The Metaphysics of Experience (American Philosophy) by Elizabeth Kraus

Author:Elizabeth Kraus [Kraus, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823283156
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2018-09-18T06:00:00+00:00

Indicative systems not specifying dual relations are less precise in their indication of the propositional subjects. They are vague in the nexus itself, being rendered determinate by the perspective of the experient occasion. In Whitehead’s example, the proposition “Caesar has crossed the Rubicon,”40 what is indicated by “Caesar” and “Rubicon” depends on whether the experient is a legionnaire in Caesar’s company or a present-day historian, being a function of the direct perceptual experience of the experient. For the legionnaire, Caesar is an historic route of experienced Caesarian occasions culminating in the experienced Rubicon-crossing, and the Rubicon is the perceived river. For the historian who has never seen the Rubicon, both it and “Caesar” denote types of nexuses, not actual nexuses. The legionnaire affirms a particular proposition; the historian, a general one. It is obvious therefore that between the propositions asserted by the legionnaire and the historian there lies a continuum of other propositions all assuming the same verbal form but whose “objective content” as denoted by the “Caesar” and “Rubicon” indicators is quite diverse. Hence, though position indicators may supply an objective spatio-temporal reference system, beyond that, any proposition has indeterminations to be rendered determinate by the functioning of the prehending subject from its relativistic perspective. No verbal statement can completely exhaust the possibilities of a proposition because of this inherent indefiniteness. A proposition is “the potentiality of the objectification of certain presupposed actual entities via certain qualities and relations, the objectification being for some unspecified subject for which the presupposition has meaning in direct experience” (PR 196–97; emphasis added). The actual objectification solves the indeterminancy, because the specification of the feeler, and consequently of its actual world, determines what will be the real “meaning” of the proposition for this feeler. The indicators may point to the logical subjects of the proposition, but the perspective of the emergent feeler ultimately decides what they are for it. Thus, “Caesar has crossed the Rubicon,” as the potentiality for objectifying Caesar and the Rubicon via the relation “has crossed,” means (when taken in abstraction from a concrete feeling subject) “a Caesarian type of route has crossed a Rubiconian type of route,” in which expression the Caesarian route is located in the Roman world of 49 B.C. and the Rubiconian route, in Italy. How the potentialities of “Caesarian” and “Rubiconian” are further specified is a function of the actual world of the experients entertaining the proposition: of the legionnaire or of the historian. Their past experience has determined the objectifications under which both routes have entered into their self-constitutive process. Therefore, as additional indicators, “Caesar” and “Rubicon” are vague and indeterminate.

A proposition thus has both the particularity of actuality in its indication of the actual logical subjects to be conjoined in the predicative pattern, and the generality of possibility in its general reference to indeterminate experients.

A proposition becomes metaphysical when its predicative pattern is capable of relating all possible actual entities as its logical subjects and is in the actual world of all experients.

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