So what I think you’re saying is that Plato had so much map-territory confusion that what he had to say about forms isn’t even a meaningful question. Is that right?
No, I agree there was a meaningful question there: “why have the things we (historically) labeled as ‘dogs’ seem so similar to us?” And you can meaingfully answer that question, in a way that improves your map of the world, by looking at how things got into the dog category in the first place, and why that category (regardless of name) even exists.
While I admit I don’t have special expertise on Greek philosophy in this area, I do know that they had not gathered enough evidence at that point to even be asking questions that require knowledge of evolution to answer, and that they were hung up on idealism (as opposed to nominalism) which forces you to think in terms of ideal forms rather than models that identify relevant clusters.
So perhaps EY’s characterization of the situation misled me, but the essential features are still there to support my claim that Plato went astray by not recognizing the source of the classification-as-dog.
I see. I guess we were disagreeing with Anna for somewhat different reasons. Your point is that when Plato was considering the question “why do the things we call dogs resemble each other” the concept the English word dog references was just a folk concept that was applied to some things that looked the same- the causal-historical story for how those things came to look the way they do is irrelevant to the fact they’re called the same thing just because our brains classify them the same way.
I think thats right. My point was that Plato didn’t really care about dogs so much. What he cared about was this phenomenon of resemblance. The question wasn’t so much how did discrete individuals (Lassie and Snoopy) come to exist in a way that resemble each other. Rather, the question is “We call both Lassie and Snoopy ‘dogs’ and yet they are different individuals. What then is the relation between ‘dog’ and Lassie/Snoopy and what are we doing when we call both Lassie and Snoopy dogs? But that might be more the entire tradition of Western philosophy talking rather than Plato himself.
Plato’s answer though is that there are abstract objects, “forms” which are imperfectly instantiated in Lassie and Snoopy. Both approximate ideal ‘dogness’. For Plato it was these forms that were ‘most real’ so to speak because they were eternal and perfect. Plato, and especially some of his later followers got really mystical about all this and it got imported into Christianity. But we can excise the mysticism/silly talk about perfection and get a live philosophical question (the most notable Platonist of the 20th century is Bertrand Russell). A modern version of the question might be “what is the ontological status of abstract objects?” At best evolution and genetics are only tangentially involved with that question and only for a subset of abstract objects (things like species) and as a whole the question is generally considered unsolved. As it stands nominalism and Platonism have about equal representation among philosophers as a whole, though Platonism has a slight advantage among those who do work in Metaphysics.
No, I agree there was a meaningful question there: “why have the things we (historically) labeled as ‘dogs’ seem so similar to us?” And you can meaingfully answer that question, in a way that improves your map of the world, by looking at how things got into the dog category in the first place, and why that category (regardless of name) even exists.
While I admit I don’t have special expertise on Greek philosophy in this area, I do know that they had not gathered enough evidence at that point to even be asking questions that require knowledge of evolution to answer, and that they were hung up on idealism (as opposed to nominalism) which forces you to think in terms of ideal forms rather than models that identify relevant clusters.
So perhaps EY’s characterization of the situation misled me, but the essential features are still there to support my claim that Plato went astray by not recognizing the source of the classification-as-dog.
I see. I guess we were disagreeing with Anna for somewhat different reasons. Your point is that when Plato was considering the question “why do the things we call dogs resemble each other” the concept the English word dog references was just a folk concept that was applied to some things that looked the same- the causal-historical story for how those things came to look the way they do is irrelevant to the fact they’re called the same thing just because our brains classify them the same way.
I think thats right. My point was that Plato didn’t really care about dogs so much. What he cared about was this phenomenon of resemblance. The question wasn’t so much how did discrete individuals (Lassie and Snoopy) come to exist in a way that resemble each other. Rather, the question is “We call both Lassie and Snoopy ‘dogs’ and yet they are different individuals. What then is the relation between ‘dog’ and Lassie/Snoopy and what are we doing when we call both Lassie and Snoopy dogs? But that might be more the entire tradition of Western philosophy talking rather than Plato himself.
Plato’s answer though is that there are abstract objects, “forms” which are imperfectly instantiated in Lassie and Snoopy. Both approximate ideal ‘dogness’. For Plato it was these forms that were ‘most real’ so to speak because they were eternal and perfect. Plato, and especially some of his later followers got really mystical about all this and it got imported into Christianity. But we can excise the mysticism/silly talk about perfection and get a live philosophical question (the most notable Platonist of the 20th century is Bertrand Russell). A modern version of the question might be “what is the ontological status of abstract objects?” At best evolution and genetics are only tangentially involved with that question and only for a subset of abstract objects (things like species) and as a whole the question is generally considered unsolved. As it stands nominalism and Platonism have about equal representation among philosophers as a whole, though Platonism has a slight advantage among those who do work in Metaphysics.