Properties beating inferential paths through the space of implications

Concepts are elaborated in properties.

With the word elaborated I mean this: a concept such as ‘a chair’ or the notion of ‘abstraction’, begin to give shape to our thinking by adding ‘things’ as soon as something is pointed out and given a name. The precise way someone is introduced to a concept is determines the way they start building the concept and can follow any scenario allowed by linguistic-environmental interaction. At the moment of being given the name perhaps a short description of it is offered or an appropriate movement or sound is played out, probably relevant to the context in which the introduction is made. If the thing introduced is found useful to the person introduced to the concept it will gradually be elaborated, that is dressed in properties that come out in the application of the concept in different situations and events. The concept will also start functioning as a property of other things. So, the chair becomes ‘mine’. ‘Abstraction’ becomes not just a painting or sculpture that looks a certain way but a way of reducing a particular instance of something to its universal idea: ‘This chair’ will have properties it has bracketed in order to arrive at a conception of a generic chair or a family of chairs, such as arm chairs, or stools. Through our interaction with the concept it is enriched and dressed in properties. In a certain context certain of its properties become operative, in other contexts, other properties come to the fore.

What I shall argue here is that properties are best seen as reasons to beat inferential paths through the space of implications. I am not going to bother questioning the reality of a property. I am not sure such a discussion of the reality of the things we conceive of is fruitful in the light of the notion that the universe is one, behaving as one in which it is possible, with our perceptual and cognitive apparatus, to make distinctions.

The possibility of those distinctions does not in anyway do violence to the universe as a single whole. It just means that for the sake of understanding and intentional use we can conceptually cut the whole up into working parts in whatever way we find useful. What the relationship of our conceptualized working parts is to the actual behaviour of the universe is unknowable beyond our ability to conceptualize things (I shall deal with that elsewhere in detail)

As such we have to make do with the question of how useful our way of cutting up the universe into working parts is and how accurate our intentional interactions become on the basis of our use of that tidily ordered and carefully conceived reality.

Properties are conditional on the behaviour of things interacting. And it is useful to model how things interact to make understanding, and through understanding, properly intentional behaviour possible and how to make it work well.

To give an example of the conditional nature of properties: A Friesian cow may be black and white during the day, but in complete darkness it is invisible. If daylight weren’t white but pink the white patches of the cow would be pinkish. All these descriptions are conditional on our perceptual and cognitive system working the way it does in interaction with light under the conditions obtaining here on earth.

All properties answer to conditions that make them obtain. There is not a single property pertaining to any thing that is not altered under the appropriate circumstances and conditions. However some properties, when they are altered, also alter the thing conceived.

All properties may be said to inhere under ‘normal circumstances’ whereby ‘inhering’ stands for little more than that the manifestation of the property is stable under stable or ‘normal’ conditions.

This is true for ‘this chair’ having the property of ‘being my favourite’ (which it will presumably remain until I find another or until such time as I am done with having favourite chairs). When it stops being my favourite, the chair will persist in being a chair, although it might start looking a little neglected and become dusty. This is also true for the property of being a chair in the first place. Being a chair is conditional on us being humans that are acquainted with chairs. A chair is not a chair to an ant or a mollusk. Chairs are things that are peculiarly defined with reference to their purpose for our use of them.

The case of ‘this chair being made of wood‘ is a more challenging one. Surely the woodiness of a chair, that is the material it is made of and perhaps even its shape or —to put that last in another way— the material organization of the chair (its form), inheres in the thing. And there is a good case to be made here. The Friesian cow persists in being a Friesian cow whatever the quality of the light: it is made of the materials that cows are made of which have been organized in a way that make Friesian cows Friesian Cows. There are conditions that would make the chair made of wood not to be made of wood, for example if the chair is used as firewood, but then it would also stop being a chair only to live on as an image in a story about properties.

Its woodiness is also, be it in a trivial way, conditional upon us calling wood ‘wood’. In another language, say Dutch, the chair is not made of wood but of hout. But then we quickly discover that wood is an accurate translation of hout and so we are back to square one.

So how is the property of being made of wood properly conditional? Is it perhaps again in a trivial sense conditional upon us being correct? It may be made of plastic that was made to look like wood.

The Matter-form compound that make things the things we can identify as that thing, is a part of what makes that thing that thing. At that moment we speak of intrinsic properties. Matter-form compounds inhere in the thing. If the property changes the thing changes. But surely this is also true with ‘my favourite chair’. If it is no longer my favourite, its process of wear and tear will change, our attitude to the chair wil change, it will become dusty.

We can usefully say that the matter-form compound is what the universe brings to the thing, while everything else: the use we make of it, the value we impose upon it, the taboos we subject it, or certain uses of it to, the way that matter-form compounds appear to us, is what we bring to the thing (never forgetting that we are part of the universe. So we might picture it in this way: the material-form compound comes from the left and all the rest comes from the right.

What we have vicariously been doing is to make an excursion into the idea of understanding how things work through modelling. What is important with reference to intentional behaviour is not so much whether a property is extrinsic on intrinsic, subjective or objective, except in so far as that makes a difference in our ability to use properties as reasons for doing something. What matters is the understanding that properties come about through interaction under certain conditions. We bring something to that interaction and the world brings something to that interaction. Understanding the responsibilities of each to achieve a specific effect and to be able to judge that effect well is what intentional reasoning is all about.

It is the interaction of things generating properties or to use another word for the same thing effects that allows a property to become a reason to do something, “If I swallow vitamin supplements then I will become healthier.” Here I express an awareness of how the properties of vitamins (the precise workings of which I am ignorant of) will interact with my body to make it healthier, or at least that is the belief I hold on the basis of what I have been told and I hold it on trust. I have not noticed my body become particularly healthier, but nevertheless my trusting belief makes me persist in the hope that eventually there will be a noticeable effect.

Inferential paths follow the implications of the interaction of things with regard to their properties, the effects of those interactions. Those interactions thus become reasons to do things. Happy is the designer who discovers a property, develops an understanding of how it works: what they must do to get the effect they wish, wish for good effects, and finds an application for it that can be judged rigorously and well.

Because properties are effects of interactions, we speak of a pace of implications. The notion of a space of implications removes the image of cause and effect working in simple linear processes. Cause and effect (as I shall be dealing with later) is a very difficult thing. All we can sensibly say is that everything causes everything.

For an inferential path to lead to a truth also requires all sorts of conditions to be carefully placed.

“You told me that if I do A, then B would follow! And now look what I’ve done!” “Yes, but you ought to have done A only after you completed Z, so no wonder!” (people learning how to cook or sail might find that this example resonates with them)

“No you mustn’t do C this way! You need to move you body like so, and then… you see, now it works!”

So for a property to become a reason is to understand all the conditions that make that property have the effect you want it to. (To understand the activity of understanding in greater detail I refer you to the page that deals with understanding things.)

It is not my intention to give you an exhaustive inventory or typology of inferential paths but it might be worth giving an indication of the range available to us. What I am often puzzled by is that people who claim to do artistic things wish to be excluded from explanatory strategies to give insight into their work.

I understand that as artistic research is there to explore the possibilities of the world and much artistic research seeks to escape the known and the familiar. I applaud that and have enjoyed some of its products. Works of art that have gone beyond the accepted and the expected, beyond the norm, have occasionally forced me to rethink my whole way of approaching things. But that does not mean that their work is not scrutable. Of course I understand that making a mysterious seeming work of art scrutable is to remove from it its cloak of mysterious unicity and I do feel the pain, but quite honestly I remain unapologetic. Art is there to explore the world, sure, but so is philosophy and science. And philosophy’s job is to clarify relationships. That is what I do. If you can’t take it, no one is forcing you to read any of this.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.