Rethinking the Subject Matter of Protometaphysics

Stewart Umphrey

How is it possible that two things be identical in number? How is it possible that there be

things that do not exist? To answer these questions, Panayot Butchvarov distinguishes

between objects and entities. Objects are singled out in perception or thought, and some

but not all of them are recognized as entities by applying the concepts of identity and

existence. Thus fundamentally does the world emerge. By dwelling on this fact,

Butchvarov is able to give connected accounts of identity, existence, essential and

accidental predication, and so elucidate the very worldliness of the world.1

I agree that metaphysics is the study not only of (1) the actual world and (2) any

possible world, but also (3) what it is for something to exist, to be real, to be an entity in

the world. I also agree that the third-mentioned study, “protometaphysics,” must admit

something like Butchvarov’s distinction between objects and entities, and that its subject

matter includes the fact that entities emerge somehow from objects. Yet the

protometaphysical account he gives in Being Qua Being seems problematic in several

respects. First, it seems to imply that no material individual or continuant could exist,

since no such thing is identifiable and existence entails identifiability. But it’s hard to see

how philosophers could be doing what they seem to be doing if they themselves could

not be embodied or enduring agents. Second, protometaphysics deals not only with

objects as such and entities as such, but also with the relationship between these two

domains and the way in which, through conceptualization, the latter emerges from the
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former. But this relationship, or emergence, is not itself an object or an entity. Therefore it

cannot be singled out or recognized. How then could anyone be conscious of it? Must the

subject matter of protometaphysics split apart as we try to hold it together in thought?

Third, whereas ancient and modern philosophers have wondered how there could be non-

existent things, only recently have they wondered how two distinct things could be

numerically identical. Only recently, then, have they been in a position to see existence as

reducible to material identifiability. Is it not astonishing that the key to solving one of the

oldest metaphysical puzzles should have escaped everyone’s notice until Frege, a

mathematician trying to establish the foundations of arithmetic, supposed that some

statements of the form “x = y” are literally true as well as informative? Fourth,

Butchvarov’s account commits one to a sort of transcendental irrealism. But what could it

mean to say that any irrealism so comprehensive is true, correct, or acceptable? And

again, is it not astonishing that philosophers should have been so naïve about the

distinction between reality itself and the accessibility of reality to thought until Kant,

trying to show how certain necessary truths are possible, supposed he could do so only by

rejecting transcendental realism?

Do these objections amount to a refutation? No, but they give one pause. And having

so paused, we wonder anew how the subject matter of protometaphysics is to be

articulated. In the following paragraphs I offer an alternative account, or rather a different

picture, or a different way of looking at the subject matter in question—one that does not

make material identity absolutely primary, and does not therefore commit one to

transcendental irrealism. My aim, however, is not to show that this alternative is superior
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to Butchvarov’s in Being Qua Being, but to make more evident still our need to rethink

protometaphysics from the beginning, as it were.

1. Is Material Identification Fundamental?

The answer according to Butchvarov is “yes.” For the subjects of accidental and essential

predication are regarded as entities, as real or existent. 2 But something exists, he claims,

just in case it can be “materially” identified. Indeed, existence is material identifiability.

Hence the concept of identity, used materially in judgments of the form “x = y,” is

absolutely fundamental in our conceptual scheme. In the logically primary situation,

when we single out objects without yet having conceptualized them, it is by applying the

concept of identity to some of them that we first cross the “conceptual frontier” into the

domain of entities. We then also apply the concept of existence. For example, suppose we

single out objects a and b. Though really distinct as objects, we nevertheless judge them

to be identical in number, to be one and the same entity. And in making this judgment, of

course, we regard a as real, b as real. Material identity is our ticket across the conceptual

frontier. Existence comes right along with it, and yet the concept of existence is

“derivative” in the sense that we explicate it wholly in terms of the concept of identity.3

But consider the following alternative. We single out a and immediately judge it to

be some entity e. Then we single out b and judge it to the self-same entity. Implicit in the

second judgment is an application of the notion of identity, but it’s merely formal; once

made explicit, it would clearly be of the form “x = x,” not “x = y.” Therefore in proto-

conceptualization it is the concept of existence, or of being some entity, that is

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fundamental. The concept of identity is derivative, or rather it need not be involved at all

if, as Butchvarov says, a concept is a principle of classification and the notion of identity

applies formally to everything whatsoever. We may of course assert that a = b. But this

assertion will either (1) be elliptical for “a is really e, b is really e, and e = e,” or (2)

declare that we now regard the apparent distinctness of a and b as merely apparent, or (3)

express our decision to extend analogically the notion of identity to these objects as well.

On none of these interpretations is material identification fundamental. The third,

moreover, points to a deflationary way of solving the Fregean puzzle. All material

identity statements are tacitly analogical. As such, they may be informative. 4 Strictly

speaking, however, they are false, since all of them misrepresent similarity as sameness.

Butchvarov would balk at the supposition that we can single out an object a and,

quite apart from singling out any other object with which a is identical, cognize it as

existing. All cognition is fundamentally recognition. But is this true? Sometimes one

presentation of an entity appears to be enough. Aristotle thought so.5 And so too, it seems,

should Butchvarov. For he takes every “quality-object” to exist, even those given in

perceptual illusions or imaginings.6 Hence, were he to single out a color or shape quite

unfamiliar to him, he could immediately regard it as real. Furthermore, he too hastily

concludes that the concept of existence is to be explicated wholly in terms of the concept

of (material) identity. Might there not be paradigms of existence that are not simply

paradigms of identity? Butchvarov would ask me to describe them, and show that they

are not reducible to those he introduces. I would ask him to do the same, since he

nowhere specifies the alleged paradigms on which his account depends. 7 I wonder, too,

whether he needs paradigms of non-identity as well. 8 Having singled out an object a, can
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he ever be sure that there is no other object x such that a = x? Can he ultimately defend

his Meinongian view that some objects do not exist?9

Butchvarov might also observe that I am making the “relationship of being” prior to

that of material identity, and argue that the former presupposes the latter. Statements such

as “a is (really) e” are essence statements. They declare that the essence of an object is a

certain familiar entity. Or rather, they declare what its essence would be if the object

existed. We determine that it does exist, that it is the familiar entity e, only by applying

the concept of identity.10 But is this true? Though first mentioned by name in his account

of essential predication, the relationship of being holds between any existing object and

the entity it is. That entity need not be familiar. It need not be the sort of entity we take it

to be. Beyond regarding it as real, we could perhaps refrain from classifying it altogether.

Yet, in regarding any object x as real, one has already crossed the conceptual frontier, and

one cannot have crossed this frontier without cognizing the reality that x is. Butchvarov

might say that I am conflating the essence of x, what it is, with the existence of x, that it

is (in reality). In fact, I refuse to take them apart. The essence of x is the entity it really is.

Hence, if x does not exist, it “has” no essence at all. I may think it has one. If I’m

hallucinating one of those pink rats, for example, I may take it be essentially a rat. But I

also regard it as real. Suppose I cease doing so, and yet continue to see it. What I then

single out is rat-like, to be sure. 11 But could it not be a large mouse, a marsupial, a robot,

a moving hologram, or an occurrent instead of a continuant? The possibilities are endless,

the answer indeterminate, precisely because the thing does not exist.

It remains questionable, then, whether material identification is fundamental, and

whether existence is to be understood as identifiability. But even if these related

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propositions are incorrect, it may still be the case that material identity is important,

indeed indispensable, whenever a single presentation of some entity is not enough. Nor, if

my alternative is correct, does it follow that something could exist without being

identifiable. Indeed, it may still be the case that something exists if and only if it can be

identified. But is this weaker claim true? Let us divide the question.

2. Does Existence Entail Identifiability?

An existent is identifiable, we say, if one could determine what sort of entity it is, or if

one could single out two or more objects that are that entity. It is the second,

transcendental sense that concerns us here. And in this sense, according to Butchvarov,

existence certainly entails identifiability. That is to say, the concept of existence is

applicable to some object x only if the concept of identity is (materially) applicable to x

and indefinitely many other objects.

What is a concept? It is a principle of classification, and in Being Qua Being he

argues that every such principle must be governed by criteria so strict that for all x, x

either belongs to the class so defined or does not; there can be no indeterminate cases. 12 It

would seem to follow that the things we usually take to be existent could not exist. After

all, if material substances are not real, what is? On reflection, though, it appears that

material things are as such bereft of identity conditions. Therefore if, as it seems, these

substances are essentially material, they cannot be real.13 The same holds, apparently, for

all continuants (whether material or not), and for all irreducibly dispositional properties—
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from which it would seem to follow that natural science has no real subject matter.

Scientific theory and common sense are alike inherently delusional.

So paradoxical are these consequences that we feel tempted to dismiss Butchvarov’s

account out of hand. We might claim, for example, that since human beings and other

continuants are paradigms of existence, they have to be identifiable—thus neatly turning

Butchvarov’s modus tollens into a modus ponens. Or we might weaken if not break the

link between existence and identifiability—perhaps by agreeing that material substances

are not identifiable in his clear but restrictive sense of the term, while denying that they

are unidentifiable altogether. How otherwise could it be useful even in practice to

suppose they exist?

Notice, however, that Butchvarov has given us an argument. He like Berkeley and

Hume, Parmenides and Plato, simply follows the logos, and the logos here seems to show

that these putative realities could not be real since the very idea of matter, or of sameness-

in-change, is unintelligible. This antirealist conclusion we cannot refute by appealing to

human practices or by noting that such things are commonly taken for granted. No, we

must give an argument if we are ever to ground philosophically our commonsensical and

scientific realism, or more to the point, if we are to show that existence does not entail

identifiability. The challenge is to do so without straying into unintelligibility. It won’t be

easy.

We might begin by arguing that the challenge is weaker than it seems. First, as noted,

Butchvarov’s position seems pragmatically self-refuting: if the argument he gives is a

good one, no one could have given it. Notice, too, that his explanation of why we think

material substances do exist—because we fail to distinguish the applications of concepts

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from the uses of words14—seems to presuppose the very sort of thing he rejects.

Butchvarov owes us an ontology of linguistic and other human practices, one that accords

with his protometaphysics. It won’t be easy to give. Second, we might explore the

possibility of real indeterminacy. Quantum theory admits as much. So, too, have Aristotle

and van Inwagen in their ontologies of material beings. 15 Butchvarov himself admits

nonspecific objects, as indeed he should: consider, for example, any of the vaguely

shaped and colored things in your peripheral vision right now, or the overall shape of

your visual field. May you not identify some of these objects? And may not the reality

they are be vague as well? 16 Yet metaphysical vagueness is notoriously difficult to

establish. We thus find ourselves in a dilemma: either we accept the proposition that

existence entails identifiability and face looming problems of one sort, or we reject it and

face looming problems of another sort.

One way out would be to loosen the requirement that concepts be applied only in

accordance with defining criteria. Butchvarov seems to favor this way, for in Skepticism

about the External World he denies that criteria (or paradigms) govern any primary

application of the concept of identity. Rather, it is something we just do, and the notion of

identity is nothing but our habit of deciding that certain objects are one and the same

entity.17 Having moved from a Fregean understanding of concepts as sharply bounded to

a Wittgensteinian understanding of the rough ground on which we live, Butchvarov can

easily admit the existence of material things.18 But his protometaphysics is now more

obscure, for so close to us are these familiar ways of doing things that they elude

observation; and when glimpsed, they seem inherently vague. Being habits, moreover,

they can change. Does Butchvarov still distinguish strictly between identity in kind and
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family resemblance, or believe that no one would ever seriously judge two congruent

white patches to be identical in number? And how could our basic conceptual activities

have any cognitive worth if material identifications are at bottom just decisions we make

and not the sort of thing that could be true or false, correct or incorrect?19

I recommend another way out of our dilemma. First, with regard to material

substances, Butchvarov assumes that matter is of the essence. Aristotle and Leibniz did

not. In their view, the essence is an immaterial form or monad, matter “itself” rather

adjectival or phenomenal. This long-forgotten option is one we need to explore. 20 Should

it prove correct, we may find that material substances are strictly identifiable, thereby

removing a major reason for thinking that existence does not entail identifiability. But

second, with regard to this very proposition, there are other apparent counterexamples.

Take any specific shape. As an entity it is a universal. It must also be incomposite, since

not only do we fail to discern any components within it, we could not suppose it to be

analyzably complex without being swept away in a Bradleian regress. 21 Still, that this

entity is somehow complex becomes evident when we compare it with other specific

shapes and with qualities of other sorts. We’re inclined to say that it contains a

determinable and a determinant, yet neither can be isolated even in thought, nor can we

tell how many such quasi-components there are. (Try counting the subgenera between

“the genus shape” and “that which makes a square the specific kind of shape it is.”) These

quasi-components must exist, since otherwise the entity would not be what it is, yet they

cannot be identified. Therefore existence does not entail identifiability.22

This argument needs elaboration and defense.23 And should it prove strong, we’ll

need to ask whether there could be any objects corresponding to these dialectically
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indispensable sub-entities, or indeed to those Aristotelian forms or Leibnizian monads.

The Butchvarovian answer will be “no.” But then, must not such “things” be only emptily

meant? There is some tension, apparently, between following the logos and being faithful

to the phenomena. Since this tension has become evident in my account (as well as

Butchvarov’s), it may be better for us not to deny (or affirm) that existence entails

identifiability, but to keep it as a question.

3. Does Identifiability Entail Existence?

Butchvarov says “yes,” and defends his answer by considering and rejecting apparent

counterexamples to the logically equivalent thesis that nonexistence entails

unidentifiability.24 While examining this defense, one should bear in mind the following.

(1) The relevant examples are not creatures of fiction or legend, but things actually

singled out: an unbuilt house present in a dream, a beautiful man or woman bodied forth

as it were in your erotic imagination, or a pink rat seen scurrying about the room. (2) In

these examples, the objects singled out are assumed not to exist, yet they must be

possible existents since otherwise they could not be singled out.25 Therefore, if we have

reason to believe that such things could not exist, we must hold it in abeyance. (3) Our

criteria for applying the concept of identity must in these situations be the same as they

would be when we coherently judge some given house, human being, or rat to exist. We

must not make them more stringent, or less, in order to get the answer we wish.26

With these precautions in mind, it seems evident to me that some nonexistent things

can be identified. Those suffering from schizophrenia, Lewy body disorder, delirium
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tremens, or the effect of psychotropic drugs, do sometimes recognize non-entities. These

well formed albeit nonexistent individuals are as plainly identifiable for them as certain

very similar individuals are for me. Being plainly identifiable, they are presumptively real

—for me, the individuals I repeatedly encounter; for them, the individuals they repeatedly

encounter, including some that do not exist. Presumptive reality is not decisive. I may

realize that the woman I met last night was only part of a dream, and yet continue my

dalliance with her in a series of daytime imaginings so lively I get lost in them. A

schizophrenic may likewise come to realize that one of his longtime companions does not

exist, and yet continue running into him here and there.

If identifiability is not a sufficient condition for existence, what is? I’m not sure. It’s

tempting to say of nonexistent things that they’re all in our heads. Taken literally this

cannot be true, but it does suggest the idea that a thing exists if others too can identify it:

entities must belong to a common world. So, for example, I regard this dream-woman as

unreal because I infer that others could not identify her. And the schizophrenic now

regards that familiar companion as unreal because, when pointed out to others, they

reported seeing no such person.27 It’s tempting, then, to say that public identifiability

entails existence. Yet this revision, too, appears insufficient, since we may have a

“philosophic reason” for thinking that many publicly observable things are non-entities.

Consider, for example, such cultural artifacts as tables, sonatas, white people, and laws of

the land. Are they not recognized by many within the culture? Yet one may argue, along

roughly Platonic lines, that cultures themselves are like comparatively stable dream

worlds, their contents like persistent shadows of shadows of reality. 28 Or to take another

example, consider such quality-objects as those constituting a white spot that remains
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unaltered over time. Together we may identify the shape-objects it has now with shape-

objects it had some time ago, thus recognizing them as a single existing trope. We may

agree that there are many such entities. But then, while discussing Butchvarov’s

Resemblance and Identity, we conclude that shapes and other qualities are really

universals, that in reality there are no tropes. So involved are we in the sensory world,

however, that we cannot rid ourselves of this conceptual illusion: tropes continue to be

publicly identifiable; we’re liable still to regard them as real. 29 But if public identifiability

is not enough, what is? It’s tempting at this point to say that a thing exists if it depends

not at all on anything we believe, perceive, wish for, say or do. Butchvarov cautions

against making this move. His reasoning is formidable. 30 Yet I suspect that, dubious and

nebulous as it is, thinking of reality as transcendentally other is the right place to begin. It

is, after all, implicit in Butchvarov’s object-entity distinction, and in our conception of

philosophy as a sustained attempt to dis-cover what there really is. It is also implicit in

the commonly held view of reality as under-lying or sub-stantial, and in the view that

non-entities are all somehow in our minds, either privately (in idiosyncratic delusions) or

publicly (in collective delusions).

Be that as it may, since some nonexistent things are identifiable, it is not true that

identifiability entails existence. Nor is it evidently true that existence entails

identifiability. Nor must application of the concept of existence piggyback on material

identification. Together these findings blow a hole in Butchvarov’s thesis that existence is

identifiability. Less dramatically put, they serve to restore for further consideration the

older thesis according to which the concepts of existence and identity are two really

distinct notions, each with its own irreducible content and its own protometaphysical role.
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4. How Is the Domain of Objects to Be Described?

One option is to make objects relative to where we are in our ontological investigations.

For example, suppose we take the evening star we see right now to be identical with the

evening star we saw yesterday. For us, the objects are these presentations of Hesperus,

while Hesperus itself is the presumed entity. On further inquiry, however, we take

Hesperus to be identical with Phosphorus. Now Hesperus itself is an object, while the

presumed entity is Venus. Given the uncertainty inherent in all ontological investigation,

it seems that every presumed entity may later be classified as an object, and that many

objects may be reclassified as entities. In any case, objects are whatever we take as given

in our present zetetic situation. For us they are the phenomena, while the reality in

question is whatever lies on the far side of the transcendental “frontier” we wish to cross

as we try to discover what really exists.

But there is another option. Crossing the frontier involves conceptualization. For a

concept to be applied, there must be something to which it is applied. That to which it is

applied may already be conceptualized. If so, there must be something to which that

concept has been applied. The regress cannot be infinite.31 Hence there must some things

that are not themselves conceptualized at all. These very things we call “objects.” Though

absolutely preconceptual, objects need not be inaccessible to awareness. Indeed, they are

just those things we single out directly in intentional consciousness, prior to regarding

them as existent or as nonexistent.

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The second option is the one Butchvarov elaborates in Being Qua Being.32 Is it

acceptable? I agree that such objects are dialectically indispensable if one assumes a

Kantian picture according to which we determine what is real only by means of

conceptualization. But is this the right picture?33 Let us not confuse logical with temporal

priority. There need not have been a time when you merely singled out objects without

yet conceptualizing any of them. Nor should we catch at the metaphor of application.

Concepts may be triggered, not employed. There may in fact be no employer at work

behind the scenes. The question is, once clear about the picture, do we buy it?

Suppose we do. We’re then committed to there being objects not conceptualized at

all, and to the possibility of bringing them to light by some sort of analytical remotion.

Yet objects as such cannot be known, understood, or recognized. They constitute,

Butchvarov says, a sort of Heraclitean flux in which there is no stability, no recurrence,

no universality or generality. Or as Kant would say, they’re less even than a dream. 34

How, we ask, could such a “domain” be described at all without stabilizing it in speech?

Is proto-phenomenology even possible?

Suppose it is, as Butchvarov and Husserl seem to believe. We must then ask, “How

is the domain of objects to be described?” Here I find Butchvarov’s protometaphysics to

be questionable in three respects. First, how is one to interpret his account of objects as a

unitary spatiotemporal manifold?35 If taken as a description of what is directly before the

mind, I don’t see how one could single out anything at all, except perhaps the current

manifold in its entirety. For every part of it depends essentially on other parts. Hence, to

discern an object, one must enforce its real distinctness from the rest of the manifold; and

this one can do only by applying to “it” the concept of being an object, a thing that could
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be identical in number with other things or be the subject of a singular existential

judgment.36 Yet Butchvarov denies that singling out involves conceptualization. Perhaps,

then, his account is to be regarded as an explanation of the fact that no object singled out

would be what it is independently of the field from which it is singled out. This fact,

easily overlooked, is one the Gestalt psychologists have made thematic. Their accounts,

too, are manifestly holistic. The trick is find a holism strong enough to explain the fact,

but not so strong that nothing could be directly singled out. Has Butchvarov succeeded?

I’m not sure.37 One thing, however, is clear: insofar as his proto-phenomenology contains

general statements about objects as such, or about the domain of objects as a whole, it

cannot be purely descriptive.38

Second, is the very language of his account unduly restrictive? The term “object” is a

count noun. It has genuinely plural and singular forms. We can quantify over objects, say

of any two objects that they are identical in number, and make singular statements about

them. True, the entity that several objects are may be very different in kind from the

objects as such. For example, quality-objects are particulars, and yet, if they happen to be

the same quality-entity, that entity is a universal. But the term “entity” is also a count

noun. Butchvarov takes reality to be a manifold of really distinct entities. In other words,

he’s a count ontologist. Indeed, some count ontology must be the correct metaphysics if

his protometaphysics is rightly framed. Is it? Suppose we agree with Thales that all things

are water, or with Heraclitus that this cosmos is everliving fire, or with the view that all

things are really just restless energy. The terms “water,” “fire,” and “energy” are mass

nouns. As such they have no plural or genuinely singular forms. We cannot quantify over

stuff, or coherently judge any two portions of it to be identical in number, or make

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genuinely singular statements about “it.”39 Now, by considering the objectual domain

alone, can one dismiss all mass ontologies, the pluralistic as well as the monistic? Or can

one do so, if at all, only through further argument? Bear in mind that if reality as stuff has

to go, so too probably does reality as the world. For despite appearances, the term

“world” is arguably not a count noun. 40 And even if it is, we recognize something as

being real only if we can single out objects that are that thing. How could world-objects

be singled out? Singled out from what? But if that’s impossible, protometaphysics cannot

be about the emergence of a world through conceptualization, nor can it be within the

framework of a world recognized as being real that we judge other things to be real or

unreal.

Third, do objects give us as little to go on as Butchvarov’s account of them suggests?

The objectual domain emerged for us by removing, as it were, everything conceptual

about presumed entities in the world. The distinction between objects and entities was

then merely one of reason.41 But now, attentive only to objects as such, we must take

seriously three options: (1) all of them exist, (2) only some exist, and (3) none exists. One

may be able to reject (3), the nihilistic option, by arguing that acceptance of it would be

pragmatically self-refuting; and reject (1), the quasi-Russellian option, by showing that it

violates our robust sense of reality. Finally, one may be able to show that (2), the

Meinongian option, is essential to our thinking and living. 42 These arguments make no

obvious reference to objects as such. Yet might not our robust sense of reality have some

objectual basis? Butchvarov admits paradigmatic cases of identity and therefore of

existence. These cases must involve objects actually or potentially singled out. They also

determine in part the content of the concepts of identity and existence, thus tying them to
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the very circumstances in which they are primarily to be applied.43 Objects, then, do give

us some guidance—but not much. To repeat, Butchvarov admits no paradigms of

nonidentity, which makes it difficult to recognize any object as being nonexistent. And

though he admits protometaphysical wonder, the objects about which we wonder provide

no clues as to their identity or nonidentity. The situation, therefore, is less heuristic than

the one Aristotle identified with the beginning of philosophy. 44 Instead of opening our

minds to reality, it puts us at the brink of transcendental irrealism.

In sum, Butchvarov’s account of objects is questionable even if there are such things

and even if they can be described, and these are big “ifs.” We should therefore reconsider

the other way of picturing our protometaphysical situation, the one according to which

objects are whatever we take as given or for granted in our ontological investigations.

Among objects, then, are people and their opinions, things regarded as fictional (even

impossible), and of course the world in which presumably we live, though strictly

speaking it is not an object.45 Thus relativized to our zetetic situation, the objectual

domain is a bountiful resource. Not all of its clues are reliable, we suspect. Perhaps many

are deceptive. To note this, however, is simply to draw attention to the uncertainty

inherent in every such investigation. Skepticism poses a threat as long as we’re still

looking, which may be forever. We may also become antirealists with respect to entire

categories of things we now take to be paradigmatically real. Yet, while skepticism and

antirealism are chronic and unsettling possibilities, transcendental irrealism is not. For

built into this alternative is a picture of reality as something there to be discovered (not

imposed) on the other side of the transcendental frontier. In practice, at least, most

ontologists buy into this picture. In debates between trope theorists and identity theorists,
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for example, both sides assume that one of them is correct. The same is true of debates

about the reality of continuants. It’s also true, as a rule, of attempts to understand our

basic classificatory activity as something we just do: we suppose that something is really

there to be understood, if only the fact that we’re not really doing anything. Most

ontologists are transcendental realists; that is the view implicit in their picture of what it’s

like for reality to emerge in the course of one’s thinking about it.

Butchvarov rejects the picture—reservedly in Being Qua Being, more robustly in

Skepticism About the External World. Should one reject it? I proceed to give some

reasons for doubt.

5. How Does One Cross the Transcendental Frontier?

Consider once more the distinction between objects and entities, or the “relationship of

being” that holds between (existing) objects and the entities they are. This distinction or

relationship is something about which transcendental realists and irrealists generally

agree. On what basis, then, do they disagree? In Butchvarov’s case, it is not some view of

the self as a unity of pure apperception, or of the world as a product of our synthetic or

objectifying activities.46 His irrealism seems instead to have three intertwined roots.

There is obviously his reduction of existence to material identifiability. There is also his

thesis that consciousness of entities must be conceptual and not direct. And least

obviously, there is his antecedent theory of universals. Let us examine each in turn.

With regard to the first, Butchvarov is surely right to deny that material identity

holds between entities or objects as such. In other words, when materially employed, the
 19

concept of identity stands for nothing at all. Therefore material identity is not the sort of

thing one could discover. Instead, one “determines” or “decides” that two objects are one

and the same entity simply by applying to them the concept of identity in a “coherent” or

“serious” fashion. I agree that one should be an irrealist, if not an antirealist, with respect

to all material identities. Yet Butchvarov also claims that existence is just material

identifiability, and from this it follows that one should be an irrealist with respect to

existence as well. But is this claim true? In sections 1-3 I gave reasons for rejecting it.

Evidently we can agree that material identity is not in the world without having to agree

that existence is not in the world.

From this, however, we cannot infer that transcendental realism is acceptable. True,

it sounds more than a little odd to say that one should be an irrealist with respect to

reality, or to the very existence of existing things. But then what does the concept of

reality or existence stand for? Surely not any real property, relation, or individual. We’re

driven, it seems, to regard existence as something that transcends every category of

existing thing, while nevertheless being immanent in all existing things. Does the concept

of existence stand for that immanent transcendental, whatever it may be? Perhaps. 47 But

the concept itself has become unclear now that it’s been liberated from the concept of

identity. We can’t even be sure that the notion of existence is a concept in any clear sense

of the term. Somehow classificatory, yes, but what are the criteria of its application? They

appear to be nondefining, like those governing the uses of words. Aristotle, then, may

have put himself on the right track when he took his bearings by the family resemblance

(pros hen homonymy) of that which is as declared in speech. Should our rough sense of

reality is to be articulated in some such way?48

 20

Leaving aside that question, I turn to the second root of Butchvarov’s irrealism.

Consciousness of objects is intentional, he says. In other words, we can be directly aware

of objects and refer to them. But to entities as such we cannot refer, nor can we be

directly aware of them. For not only is it through conceptualization alone that we cross

the transcendental frontier, the resulting consciousness is essentially conceptual and

nonintentional. To “recognize” is to regard certain objects as being some entity; it is

always seeing as, never really seeing. This proto-epistemological claim would foster

skepticism were it not for Butchvarov’s insistence that the very idea of a world to which

the concepts of existence and identity do not apply is unintelligible. Indeed, the world for

us is essentially a result of our conceptual activities: objects, he says, are conceptualized

“into entities” by certain decisions we make.49 And this view would foster transcendental

irrealism even if entification should occur without material identification, and even if our

notion of existence should fail to be a concept, for then too the existence of certain

objects would not be the sort of thing one could discover.

But is it true that entities cannot be discovered, or that consciousness of them must

be nonintentional and therefore scarcely awareness at all? From antiquity philosophers

have found in us a capacity for insight, for noêsis. Like Butchvarovian singling-out,

noêsis is intentional. Yet unlike singling-out it is of the entity that some object is, and it

must be an accomplishment, the result of some investigative work on our part. On the

other hand, like Butchvarovian recognition, noêsis is of reality as such. Yet unlike

recognition it must be non-conceptual, always a case of seeing rather than seeing as, and

whereas conceptual illusion is possible, noetic illusion is not. Now, if noêsis should turn

out to be a third sort of consciousness available to us, we have another way across the
 21

transcendental frontier, one that involves discovery rather than decision, thus making it

evidentially superior to “recognition.”50 In the course of inquiry an object may become

transparent, as it were, allowing us to see revealed in it the reality it presents. Such

insight is necessarily veridical. It is also non-propositional, like touching something

rather than noticing that something is the case, though it may immediately enable one to

find mistake unthinkable in judging this object to be a certain entity.

Is insight available to us? Many philosophers have thought so, which in fact explains

their vulnerability to radical skepticism: reality is there to be discovered, alright, but with

conceptualization comes the possibility of illusion, and distinguishing genuine from

merely seeming insight proves difficult. These days, however, philosophers tend to be

dismissive of this view.51 Many regard it as archaic, or make fun of the idea that we could

ever attain a “God’s-eye view” of things. A few have argued that insight is impossible

given some causal theory of awareness. Yet, as Butchvarov has shown, causal theories of

awareness are themselves to be rejected. 52 Without them, however, these refutations are

little more than rhetorical appeals to our modesty or desire to be current. It thus remains

to be seen whether insight is another way across the transcendental frontier.

Leaving aside that inquiry, I turn to the third root of Butchvarov’s irrealism. In

Resemblance and Identity he defended an in rebus theory of universals by arguing against

its antirealist alternatives.53 Though strong, his arguments left untouched a problem

within the in rebus theory itself: the relationship of identity between locally separate,

“exactly resembling” qualities cannot be immanent in the world; it cannot be real. Almost

alone among his fellow realists, Butchvarov took note of this problem and set out to

resolve it.54 To do so, one must distinguish carefully between quality-objects (features of
 22

spatiotemporally diverse particulars) and quality-entities (universals). And since neither

objects nor entities as such can be materially identical, in rebus realism must be

complemented by a transcendental irrealism. The protometaphysics of Being Qua Being

is to the metaphysics of Resemblance and Identity as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is to

the foundations of Newtonian mechanics as he understood them. This is true, I believe,

even if Butchvarov’s philosophical development has not been as I describe it.

Having denied that material identification is fundamental, and pictured our

protometaphysical situation in a way that accords with transcendental realism, can I be a

realist with respect to universals? Yes, but the “relationship of being” will have to be

enriched. Universals will be less in rebus than supra res. They will not “enter in” the

fabric of objectual space and time, or be the essences of qualitative particulars, nor

however will they be like balloons tied to many different pegs.55 Instead they will be like

things more or less evident in their diverse manifestations. Both theories take universals

to be real, trans res, beyond the transcendental frontier. Yet they are not equivalent, for as

Butchvarov in another context observes, they “convey different pictures of the world,

suggest different analogies, enforce different ways of seeing the same subject matter.” 56

They’re also problematic in different ways.57 One cannot rethink the subject matter of

protometaphysics, it seems, without having to rethink the subject matter of metaphysics

as well.
 1

ABBREVIATIONS

BQB P. Butchvarov , Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence, and Predication
(Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1979).

SIE ___________ , Skepticism in Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1989).

SEW ___________ , Skepticism about the External World (N. Y.: Oxford U. P.,1998).

NOTES

1
BQB, especially 1-8, 39, 46, 52-53, 89, 148, 154-55, 159, 248, 255.
2
In protometaphysical investigations, no distinction need be made between being existent and being real: BQB 40, 42, 51,
58.
3
BQB 40-41, 44, 52, 55, 88, 110, 112-13, 134-35, 190. See also SEW 130, 137, 148, 156, and “Our Robust Sense of
Reality,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 25/26 (1985-86): 403-21.
4
Compare BQB 47, 149-53, SIE 67-71, 75-79 (and see below, note 55). This is not to be confused with the view that all
such statements are merely pragmatic (BQB 266n10).
5
Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19, 100a15-16.
6
BQB 228-29, 234.
7
Consider BQB 36, 80, 117, 161, 188, 234-35, 249.
8
BQB 80 with W. v. O. Quine, “Natural Kinds,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (N. Y.: Columbia U. P. 1966),
119-20.
9
This weakness is easily overlooked if, ignoring Butchvarov’s phenomenological approach, one thinks of objects in terms
of definite descriptions. Cf. BQB 62 with 41, 51.
10
BQB 144, 148, 150, and context.
11
Cf. E. Fales, A Defense of the Given (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 51, 105-09.
12
BQB 114-16, 160, 176-77, 186-87, 190, 249.
13
BQB 178 and context.
14
BQB 176, 186, 234-36.
15
Cf. Aristotle, e.g. Metaphysics VII.3, and P. van Inwagen, Material Beings (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1990), chapters 17-19.
16
Cf. BQB 104 with 78-79, 114-15, 186, 223. Butchvarov asserts, however, that the “law of specificity” does hold for
entities as such (BQB 104). Why? Perhaps he believes that two such objects could not be identified. If so, any nonspecific
object could be counted as a foil (see above, note 8). But which objects, then, are sufficiently specific that they could be
arguments in conceptually worthwhile statements of material identity?
17
SEW 128, 134. See also SIE 76-77.
18
SEW 12, 132, et passim.
19
Compare SEW 128-30, 134, 147 with BQB 116fn2, 186, 227. Earlier, too, he admitted some freedom in our decisions to
apply or not to apply the concept of identity (BQB 80, 223), yet he insisted that material identicals be similar to
paradigmatic cases, and did not deny that such decisions could be genuinely heuristic.
20
Also to be explored is David Bohm’s non-standard interpretation of the quantum mechanical formalism, according to
which elementary particles are wholly determinate.
21
For Butchvarov’s version of the reductio, cf. “The Limits of Ontological Analysis,” in The Ontological Turn: Studies in
the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann, ed. M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke (Iowa City: Iowa U. P., 1974).
22
For Butchvarov’s way of dealing with this apparent counterexample, cf. SIE 78-79, 118-19 with Resemblance and
Identity: an Examination of the Problem of Universals (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1966), chapter 4.
23
I have tried to do so in my Complexity and Analysis (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002), chapters 3-7. To forestall
two possible misunderstandings: (1) I cannot then agree that existing entails being an existent or an entity, but I can still
agree that there is no entity without material identifiability. (2) If the admission of such quasi-components or sub-entities is
to have a phenomenological basis, I must deny that direct awareness is limited to whatever one can single out, but may still
be able to maintain that one can be directly aware of sub-entities “in” and only “in” things singled out.
24
BQB, 100, 112-21.
25
BQB 62, 89.
26
With (1) Butchvarov emphatically agrees: BQB 51, 89. But has he in fact made his argument within constraints (2) and
(3)? I have my doubts.
27
We regard these potential witnesses as real, of course, but from this one cannot infer that identifiability entails existence
without begging the question.
28
It follows that identifiability and coherence-with-other-identifiable-things are not jointly sufficient. For a different
criticism of the coherence criterion, cf. SEW 119-20, 125 (compare 136-140).
29
Another example: We single out the colors together with the shapes of two white squares, and finding them to be identical,
immediately regard as real the composite universal whitesquareness, exemplified by all and only things that are both white
and square. But then, reflecting on the limits of ontological analysis, we conclude that there can be no such entities even
though we can all identify them. Yet another example: We identify different bodies of water and regard them as real. On
philosophical reflection, however, we realize that water is a scattered mass, every portion of which is really just water. Yet
we still tend to regard these bodies as entities in their own right.
30
BQB 253-54 with 62-63, 98, and SEW 22, 32, 118-22, 153. For a rejoinder, cf. L. L. Blackman, “Mind as Intentionality
Alone,” Metaphysica 3.2 (2002): 55-57. Though I myself am not eager to do so, one may wish to qualify the proposition in
question so as to include among existents such things as thoughts we have, theories we construct, and practices in which we
are engaged.
31
Compare the metaphysical claim that there are no atomic facts, that facts are molecular all the way down, or the
metaphysical claim that there are no elementary particles, that matter is divisible ad infinitum.
32
BQB 39-40, 44-50, 56-57, 76. Does he still accept this option? Consider the following passage in SEW:
 [Our applying, or not, the concepts of identity and reality in certain circumstances is something we do] in the
context of our past experience, scientific judgments, and judgments about other presently perceived objects. The
mention here of such a context does not at all signal even a partial commitment to a coherentist theory of
justification. The context in question is relevant in the sense that it is part of the occasion that may trigger a
genuine application of the concept of reality… The point is merely that we do not make genuine applications of
the concept of reality, or indeed of any concept in a vacuum! (144; cf. 136-40)

But elsewhere in SEW he reiterates his earlier position. Cf. esp. 125, 129-32 with 67-68.
33
To appreciate this question, it may help to consider an analogous case from the history of physics. Having observed that
light passes through a vacuum, and that it’s waviform, luminiferous ether became a dialectically indispensable medium for
those who also accepted a certain picture of what it’s like to be a wave. Einstein rejected the picture in 1905, as have
physicists ever since, even though no clear picture (of waviform photons) has taken its place.
34
BQB 35, 42, SEW 150, and I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A112.
35
This account is offered in chapter 8 of BQB, especially pages 219-25.
36
Compare H. Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1981), 52: “‘Objects’ do not exist
independently of conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of
description.”
37
It’s not clear to me that phenomenologists as such must insist on the “necessary togetherness” of qualities in a quality-
cluster, or on the indissoluble unity of the entire spatiotemporal “fabric.” Are the limits of ontological (entitative) analysis
also the limits of phenomenological (objectual) analysis? Must the fabric be that tightly woven, the togetherness that
intimate?
38
Consider BQB 248-54 (also SEW 150). Likewise questionable is E. Husserl’s account in The Phenomenology of Inner
Time Consciousness, where, in trying to describe (explain?) the unitary flow of consciousness, he posits a complex network
of indefinitely many protendings and retrotendings.
39
Cf. H. Laycock, “Some Questions of Ontology,” Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 3-42, and “Object,” in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/object>. Also A. P. D. Mourelatos, “Events, Processes, and
States,” Linguistics and Philosophy 2 (1978): 415-34, P. Simons, Parts: A Study in Ontology (Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1987),
153-66, J. Benardete, Metaphysics: A Logical Approach (N. Y.: Oxford U. P., 1989), 35, and S. Umphrey, Complexity and
Analysis, 149-50.
40
Cf. B. C. van Fraassen, “‘World’ Is Not a Count Noun,” Nous 29 (1995): 139-57, and E. Husserl, The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy §§ 9h, 36-38.
41
BQB 45, 53, 248, and SIE 79.
42
SEW 118. On Russell’s actual position in the period between 1905 and 1919, cf. J. Dejnozka, The Ontology of the
Analytic Tradition and Its Origins: Realism and Identity in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 1996), 130-35 and context.
43
BQB 249. This may solve a problem very similar to the one Kant tried to solve by introducing transcendental schemata
(Critique of Pure Reason, B176ff). In SEW, the link between the content of a transcendental concept and the circumstances
of its primary applications becomes more obscure.
44
BQB 33-34 et passim. Compare Aristotle, Metaphysics I.2, 982a12-13 et passim.
45
On this option, one may leave unanswered the question whether there are Butchvarovian objects or Kantian sensations.
46
BQB 250-54, and SEW 136, 151, 154-57.
47
Compare SIE 75, 115-19, SEW 110, 122-23.
48
Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics IV.2. Is it the case that our conceptual scheme, or any concept within it, however fundamental,
has as its proper domain the world and not the transcendental ground or emergence of the world. If so, concepts are
necessarily secondary, unsuited to the protometaphysical role Butchvarov tries to give some of them.
49
BQB 47-50, 56, 88, 131, 134, 138, 144-48, 207, 248-55, and SIE 73-74, 118, SEW 127, 134, 140, 148, 153-54, 164n52.
50
According to Aristotle, the capacity for insight has no structure, no inherent content (de Anima III.4-5). In this respect, it is
unlike any concept understood as a capacity for recognition. Therefore, in noêsis, unlike proto-conceptualization, it makes
no sense to say that one is imposing any content or structure on objects.
51
But not, for example, Kurt Gödel. Frege, too, seems immune to irrealism in part because he accepts the possibility of
noetic insight: cf. Foundations of Arithmetic §§ 96, 105 (but compare § 26end). Before Kant, transcendental realists felt the
force of radical skepticism, but it never pushed them in the direction of transcendental irrealism. In recent decades, however,
the ghost of radical skepticism has been one of the things driving philosophers to take refuge in transcendental irrealism.
Why? One reason seems to be the doubtful assumption that such skepticism is a doctrine, combined with the doubtful
assumption that transcendental realism entails it.
52
SEW 16-18, 22-23, 53.
53
P. Butchvarov, Resemblance and Identity: An Examination of the Problem of Universals (Bloomington: Indiana U. P.,
1966). See also “The Ontology of Philosophical Analysis,” Nous 15 (1981): 10-12.
54
Critical for Butchvarov is the debate between G. E. Moore and G. F. Stout. Moore was an in rebus theorist who focused
on the universal that apparently distinct qualities are, without also focusing on their apparent distinctness. Stout, however,
did focus on their apparent distinctness, and this led him to reject the in rebus theory. Cf. BQB 191-96, and SIE 77.
55
Cf. BQB 207, 218, 222-24. The alternative view sketched here is but a specification of the alternative introduced in
section 1 of this essay. Usually branded as “Platonic,” it may at one time have been shared by G. E. Moore. Consider
“Identity,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society n.s. 1 (1901): 123, where it is claimed that when we say, “‘The red in this
place is the same as the red in that place,’ we are asserting that two things numerically different have the same relation to
one universal.” I wonder, though, what he meant by “the same relation.”
56
BQB 181.
57
The common problem is this: Qualities are at once features (modes) of particulars and instances (manifestations) of
universals. They appear moreover to be essentially of both. That constitutes a problem. To solve it, in rebus and supra res
theories make different proposals, and these proposals turn out to be problematic in different ways. Crudely put, the in rebus
theorist is liable to bring the universal (entitative) too close to the particular (objectual), whereas the supra res theorist is
liable to push it too far away. This suggests another formulation of the problem common to both: How is one to understand
the relationship of being insofar as it is the relationship called “instantiation,” “exemplification,” or “participation”?