2.44
But what about our categories of understanding? For instance, we’re the ones who call this a ‘stone.’ How could we say that the stone has a world if it’s merely called this by convention and there are no actual boundaries that correspond to our naming? As Varzi writes: “On closer look, material objects are just swarms of subatomic particles frantically dancing in an otherwise empty space.”[1] He writes: “Take this cat, Tibbles [… ;] Tibbles is eating a chunk of tuna […] now it is in Tibbles’s mouth: is it part of Tibbles? Will it be part of Tibbles only after some chewing? Only when Tibbles swallows it? Only at the end of the digestive process?”[2] “It is true that I had the impression of seeing the shoreline of Long Island from my plane; but it is also true that when you actually go there, ground-level, things look very different […:] an intricate disarray of stones, sand, algae, piers, boardwalks […].”[3]
Do we just call it ‘stone’ for pragmatic reasons?
The fact that entities don’t have strict delineations, in an ontic sense, doesn’t really get to the core of the issue. To return to the discussion from the previous section, a stone that’s broken in half, for instance, is now (now becomes) two pieces (or two stones?) that also show us particular ways of being in the world. This would be true of any number of pieces. When the stone is not broken, it coheres into a whole (§2.20).
‘But the stone is already in these pieces: this is just what atoms are!’
Atoms show us a way of being in the world. As Koffka writes, “The whole is something else than the sum of its parts”:[4] the way of being of an atom is other than that of the stone. While these different levels are nested, this doesn’t affect my claim. This is also true in the case of, for example, ecosystems: we can travel ‘upwards’ (in scale) and notice that the berry is nested in the context of its various relations, nested in the context of a particular bush, a forest, and so on: and we can travel ‘downward’ to the atomic level. This inter-nesting is just part of how the world is.
This means that the (sub-)atomic structure of a given thing doesn’t affect the thing’s way of being (in the sense under discussion).
Ontology is not delineated by convention (§2.4). As I’ve alluded to above (e.g., §1.86), practices aren’t primary. Our practices and conventions don’t emerge from a vacuum but from our interactions with things. How things appear is in a dialogic kind of encounter with our practices. This is because, as I’ve mentioned, things aren’t pre-constituted or eternally constituted things (present-at-hand) but are bound up with how we engage them (ready-to-hand), which has to do with our understanding and interpretation of Dasein (of our own being and of Being itself) (§2.4–2.5). Thus, the appearance of things and the horizon of our practices are both grounded in an ontology. Beings are the beings they are as revealed through practice or engagement, and practice can take up beings only as the beings they are. Beings can also call out to be taken differently.
Therefore, first, the argument of scale misses that entities on different (nested) levels still have ways of being and, second, convention doesn’t precede ontology. The fact that a stone appears to us as a thing doesn’t mean we’ve made this up; its appearance as a thing is made possible by its appearance (where ‘appearance’ is, to emphasize, not an illusion, but how it shows up for us), i.e., by its way of being.
Furthermore, language and concepts are bound up with things and aren’t merely conventional or artificial modes we impose upon reality. As practiced, languages reveal a deep engagement, a deep entanglement, with the world. Our categories are enmeshed with phenomenal appearances: they enable or hinder, reveal or disavow, certain relations. Language is part of how things are gathered.
— Philosophy is concerned with this gathering and, thus, with language and concepts. It’s concerned with precision, the criterion for which can emerge only from its activities. – To be careful with language is to be concerned with how one is in the world.
[1] Achille C. Varzi, “Boundaries, Conventions, and Realism,” in Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science, eds. J.K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and M.H. Slater (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011): p. 129–53, see p. 136.
[2] Varzi, “Boundaries, Conventions, and Realism,” p. 140.
[3] ibid, p. 139.
[4] Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1935), p. 176.