qualities as a whole, the smaller arrangement could not either be or be perceived apart from its place in the larger one. Someone who saw a carburetor on the ground would not understand what it is if they had no idea that is was part of an engine. But at this point we're not going to raise the question of whether or not teleological properties belong to nature. So back to the bricks.

They are unique bricks, and we've already stated what we mean by that (1.2.14.19). The bricks are related in certain ways to other things, and ultimately to all other things. We've already shown how in the case of a mountain, the question "What mountain?" was always and inevitably answered by such a specification.

What makes these stones these stones is an infinitey of relations, temporal, spatial, and so on. And the relations are not mere rationes cognoscendi. They are part of that which individuates. They are part of what goes into making the specific differences of the terms. Two stones that were exactly alike not only in quality, but in these relations as well would not be two stones, only one. The qualities of what we call a single stone, if they had two differing sets of relations, would not make one stone, but two. Either the relations are essential to a thing's being what it is, or else we must exclude from its nature what is indispensible if it is to be that thing. But excluding indispensible relations is impossible. Therefore, the relations are essential to its being what it is.

This view is consistent with common sense. Think about the way in which, for the common person, temporal and spatial relations are thought to be the essence of things. The Capitol is built partly of sandstone from Virginia, partly of marble from Massachusetts. The ordinary person would not say that the stones would be what they are apart from their relaitons to their past. The are stones, the stones, that came from Massachusetts and Virginia. And if they had come from somewhere else, they would not be the stones they are.

The common person would probably falter when pressed, since if they were asked whether they could not still have been the same if shipped by a different rounte or quarried somewhat later, they would say they could have been the same. And in the same way about spatial and other relations, part of what iffeentiates these stones from others is their being here rather than there. Yet the ordinary person would probably admit that they might have been elsewhere. But when that person vacillates between saying that the same thing might and might not have had different relations, they are vacillating between two notions of the same thing. The thing that might have had different relations is a pattern of qualities artifically abstracted already. Start by assuming that a stone is merely a certain shape, size, hardness, and weight, and there is nothing that requires it to be here rather than there.

But these qualities are not what makes this stone what it is. Qualities abstracted in this way have had their lines of attachment cut. It would theoretically be repeated anwhere, and therefore is the reverse of unique. This stone is unique. What makes it unique is a set of relations that fix its connection with everything else in the universe. Removing any or all of these relations removes part of what makes this stone what it is, and assumes that it is related internally to everything else.

This is prejudging the case. You secure the admission that existing things are unique, and then define uniqueness as involving internal relations.
But the uniqueness of the existing thing is not in question. And there is nothing arbitrary about the definition of uniqueness, which we've already shown. It is the only definition that is consistent with our actual meaning.

32.06