by Lorenzo Peña
CSIC. CCHS. JuriLog
Summary
§1.-- The scope of the problem about cultural entitiesFoot note 1
There are a number of entities whose existence depends on culture, or on a range of collective behaviour performed by beings endowed with intelligence and will with acquired habits, transmitted from an individual to another and from one generation to the next through a system of signals and characterized by two opposing traits of being durable and yet changeable.
The human species is not alone endowed with culture in this regard. Modern zoological science tends to recognize as cultural a wide range of animal species -- not just all those closely related to ours, but possibly, too, other more distant ones, even some whose complex traits of social behaviour we used to ascribe to instinct. A case of this growing acceptance of culture in the life of many species is the discovery of modes of singing of certain bird species, collectively acquired and not genetically transmitted.
In particular, primatology has tended to recognize more and more the presence and importance of cultural patterns in the collective life of our close relatives, the apes. Other mammals whose relationship with us is more distant have, in their own ways, evolved into highly intelligent creatures; among cetaceans phenomena of cultural life, according to definition given above, have been noticed.
However, since anthropocentrism is human and our species is the most cultural one in this world, this paper focuses mainly on the study of human cultural entities.
There are some differences between cultural entities and natural entities, although this difference is only relative.
Cultural entities arise from acts that, to some extent, are voluntary and conscious, or at least intelligent. That is, they arise from behaviour which is, in one way or another, characterized by teleology and some more or less conscious deliberation. This is why they are not merely natural creations, or plain products of instinct. Merely natural creations stem from the genetic heritage of the species members as an automatic result triggered by external factors. By contrast, cultural entities are pliable, their existence varying in accordance with collectively acquired patterns, which can be transmitted through a semiotic process but also can be lost with no change of the genetic heritage.
For cultural entities to arise from intelligent and voluntary acts -- and hence for them to be preserved, modified or extinguished through acts of the same nature -- does not imply, of course, for such individuals as are engaged in those acts, their agents, to be aware of the creation, the maintenance, or the modification or destruction of such cultural entities, let alone to have these goals in mind.
What is certainly required is for those individuals to possess both intellectual (not just perceptual) knowledge and volition or will; for that intellectual knowledge and will to be socially coordinated, in such a manner that those individuals make a social species able to use some method of communication or signalling.
It is such a dependence of cultural entities on conscious and voluntary acts what gives rise to a particular difficulty concerning such objective entities. They seem to be the products of sheer subjectivity (in particular human subjectivity in the cases which concern us most.) It sounds paradoxical that they existentially depend on subjectivity and yet are objective entities.
Natural beings are not subject to such a paradox -- notwithstanding what they may be surrounded by plenty of other ontological or metaphysical difficulties.
§2.-- The Temptation of fictionalism
Two major difficulties plague the recognition of cultural entities, namely:
That dual difficulty has prompted sundry attempts to eliminate the use of such cultural entities through the history of philosophical thought. We can group them under the common denominator «Fictionalism».
Fictionalism is a sort of reductionism, but not all varieties of reductionism are fictionalistic or eliminationistic.
Reductionism is any approach which accounts for truths about certain entities in terms of truths about other things. That does not necessarily mean a denial of the existence of the problematic entities. A reductionist is not necessarily bound to claim that the inventory encompassing the whole reality does not include the entity or the kind of entities in question. All he is committed to claim is that what can be asserted or denied about that entity, or those entities, necessarily implies certain assertions or negations (possibly not the same) about another entity, or other entities, and necessarily is implied by them, owing to which the presence of the thus reduced entity in the world can be considered somehow redundant.
Thus, e.g., the reductionist who maintains that the water molecule is reduced to two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen in some combination is not committed to deny the existence of water molecules, but only to claim that ultimately truths about combined hydrogen and oxygen atoms underlie truths about water molecules, so that a world with just combined atoms and a world containing molecules, too, would be indiscernible worlds (under some reasonable pattern of indiscernibility).
A reductionist applying Occam's razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem) will probably proceed to elimination, and claim, in the considered example, that there are no molecules, and that our speech about molecules is a fictional and expedient way of speaking about the combined atoms.
Fictionalism is a variety of eliminationism. There is also a non-fictionalist eliminationism, proposing to abandon talk about certain objects. Whoever proposes to discard phlogiston, devil-points, ether, dormitive virtue, etc, does not propose, in general, to reconstrue or paraphrase those of our assertions which appear to refer to those entities, but to dispense with them altogether.
Coming back to cultural entities, strict eliminationism proposing radically to abandon our talk about such entities is hard to find, as that talk plays a big role in our conception of human reality and it is far from easy to design a plan -- ever so rough -- to waive it without thereby impoverishing our image of the reality we live in, and even without rendering our practical rationality impossible.
But the two aforementioned difficulties have caused a number of authors to look for ways of carrying out an eliminative reduction, i.e. to embrace fictionalism.
This attitude goes hand in hand with individualism and nominalism. It tends to think that only individuals are genuine, real entities. By «individuals» I mean not just substances -- men, stones, clouds, rivers, houses, etc -- but also individual acts, events, or perhaps also other accidents of substances (the whiteness of this piece of snow).
Such a nominalistic and individualistic view tends to regard any other entity as a mere fiction: there would not be lumps of water, but assembled molecules; there would be no universal such as whiteness, and so on. We would be entitled to keep using terms that appear to refer to such non-entities, but it would be a fictitious speech, in need of being properly analyzed or paraphrased with references only to non-eliminated components of the reduction.
Leaving aside that metaphysical discussion -- which goes beyond the limits of this paper -- I shall focus here on criticizing fictionalism regarding cultural entities.
The problem with fictionalists is that they want to reach the advantages recognizing certain entities provides without paying the fair price of such a recognition, which is impossible.
Any fictionalist can produce a list of statements referring to entities he regards as eliminable and liable to reasonable paraphrases into terms no longer containing such references. The problem is whether a universal and non-ad hoc criterion on such paraphrases can be set forth. The wider the explanatory field such references are involved in, the harder and increasingly unlikely the goal of finding such paraphrases becomes.
We can say that the customs of a certain society concerning war, food, labour, arbitration, clothing etc have influenced those of other contiguous or related societies. Should we find credible paraphrases of that discourse eliminating the reference to customs and relating to individuals only, the result would probably be hardly understandable, disconnected, lost in a mass of scattered details and, in short, lacking the explanatory power we initially assigned to such influence ascriptions.
However, let us proceed from the mere enumeration of customs in several fields -- each one on its own -- to an elucidation of ways of life (saying, e.g., that American way of life was very influential in Europe in the second post-World War period); let us proceed from small areas and short periods to broader space and time spans (saying that the man of the Neolithic time inherited the way of life of the Palaeolithic man which he adapted to the new available technical resources). Then any plan, ever so sketchy, for such a set of paraphrases will become unimaginable, even if we conceive it as a mere scheme to pursue an indefinitely long series of utterances, of whose precise content we would have no inkling.
When fictional discourse about a kind of cultural entities is alleged, a vague allusion is often made to an as if consideration while providing rules, patterns or criteria to sort out what is to be taken at face value and what needs to be understood as an improper and literally false speech.
Falling back on the as if explains nothing at all. Instead it needs to be explained. If a person says that, although there are no ghosts things happen as if there were any, such an assertion may be construed more or less charitably, but, pending such an construal, fails to tell us anything meaningful. Admittedly the context does often allow us to provide the appropriate reading. Thus upon hearing a statement of «Today is not Sunday, but it's as if it were» uttered on a holiday we understand shops and offices are closed. In the absence of such a context, of course, the sentence says nothing.
Thus, we must regard as an obscure claim the fictionalistic opinion that there are no architectural styles, customs, institutions, rights, traditions, economic structures, partnerships, churches, religions, but we can talk as if there were such entities and we are entitled to pretend we are ascribing them traits, qualities, origins, consequences, and in some cases, rights and duties.
In fact it is hard to understand exactly what such an opinion is claiming, unless it is followed by a paraphrase program (however abstract, general, vague, wishful or long-winded it may be).
Lacking such a program, we cannot countenance the view that such a fiction is useful and un-problematic, as it happens we talk about legal fictions, since this notion is un-problematic only as regards a modest use, as a sort of shorthand.
Neither is it acceptable just to list a few eliminative reductions adding the coda «and so on» (or an ellipsis). Such a coda has a clear meaning only when it is clear what rule has to be applied in order to insert successive members of the series -- even if we fail exactly to word out the rule, which is a different problem; it is enough for us to be able to apply it. In the absence of such a rule, the coda lacks any clear meaning. (What would be meant by the sentence «The Giralda, Mustafa Kemal, penicillin, the Battle of the Marne and so»?)
§3.-- The Platonistic solution
If, in the end, reductionist temptations are shown hard to accept, then we are bound to recognize the existence of cultural entities. What entities are they? Can human thought and action create entities? It is creation, not processing or production, which is at stake here. To merely produce something a pre-existing material has to be used and consumed.
We are again faced with the difficulty of whether something enjoying objective reality can arise out of subjectivity, and, what is more, by being created, not just produced. In front of such a difficulty, we could perhaps resort to the opposite, recognizing to cultural entities an existence in and of themselves, not originating from human creation, an existence that, on the contrary, man would assume, in order to make likenesses or copies of subsistent cultural entities in human evolution.
Is that view workable? Cultural entities were seen to arise in the process of human cultural life as entities endowed with temporal existence and even spatially circumscribed, and, in principle at least, able to feature as links in causal chains; therefore they would be real and somehow concrete entities. What can we win -- or lose -- by seeing them as abstract, timeless, becoming-less, lacking spatial location, not embedded in causal chains, inert, inactive, impassible, incorruptible, indestructible?
Let us take the example of a cultural entity: the Romanesque. It is an architectural style with a story that emerges in the tenth century in a part of the surface of the Earth (South-West Europe), derived from a number of sources, materialized in an array of buildings, which evolves, reaches its culmination, after which it decays and finally goes extinct. Thus we ascribe it temporal and spatial determinations, change and an occurrence in causal chains, if not as a cause, at least as an effect.
This raises the question of whether we would call «Romanesque» a building stylistically similar to the Autun cathedral but built anywhere in the world outside the considered geographical area in any period before of after the span of X-XII centuries, playing no role in the considered causal chains (not built by men having undergone those influences and perhaps even undertaking the construction with an aim having nothing to do with religious Christian ends).
Even further we ask whether we would call «Romanesque» a building like the Autun cathedral in a planet, Jumelia, built by intelligent beings similar to humans on that planet. Whether Jumelia is a planet in our universe or in a different real or possible world does not matter here, nor whether it lies at a spatial distance from Earth -- be it finite or infinite -- nor whether it is connected with our universe through another dimension. All we need is the bare hypothesis that Jumelia exists and contains the Autun-like building. Do the Autun cathedral and the Autun-like building share the same architectural style?
If so, then cultural entities seem to be natural entities culturally exemplified or instantiated, yet by themselves lying outside the flow of history. Such an affirmative answer makes us see cultural entities as abstract patterns, existing in and by themselves, outside human creation, as celestial or ideal archetypes that we could apprehend and take as models.
Accordingly, we would ascribe such a kind of existence -- as abstract, ideal, inert and purely exemplary beings -- to other cultural entities such as: customs; fashions; languages; political institutions (dictatorship, plebiscitary regime, aristocracy, the poll-tax voting system); social formations (slavery, communism, mercantilism); economic structures; ideological, legal and philosophical systems; theories -- whether scientific or otherwise; stories, epics, chronicles, traditions, religions, ritual practices, mythologies, legends, art works, musical compositions, scores, poems, novels, essays; rights, duties, legal situations, laws, constitutions, regulations, codes, jurisprudential doctrines; perhaps also parties, churches, companies, associations, boards, municipalities, popular masses, scattered communities.
When you muster the above list, you feel a growing unease at the idea that all those entities are abstract, ideal, non-material beings such that humans could just take them as models for them to make copies. Maybe so with the Romanesque. Maybe so with communism or monarchy or evolutionism, or the novel. But we are reluctant to think that, besides the Quixote Cervantes created as a literary work, there is an ideal novel, Quixote in itself, which Cervantes would have copied and transposed into paper sheets. We are still more reluctant to think that the order of Friars Minor, OFM, is an ideal or abstract entity St. Francis of Assisi merely exemplified on this planet at a given time.
On the other hand, the latter example allows us to look at a particularly strong difficulty plaguing the conception we call «Platonistic», i.e. the abstract view of cultural entities (which views them as exemplary, ideal, timeless beings, indefinitely exemplifiable into concrete and temporary entities).
We say that the OFM has more weight in the XIV century than in the twentieth century; that it splits into several branches; that it undergoes an increase or a decrease of its membership, and so on. Obviously the ideal entity OFM, if any, does not undergo those vicissitudes, but escapes any fluctuation. Then it will be the Earthian instantiation of OFM, created by the St. Francis of Assisi, which bears those changes. The Earthian OFM would pass through such a historical development, while Jumelia OFM would go along different historical developments.
For any given discrepancy leeway a broader one can be devised. The wider the variation, the less likely it is that both entities are instantiations of the same model, OFM as such -- or OFM on and by itself.
To prevent the slippery slope, we can stop at the starting point, maintaining that the abstract or ideal entity, OFM as such, is an exact model of the OFM as it exists on our planet and that accordingly a congregation on another planet or another world diverging from our OFM will not be an OFM, but something else, another entity. Whence two consequences follow:
We thus face the first difficulty surrounding the Platonistic view, namely that either, for each cultural entity, there is an ideal model whose exact copy it is (and then the ideal model is redundant and will share the ups and downs of the copy), or else increasingly heterogeneous and disparate cultural entities have to be brought to being imperfect copies of a single common model, in which case the ideal model does not account at all for the particular features of the copies, which lessens its explanatory power.
A second difficulty arises: when we say the ideal models are taken as standards, guidelines or archetypes that can be imitated, either we are saying something or not. In order for us to be saying something, the imitation must be a real process, even if it is not exactly a case of inspiration or illumination. However, either the ideal models wield a causal action (inspiration or illumination) -- and then they are no longer heavenly, inert, abstract and timeless -- or else some spiritual agent discharges the inspiration or illumination by presenting those models to the mind (through one of the ways of illumination or similar processes variously imagined by Plato, S. Augustine, Avicenna, Averroes, Malebranche and so on).
Illuminism was never commonly accepted but nowadays it is discredited for several reasons. One of them is that it is hard to prove that illumination exists. More serious is another difficulty: it cannot provide a suitable solution to the problems.
§4.-- Concrete realism
The two above-mentioned difficulties make us see how unattractive Platonism is.
In order for us to settle on how to classify cultural entities in other worlds somehow similar to ours, instead of resorting to Platonism, we had better fall back on a reasonable theory of trans-world identity or on a surrogate such as counterpart theory -- despite all relativism the latter entails (insomuch as for an entity at a world to count as a counterpart of another entity at a different world is relative to the context).
Be it as it may, the two difficulties we have assessed bring us back to the need to recognize that the only cultural realities are concrete, temporal entities having a historical origin caused by previous events of social life and in turn bearing on other social realities.
This concretist account of cultural entities is justified by the need to recognize the existence of those entities (as against nihilism and fictionalism) and by the difficulty which surrounds seeing them as abstract or ideal entities. The remaining choice it to recognize them as concrete and historical beings.
But that brings us face to face with the greatest difficulty which we have been turning around but not addressed yet: that of understanding how it is possible for man to collectively create entities.
In order to address the difficulty, it is good for us to follow an old methodological principle: to analyze, to break up, to split. The difficulty taken as a solid block is hard and unwieldy. Let us try to make it more tractable by slicing it into several pieces.
As we have noticed, the crux of the difficulty is that a cultural entity would arise from human collective action through creation, not through production. We grant that production is a kind of action we are up to, since any production avails itself of raw existing materials and transforms them. Although the result is a genuinely new entity, it is an entity that, even if new, is made up or constituted, in part, by something which pre-existent which was given or taken.
In that broad sense of «production», we produce by shaping, kneading, combining, mixing, casting, carving and building but also by carrying or transporting objects (the physical object lying at this place has acquired a new feature it lacked when it lied somewhere else).
Those productions are typically material productions, which are carried out with the use of raw materials. But as regards intangible entities a problem appears since no workable raw material seems to be available for the task.
However, cultural entities can be sorted out into those arising from nothing (if any) and those that do not arise from nothing. In the same way as a material production takes a pre-existing material and shapes or modifies it, the outcome being a new entity, analogously those producing a new cultural entity avail themselves of a cultural preexisting material.
New languages -- whether natural or artificial such as Esperanto -- arise through modifications and mutations of earlier languages. New practices or habits are originated from the old ones they replace. New social institutions arise from previous ones by a process of change, be it sudden or step-by-step. Novels, essays, poetry books, legends -- black or white -- myths, songs, etc. arise from previous spiritual and intellectual materials fashioned in a new way.
New legal situations arise from precedent legal situations through one of the three processes of normative change operative in human societies: implicit adoption by the masses, customary enactment and pronouncements of the authority vested with legislative power. A new religion is a historical output made with components or materials borrowed from earlier religions. New parties, new congregations, new companies do often arise from preexisting groups (through sundry processes of merger, re-founding, co-optation, harbouring, splitting, absorption, subsumption, embracing, and the like), and when such is not the case, the raw material is made up by such human individuals as enter the new groups. And so on.
It is cultural life what thus supplies the materials for cultural processing or reprocessing, and thus for the formation of new cultural entities encountered in the history of our species -- or of any other.
What alone remains as a persistent difficulty is the emergence of the first cultural entities, the primal ones: primitive languages, pristine habits, primordial ideas or entities that could not derived from previous ones.
We admit there are rights and duties as institutional realities of human culture (or -- I repeat -- of any other social and cultural species), having a historical origin from previous legal situations. Those in turn arise from others and so on, the chain of such changes having started with a first link which did not come from previous ones, unless we countenance a temporal infinite regress, which, as we empirically know, is not true in our case (even if it is the case for other social and cultural species in different possible worlds or perhaps at other spots of our own universe).
But here we had better go into a subdivision. At the start of this paper I provided a provisional definition of cultural entities, viz. (to sum up): they lie in collective behaviour of creatures endowed with intelligence and will and incorporated into acquired habits transmitted through a system of signals.
Non-cultural, or natural, entities are those lacking those features, e.g. natural patterns genetically transmitted, instinctive behaviour patterns, those whose existence or survival does not depend on intelligent acts or decisions.
We soon realize that such a characterization is a matter of degree. Some entities are more natural than others. Some patterns are more instinctive than others. Some semiotic rules are conventional, but there also are signalling patterns which are spontaneous and instinctive. There are many intermediate situations in varying degrees of approximation to either pole.
There are groups or congregations that arise -- to some extent -- through the sheer instinct of members of the species: flocks of birds, swarms of social insects, colonies of different invertebrates. Probably the first hominid communities, like those of our close relatives, the apes, were intermediate cases where culture was already at work but nature and instinct still prevailed.
There are complex signalling systems resulting from a long historical evolution and, at times, produced through a work combining individual talent and collective creation (the Morse alphabet, cryptography, Braille, shorthand, musical script etc.). There are basic systems that, while being genetically transmitted and triggered by sheer instinct, convey information nevertheless: wedding ceremonies, warning messages, etc. Quite probably there was a long and slow evolution from the latter to the former.
In the normative field there are mandatory rules of living-together that govern the lives of individuals of any social species, and are enjoined, in an instinctive way, by a vital or biological need; probably our instinctive inclination to follow such rules or guidelines is part and parcel of our genetic outfit, although subject to marginal shaping. Based on those minimal standards -- which are a requirement of nature (and, as such, make up a genuine natural law) -- more complex and sophisticated normative systems are little by little developed and may even clash with basic requirements of natural law (which they do when they fail to implement legal rules consistent with the nature of the things they regulate).
Generalizing, we can assert that many cultural entities, with a high degree of culturality, arise -- through collective transformation, most often gradual and step-by-step -- from less cultural entities which already displayed some degree of culturality. And so on.
Our methodological contrivance may fail to radically solve the whole difficulty, since a residue apparently remains, namely how to envisage the initial jump from a complete non-cultural origin to an incipient or embryonic cultural realization. Yet we are entitled to guess that this is a quite small step which consists in some behaviour patterns undergoing a mild mutation, namely: they stop being purely natural or instinctive by becoming marginally moulded or shaped and, thus, prone to cumulative change through successive generations.
We thus bring back cultural entities to primal natural entities: repetitive practices caused by instinct; groups of individuals whose gathering is ruled by instinct; signalling patterns automatically triggered by the conjunction of genetic factors and empirical data; rules of behaviour implicitly dictated by the nature of relations and instinctively enjoined. The ultimate material of culture is the one Mother Nature provides us with.
§5.-- Supervenience
Scientific explanation advances when we are able to understand that simpler things constitute complex ones. Thus we are able to account for the plurality of material substances through mixtures or combinations of simple substances, namely elements; and to account for the diversity of elements in virtue of their subatomic composition, i.e. the particles making up their respective (miscalled) atoms. And so on.
Such a constitution relation can receive several interpretations, one of them a strictly reductionistic one (according to which the world would be exhaustively described if only things of the lower level were mentioned) and another one through the concept of emergency or supervenience, by maintaining that, even though ontologically lower entities constitute those of the higher level, such a constitution does not rule out that the latter are entities on their own right.
Under the latter account the higher entities emerge or flow from the lower ones through a supervenience relation, which means that there could not be two worlds equal at the lower level but different at the higher one. Yet entities at the higher level are neither entia rationes (fictional beings) nor eliminable assumptions. The world would not be adequately described if the higher tier was dispensed with. Admittedly the information about the higher level involves that of the lower one (although the involvement may fail to be a strictly logical implication, since perhaps a world containing everything at the lower level yet lacking the higher one is metaphysically possible). Even if the implication is logical, the logical consequences of a fact are not necessarily devoid of reality.
The problematic nature of cultural things in life has led many authors to a triple search:
As examples thereof, we can recall, in past times: the search for an original or Adamic language (which would be a natural sign system, either a purely metaphorical one, or -- what was taken to amount to the same -- one pronounced by the gods); attempts to reduce history, with its clatter and complexity, to the crossing of a few causal lines, e.g, the clash between the two plots of good and evil (or the interplay of Augustine's two cities); in a more refined way, attempts to account for human norms by the natural dictates of evading pain and achieving pleasure (Epicurus).
In more recent times, a sophisticated construction along those lines was that proposed by historical materialism, according to which all cultural entities are sorted out into two main kinds: economic entities, making up infrastructure, which comprises whatever immediately pertains to material production, and all the others, which make up the social superstructure, and are generated by the economic basis as derivative and ancillary entities. Another proposed reduction is that proffered by psychoanalysis, according to which all cultural entities would be the outcome of a sublimation of natural instincts of human individuals or the like.
In each case these reductions tend to regard the existence of apparently floating, ethereal or intangible components of culture as made up by more corporeal and tangible entities.
The underlying reason may be a methodological canon enjoining us to, as far as possible, reduce problematic entities to un-problematic, or less problematic, ones.
The involved problematicity can be either epistemological or ontological; in the former case it is due to a lack of acquaintance; in the latter case, what is at stake is the fact that our ontological inventory, the catalogue of kinds of entities one is willing to assume, depends on one's particular worldview.
It is by now well-known that all those reductions face three difficulties. The first one is their often confused or obscure theoretical content. The second one is the lack of cogent arguments in favour of the proposal over and above the initial attractiveness of reducing what seems to be more obscure to something apparently clearer. The third one is that any ever so clear interpretation of the reductions is bound to face serious objections (e.g. unilateral reductions quickly appear to be unfeasible, since either they bring about a circle or they trigger an infinite regress).
While I do not commit myself to any of those reducing undertakings, I must admit that they vary in their degree of plausibility -- according to their explanatory power, their theoretical fertility and their intrinsic probability.
Be it as it may, what can be said is that, in general, reductions (in a strong sense) tend to raise more problems than those they solve, while a part of their job can be better done by using a notion such as supervenience. Supervenience is not symmetric. A cluster of factors -- or a kind of facts, entities or relations -- X, supervenes on a different cluster or kind, Y, when things could not be the same in terms of Y without also being the same as regards X. The idea, of course, can and must be refined, as some philosophers have done through strenuous and persistent attempts at reaching a suitable formulation, which have stranded on unwarranted weariness today (due in part to graduality considerations having been left out, which would have contributed to a higher fruitfulness of the notion).
Nothing like a physicalistic programme is therefore to be endorsed here. The idea is not that molecules are to be scrapped while combined atoms alone are to be recognized as genuine entities, or that atoms are superfluous while interrelated particles alone would be kept, or that cultural entities are redundant and, in the end, natural entities alone would exist even if some of them could be described as cultural entities by way of a convenient abridgment.
Nor is it the case that, among cultural entities, some of them -- those most removed from natural materials -- would be dispensed with so that a comprehensive inventory of the cultural world would be exhausted by listing those closer to such materials. None of those devices is either necessary or plausible. What can be contended, in a more reasonable way, is that the world could not be equal as regards entities pertaining to the lower layers without also being equal at the higher layers.
Human beings are material and corporeal beings whose mental capacity is also natural. Going into philosophy of mind is beyond the scope of this paper, but anyway some relationship clearly exists between the approach we are espousing for a philosophical view of cultural entities and one which would be reasonable in philosophical psychology. In either case, resorting to supervenience seems to be a sensible middle course in-between strict reductionism and dualism.
If assuming cultural entities is to be useful to scientists (historians, linguists, sociologists, lawyers, political scientists, etc), then the thus assumed entities cannot be incomprehensible, unattainable or enigmatic. We try to see how such cultural entities as are most distant from material or tangible beings originate from those closer to materiality and how variations in the more basic field of the latter are followed by correlative variations in the more sublimated field of the former. Those attempts contribute to overcome the enigmatic, floating or unintelligible appearance of a number of cultural entities. Ours is a methodological guideline which, renouncing any stiff, dogmatic or geometric standards, runs after the infinitely complex, multiple and contradictory world of cultural entities.
Culture supervenes on nature. There cannot be two species which are alike as regards nature, but such that one would be cultural while the other was not, or having different cultures. Granted, the same species, with its basic nature unaltered, has different cultures at different stages, times, places and circumstances. But each cultural difference also implies that some natural objects are affected and undergo changes -- coming to be or extinction -- describable in naturalistic terms. There is no culture without using or processing natural beings, whether sound waves, muscle movements, pieces of clay furrowed with a stylus, magnetic disks, or neurons and synapses undergoing certain physiological processes. In some sense cultural life is constituted by these natural facts. But cultural entities are not thereby dissolved; they do not lose their self-existing ontic specificity.
Dissatisfaction with the conceptual appeal to supervenience and the pursuit of something sharper and more drastic -- tending perhaps to erasing cultural entities from the ontological inventory -- arises from a latent empiricism or physicalism, from the assumption that in reality either physical entities (according to physicalism) or arrays of sensations (according to empiricism) are alone truly real and whatever goes beyond is a scenario of words, chimeras or entia rationis. Thus formulated, the assumption is just a prejudice, probably as stubborn and sticky as prejudices tend to be. It is certainly not a gratuitous choice free since its supporters must be granted an important point, namely that basic entities (whether physical or experimental) are endowed, at first sight, with greater robustness or immediacy. Yet explaining the prejudice or condescending to it is no sufficient reason to embrace it when we realize it sterilizes, shrinks and impoverishes our intellectual understanding of reality.
The ongoing uneasiness with the notion of supervenience may be partly brought about by its failing to provide us with definitions of what a cultural entity in general is or what cultural entities of this or that sort in particular are. Such a shortcoming, if it is one, is shared by all conceptual tools used in this article to try to explain the existence of cultural entities. Our conceptual outfit does not yield answers to the questions of what duties, socio-economic structures, languages, revolutions or judicial failures are. To provide definitions is fine, but it is not always possible. Sometimes concepts can be elucidated without being defined. Elucidations inquire what true assertions essentially involve the notion, what inferential links are valid between those assertions and a range of other assertions wherein the notion is absent, whether those truths are contingent or necessary. Elucidations sometimes resort to expanding quasi-circles of mutual definitions. Physicists are probably unable to define «electron», «quark», etc, let alone to do it with terms understandable to those uninitiated into the discipline. It would be unreasonable, though, to draw the conclusion that there are no quarks, electrons, photons or anything like that.
§6.-- An ontology of cultural facts
I have hitherto spoken about cultural entities without entering metaphysical classifications. Are they singular entities, objects such as individuals (stones, stars, fruits)? Are they clusters or sets? Are they states of affairs? Are they qualities or other sorts of accidents of individual substances or assortments thereof? Are different cultural entities beings of different kinds or sorts?
Even though, for the purposes of this paper, I have kept clear of such a debate, I have to admit that, unless I address it, be it briefly, the nature of cultural entities remains shrouded in mystery.
The recognition of cultural entities is, by itself, neutral regarding those issues. And so is the gradualistic and supervenientistic approach I have been setting up, which comprises these tenets:
Neutrality is limited, though. A mystery or uneasiness as regards entities such as cultural ones will be with us while we cling to ontological eliminationism which wants us to banish from our world-view, e.g., whatever is not a singular individual, or anyway not a substance. It is obvious that endorsing cultural-world or value entities makes sense only if the inventory thereof comprises, not only churches, pictures, coronations, dethronements, wars, but also universal entities: peace, political turbulence, the critical spirit, and so on. A great many cultural creations are not singular entities. Voltaire's Candide is not a determined piece of matter with this or that physically describable features (a bunch of sheets of paper, for example); that piece will be the manuscript of the work, that can subsist or not, unlike the work itself, which can be translated, printed, adapted, modified, staged, etc.
Many cultural entities do not seem to be either substances or singular entities or qualities of substances or accidents, or traits or universals repeatedly instantiable, but facts or states of affairs: Robespierre's fall, the construction of the Suez Canal, Angola's independence.
A scholar of culture is thus interested in adopting a broad and eclectic ontology, embracing as much as possible. It is hard in advance to sift ontological categories by picking on some of them as admissible and discarding the others, because in the field of culture multiplicity, diversity and ontological richness prevail.
Nevertheless, trying to unify the plural is a task for philosophers to undertake. The lush ontological multiplicity had better be handled by being channelled into some kind of unity, by means of an ontology of states of affairs (under F. Fitch's inspiration, though following a different path). Could we construe all entities, whatever they may be, as states of affairs, we would no doubt be more successful at uniting the manifold of our cultural ontology and at achieving a unified pattern of understanding.
To say that an entity is a state of affairs is to claim that it can be represented by an affirmative or negative sentence, whether atomic or molecular (i.e., by a simple statement or some syntactic combination of sentences that makes up a complex sentence). A state of affairs can also be represented or designated or denoted by a noun phrase resulting from nominalizing a sentence.
Our ontological reduction of all entities to states of affairs can start by recognizing that every being is the same as its own existence, which is indeed a state of things. To the obvious objection that you do not affirm or deny a name while a sentence whose verb is «exists» is asserted or denied, we can reply that different syntactic combinations of two expressions do not rule out their being synonymous, because the existence of perfect synonyms with different syntactic collocations is linguistically widespread (the so-called complementary-distribution allomorphous morphemes). Many languages have two or more variants of an expression with different syntactic placements -- or, in other words, pairs of perfectly synonymous terms, either of which alone is able to enter certain syntactic combinations.
Such can be the case as regards the difference between a noun-phrase designator and the sentence formed by attaching thereto the verb «exists». That is what explains the «redundancy» of the ascription of existence and why, since Kant's Beweisgrund (if not earlier), many philosophers have thought that such an ascription does not add (or remove) anything, but sets (or resets) the thing to which the (apparent) attribute of existence is ascribed.
Within the framework of the gradualistic view we have outlined, existence can be a property that comes in degrees, or even a property liable to multiple rankings, not just a linear graduation.
Properties or universals can, likewise, be taken to be identical to their own existence, while, others things being equal, the more a property is exemplified, the more real it is. (Thus novel was less existent in classical times than in recent centuries because there were only a few novels in that period.)
Accordingly there is no insurmountable categorical barrier separating some cultural entities from others --e.g. historical facts from patterns of social behaviour, or architectural, calligraphic or clothing styles or legal situations, or normative systems, or institutions, or organizations. For certain ends and purposes we can, with some advantage, take them as entities of different kinds or sorts, as if what can be asserted or denied about entities of one sort cannot be interestingly asserted or denied of entities of the other sort. But the difference is just a pragmatic one, justified in order to facilitate our description, or a tribute we pay to customary ways of speaking.
Culture theorists often speak as if their ontology only consisted of facts; they inquire into the facts of culture. If the present proposal of an ontological reduction has any value, then that way of speaking is justified. Presidents of republics and any other characters and individuals, works of art, institutions, modes of production, doctrinal systems, five-year plans, lessons of historical experience, and so on, are, all of them, facts.
The proposed reduction has not been put forward for any reason having to do with any peculiar feature of cultural life. It is backed up by metaphysical considerations I addressed in previous papers. However in the field of culture the reduction is remarkably fertile, allowing us a unified account which avoids constrained assortments some scholars are driven into, such as having to settle whether baroque is a universal or a fact spanning several centuries.
The controversy would be genuine, and hard, if there were categorical differences in their own right (such that what can be asserted or denied about entities of a category could not be suitably asserted or denied about entities of the other category.) Otherwise, those disputes lead nowhere, being, as they are, pseudo-problems.
§7.-- Conclusion
I have outlined a theory of cultural entities which recognizes their real existence and views them within the framework of a unified ontology without any categorical plurality. Metaphysically relevant differences between what is cultural and what is not are variations in their respective degree of materiality and naturalness (instinctiveness or genetic transmissibility).
Culture has its own nature. In the field of culture that is natural which serves as a raw material for reworking and adaptation, and therefore is more stable, bulky, spontaneous, that which is to a lesser extent the outcome or intended effect of actions undertaken by individuals or small groups; that which, while not being instinctive or genetically transmitted, is spontaneously acquired through cultural heritage spanning several centuries and is hence less prone to artificial manipulation, or to change at the discretion of the will of individuals or coteries.
In the cultural world different stages or levels can be distinguished. One can reasonably research the supervenience relations of the upper levels on the lower ones and of the entire cultural sphere on nature, not losing from sight the existence of degree variations taking into account that those supervenience relations will be properly formulated only when those variations are taken into account.
In the light of the above considerations, being rooted in the physical world, in nature, being of a historical character, being contingent and precarious, cultural entities are not inhabitants of an world-less Heaven, Platonic or ideal Forms or abstract entities. Nor are they components of a mysterious unworldly Kingdom which would be puzzlingly created outside the real world and space-time by the grace of human thought or action. We do not need any such third kingdom, any ontological unworldly empire, or any order of non-real things. Such devices are pointless because we can account for cultural entities with more sober and more common-sensical conceptual resources. Everything is in the world.
§8.-- References
[Foot Note 1]
This paper was written as a part of the Research Project «A gradualistic logical study of normative conflicts» [BJU2002-1042].