Matter Thinks

Names are Objective September 29, 2009

What’s in a name? How does a name relate to the thing it names? This question has always fascinated philosophers, and continues to be fertile ground for philosophy. The view of objects I describe in No Boundaries and The Objective Gap casts the problem of names in a new light.

A name clearly is a property; the question has been, a property of what exactly. This becomes a problem when we consider the names of fictional characters, cases of mistaken identity and other situations where the exact thing being named is ambiguous, incorrect or even nonexistent. To address this problem, many philosophers have turned to exotic ideas such as many worlds theories and modal logic.

From an object-oriented point of view, however, the source of the problem is clear: the objective gap. Names are rigid designators of objects, not substance. An object is a mental construction which is imprecisely, incompletely and tentatively mapped to reality. The object itself always exists, as an object; but mapping it to something real doesn’t always mean that reality is what the object says it is. The object called Santa Claus clearly exists, and might be mapped to all sorts of things — a picture, a guy in a costume at the mall, the words “Ho ho ho!”. All of these things are real, and they are all Santa Claus in a sense, but they are more something else than they are Santa — other objects can be mapped to them with more plausible claims of existence.

But mapping Santa Claus to things that aren’t literally Santa Claus is not only possible, it can be useful. It lets us judge the quality of the mall guy’s Santa performance — how convincing is his protrayal? How much like the “real” Santa?

Let’s say, though, that we recognize the guy in the Santa suit, and he’s someone we know named Al Jones. In that case we will apply another object, “Al Jones”, which is an identity rather than a role. So this mapping will be more exclusive and permanent: we expect the man to remain Al Jones even after changing out of the suit, and we don’t expect the man to also be Bill Smith or anyone else. In other words, we accept this mapping’s claim to existence.

But a funny thing happens at that point. Instead of judging flesh-and-blood Al Jones against the “Al Jones” object, the way we judged him against the “Santa Claus” object, we judge the “Al Jones” object against Al Jones. That is, we compare the object to our perceptions, and if there’s a problem we modify the object to match the perceptions, or throw it out.

So if we walk up to Santa and find out we were wrong, and see that it’s actually Bill Smith in the Santa suit, we must unmap “Al Jones” and map “Bill Smith” instead. This has no impact on the existence of the real Al Jones or the real Bill Smith, or for that matter the “Al Jones” or and “Bill Smith” objects. Ontologically, nothing has changed. All that changed was the mapping.

In many ways, this view is resembles contextualism, only as an ontology rather than an epistemology. Contextualism says that what we can claim to know depends on the context. An object-oriented ontology says that we what we can claim exists depends on the context, context in this case meaning the selected object mapping. In particular, we cannot say that an object exists based purely on its own properties. Those properties were selected on the basis of a mapping, and other properties were not selected. To justify our belief in the object we have to look at the whole picture.

In this way, objects are like shadows. A shadow exists only by virtue of non-shadow; if there weren’t light to be obstructed, there wouldn’t be a shadow. A shadow is a subtraction.

The process of deciding what exists is also largely a process of subtraction, of removing noise so we can detect the signal. There are an infinite number of things that might exist, and many, many that might plausibly exist at any moment, so many that we must eliminate huge numbers of them at every turn.

But we also have the power to use mappings that don’t completely fit reality, but are nevertheless useful — metaphors, analogies, figures of speech. In such cases, the object’s properties are more valuable than its claim to existence, so the later is disclaimed.

Logical propositions are in this category. To reason about an object, knowing its properties is more important than whether or not it exists. In fact, you could say that much of the power of classical logic is precisely the ability to reason about things that you’re not sure really exist, or even know for a fact don’t exist — things that lay in the future, for example.