Convention, Invention, and Necessity by Joseph L. ESPOSITO’

Summary Philosophically speaking, invention is the mother of necessity. This means that Hume’s

analysis of the idea of necessity utilizing the notion of power, when properly qualified, is essen- tially sound and not at all a discouraging prospect. The task of the paper, then, is to specify in what respect it is possible to claim, for the various important senses of ‘necessary’, that such a notion is applicable whenever successful control has been exercised.

Resume Du point de vue philosophique, I’invention est la mere de la ntcessitt. En effet, l’analyse

qu’a faite Hume de l’idte de ntcessitt en recourant A la notion de pouvoir est, lorsqu’elle est con- venablement nuancee, essentiellement correcte et ne constitue pas du tout une perspective dtcou- rageante. Le but de cet article est donc de montrer que la notion de ccntcessairen, prise dans les divers sens importants du mot, est applicable partout ou un contrBle efficace a ete obtenu.

Zusammenfassung Philosophisch betrachtet ist die Erfindung der Ursprung der Notwendigkeit. Das bedeutet,

dass Humes Analyse der Vorstellung der Notwendigkeit auf Grund des Begriffes der Kraft (ccpo- wen)) im Wesentlichen richtig und vielversprechend ist, sofern sie korrekt formuliert wird. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird gezeigt, in welcher Beziehung es fur die verschiedenen wichtigen Bedeu- tungen von motwendig)) mtrglich ist, die Anwendung eines derartigen Begriffes tiberall dort zu garantieren, wo eine erfolgreiche Kontrolle durchgefuhrt worden ist.

In the first Enquiry (Sec. vii) Hume rejected the idea of a necessary con- nection because (a) he could not find the ‘copy’ of the reflective idea of ener- gy or power in either sentiment or consciousness, and because (b) the ‘autho- rity’ of such power was variable and unpredictable. Against (a) I have argued elsewhere that it followed from Hume’s problematic account of consciousness that a dyadic relation such as that of ‘power’ could not be known.1 With respect to (b), where failing or unpredictable powers are involked, we

Texas Tech University, Lubbok, Texas 79406. 1 “ Hume and the Transcendental Idealists, ” The Southern Journal of Phifosophy, 14

(1976), pp. 431-442.

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are left to assume that whenever the exercise of a willful power is successful a necessity results. Pursuing this line of argument, I shall maintain that Hume’s account of our idea of necessity in terms of power, when stripped of its cumbersome psychologism, is on the right track; and that it may be plausible to say that invention is the true mother of necessity.

We know that a will has been successfully exercised if we know precisely what was intended and are able to identify the specific outcome as satisfying that intention. This is a clear enough idea not contravened by the occasionalist hypothesis. For it makes no difference whether my arm is raised directly by my power (along the model of Hume’s Divine Creator), or whether entirely unknown and independent influences come into play as the ‘real cause’. If my arm is raised independently of my will, is it not possible to say that something in the universe must be constrained necessarily to bring about the result us i f 1 had? The difficulty seems to be with locating the correct necessitating power, not with the idea of a necessitating power itself.

At this point, of course, Hume correctly notes that when I judge that this outcome happened as, or as if, I had intended, I am only comparing it with what customarily happened previously. Otherwise I would not think that I had such a power in the first place, or know what to expect. But what is the leading principle of the inductive argument from experience? Is it i ) ‘Whenever I willed P in the past, P would occur by my power ’, or ii] ‘In the past whenever P occurred after willing it, I assumed that it resulted (in whatever manner) because of the willing ’? If iz], then when P does not occur upon willing it I may question the assumption of potency. This is what Hume wants us to do. But iz] appears to be based upon I ] , for I never would have made such an assumption in the first place except through inductive inference based upon i). Yet if 0 is the leading principle, then if P does not occur upon willing it I may just as well assume that I have now lost control over it than to assume that I never had such a control. The argument of (b) fails to distinguish between the truism that if my powers fail so will my belief in things happening necessarily by them and the alternative occasionalist possibility. At this point Hume’s refutation rests upon the more troublesome task of establishing (a).

If we grant that it is at least not incoherent to say that if a power is suc- cessfully exercised a necessity will result, we can proceed to develop a theory of modality in terms of the possibility of such success. What that theory might look like in outline is now presented.

The imperative mood of the verbs ‘to conceive ’ and ‘ to imagine ’ play an important role in the analysis of modal concepts, particularly in descriptions of possible worlds. Both signify achievements closely tied to the conventions

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involved in the act of following a command or request.2 Such imperatives in- variably require some form of semiotic articulation and with it the fixing of reference between sign and signified. These conditions make possible self- stultifying commands of the form: Do X and don’t do X . For example:

Conceive of a figure with both five and six sides. Imagine an object moving both away from and toward another object. Imagine this inkwell as a pen.

It has been tempting to say that, for example, the reason we cannot con- ceive of one figure with both five and six sides is that it is a logically necessary proposition that ‘five is not six’. What we would have then is a propositional attitude, not an attempted mental achievement. Yet the proposition ‘two dif- ferent things cannot in fact be the same’ may be taken more plausibly as a report of the thought-experiment to imagine two different things as similar in every respect than the imagining may be taken as an enactment of a proposi- tional fact. We cannot determine prior to the acts of conceiving or imagining whether there is a possible-world referent for a given proposition. In this sense at least necessity is (I posteriori. Whether the experiment need be repeated is a matter to be determined by our control over the raw materials and experimen- tal apparatus (language). Once we realize that words are what we make of them, a realization that historically took time to emerge, we can be sure that a conceiving or imagining based upon linguistic imperative always gives a definite modal result. Such control over language is simply the fiat that signs be given specified sense and reference. And while it is true that each of us must learn to be at home with language, we eventually come to realize that what we are learning is subject to human control in principle, and that in this area at least there are no undecidable questions. Wittgenstein spoke of the dead-end in philosophy that results from asking how signs come to represent their ob- jects. 3 The answer is: they are made to.

Let us assume that modal notions characterize a degree of control over a subject, with necessity as something that results from total control, and possibility as something predicated of subjects over which we have only par- tial control. To say that P is necessary is to say that P is entirely subject to a controlling framework. For example, the designation of a name is necessitated by the naming ability, a chosen sign, and the naming act.

The control of linguistic reference-range generates necessity, not only through a precise specification of meaning, but through precise restriction of

2 See, for example, J. M. Shorter, “Imagination, ” in Essays in Philosophical Psychology, edited by Donald F. Gustafson (New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 154-170; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G . E. M. Anscornbe (New York: Macmillan, 1968). Remark 451.

3 Philosophical Investigations, Remarks 432-436.

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extensionality as well. The latter necessity results whenever we are asked to ‘imagine precisely event E at time t other than it is’. To be able to designate both E and t we must refer a particular E and this keeps the rest of the com- mand from being carried out.

Logical necessities also come under this purview. A good reply to the view that a logical necessity results from a logical form is that if this were the case inferences could not take place. 4 It is fiat not form that makes for logical necessity. Not surprisingly, Charles Peirce, one of the founders of symbolic logic, took this position. Only someone who constructs logical systems could see that the illusion of the heteronomy of logical forms results from the con- trolling acts of producing what Peirce called “ a perfectly regular and very limited kind of language. ” 5 The rest of us study other peoples’ constructions, and then we see forms. If we think of modusponens in symbolic form it is easy for us to think of the totality of marks as comprising one large sign and each mark as a designator in its own right. In Peirce’s system of existential graphs this illusion disappears and all that we are left with are fiats or what he called ‘ permissions ’. 6

Once necessity and possibility are seen in terms of degrees of control the distinction between logical and causal necessity ceases to be an important one. Whether a subject is conventionally necessary or ‘ inventionally ’ necessary is simply a matter of whether it is subject to a controlling framework. Consider the recent debate over the question of whether the following case is one of logical or causal necessity, or neither.7 Three gears, X, Y, Z, are interlocked such that X i s meshed with Y and Y is meshed with 2. Is it logically or causally necessary that if X turns clockwise it will make Z turn clockwise as well? One suggestion is that this is a case of logical necessity, based simply on the mean- ings of the terms fully describing what is going on. Against this it has been argued that neither sort of necessity applies because one gear might vanish or turn into a fish. This is the sort of disagreement one might expect when necessities are regarded as independent subjects of investigation rather than as subjects of control. If we had an answer to this question, based on such a view, we would expect that it be the answer for all time, for we would have

4 A presentation of this argument is found in Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science (London: Poutledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 55-57.

5 Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 1960), Vol. 2 para. 599.

6 Don Roberts describes the system of existential graphs in The Existential Graphs of Charles S . Peirce (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). A similar approach is found in G . S. Brown’s Laws of Form (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969).

David H. Sanford, “Causal Necessity and Logical Necessity, ” Philosophicot Studies, 28 (1975), pp. 103-112; Myles Brand and Marshall Swain, “Causation and Causal Necessity: Reply to Sanford, ” Philosophical Studies, 28 (1976), pp. 369-379.

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discovered the modal property of the given instance. But suppose that we could find ways of keeping gears from turning into fish or from disappearing, or from changing in any way. Such control would require that we consider the action of the gears as causally necessitated. We already can keep this from happening in the linguistic world and for this reason if we command the im- agination to imagine something rigidly designated as ‘rigid ’, ‘ meshed ’, etc., we also have a case of logical necessity. In actual circumstances the difference between the two kinds of necessity is a matter of actual control either over a description of the event or over the event itself. The naming process guarantees a commanding control over the imagination, but the physically controlling process does not establish such a control because it does not keep the object physically controlled the way the naming process keeps it named. If there were indestructible substances in nature not already arranged and shaped as are X, Y, and Z, we could not modify them so as to produce X , Y, and Z . But if we could produce such a substance and achieve indestructibility in matter and form we would be able to generate a causally necessary relation each time we turned X, and that would have nothing whatsoever to do with linguistic or logical conventionality. Of course we ourselves might turn into a fish, and so might not be able to turn X. But this objection fails to distinguish between it being necessary that an event happen and that that event happen necessarily as a result of some other event happening. Nothing need be causal- ly necessitated in the first sense, and in similar fashion nothing need be logically necessitated if no logical constructs are ever put into relation with one another through some mental agency.

In the above remarks I have briefly generalized upon some implications of Kripke’s remark that “ ‘possible worlds ’ are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes. ” * The stipulating condition is simply that which exer- cises a control, and imagining and conceiving are more like looking into mir- rors, though with an initial sense of discovery. But a significant objection against this view of modality is that it seems to beg the question. We require knowledge in order to make and execute commands and in order to control objects, so that if we grant to control a cognitive guidance, already in such cognition is contained all of the absolutist and intuitionist distinctions we are seeking to overturn. In the Critique Kant seems to pose just this restriction upon the imagination when he writes: “ I f the imagination is not simply to be visionary, but is to be inventive under the strict surveillance of reason, there must always previously be something that is completely certain, and not in- vented or merely a matter of opinion, namely, the possibility of the object

Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” in Semantics of Natural Language, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), p. 267.

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itself. ” 9 Not surprisingly, this follows from Kant’s assumption that all necessity must be grounded in a priviledged apodictic state of knowledge call- ed transcendental apperception. 10 If, instead, necessity devrives from suc- cessful control, whether in the manipulation of nature or in the manipulation of signs, then the authority over the imagination derives from the demonstrable success of that manipulation relative to the fulfillment of a given purpose. A closer look at Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception reveals something besides a propositional attitude. Fichte took such a look and noticed instead action and endeavor. Upon what else could Kant base his claim that “we cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in the ob- ject which we have not ourselves previously combined ”? 11 Peirce put the mat- ter in another way: “If the ultimate interpretation of a thought relates to anything but a determination of conditional conduct, it cannot be an intellec- tual quality and is not in the strictest sense a concept. ” 12

This interpretation of modal concepts suggests a ‘natural history’ of such concepts. In a primeval universe, where we can control nothing, no distinction between necessity and contingent possibility can be made. Then when the slightest necessitation becomes possible for us the distinction is born and crudely takes the form of ‘God” as a necessitating being and man as a con- tingent being. With the growth of scientific experimentation and linguistic codification specific necessities are formed, necessities that are not a priori in the sense of requiring nothing for them to be known, but rather aposteriori in that they first require the accomplishment of a controlling framework. Then to the extent that that framework dominates the necessities appear to be a priori. Both the refinement of reference and the refinement of material substances are necessary for us to be able to say that the statement ‘ gold has an atomic number of 79’ is necessary a posteriori.

It is, then, a matter of fact that there is a distinction between necessity and possibility. Should certain parts of nature remain intractable, as Hume believ- ed, there would always be some contingencies. If nature, on the other hand, becomes entirely subject to our control in a God-like fashion, the only con- tingency would be that there is anything at all.

9 Immanual Kant, Critique ofpure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A769f, B797f.

Ibid., A106. Ibid., B130.

12 Manuscript 908. See Richard Robin’s Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S . Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967).

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