Attribute and Act

ATTRIBUTE AND ACT WE SHALL PROPOSE AN ONTOLOGY based on wo primitive notions expressed in two primitive loutions : "A is an (actuated) attribute," and "A is identical with (some) B," together with the customary logical operations of negation, conjunction, disjunction, implication, and quantification. We shall also make use of the primitive logical concept of necessity as an alethic propositional modality and construct an ontological cognate by means of it. It is our opinion that with these primitives we can deal with certain other entities such as events, states of affairs, propositions, and intentional objects-many of which are primitive to other ontologies-by means of attribution, actuation, and identity. Let us begin with the concept of an attribute. By an attribute we shall understand whatever can be said of anything as a property of that thing. Thus the properties of being green, of being actually existing, of being such that George III was a Hanoverian, and of being such that two and two are not five, are all attributes in our inclusive sense. Some attributes appear to be primitive and irreduciblesuch as the attribute of being one or singular-while others would appear to be composites of attributes themselves more simple-such as the attribute of being either red or blue or the attribute of being if a violinist then a musician. Whether there exist perfectly atomic attributes and whether attributes may form a calculus subject to combination and reduction to attributive simples are questions beyond the scope of the present essay. The crucial essential characteristic of an attribute is its capacity for being predicated of, asserted in connexion with, ascribed positively or negatively to some entity. ATTRIBUTE AND ACT The crucial existential characteristic of an attribute is its actuation. By actuation we understand the making real or actual of an attribute. We might describe actuation as analogous to instantiation or exemplification. The preference for a special term is at length arbitrary but it does express something of importance. Exemplification, instantiation, and inherence all characterize an attribute in relation to another-some subject of attribution. While it is undoubtedly the case that most actuations are exemplifications-perhaps only a philosopher could think of one which is not-it is better, for our purposes, to deal with the realization of attributes as such. Thus many attributes will always be actuated, many will be actuated variably, and many will never be and can never be actuated at all. Accordingly, actuation is distinct from existence or self-identity insofar as there may be existent but unactua.ted attributes. We shall hold, in fact, that all attributes exist simply by virtue of their being attributes-even those which are neither actuated nor actuable. It should therefore be clear that we embrace an extreme form of Platonic Realism. Whitehead, for example, said much the same of propositions-whether true or false they exist etemally.1 Husserl has said of states of affairs (Sachverhalten .) that, whether possible or not, they all maintain ideal unities.2 Even St. Thomas Aquinas, for all his Aristotelianism, seems to allow a kind of qualified existence to unexempli:f:ied ideas and unrealized forms as types in God's speculative knowledge .3 1 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan: 1937)' pp. 227-8. 2 E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 284-5. Also Cartesian Meditations (Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), Meditation II, pp. 50-53. a St. Thomas Aquinas. Truth (translated from the Leonine edition of Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, by J. McGlynn, S.J. Chicago: Regnery, 953), Q. III, I. Compare the more concise account in Summa Theologiae I, 15, 3 (Rome: Marietti, 1950). This is not to suggest that St. Thomas would accept the in se or per se existence of such eternal objects as attributes. But it is noteworthy that the Platonic tradition is not so foreign to this great Ari§totelian as some wight urge. NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P. We shall say, further, that an entity has an attribute or is qualified by an attribute only in terms of a coincidence of that entity's identity and the actuation of the attribute. These ways of speaking...