The Brain, a User's Manual:
How to Talk About Things—Part Three
By Gabriel Blanchard
The previous categories were, on the whole, self-contained predications. We turn now to a more dynamic set.
A Dictionary of Discords
This is the third and final installment in the “How to Talk” miniseries, part of our crash course in logic. In this series, we’ve now discussed: 1) substances—or, to use a more ordinary English word, things; and 2) the nine categories of facts we can predicate about things. (The categories, according to Aristotle, are: substance itself, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, posture, condition, action, and affection.) Before we move on, we should make a note of a few other things which are slightly more complex, but of the same basic kind as the categories.
We often speak about the different senses of a word. In the present author’s experience, one of the most common causes of distrust and even enmity among people—such as the ever-useful Miss B and Mr. A—is mere miscommunication. These mistakes are often made because Miss B means a word in one sense, while Mr. A is interpreting that word in quite a different sense. Sometimes, this is because one party or the other (or both) do not realize how many senses the crucial term has; in extreme cases, one or both may not even recognize how the misunderstanding is possible.1 Other times, there may be some hostility between Miss B and Mr. A that makes one or both of them less than willing to understand each other. Or Miss B might misinterpret what Mr. A said due to a mere lapse of memory, or even of hearing. (This is partly why the rules of debate traditionally include being polite and magnanimous2 in how we speak to, and about, our opponents; some people would say, being excessively polite and magnanimous. We can’t stop for a full exploration of this topic now, but we will come back to it.)
To help prevent misunderstandings like these, a few more predicable things deserve discussion. Most of them are subtypes of opposition and change, as well as one type of time, one relation that tends to get confused with time, and another relation that doesn’t.
Oppositions
“Opposite” doesn’t sound complex; however—and we should have expected this from a word that is about contradictions—it contains multitudes.3 If we want examples, “man” will do nicely: terms which are “the opposite” of man include child, woman, ghost, nature, coward, God, animal, machine, and extraterrestrial; doubtless there are more. Thankfully, “man” is an outlier—most words have fewer opposites than this! Aristotle takes note of four types of opposition.
i. Relative Opposites
These are opposites only in terms of one another. For instance, half of something (say, a cup of fish sauce) is the opposite of double that thing (two cups of fish sauce). Opposition of this type is meaningless outside its original context, or at most, it exists only in the abstract: half and double are comprehensible ideas but need to be “of” something, like a cup of fish sauce, to really mean anything.
ii. Contrary Opposites
These are opposites in the sense most of us first “reach for,” mentally. Classic pairs like good and evil, black and white, life and death, or pleasure and pain all fit the bill; so do organizations with contrary aims (like the aim to destroy each other).
iii. Privative4 Opposites
These oppositions are between some concrete thing, and the absence of that thing. Aristotle’s example is vision and its privative opposite, blindness. These aren’t purely abstract terms like “half” and “double”; they can be discussed without specifying “blindness of what.” They also aren’t opposed in quite the same way as contraries: for example, pain is not merely lack of pleasure (at most, a lack of pleasure is one kind of pain, namely boredom or numbness), but blindness is the mere absence of sight.
iv. Negative Opposites
Finally, we have logical opposites. The opposition here is between X and not-X, terms which must very strictly defined. Picking up the example of black and white above, the contrary opposite of “black” is “white”; the negative opposite of “black,” however, is “not black.” (Equivocations, deliberate or otherwise, often slip into arguments through lapses in this rigor of definition—the proof that white horses are not horses is a good example.)
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The more it changes, the more it's the same old thing.
Oh the Times …
In the prior installment of this series, we said that, as an Aristotelian category, time is simple. We lied. But it isn’t very complicated! There are only two things we have to address here. One is that—as we know perfectly well, and thus, easily forget—not everything fits into just one time sequence, i.e. things can happen at the same time. If Mr. A sneezes, this could be before or after Miss B yawns, or the two events could be simultaneous.
The other is a clarification about what certain words can mean: words like “prior,” which we habitually associate with time. These can also indicate logical sequence, or dependence. Now, logical sequence is easily confused with temporal sequence. We experience things in time, so we usually notice causes first and then their effects happening later. A full-grown chicken lays an egg and broods on it, and eventually that egg hatches into a chick, which matures in turn into a full-grown chicken—cause, effect, cause, effect.5 However, some have things have a logical sequence, yet do not occur in a temporal sequence.
This is counter-intuitive, but it’s not as hard to grasp as it may seem. Imagine you are holding a pair of books and put them down on a table at the same time. Obviously, one of them will be on top of the other. In this way, the position of the top book is the result of the position of the bottom book; so the bottom book’s position causes the position of the other one, even though the position of both books started at the exact same time. This is what is meant by calling X “logically prior” to Y: X is the cause of Y, whether or not X is earlier than Y in time.
… They Are a-Changin’
Aristotle also addressed six types of change in the Categories. (In many translations, especially older ones, the word Aristotle uses for “change” may be translated “motion.”6) Four of these types can be put in two natural pairs.
i. Generation and Destruction
On the one hand, things grow, begin to exist, take shape, are born, and mature; on the other, things shrivel, cease to be, break down, die, and decay. This often means living things, but not always. (“Destruction” is also referred to as “corruption,” again especially in older translations of the classics.)
ii. Increase and Diminution
Simpler still—things get bigger or smaller (literally or metaphorically).
iii. Alteration
Things change in ways that don’t fit into the above: a chameleon changing from green to reddish-brown, for instance, is neither growing nor decaying by doing so, and is not becoming bigger or smaller: it is showing alteration.
iv. Movement
We’ve admitted that we lied about time; we were telling the truth about place being uncomplicated, though! This just means moving from one place to another.
My Precious
And finally, one last type of relation merits mention, namely possession. There are different kinds of possessing or belonging, of course; we need not go into the full details here. However, to suggest some of the different sub-meanings, we may ask the devil:
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell … We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely graded differences that run from “my boots” through “my dog,” “my servant,” “my wife,” “my father,” “my master,” and “my country,” to “my God.”
—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter XXI
1In the present writer’s experience, miscommunications of this kind are abundant in conversations between Catholic and Protestant Christians. Catholics and Protestants have many shared vocabulary items (“grace,” “necessary,” “infallible,” etc.), but far fewer shared definitions.
2The word polite descends from the Greek term πόλις [polis], “city”: polite behavior is the courtesy proper to civilized people, as contrasted with those who either have not entered the city’s life (“savages”) or have been expelled from it (“outlaws”). Magnanimity, a related idea, comes from the Latin phrase magna anima, “great soul”: this phrase was compacted into a noun to translate Aristotle’s highest virtue, analyzed in the Nicomachean Ethics. More recently, it has been recognized that the need for, and duty of, politeness and magnanimity in debate does itself need to be leavened with a wariness of those who would use the courtesy of others as a tool against them.
3“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, §51.
4From the Latin prīvāre, meaning “to rob, strip, deprive of.” The word deprivation is related. (However, the word depraved is not: it comes from prāvus, “crooked.”)
5This of course settles the old riddle in favor of the chicken egg chicken oh forget it
6This is why St. Thomas Aquinas‘ five proofs of the existence of God include what is often called an “argument from motion,” when it is really an argument from change in general (or what is called the cosmological argument today).
Gabriel Blanchard has worked for CLT since 2019, where he serves as its editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you’re enjoying this series, you might also like our Great Conversation series (the late Mortimer Adler’s name for the interconnected tradition of literature, science, theology, law, and philosophy throughout Western civilization). Or, if you’re looking for more ways to sharpen your mind, our Sorting Through Sophistries series might be for you (covering fallacies of all kinds, from appeals to false authorities and cherry-picking evidence to the Forer effect). And if you’ve come into the Brain User’s Manual here and want to start from the beginning, you’re in luck, as we’re only five posts in: you can follow these links to the first, second, third, and fourth installments.
Published on 7th November, 2024. Page image of Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper.