Relations, Monism, and the Vindication of Bradley's Regress

Abstract

This article articulates and defends F. H. Bradley's regress argument against external relations using contemporary analytic techniques and conceptuality. Bradley's argument is usually quickly dismissed as if it were beneath serious consideration. But I shall maintain that Bradley's argument, suitably reconstructed, is a powerful argument, plausibly premised, and free of such obvious fallacies as petitio principii. Thus it does not rest on the question-begging assumption that all relations are internal, as Russell, and more recently van Inwagen, maintain. Bradley does not attack external relations in order to affirm a doctrine of internal relations, and his monism is not derived from the internality of all relations, but from the self-contradictory nature of all relations. For Bradley, it is the "relational situation" as such that is ontologically defective.C. D. Broad once said of F. H. Bradley's famous regress argument against external relations that its use "would disgrace a child or a savage". 1 But some of us who are neither find the argument surprisingly resistant to refutation. 2 It is not a compelling argument, but then which argument for any interesting philosophical thesis is compelling? It is however a 'good' argument, indeed a powerful argument, plausibly premised, free of obvious fallacy, and worthy of very serious consideration. Or at least that is what I will be maintaining.

Trope theory and the Bradley regress

“…Although the setting in which his suggestion is formulated is neither trope nor bundle theoretical (Armstrong is here interested in joining substrate with universal), his account is still interesting in that it clearly captures both why this 'no-relation' approach is attractive and why it is 11 A contemporary Bradleyan is Vallicella (2000Vallicella ( , 2002. 12 It is instructive to contrast the dependencies which characterize this (vicious) regress with those of the acceptable kind.…”

Relata-Specific Relations: A Response to Vallicella

“…This is, in a nutshell, Vallicella's point. Following Vallicella's own style, we present the point here below in the form of a master argument, which we distil from two of his papers (2002, 2004). Suppose a relation R holds between a and b .…”

“…Do we not need some operator to apply relations to relata and get an actual relating, like glue needs someone to apply it to the pieces of the broken plate? The reply, according to Vallicella (2000, 2002, 2004), is: yes, we do. Relations cannot indeed do their relating work alone.…”

“…No other options will do. In this paper we reject Vallicella's conclusion by considering an important option that becomes visible only if we hold onto a precise distinction between the following three feature‐pairs of relations: internality/externality, universality/particularity, relata‐specificity/relata‐unspecificity. The conclusion we reach is that if external relations are to relate their relata, they must be relata‐specific (and no special operator is needed).…”

“… A bstract According to Vallicella's‘Relations, Monism, and the Vindication of Bradley's Regress’ (2002), if relations are to relate their relata, some special operator must do the relating. No other options will do.…”