In May, Finnish philosophers were privileged to enjoy the company of metaphysician and philosopher of mind John Heil (b. 1943). Regardless of his busy schedule – the Dynamis seminar in Turku, several workshops, and a philosophy colloquium in Helsinki – I got a chance to sit down with professor Heil to discuss some of the most compelling questions in contemporary ontology and metaphysics.
How did you end up doing philosophy in the first place? Why did you choose metaphysics and the philosophy of mind?
As an undergraduate, I did political science planning to go to law school, and I took some philosophy classes which I think we were required to take. One of the courses was political philosophy, and the arguments were so terrible I thought I can’t continue doing this stuff, I need to do philosophy. So, I went to a philosophy program, and I ended up writing on J. J. C. Smart’s identity theory1According to J. J. C. Smart’s physicalist identity theory, every mental state is identical with some state of the brain., which had come out in the late 1950’s. So that’s how I started out in philosophy.
There was no pressure whatsoever to publish in those days, you just published if you had something to say. I published two or three papers because they seemed interesting to me. And then I started doing more and moved from where I was teaching to another institution. By then, publication and conferences had become a big deal. So, I got involved in all that and I just naturally gravitated toward the philosophy of mind, not Jack Smart, but just philosophy of mind in general. I wrote a bunch of papers on it.
I then moved [in 1987] to a small school called Davidson College that had an amazing philosophy department. Alfred Mele, who is, as far as I know, the world leader in action theory, was my colleague for the whole time I was there – we both have since left. But Mele and I talked a lot about action and philosophy of mind. These were the days in which the mental causation issue was coming very strongly into discussions in philosophy of mind, and I realized that you can’t understand mental causation unless you know what causation is and you can’t understand causation unless you know what powers and properties are, and so I became interested in metaphysics, not just the metaphysics of mental causation, but metaphysics more generally. And then it just took off.
Metaphysics seems to be a field in philosophy that has to continually justify its own existence. What do you regard as the value of metaphysics in the history of philosophy and in this time and age?
I think metaphysics is inevitable. We all make metaphysical assumptions; we just don’t reflect on that. We all assume that we have free will – that when we act, we act freely. But that seems to be a metaphysical position, and someone at some point is going to ask: so, what’s that? What is free will? Questions like that arise naturally and inevitably.
I’ve become interested in the symbiotic relation between science and metaphysics especially. When you look at physics, there at least half a dozen interpretations of quantum mechanics, and they’re incompatible with one another. Those interpretations are purely and simply metaphysics. In concocting those interpretations, physicists are acting as metaphysicians. We’ve got these equations, and they work. But what must the cosmos be like given that these equations work? As Stephen Hawking put it, ”what breathes fire into the equations?” What are they telling us, really? We can use them, and we get experimental results, but what did they say that the cosmos is like if they do work – if we do regard them as true. So, I think metaphysics is unavoidable and inevitable.
I think that probably starting in the 20th century metaphysics underwent a change and started distancing itself from science. So nowadays, in the US, if a department decides to hire in metaphysics they say in the description of the area of confidence ”either metaphysics or philosophy of language”. The so-called mainstream metaphysics is moving much more closely to the philosophy of language than it is to the science, its natural home.
That’s a good lead to my next question: you called a contemporary analytic metaphysics, ”linguisticized” metaphysics. What is it that goes wrong with the contemporary analytic metaphysics and how?
As Donald Davidson pointed out, a long time ago, the concepts we use in thinking about mental states are not commensurable with the concepts we use to talk about physical states. Nevertheless, it could still be true that whenever this mental concept applies, what it applies to is in a definite physical state. The identity conditions for concepts in physics or neuroscience are quite different from those in psychology or what the philosophers of mind are talking about. And they’re taking this taxonomic distinction to reflect a metaphysical distinction: that somehow mental things must be distinct from physical things. The premises concern reduction, but what is reduction? When you reduce the A’s to the B’s, are the A’s and B’s entities, can you reduce an entity to another entity? That doesn’t make sense. Reduction means being able to translate concepts in one vocabulary into concepts in another vocabulary, and there’s no prospect of doing that in the case of philosophy of mind nor in the case of ordinary physics.
The physicist Arthur Eddington talked about sitting down to write his Gifford lectures at his two tables. One was his everyday table, and one was the table he knew of from physics. They were completely different, but he knew they had, in some way, to be a single table. This is what philosophers of mind talk about as an explanatory gap: a gap between descriptions of ordinary true descriptions to the table and the table described in the vocabulary of physics. It is true that the table is solid, it’s true that it’s beige-colored or whatever it might be, it’s true that it is sharp-edged and so on. The truthmaker for ‘this is a table’ is ‘this being a table’. But when you look at it more closely, you see that what this table is, is something that is describable in a vocabulary that is completely orthogonal to the vocabulary we use to describe the everyday table.
The way we go about identifying Eddington’s everyday table with the table as revealed by physics, is by looking closely at individual tables. We look at them and we find out that they’re made up of atoms and that their atoms are made up of quarks and leptons and so on or maybe they are disturbances in the field or whatever. That’s how we make the identification.
What the explanatory gap business in the philosophy of mind does is it takes the fact that you can’t translate or derive mental concepts from physical concepts and interprets that as a signal for an important ontological difference. The language that we use to describe our mental states can’t be translated into the language of physics or neuroscience or whatever, but we understand that this table is the same one that we could give a description in the language of physics, not because we can translate table talk to talk about quarks and leptons, but because we know that if we decompose the table, that’s what we’re going to find.
I think that the questions, the whole framework that’s being developed and that is everywhere now, is heavily ”linguisticized”. We philosophers are taking linguistic differences, or taxonomic differences, to signal metaphysical or ontological differences, and I believe that is a huge mistake.
If I’ve understood you correctly, in your view it is empirical science which can figure out what the substances are really like. You already started on the topic, but can you elaborate on this view of yours about the connection between ontology and empirical science?
What metaphysics or the part we call ontology does, is provide what you might call placeholders. For example, if you have a substance ontology – substances, properties, and relations – the notion of substance is a placeholder for whatever physics identifies as the ultimate things. These might be particles, they might be fields, they might be the universe as a whole – they might be something that we haven’t even thought about yet. If a substance ontology held up, then the idea would be that the substances are atoms, or the substances might be quarks and leptons, the substances might be fields, there might be one substance – space-time or a unified field, or the entire cosmos. In fact, that is where physics seems to be going: we have the entire cosmos, and everything else is just a wrinkle in it or something of the kind.
So, ontology sets out to provide placeholders that will work in whatever physics produces. People who talk about the special composition question, for example, will ask when does a collection make up a whole – if ever. Nihilists say never, others say sometimes. There are all these different views, but they seem to be presupposing a corpuscular, atomistic universe. Suppose the universe were just a unified field. How does the special composition question take hold there? This is one example of metaphysics or ontology constraining science, I think.
Substances all the way down
Speaking of constraints, analytical ontology has been – and still is – bristling with theories in which the fundamental entities are thought of as static, substance-like entities – or theories in which entities are divided into general (universals) and individual (particulars) entities. Whereas some trope and process ontologies, for example, can be seen going against this tradition2See e.g. Barry Smith’s critique against fantology: Barry Smith, Against Fantology. In Experience and Analysis, J. Marek and E. M. Reicher (eds.), 153–170. Wien, ÖBV & HPT, 2005. And Johanna Seibt’s critique towards the so-called substance paradigm: e.g. Johanna Seibt, The Myth of Substance and Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Acta Analytica 15, 1996., professor Heil seems to go with the traditional approach in his substance–property ontology. In his keynote speech in the Dynamis seminar, Heil gave the impression that his approach has slightly changed after his most recent publications. I was eager to hear whether he still strongly believed in the substance–property ontology.
And in your view, there has to be substances and properties, right? Or have you changed your view?
I’m changing – I don’t stand still. Previously and in my last book Appearance in Reality which came out in 2021, I defended a two-category ontology of substances and properties where substances were simple, they couldn’t have genuine parts. They could be classical atoms, or they could be electrons, or they could be fields. The properties were modes, modes of those substances, that is, modifications of them. For example, if a field were a substance, then if there was a local excitation in the field that we would describe as an electron, that would be a mode. The electron wouldn’t be a substance, it would be a mode, it would be a property of the field.
I now think that talk about properties and substances is misleading. Clearly, they are related to one another. If you’ve got a mode, it has to be a mode of something, it has to modify something, you can’t just have a mode floating out there. In fact, the whole motivation for modes issued from the fact that accidents had a bad reputation because of explanations of transubstantiation. When the bread and wine are consecrated, the substance leaves, but the accidents remain. These were called real accidents because they exist independently of anything. Descartes and others didn’t want to have anything to do with free-floating accidents. They focused on what they called modes and they recognized that you can’t have a modification without something to modify, nor could you have something that isn’t modified, the dependence is two-way.
What I came to see was that when we talk about substances and properties, we are describing things in two different ways. Locke talked about partial consideration. We can consider an object’s shape, its color, its mass. We can consider all these things about it. These are simply different ways of considering it, owing to its nature, so it is not subjective. We could also consider the object as something that is modified, as something having properties. These are just two different ways of considering the same thing. Both substances and properties are abstractions in the traditional sense – not in the sense that they’re in a Platonic heaven – they are abstractions in the sense that they are what you arrive at when you attend to an object partially, when you consider the object in a partial way. In Locke’s terms, you engage in partial consideration which in those days was synonymous with abstraction. What Locke and his contemporaries meant by abstraction was not what metaphysicians mean today.
You have said that substances must be simple3“Simple” here refers to mereologically simple: an entity that has no proper parts.; that they can’t be complex. Do you still think that this is the case?
I think a coherent concept of substance will include a commitment to the idea that substances must be simple. If substances are atoms, for example, when you put them together you get an object, a mobile phone, for instance. We treat that as a substance and we say that it has properties, but when we describe the mobile phone’s properties, they turn out to be just what you get when you put the atoms together in the right way.
If you put the atoms together in the right way, you get something that is red, even though the things that make it up aren’t red. And the redness is not a new thing. It’s simply the way the thing looks, the way it appears to us. I don’t mean to say that redness is mental – only in the minds of observers. It just so happens that, when you put these particles together in this way, you get something that’s red. I don’t like talk about emergence for example, I have a lot of reasons for doubting emergence. In my view, if you have substance and property in your ontology, you should think of substance as simple. I take that to be the traditional view.
I think if you go with substance and property, you should be prepared to say that substances are simple: if substance–property ontology holds up, substances must be simple.
And do you believe that the substance–property ontology will hold up?
Well, I don’t know, I’m not sure. Setting aside my earlier reservations, it does seem serviceable. With what we now have, with what physics is giving us, other ontologies don’t seem to work so well. When you drill down, you don’t find individual qualities. You find disturbances in the field or particles or something like that.
What do you think about ontological fundamentality?
I’m not a fan of fundamentality, because when you talk about the fundamental things, you make everything else less fundamental, enjoying an attenuated kind of existence, making them depend somehow on the fundamental things. D. C. Williams said that all that exists are plenum of qualities in space-time, but there are also collections of them. The collections are just as real as the qualities.
Suppose you make up a crazy object. The object that consists of Donald Trump, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. For Williams, these would just be spatially distinct collections of qualities. That object is no less real than an electron or your mobile phone, we just don’t care about it. Some objects we care about. We give names to those, and we talk about them in various ways. There are endless other combinations that we don’t care about. We care about combinations when we find multiple cases of them, similar ones. Then we start thinking: ”oh, OK, this kind of combination is significant”. But that doesn’t mean that the combination is any less fundamental or exists in any attenuated way than the things that make it up.
In your theory, substances are bearers of properties and properties are the ways that substances are – modes. Are all the modes contingent for a substance or are some necessary?
My own view is that when you start to look at science and metaphysics (and I’ve moved much in the direction of David Lewis) that necessity is going to be dominant: everything is as it is of necessity. This was the ancient view: things behaved as they did because of their natures, their character, and if they had that character, they did what they did. I think something like that is where we’re going in the metaphysics of physics. It’s certainly where David Lewis is, because anybody who’s a four-dimensionalist, who thinks that cosmos is a four-dimensional space-time entity, then everything is as it is. It’s just, in a way, atemporally sitting there so that the you of tomorrow is already there. I have become convinced that there is a non-zero chance that necessity is what we’re going to have to live with in physics and in metaphysics.
In that case, we need to understand that, while our talk about tables, and chairs, and motion, and free will could all be true, the nature of the truthmakers might be something very surprising. The truthmaker for ”I am moving across this room” might turn out to be an extended region of space-time that doesn’t move. No piece of it moves, but that could be what motion is. That doesn’t eliminate motion or show that it’s an illusion. It shows that when we talk about motion, that’s what we’re talking about. We have to be able to accommodate these kinds of positions when we do philosophy and especially metaphysics.
I hope I finish my next book before I leave the world – before my temporal parts run out.
About qualities and powers
Causation, natural laws, and dispositions or powers have been eagerly discussed in contemporary metaphysics for several decades. How to understand, for example, the disposition of a glass item to shatter when dropped on a hard surface or the disposition of a billiard ball to roll forwards when hit with another ball on its opposite side? The week after our interview, professor Heil held a presentation at the Powers, Causes & Laws workshop organized by Mind and Matter, but we already considered his most recent views about powers and qualities while sitting by the interview table.
How do you see the relation between qualities and powers nowadays?
I’ve now bonded with David Lewis and Spinoza. I regard Lewis and Spinoza as two sides of the same coin. The conventional view of objects interacting in space-time as pieces of matter is certainly true in the manifest image, in our everyday experience, and in the laboratories of scientists. But when we ask ourselves what those things are – it could turn out that they’re extended modifications of space-time or something like that. And those things don’t move or interact at all.
One problem with contemporary talk about powers is that it has inherited a vocabulary of dispositional and categorical properties from Ryle. Ryle was using the terms, not to talk about properties, not to do metaphysics, but to talk about talk: the way we talk about things. Sometimes we talk about things in an ”if, then” way: if you drop the cup, it will break. Sometimes we talk about them categorically: the cup is red and cup-shaped. These are just different ways of talking about objects. Philosophers came along and said, oh, so there are two kinds of property, dispositional and categorical. How do they fit together?
This is an example of linguisticized metaphysics. ”Dispositional” became synonymous with having powers and then people said: hold on, if categorical properties don’t have powers, we couldn’t perceive them, they couldn’t do anything. What I have argued (echoing C. B. Martin) was that qualities themselves are powerful. A ball’s redness or sphericality are categorical properties, qualities of the ball. By virtue of being spherical, which is a categorical property, the ball has the power to roll under the right circumstances. The ball is red, its redness is another categorical property. By virtue of being red, the ball reflects light radiation in a particular way. Qualities and powers run together. I don’t think it is right to separate them.
So, they run together, but are they identical?
These are simply two ways of talking about the same thing. We can think about the ball’s sphericality as a quality of the ball, but we can also think about it as providing the ball particular powers.
But aren’t powers and qualities individuated differently?
They are certainly differentiated in different ways linguistically, but that does not mean they are different kinds of property. Take the Morning star and the Evening star. They were distinguished in two different ways, and yet it turned it out that they were the same heavenly body. We can, and often do, distinguish one thing in two different ways.
This is Davidson’s point in the philosophy of mind. I can describe you as having certain thoughts or beliefs or intentions. In principle, you could also be described as being in a certain neurological state. Now, you can’t derive the one description from the other. I have no idea what that might involve, but that’s irrelevant. Davidson’s idea was we have these two ways of talking about the universe. They are different ways of talking, they’re not inter-translatable. But that doesn’t mean that when we make a mental attribution, what makes that attribution true couldn’t also be given a completely independent physical description. In fact, Davidson thought that’s the only way to account for mental causation. We’re just describing the same thing, and we’re thinking about the same thing in two different ways. The language we use is completely different, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not talking about the same things.
How has the practice of academic philosophy changed during your career? Do you think we have made any progress?
I think in one sense, philosophy has made progress. In another sense, as an academic discipline, it’s becoming less and less viable, because we’re becoming more and more specialized. Philosophers working in different areas can no longer talk to one another, two philosophers doing the same kinds of things might not know about each other.
Also, the pressure to publish has, I think, had a very corrupting effect. As soon as you obtain a position (or in order to obtain a position) you have to produce publications. And the way to do that is to say things that are pretty safe. You don’t want to say anything that’s terribly controversial. When you’re senior, you can get away with that, but when you’re junior you have to find a niche and find a little move that you can make within that niche. This is one reason the necessity of publication for academic standing has been highly corrupting. It didn’t exist when I came out of my PhD program, but it came on in the years to follow. When the American Philosophical Association decided to do a journal, they asked me to be the inaugural editor and I agreed but only on the condition that I could publish papers that were interesting, and not just epicycles. I want to see people stick their necks out and I want to see something interesting.
The current state of philosophy is probably largely due to bureaucracy. The Deans and university administrators want some objective way of assessing people’s merit and publication, whether anybody cares about the publications or not. If you publish in a good journal, that’s all that matters. The more publications you have, the better. I know people with lots of publications who are not very good philosophers. When I started out, I only published when I thought I had something to say, and I’ve always written because I wanted to understand something. If I can understand something, if I can express it in a way that’s clear even to me, then maybe others can understand it as well. That was often my motivation for publishing: I was trying to figure out things for myself.
What is, in your opinion, the most important discussion in the field of metaphysics or in contemporary philosophy in general right now?
That’s a difficult question. I’m so deeply involved in metaphysics at the moment that I don’t think about ethics or political philosophy or things that are going on there.
In metaphysics, I worry that too much contemporary metaphysics is linguisticized, but I am hopeful that linguisticized metaphysics is going to go away, that it is not going to be long-standing. I think that what we need to do is look in the corners for philosophers who are doing work that belongs to a different paradigm. Yesterday at the conference people were talking about paradigms and paradigm shifts, Kuhnian talk. And I think there are different paradigms that are already out there, but they haven’t been appreciated. As a result, we’re stuck in this linguistic cycle. And we’re having trouble getting out of it. And the only way to get out of it is to see it for what it is. Then you can say: ”Oh, there are options, there is another way of looking at things!” To me, that’s liberating. It isn’t that you think that such and such is wrong and I’m right, but that you come to appreciate that this other way is more productive, more edifying. We can make more sense of ourselves, the lived world, the world that we get in physics, and so on when we look at things in this way. Importantly, it is all defeasible, it could turn out to be wrong.
And to clarify: your view is that we need to get out of this language-centered way of doing metaphysics and move more towards empirical sciences?
Yes. We need to be continuous with the sciences. But empirical science works to explain the appearances. Its job is to explain why planets orbit as they do and on the like. There is a mutual dependence here on metaphysics and not just physics, but also the social sciences and all the rest. We need to look for a comprehensive view that can put these together and make sense of them. This would require continually reassessing where we are in light of what’s going on in other areas. This is the position that I now hold.
It is said on the Washington University website that you have been listed among the 50 most influential philosophers of our time. What is the influence you wish to have had or you wish to have in the future on the field of philosophy?
To make people think in different ways – to liberate people’s thinking. If I could have the effect on younger philosophers that C. B. Martin had on me, getting me to think about things in a different way and to say: ”Oh wow, this is a way that of thinking about things that hadn’t occurred to me” – then that’s liberating. That’s what I would like to impart.
My guess is that I was on the ”top 50” list just because I published a bunch of things and had lots of citations and so on – so that’s where that came from.
Ending notes: upcoming manuscript and thoughts about the field of metaphysics in Finland
I’m working on a new manuscript that I started working on about a year ago. But bureaucracy rules nowadays, right? I was put on a university committee that is taking all my spare time. Times that I’m not preparing to teach, I have to spend working on stuff with this committee. So, the manuscript has just been sitting there unlooked-at. It includes a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about, but with arguments, with illustrations, and with examples. There are things I would need to add to our discussion that would take a week to go into in order to make them plausible. I could just assert them, but that’s not to make them plausible.
I also just want to say that I so admire Finnish philosophers and Finns working in metaphysics. It is uplifting to see so many people doing so much that’s interesting. And smart people. This is most encouraging. What is depressing is that you are forced to do a lot of your work in English, and I am sure this difficulty is underappreciated. English has become the lingua franca of science and philosophy, and a lot of other areas, and that’s too bad. There’s nothing we can do to change it at the moment, but that’s something that is unfortunate and I myself feel embarrassed for English speakers, for foisting this on you.
A shorter version of this interview is published in Finnish in niin & näin 3/2024, pp. 6–10.
