Appearance, Identity and Ontology Author(s): Renford Bambrough Reviewed work(s): Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New

Series, Vol. 75 (1974 - 1975), pp. 69-76 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Aristotelian Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544866 . Accessed: 16/02/2013 22:52
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V*-APPEARANCE, IDENTITY AND ONTOLOGY by Renford Bambrough

A child who is seeing moving pictures for the first time may be told by his father that the pictures are not really moving at all. The illusion of movement is presented by a rapid successionof still pictures. If the child is puzzled or incredulous, he may be shown what happens when the projectoris slowed down so that the film is presented at the rate of one frame per second, or he may be given a piece of the film and see for himself that it consists of a series of stills. The child may feel differentlyabout films for a time; he may seethem differentlyfor a time. But he will soon see them again just as other people do, and even while he is seeing and feeling about them differently he is unlikely to give up using the language of motion in speaking of what happens in the film. The Lone Rider rides, the wheels of the stagecoach turn (even if they sometimes turn backwards) and if the cops fail to catch the robbers it is not because they are transfixedby the mechanism.

What the child has learned about the film is a matter of fact, though it does also adjust his ideas about films, change his conception of them. We think differently of sunrise and sunset after learning what Kepler and Copernicus show us. Eddington misunderstood the difference that it makes and should make to our ideas of chairs and tables to be told about atoms and electrons, but he was not wrong to suggest that it does make a difference and that the difference is important. The sort of difference in our ideas that may be made by the report of a factual discovery may be made without the report of a factual discovery. It may be made by a philosophical remark, or by a remark which is like a philosophical remark in that it represents something differently without revealing or purporting to reveal any aspect or feature of it
* Meeting of the Aristotelian Society at 5/7, Tavistock Place, London, W.C.I, on Monday, gth December, I974, at 7.30 p.m.

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that was hidden. Very often such a remark, whether philosophical or not, will be expressed in words which are also capable of expressing a report of a factual discovery, and when this happens there is a specially serious risk of confusion of purpose on the part of the author of the remark and of confused reactions by those who hear or read what he says. Such confusion will be committed and encouraged by philosophers who think of philosophy as a kind of science, or as merging into science. Conversely,the idea that philosophy is a kind of science or that it merges into science may itself be prompted or promoted by the fact that so many of the forms of words in which it is natural and correct to express philosophical propositions have other natural and correct uses in which they express propositions about matters of fact. All this can be illustrated by comparing the father's remark that moving pictures do not really move with the remarksof a philosopher who says that though I appear to myself and to you to be or to have a continuous unity I actually consist of a succession of temporary states which are not bound to or by any persistent self or soul. Wittgenstein is said to have accused a philosopherof thinking that causal connexions are made of wire. He mocked the idea that the meaning of a word is an object, that the soul is a little man within, that time is an ever-rolling stream, as the pictures by which language bewitches intelligence, concealing logical connexions and distinctions in the guise of physical things, states and processes. But sometimes he took his own advice, and supported aphorism and ridicule by describing or inventing examples, and then his attacks on these confusions took a more laborious but clearer form. One of his most useful examples seems not to occur in any of his published writings. Imagine a screen on the wall of this room on which from time to time there appear circular patches of coloured light, red, green or yellow, like those of traffic lights. Suppose that the lights enter the screen at the left hand edge, and that in the middle of the screen there is a black patch behind which the lights disappear, to reappear on the other side of it after the lapse ofjust the time that would be taken by them to move across the black patch at the speed at which they travel visibly, first across the left hand part of the screen and then

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across the right hand part to disappear finally over the right hand edge.

Clearly there are various possible mechanisms that could produce this effect. There could be men carrying poles with lanterns hooked to them one above the other, or a system of moving belts, or projection or back projection of a film. Let us take the case where lamps are physically carried along behind the screen so that when they disappear behind the black patch they are nevertheless still there and still moving. What goes on behind the screen is unseen by us, but is not in principle invisible to us. If on one occasion, after a sequence of red, green and yellow lights enters the screen from the left, and, after it has disappeared behind the black patch, a sequence of red, yellow and green emerges from behind the black patch, we may speculate on what change occurred behind the screen. The most natural assumption, in the light of our knowledge of the mechanism and the operator, may be that the second and third lamps have changed places, or that both have changed colour, or that they have been removed and replaced by two different ones. There may be physical obstacles, but there cannot be any logical obstacles to our discovering in each such case what did happen behind the screen. But all the appearances may be preserved in a case where we are not interested in the mechanism by which the effects are produced or even in a case where there is no such mechanism, where we are concerned only with phenomenal coloured patches passing across the screen. It now makes no sense as an empirical hypothesis to suggest that the second and third lamps have changed colour or changed places. No question arises for us about what goes on behind the screen because nothing does go on behind it, or if anything does it is not what we are interested in. But we could still intelligibly debate whether a change in the pattern of lights, whose detailed specification in terms

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of number and sequence of colours was agreed between us, was to be further described as a change of colour or of sequence or as a combination of the two. Such forms of words as 'it has chanigedcolour', 'they have changed places', 'it is the same one as before' will all make sense in this new situation as they did in the first situation that I described; but to confine our attention to the purely phenomenal presentation is at once to change the sense of each of these expressionsand of every kindred expression.Our questions are not now about any unseen things, events or processes, but are questions as to whether, given a certain descriptionof a sequence of phenomena, that sequence is or is not accurately describable by a certain other description, more compendious than the first, which somebody might use as a summary or mnemonic of the first. When the number of lights is small and forms a single row or column it is not realistic to envisage a conflict between the observers about its proper description, and there is no scope for insight or imagination in its understandingor representation. In the simplest cases there is no point in going beyond a mere specification of the numbers, colours and sequences of the lights. But it can be shown by taking only one slightly more elaborate example how much scope there is for such disputes and for the exercise of such faculties on cases of substantially the same nature. This time there are a hundred and forty-fourlights, forming a twelve-by-twelve square. When they appear at the left hand side of the screen they have no obvious regular pattern. When they emerge on the right hand side of the black patch they still present an irregular appearance, but the arrangement is different. Many of the positions are now occupied by lights of different colours from those that were occupying them at the beginning. If somebody now says 'Every third light has taken on the colour of its immediate predecessor'he may reveal to us a simple and regular relationship between the two complex and untidy patterns. Alternatively, or in addition, he may find a form of words for summing up the arrangementof each of the squares of lights. These questions and examples all have a bearing on the

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distinction between scientific theory and philosophical speculation. Heraclitus said 'The sun is new every day.' We can imagine him to have meant something of the same kind as he meant by his paradox that you can't step into the same river twice. But it is equally easy to envisage the words as expressing an empirical scientific theory such as the one whose bones are buried in our use of the expression 'the new moon.' We know now that when no moon is visible there is still an unseen moon, but a plausible theory at one stage of the investigation would have been that the moon dies and is born every month, and correspondingly that Apollo like a mortal householder lights his fire every morning and lets it go out or quenches it in the sea at sunset. A child looking at a strip cartoon for the first time, and seeing a succession of pictures of a teddy bear in different poses, will point to the first picture and say 'teddy bear' and then at the second picture and say 'another teddy bear.' This illustrates both what makes some philosophers speak of the conventionality of our concepts and what makes others insist on their objectivity and irreplaceability. Those pictures could of course be (understood, intended as) pictures of a number of different teddy bears, and we may speak of a convention that in cartoon strips we intend and understand them as pictures of the sameteddy bear. On the other hand the convention is so deep-rooted that we are at firststartledwhen the child shows that he is unfamiliarwith it. The child who says 'take the banana's coat off' or 'shut the door of the box' is again tracing in dotted lines alternative languages and ways of thinking that we might have had, and in some cases ones that some other people (Frenchmen, American Indians) actually do have. If we do speak of a 'mere convention' in the case of the teddy bear we shall have to face some harder questions of the same sort. Is it a mere convention that I am sitting on the same chair now as I was sitting on two minutes ago? Or that the teddy bear picture that I now see in the top left hand corner of the page is the one that I saw there when I first opened the picture book? Here again there are alternative ways of speaking, and here again that does not mean that any way of speaking is as good as any other. But it does mean that there is always scope for

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learning more by making comparisons and contrasts that our language does not make for us. When Hurricane Hilda blows across the Atlantic and into the Southern States she retains her identity by retaining her character and her spatio-temporal continuity. After her death and a period of calm the continuity is broken and when there is a new outbreak we call it Irene or Iolanthe. If the continuity is preserved but the character radically changesit drops to a light breeze-we still say that Hilda has died down or out; that is the end of Hilda. Suppose now that there is a short break in the temporal or spatial continuity, or in both. Hilda dies down over the Azores at 6 p.m. and at 6.I5 p.m. a tempest of the same complexion arises over the Azores. Did Hilda die or sleep? Or suppose that just after Hilda's death over the Azores the birth of a hurricane of the same nature is reported some 50 miles east of the Azores. The times and distances may be anything you like and may be combined in any way you like. There is no need to spell out tedious examples to show that there are transitions here from cases that are clearly cases of hurricane-identity through cases that are debatable to cases that are clearly not cases of hurricane-identity. What is the nature of the debate? It proceeds by the making of comparisons and contrasts between examples, just like the debate about whether in Wittgenstein's example we have the same light and a different colour or another light of a different colour. One thing that is clear about the question 'Is this Hilda again or is it Iolanthe?' is that sometimes the answer will be 'definitely yes' and sometimes 'definitely no' and that sometimes there will be no definite answer in either of these forms. But this is not to say that there will be no answer but only that the answer will either be indefinite or will be definite but not in either of these forms. And as I have argued elsewhere ('Unanswerable Questions' P.A.S.,S.V.J, I966) the fact that the answer to a question is indefinite and the fact that it does not take one or another of the standard forms we might expect it to take, or wish that it would take, gives us no scope for choosing or influencing what the answer is to be.

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APPEARANCE,

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All this applies as certainly, if not quite so obviously, to the a priori consideration of pictures and patterns in appearance as it does to empirical questions about what appearances are in fact to be observed. Those who were or are in the habit of speaking of 'picture-preference'have rightly assumed that if there is absolutely no difference between one picture and another in its implications or consequences it does not matter which picture we choose or recommend; and at least some of them have noticed that the question whether a case is one in whichwe can 'saywhich we like' is not itself a question in answer to which we can say which we like, even if none of them, ex has seen that they are hoist with this petard. But they hypothesi, have all gone on supposing that the implications or consequences in question must be observable or empirical consequences or implications. That you and I do not differ about what has been seen on the screen does not mean that we differ only in notation if I say that a red light has turned green and you say that a green light has taken the place of a red one. We may be making different comparisonsand different contrasts. The same goes for Descartes versus Hume on identity of persons, and Kepler versus Tycho Brahe on the sun and planets. For all the differences between these conflicts, they both illustrate the power of context, of the comparisons and contrasts that I may fail to make even when I have in my possessionall the tools and materials for making them. It does not take many examples to show the range and scope of this power in art, in science and in life. If you look at the still pictures outside the cinema before you see the film and after you have seen the film they will look very different although they are still the same. If you see the end of the film first, and then see the whole film again, the end will be exactly the same but will look very different. If you know Macbethwell, you know that Lady Macbeth says in the murder scene 'A little water clears us of this deed.' It is Macbeth who asks 'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand?' and answers that his hand will the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red. You also know that it is

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Lady Macbeth who cries that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten her little hand. But you may know the play well without having seen the connexion and the contrast between these two passages, and hence you may come to know the play better by reflection on your knowledge of the playeven if you know it by heart. Sir John Sheppard, in his lectures on Greek and English Poetry, taught us much that was worth learning even when he did not refer to a poem or line that we did not know: he pointed out that the wrathof Achilles and the man Odysseus and the arms and the man celebrated by Virgil link the first and lead to those and the Aeneid, words of the Iliad, the Odyssey of Paradise Lost. The idea that philosophy merges into scientific theory has at least this to be said for it: that the scientific theorist must use among other procedures the procedures that are the only ones that a philosopher needs or can use. If one who looks and sounds like a scientist and calls himself a scientist confines himself to the use of these procedures he is a philosopher in disguise. The disguise is sometimes effective both (a) because of the fact (on which I have already remarked) that many forms of words are as capable of expressing a priori as of expressing contingent remarks and (b) because in the pursuit of some of the theoretical purposes of physical science there must be shorter or longer phases during which all or most of what the theorist is doing is a priori. Sometimes this a priori work is mathematical. Sometimes it is of the kind that I have illustrated in my examples of films, lights, hurricanes and heavenly bodies. I am not sure that a treatment of such examples, even if it were much fuller and better than mine, would be sufficient for the understanding of the philosophical issues. I am certain that it is at least necessary. Accordingly, I doubt whether a treatment in the theoretical idiom used by most philosophers is necessary, and am certain that it is not sufficient. That is why I have presented what is only a page or two of an album, and have left it mainly to my title and to the discussion to mark the connexions between my examples and the traditional and recurrent philosophical problems to whose solution or resolution they are meant to contribute.

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