Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
Lecture 26: Definition: Cause, Effect, Substance, and Accident

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Now, later on in ethics, you'll see at the beginning of ethics, you meet what is called the first definition of good. And we'll examine that at some time. But the first definition of good is that good is what all desire. But you could ask the Socratic question about that, right? Is it good because we desire or want it? Or do we want it because it is good, right? Now, it makes all the difference in your understanding of that definition. And therefore, your understanding of good, and eventually bad and so on, and better, of course. It all depends upon your understanding of that definition. Is it a definition by cause, or is it a definition by effect? And actually, it's a definition by effect, but you have to show that by interesting discourse that people will have when they study a little bit of Nicomachean Ethics, right? And so, this distinction between definition by cause and definition by effect is a natural distinction to use, or to have in mind, in understanding Socrates' question. And as Heisenberg said, right, it's the greats who taught us how to ask questions of principle. And they gave us the most powerful tool the Western mind has, he says. You know, I learned to ask the question about the definition of good from Socrates in the Euthyphora, right? And I was reading, I think this is the De Virgione here, St. Augustine, and he quotes the common definition of the beautiful. The beautiful is that which pleases with, what? Seeing, right? And St. Augustine asked the Socratic question, right? Kind of question. Is it beautiful because it pleases us when we see it? Or does it please us when we see it because it is beautiful? And St. Augustine says, I have no doubt that it pleases us because it is beautiful, right? So that definition of the beautiful is a definition by, what? Effect, right? Now, again, you can, you know, discuss that, and a father can understand it in your discourse about that. But your whole understanding of the beautiful depends upon that. Is that first definition of the beautiful, that which pleases when seen, right? The definition by cause or by effect, right? Your whole understanding of the fine arts, right? The arts of the beautiful, in a sense. The Mozart, as everyone's called, right? Depends upon, because if you say it's beautiful because it pleases us, then you're really not saying that the beautiful is anything in the thing. It's just the effectiveness upon us. But if you say it pleases us because it is beautiful, then beauty is something in the thing. The same way about the good, right? If it's good because I want it, then good is nothing in the thing, right? It's something we say about the thing because I happen to want it, right? But if I want it because it is good, then the good is in things, huh? So the whole ethics depends upon understanding whether that definition of good is by cause or by effect. If you don't understand that, you don't understand anything, right? I tell my students sometimes when we discuss that definition now, you know, start to raise the question, you know, I'm going to tell your parents you don't understand good and bad. And they don't, right? Good. But sometimes when you talk about comedy in kind of a loose sense, you say comedy is a likeness of the what? Laughable, right? Okay. Now, is that a definition by cause or by effect? Comedy is a play that makes you laugh. Yeah. By tragedy, you know, it makes you weep, right? So we tend to define things often by effect first, right? And many times you don't get any further than that, huh? Because, as you saw in our study of the natural road, the effect is usually more known to us than the cause. And that's because the road goes in the senses into reason, huh? And the senses know more effects than causes, huh? So every time we ask the question why, we know the effect, but not the, what, cause. Now, notice this is almost the same distinction as that, but it's stated a little bit differently, right? I could say to bark is a property of the dog, right? And so I define the dog as a four-foot animal that barks and define him not by his species making difference, but by property, right? I could also say that to bark is an effect of the dog, right? He's not a dog because he barks, right? I might recognize him to be a dog because he barks, right? I went to Mass this morning, and somebody comes to church there, and he's there a dog in their car there, right? And she comes to walk by the car. Everybody's kind of laughing about this, you know? Who's dog in the other? I was, you know, who is it? But, you know, it's not a dog because it barks, really, but because it is a dog, it barks, right? So the bark is really an effect of it as being a dog. It's not a cat because it meows. It meows because it's a cat. I said, cats do. But I think it's good to state both of these. It's a very important philosophy to have both of these in mind, right? But sometimes the great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, Socrates and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, sometimes they'll speak, you know, this is being encircling by the definition of the full sense. Sometimes they'll say it's a definition by effect rather than by cause, right? So Thomas talks about the definition of the good. The first definition of the good is what all desire. You can find out this is a definition by effect, right? By cause, no? Okay? So sometimes one distinction is more appropriate to use than the other, right? But they're very similar, these two distinctions. Do you see that? My question, the... So the definition by cause and effect, this is really the third type of definition of a thing? No, no, this is... We have two distinctions here, definitions of things, right? One is into definition in the full sense and encircling, right? Right. And definition in the full sense could just keep the word definition if you wanted to, and then call the only encircling. The other distinction is between definition by cause and by effect. But it's almost the same distinction, right? Because the property, in a way, is an effect of the species making differences. And the species making differences are what make it to be what it is, like the cause, right? But it's stated a little bit differently in the distinction, right? And I think it's good to have both ones in mind, because it's more natural, I think, if you define the good as the good is what all desire to not ask, is that a definition of the full sense or encircling? And it couldn't, some of it is a language, but it's more natural to use the other language here. Okay? The second, would it be in any way broader than the first, or would it be, would they be, like, exactly the same? Well, in explaining the first distinction there, you eventually got down to the names, right? Because the emphasis is upon the speech, the speech is composed of names, and what are the names in the definition, right? And you might have a genus in both cases, but in one case, you completed what the species making difference is. In the other case, you'd have something more like a property or something that follows upon nature, right? More like another kind of name, right? But here, you're not so much emphasizing a name, but a cause and effect. But if you did have a definition by cause, because I can't think of an example, but if you did, that would be a definition in a full sense, though? Yeah, yeah. When I define marriage, for example, right, I define marriage as a stable union of a man and woman by mutual choice with the sake of children. And when you study the causes, you found there are four kinds of causes, and this definition of cause, of marriage, involves four causes. Or the definition of a sacrament, I can not have a child, an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace, right? To give grace is the cause in the sense of in their purpose. Instituted by Christ is the cause in the sense of the mover or maker, right? Sign is more the cause in the sense of form, right? And outward, if you refer to the sensible matter, the matter in the form of a sacrament is the matter. So, there you have a definition by cause. On page four, I think we've touched upon that enough. The reason why the definition by effect very often comes before the definition by cause. And the reason why the encircling always comes before the, what, definition in the full sense, if you need both of them, right? But notice the reasons we gave are not so much identical here, right? Here we said that the effect is more known to us usually than the cause. So we define by cause before effect, right? Here I said we know things in an outward way before immediately. Therefore we tend to encircle them before we bring out fully what the thing is. Or we know things in a confused way before we know them distinctly, right? You'll see the difference there in the way I explain why that is so, right? Why the orders of that sort corresponds to the, it's somewhat different, right? But what stands out in it, right? Here you see definition by cause, definition by effect. Why do we define these things by effect before by cause? What stands out is, well, the effects are more known to us usually than the cause, right? They're more sensible. When you say, why do you encircle a thing rather than get inside and penetrate? Well, you know things in an outward way before you know them in with you, right? Or you know them in an indistinct way, right? Before you really bring out distinctly what they are. Okay? This question, I think we're, in Greek we have this word to define orizo, I guess, right? Yeah. Which has its root in this, about these boundary markers that they've set up around the property, which seems to be closer to that second notion of encircling. Well, I would say it goes back to the broad word itself, definition, right? Okay. All these are definitions in some sense, right? And definition comes from the Latin word finisa, in the sense of limit or boundary, right? Mm-hmm. Now, in Greek, you know, sometimes you'll see the Greek word would be horos, which is exactly like limit. Okay? Right. And sometimes you'll see the word in Aristotle called horismasa, okay? Very close to our word horizon. Oh. Horizon is that line that separates the sky from the earth, right? Okay. And originally these things, you know, are taken even in farming, right? Right. If I put a fence around my property, I define my property, right? And I should, you know, in that fence include only my property, but all my property, right? But none of my neighbor's property, right? Right. You know? And let me speak of the city limits, right? And so on. And then the idea of limits is a very precise thing, right? So if you have the limits of, let's say, Worcester down here, the city limits of Worcester should contain the whole Worcester, right? Right. But none of any of the other towns around there, right? The limits of the state of Massachusetts, right? You know, should take in the whole of Massachusetts, but none of Connecticut or Maine or any other states around there, huh? We haven't sure. And so you could say the definition, the logitional say, is convertible speech. Okay? It's not the whole meaning of definition, but a definition must be, what? Convertible speech. Now, what does that mean, huh? Convertible is a critical word, right? You can buy cards, convertible, right? Okay? But in logic, you speak of two things as being convertible. A and B, for example. If every A is B, and every B is A, then A and B are what? Yeah, that's what it means, right? So, a definition and what it's defining should be, what? Convertible, right? Okay? So, if, say, equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral is, in fact, the definition of square, then both, every square should be a, what? Equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral, and vice versa, every equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral should be a, what? Square, right, huh? Okay? And sometimes you'll see Socrates or somebody will be turning around what someone proposes as a definition, right? And if it's not convertible, then it doesn't fulfill the first condition, you might say, the definition, but it's suggested by the very name itself, right? You know, I ask students in the love and friendship class, what is love? And they say, what's an emotion? Well, I don't think you want to say about that. But maybe there's one love that is an emotion, right? I say, but so is anger, so is fear, right? So, even if every love is an emotion, which is not true, but even if that were true, if every love is an emotion, not every emotion would be, what? Love, yeah. So, we haven't defined it yet, huh? I take usually an example of chair, and I ask a student, what is a chair? And they'll say, well, something to sit on, or a piece of furniture to sit on. I say, well, every chair is something to sit on. Well, is everything to sit upon a chair? You've got a bench, maybe, or a sofa, or you've got a saddle and a horse and so on, right? See? So, you can't turn it around. So, that's not a definition of square, right? And so, even something as familiar as, I mean, a chair. So, even something as familiar as a chair, it's hard to define right off the bat. You start to add differences, right? You say, well, a chair is something to sit on for one person, or one adult, right? Well, is that convertible, see? Because maybe the saddle is for one person to sit on, too, right? And maybe a stool is for one person to sit on. It's not really a chair, right? But then you say, it's something for one person to sit upon that has legs and a back, or something like that, right? And then you might be, I write a convertible speech, right? Okay? So, Nero Stahl talks about defining in the second book of the Posterior Analytics, huh? He talks about how you have to keep on adding differences until the speech is, what? Convertible, right, huh? There we have a little bit of the origin of the word definition there, huh? Now, in page five, we meet a third distinction, but quite different from the first two, right? Okay? It's a different kind of distinction, huh? And it's a distinction based now upon the thing being, what? Defined, huh? Okay? By the first two distinctions for how we define the thing, right? By cause or by effect, right? By difference or by property and so on, right? Now we're talking about things that are so different, and the kind of thing they are, that you can't define them in the same way at all. Okay? Now, the fundamental distinction is the one that we meet in the categories of Aristotle, between substance and accident, huh? Now, let's recall a little bit of that distinction there, why they have to be defined differently, and we'll see that in comparison here with that word definition there. A man, for example, or a dog, these are examples of a substance, right? A thing that exists, right? But not in another, it's a subject, right? But you take the health of the man, let's say, or the health of the dog, and that's not something that exists by itself, is it? So if you have a man and a dog in this room, you could leave the man in here and put the dog in the next room, right? Or leave the dog in here and put the man in the next room, right? But if you have a healthy man in this room, you can't put the man in one room and his health in the next room, right? Because the health exists only in what? The man, right? So health is an example of what they call an accident as opposed to a substance, huh? Okay? And substance comes from those Latin words to stand under. That's what it has that name, right? It stands under the accident. So the accident comes from those Latin words to happen to something, right? That's what happens to something else. So the kind of thing that an accident is is really quite different from a substance, huh? The substance is something in itself, and the accident is really something of another, right? Okay? Maybe that in which it exists, huh? That's what happens to something else, right? That's what happens to something else, right? That's what happens to something else, right? That's what happens to something else, right? That's what happens to something else, right? That's what happens to something else. But the man and the dog is not something in another, right? It's in a subject. So you can define the man and the dog by itself, but you can't really define health by itself because it isn't something by itself. It's something of another. So you have to define health as something of another. So without trying to be very profound, you might define health as something like the good condition, or a good disposition of the body. Sickness would be a bad disposition of the body. So you have to define it as something of another because of the kind of thing it is. It is not a thing in its own right or by itself. It's something of another. It's not something complete. But the man and the dog is something in itself. Now, in a way, the definition of an accident here almost seems to go against the meaning of the word definition. Because the word definition comes from the word limit, right? And as we said, in the limits of my field, or the limits of the city of Worcester, there shouldn't be contained anything besides Worcester or my land, right? But in the definition of an accident, you have to bring in something other. You have to go to the definition. Like here, I bring in the body, which is not health, right? Something else. The body is something the gene is a substance on. So, in the seventh book of wisdom, Aristotle says that either there's no definition of accident, right? Because you bring in something other than what you're defining, right? You seem to go against it either. Or you have a definition in a secondary, what? Sense, right? Okay? So, the distinction between substance and accident is where we first see distinction between something that can be defined by itself and something that has to be defined as something of another. You have to say what it is of another. Sometimes when Thomas talks about wisdom, right? Human wisdom. He'll say it's the highest or the greatest perfection of reason. Now, all reason's knowledge is perfection of reason, right? But wisdom is the highest or the greatest perfection of reason. And that's not yet a complete, you know, understanding what wisdom is. But notice how you're starting to define wisdom as something of, what? Another. Yeah, something of reason, right? Okay? It's a, what? It's perfection of reason, right? Well, so is geometry, right? But wisdom is the highest or the greatest perfection there is of wisdom. Well, maybe you can't really know wisdom without knowing that it's something of reason. And we looked at the premium, right? The wisdom, right? And remember the sixth attribute of the wise man, he orders and directs others, right? Well, if you recall in the premium to the Camachian Ethics, Thomas quotes that from the premium of Aristotle to wisdom. And he gives us a reason for it, right? That wisdom is the highest perfection of reason and it's proper to reason to what? To order things, yeah. If you go back to the definition of reason, which is, the first definition is the one given by Shakespeare, huh? It's the ability for a large discourse looking before and after. Before and after is a definition of order. So if wisdom is the highest perfection of reason, then the wise man most of all will see order, most of all the order to direct, right? So you can't really understand what wisdom is fully, human wisdom anyway, right? Without understanding reason, right? Because wisdom is not something by itself, right? It's something of reason, right? And in general you can say reasoned out knowledge is something of reason. We take up love and love is really something of the heart. Now desire is something of the heart too, right? The heart desires, the heart loves, and so on. But just like wisdom is something of reason, love is something of the heart. So if you want to see what love is, you have to say what it is of the what? Heart, huh? The basic notion is that love is the conformity or agreement of the heart with its object. That's really what it is. And once the heart is conformed to an object, to an agreement with the object, then if you don't have the object, then you have this desire whereby you try to acquire it, right? Or if you acquire it, then you have delight or joy or pleasure, right? So you can't really know what love is unless you know what it is of the heart. Love or liking, you know, is conformity of the heart with its object, right? And desire or wanting is the heart, is the seeking, the heart's seeking of an object, right? And joy or delight or pleasure is the heart resting in that object once its acquire it presents. So this is an extremely important distinction here, huh? Between the definition of a substance, the definition of an accident, but this distinction can be understood more broadly than just substance and accident, right? Okay? And that is the distinction between something that can be defined by itself, right? And something that must be defined as something of another, right? And if we have a chance sometime to study about the human soul, right, huh? The human soul, and that was not an accident, right? But it's actually what they call substantial form. But it's something of another. You can't define the human soul by itself, huh? You have to define it as something of another. And so Aristotle finally, you know, approaches the definition after the dialectic of book one. He starts to approach it in the second book. He gives six divisions, right? And as Thomas explains, three divisions are on the side of the soul itself, and three on the side of that which the soul is something. Just like if I was going to define wisdom, I might say, well, we've got to talk about, you know, what reason is, right? We'll say some things about that. And then, but wisdom is of reason. We have to say some things about that. Okay? So this is an extremely important distinction. But notice, it's a much different distinction than the first two, right? The first two, in a way, correspond to each other, right? And you'll read a distinction by the way you're defining the thing and how perfectly you're defining it, right? Are you defining it by difference or by property? Are you defining it by cause or by effect, right? But here you have things that are so different that they have to, what, have also different meaning of your definition, right? One is defined by itself, and the other is defined as something of another. Because it is something of another, right? And that's a good sign of the fact that you can't separate logic entirely from things like the modern logicians try to do in symbolic or mathematical logic, right? You want to purely form a logic that can do with things. Forgetting that the purpose of logic is to help you know things, right? And I want to know both man and health, right? I want to know, you know, the soul, right? I want to know wisdom as well as reason, right? And so you have to take into account the fact that the kind of definition you have of a substance and an accident cannot be the same kind of definition. One must be what? It must be on something other than what you're defining. It might seem a first contrary definition. Well, it is a contrary definition in the full sense where you have a definition of a substance. Herstavo, you know, I mentioned there when you were talking about the categories, that instead of calling the first category substance in the topics, he calls it what it is. Because that's the fundamental meaning of it. But in some way, health is what it is to the more fundamental you see. Health is how you are. How are you today? Well, I'm kind of sick, very healthy, or whatever it is, right? But in some sense, you can ask the question, what about health, right? But as Herstavo says, healthy seems more real than health, right? Because healthy brings out the fact this is something or another, right? Why health seems like there's kind of like good self, you know? Why is something more real than what? Wisdom. So is wisdom, then, is that like an accident of an accident? Something of an accident? I say, in general, we're saying it's something of another, right, huh? Yeah. So you can't really understand wisdom without understanding something other than wisdom, namely reason. You can't really understand health without understanding something other than health. You can't really understand it. You can't really understand it. Is glass suitable for drinking red wine? And is the mug suitable for drinking red wine? You want a glass that's shaped like this, right? To look like, you know? So you can, you know, put a little bit of wine in there and swish it around and sniff it, right? Okay. So notice there are some differences among liquids, right? Like the wine and the coffee or tea, right? And the water, right? Where he's got to know something about what people are going to eat. Or use these things to drink, okay? Other things, the distinction is kind of irrelevant, right? So maybe hot chocolate and coffee could be drunk out of the same, what? Mug, right? I could clear a mug for my tea because I can see the beautiful color of the tea, right? But that's unnecessary with coffee because you can have a good color, right? But I see the distinction between the teacup or the tea mug or the coffee mug and the glass that doesn't have any handles, right? That's a distinction that's very important, isn't it? So, the difference, say, between the definition of square and the definition of circle, right? The magician has nothing to say about that, right? Just the geometry talks about the definition of circle and the definition of square. It's too much between them, right? Because there aren't really a different kind of definition, are they, right? But, when you define something as something of another, right, and define something else by itself, right? To me, you have a different kind of definition. You can't use the same kind of definition. And that kind of distinction would be relevant to the, what? Yeah, see, okay. You see a comparison I'm making, right? The glass there and the mug are tools for, what? Drinking, right? Definition is a tool for, what? Understanding what a thing is. And some distinctions are relevant, right? Among the things you drink with, right? The mug and the other glass, right? Others are relevant to that, right? Okay. But here's a distinction where you really need a different kind of, what? Definition to define hell and to define man. It's like you need a different kind of receptacle here, right? To drink coffee than to drink water. Do you see that? Okay. So you can't fully separate logic from things, huh? In fact, the distinction between definition by cause and definition by effect. That's something to do with things, right? Cause and effect is a distinction in things, right? And so definition by cause, definition by effect. You have to know what you're doing, right? As I was trying to indicate, I mean, the most basic things, like the definition of good, right? The whole of ethics and the whole of what you say about human life and action. Depends upon understanding what the good and bad are, right? And what kind of definition you have here of the good, right? So those distinctions are very relevant, huh? Logic is going to be useful for knowing things, huh? I don't know, one of the symbolic magicians of the University of Minnesota told one of my friends here in Minnesota that symbolic logic is useless for knowing things. It was a moment of honesty or what? Now we're going to go quite that far, but I mean, you know, some tooth, that is a mark. Okay. Now, in the next section here, page six and seven here, there's not enough of the logician to know what a definition is, and even to know the kinds of definitions, he has to know that. But he also has to know how to find the definition, right? Or how to arrive at a definition. And one thing you have to know when you learn the ways that we arrive at a definition, it's useful to know these ways and you have to follow these ways, but logic is not a substitute for thinking, huh? You still have to think when you use these ways, huh? And it's not automatic in the way that adding or subtracting or multiplying or dividing becomes kind of, what, automatic, right, huh? Okay. I find that myself, even if I'm correcting papers or something like that, you know. I have to think a little bit about whether a student has said something or not, right? When it comes time to figure out the averages, you know, and you've got a bunch of numbers there, well, it's a mechanical thing, right? You can do it automatically, right? But in defining, you have to do a lot of, what, thinking, right? And the definition, as they say, like the definition of motion, the definition of the soul, the definition of eternity, the definition of time, these are a major work of reason, huh? You see? Okay? Now, I like to use a military kind of metaphor here to approach the question of how you investigate a definition. Plato and Aristotle often compared to finding the hunting, right? And you see this in the dialogue with Plato and we're trying to hunt down the things, trying to escape from us, right? And Aristotle speaks of, in post-analytics, he used the word to terue, right? Which comes with a word for a beast, right? You're hunting down the beast, he's trying to escape you. Okay? Well, I use a slightly different metaphor, but hunting and warfare are similar, right? And I say, you've got the enemy castle here. Now, I take the enemy castle here, huh? Right? Okay? Now, there's three ways of attacking that castle, right? Which is guarding what it is, right? You can attack it from the side, right? Balls, right? Or you can dig underneath it and try to undermine it, right? Okay? We'll get about these tunnels of the North Koreans. It's a dug, you know, or something, or two of it. But in the enemy territory, we can turn this on. Or if you've got an airplane, or if you've got a catapult, you can go ahead. Okay? And so you'll see that even in the old castle there, now, they wouldn't try to undermine it, right? Dig holes, right? And the enemy says, just type your own hole, and you're halfway down the passage, and you're that nasty exchange down there. Okay? But then you, you know, shoot the flaming things, and then so on. And you try to knock the walls down, and so on. Now, let's drop the metaphor here, right? Yeah, for much of the terms, right? What do these three correspond to, huh? But notice how when we talk about the more universal and the less universal, right? We tend to, what? Put the more universal above the, what? Less universal, right? Okay? So we'd say that under animal comes man and dog and cat and horse, and under, you know, quadrilateral comes square and outbong and so on, right? Okay? There's a reason why we do that, right, huh? But notice even the definition there of species in general, we said, it's the name of a particular kind of thing, right? Placed under a, what? Genus, right, huh? And notice how we tend to say the more universal above the less universal, right? We're more apt to say man is an animal than an animal is a man. So we can say some animal is an animal. We tend to say the more universal, the less universal. And they call the thing of which something is said, the subject, remember? And then that which is said of it, the predicate, and subject means sub, under, right? Okay? So we tend to put the more universal above the, what, less universal, right? Okay? That's why you speak of porphyry's tree, right? Because you divide the more universal, it spreads out like a tree, huh? One time at a Christmas party there, they gave the magician a porphyry's tree, right? So, you could attack it from above, meaning start off with something more universal than what you could learn to define, right?