counterfactualism
"what does your notebook look like?"
-it's green and a bit wrinkled and torn and covered in doodles and almost full of notes.
"well, are you looking at it right now? if not, how does it have all of these properties?"
-no, it is tucked away in my closet; nobody has it in their presence. but if you want me to show you, i'm sure it will look just as i have described.
"I'm sure it will, but my question is what it looks like right now."
-why, it doesn't look like anything right now, for no-one is looking at it.
"so your notebook is not green and covered in scribbles?"
-not in the same sense that this book sitting here between us is black.
"well then, is there any sense in which your notebook is green?"
-it is green in the sense that if i were to approach it and hold it before me, i would see a green notebook.
"but that is an appeal to the future. what of its present state? is it presently green?"
-what exactly is this question supposed to mean? are you asking if the notebook looks green even as it is tucked away from sight? clearly that makes no sense. yet all i can do when discussing this object is to picture it, and the picture of it has it as being green, solid, extended, etc... yet because these are all phenomenal properties of one kind or another, the presently concealed notebook, as it currently has no phenomenal nature, cannot itself have such properties. my picture is inadequate in describing the notebook in its current state, and that's the problem you have with materialism. so, what properties would you say that the notebook has now?
"well, the notebook currently exists in our imagination, as we are discussing it and presumably picturing it. so it has imagined phenomenal properties, but seeing as how my propositions only refer to this imagined notebook, the imagined notebook is all i am really referring to. if there is not currently a concrete notebook, then it is senseless to speak of the concrete notebook as it is."
-so the notebook simply does not exist except within our imaginations (including our memory and expectations)?
"precisely."
-so, ontologically, the existence, the reality of the notebook is exhausted by our imagined version of it?
"apparently."
-so if i were to ask you to place on top of the green notebook in your imagination, an imagined blue one, there would be no ontological difference between the two notebooks? one exists just as much as and in all the same ways as the other? they would be equally "real"?
"well, except that, were i to open my closet, i would not expect to find the blue one; only the green one."
-but is that not, in your own words, an appeal to the future? 'If i open the closet, then i will find the green notebook.' this proposition is true for the green, yet not for the blue notebook. is there not then an ontological difference between the two? is the green one, right now, not in some way more "real" (or perhaps just real in a different way than) the blue one?
"I suppose that might be true."
-and is the "if, then" (counterfactual) nature of the current green notebook really something of the future? i picture this aspect of it in a temporal way - by going up to it as i might in the future. but is this picture of me going up to it any different, fundamentally, than the materialist's picture of it just "resembling" the phenomenal notebook, regardless of the absence of an observer? these are both just hypothetical pictures, they are not meant to exhaust what i mean by "the current (state/existence/reality) of the notebook". For instance, one could say of the book between us that "The book is on the bed," and because this book has the concrete-phenomenal nature which it currently does, it is obvious that this is the case. We can say of this statement that it is true. But is the proposition, "The notebook is in the closet," not also true? Living within the linguistic context of strong idealism, it is difficult to see how it is true. the point is that one must realize that he is in such a context. When, in normal conversation, you ask me where the notebook is and i tell you it is in the closet, my answer is not false. It is true (and obviously so), yet only in a different way than the proposition about the book on the bed because in that context, we are playing a different language-game.
"But I just don't see how a statement about the notebook in the closet could be true, for what is it exactly that we are talking about when we speak of it? what concept do our words refer to? if it is just a mental image and not phenomenally concrete, then we are once again only referring to an object of our imagination."
-my point here, once again, is that the reason you don't get it is that you are stuck in the linguistic context of idealism. just as materialists just don't get how the notebook can't "be there" when they are stuck in their linguistic context. only after one has played within both of these language-games and can see them both in hindsight can he find the flaws in each. i now find myself in the language-game of 'counterfactualism', and here, it is perfectly fair to say both that the book on the bed and the notebook in the closet exist; they are both real, just in different ways. they both have what i call a counterfactual reality, yet the book on the bed is special in its having a phenomenal reality. the book is colored and solid and extended, and so is the notebook, only counterfactually. it is true to say that my notebook is green, only in a different way than to say that this book is black. we are just fluctuating between different language-games as we go from one to the other, and that is the essential point.
a similar thought experiment:
i am away from my home and receive a call from my neighbor saying that my house burned down. why do i react differently, with reference to the notebook, in this situation than if i am away and someone simply asks me to imagine that my house burned down, and the notebook along with it? if the notebook only exists as an idea when tucked away, why am i mourning its loss at the thought of it burning up? if no-one saw the notebook burn up, then it didn't actually happen, right? (there is no non-human situation.) so my picture of the event is just a fabricated one, and has nothing to do with concrete-phenomenal reality, right?
-what about this is wrong? there is something about what i call the notebook which is different in the two situations. so what is it? when i simply imagine my house burning down, i know that it is just a story. i will still be greeted by my notebook upon returning home and gleefully opening the closet to find it. i can say, "that was just a game. my notebook is still there," and this statement is essentially right. but when my house does burn down, i can not speak of it in the same way. so what object am i referring to when i say, "my notebook is still there," if it is true in one case and false in the other? I am not referring to a picture, for I can picture it in either situation. I am stating a fact, and the difference lies in the relationship between the fact and reality. but what reality? not a phenomenal one, to be sure! there were no concrete phenomena correlated with the burning of the notebook, and i am not mourning the mere imagined phenomena of it burning either. so to what kind of reality does the proposition "the notebook is still there" (which is true in one case and not the other) correspond? must we return to materialism? must there have been something with solidity and extension sitting in the closet all along? no! facing one wall of nonsense should not lead us into the arms of another. the concept of a counterfactual reality allows us to get back what the idealists lack (assuming that they don't have God holding everything in place, as Berkeley did) without moving back to the absurdity of materialism.
So then, one may ask, of what exactly does this counterfactual reality consist? and this is a fair enough question.
Wittgenstein says: "The human body is the best picture of the human soul." And the same can be applied to the counterfactual notebook. If one wants to imagine the counterfactual notebook, then imagine the phenomenal notebook. that is its best picture. the point, however, is that the attempt to picture it is doomed to be figurative. the counterfactual notebook does not look like anything (nor feel, etc.). If you want to get to the essential being of the counterfactual notebook, know that it cannot be spatial, colored, solid, etc. It is just the fixed possibility of these things. the form of reality which counterfactual reality fits into is essentially a kind of possibility. finding a unicorn in my closet is possible too, but that is not the same kind of possibility. there is nothing to rule that out, but it is not expected. i would be surprised, however, to find my notebook missing. so in what does counterfactual reality consist? a kind of fixed possibility of phenomena, and it can be described in terms of the same exact facts which describe the phenomenal reality of which it is a direct possibility. "The notebook is in my closet." it is obvious what this means, but if we must put it into different, more 'precise' terms, we could say: finding the notebook in my closet is a fixed possibility for anyone who opens it.
is the linguistic context of counterfactualism exempt from the same scrutiny which we applied to the others? of course not, but it is a step forward and out of the ancient debate. first, one must understand this point of view, and then only later, once we can look at its linguistic context with a kind of hindsight, will we be able to scrutinize it in a similar way.
A note: whether i should have used "realism" in place of "materialism" in this post... i'm not sure, as each 'school' is too elusively defined. what i'm referring to is the belief in an object which has any concrete-phenomenal properties in the absence of an observer, and my point is to replace such an object with a 'counterfactual' version of itself. the difference is this: the concretely phenomenal object with concretely phenomenal properties exists in one's presence, but in one's absence, what is left over is the corresponding counterfactually phenomenal object with counterfactually phenomenal properties. in practice, the two different types of objects would generally be spoken of in exactly the same way, for it is, one might say, not an ontical difference, but an ontological one.
maybe this makes me some kind of pluralist? am i reaching toward some kind of ultimately True ontological picture here? not necessarily. ontological truths are just as subject to our language as ontical ones... so what is an accurate ontological picture supposed to be? what is such a picture supposed to represent? either i am confusing myself or this is something to keep pondering...
-perhaps the answer is to say that what i have done is not the painting of a picture, but merely that I have pointed to someone else's picture and revealed that certain aspects of it are metaphors. our relationship with non-present objects is different than our relationship with present ones, so although we may speak of them in the same manner, the sense in which they are phenomenal objects is fundamentally different.