Topics Existence

Question Do ideas exist independently, out there in the ether, waiting to be discovered. For instance did the idea of the motor car exist say 1000 years ago before any human ever thought of it? Steve B.

Accepted:
January 25, 2006

Comments

Discovered things seem to exist independently of their discovery (think of uninhabited islands and rare species), while invented things come into existence in the very process of their invention (think of the first light bulb). But even if the first light bulb came into existence when Edison invented it, what about the idea of the light bulb? Did he invent this at the same time, or was it, as you suggest, hanging around for eons just waiting for Edison or some other genius to stumble upon it?

It's a great question--and connected at root to venerable metaphysical questions to which, in my view, we still lack satisfactory answers. The issue isn't so much about how we use the concepts of invention and discovery (though this is interesting), but rather about the unsettled status of the "ideas" that we discover/invent.

On the one hand, we certainly seem to talk of ideas as things that transcend particular, spatio-temporally located acts of thinking in which they might figure. We might say: George and Laura came up with the idea that Sam should be nominated independently of one another. And in saying this we seem to hold that one and the same idea--that Sam should be nominated--existed and was at work both when George entertained it and at the different time and place that Laura did. And we further pull ideas apart from particular mental events when we say: the idea that resources should be distributed equally has gripped many thinkers through the ages. Or better: the idea that things fall apart is depressing. Or better still: the most fruitful ideas are surely yet to be considered. If we take all this "idea-talk" seriously and straightforwardly then we seem committed to ideas as entities that exist independently of particular acts in which we thinking of them, and even of collections of such acts.

But then where and when do these ideas exist: Always and everywhere? Outside of space and time altogether? In some mysterious ether (as you suggest)? No answer seems palatable, but without one we can't hope to understand how ideas can come to "figure in" our thought and talk about them.

This dilemma about the status of ideas also applies to numbers: we seem to talk and think about numbers as entities that are distinct from our symbols for them, as well as from our thoughts and claims about them; but then where, when and how do numbers exist? And how do we interact with them? And the dilemma also connects to the ancient problem of universals: we seem to talk and think as if there are properties, such as redness, that exist independently of the various particular things, such as my car, that are red; but then where, when and how do such universal entities exist? And how do particular red things partake of redness?

Resolving this type of dilemma inevitably involves trade-offs. Perhaps the way we talk about ideas shouldn't be taken straightforwardly and seriously. No one thinks our talk about "the average American couple" is really talk about some peculiarly normal couple that exists somewhere (in Kansas?); it is rather a shorthand way of expressing statistical facts about the American population. So too the ways in which we seem to talk about ideas that transcend acts of thinking might, in the end, be construed as a shorthand way of talking about certain groupings of actual and merely possibly acts of thinking. But how exactly should our idea-talk be recast? For every ingenious proposal there is, in my view, a subtle obstacle.

We might argue instead that we can stick in a principled way with some odd-seeming answer to the uncomfortable questions--"Yes, ideas do exist outside of space and time, and we grasp them via a special faculty of intuion"--or better, that such questions needn't, on reflection, be answered at all. But this too is hard to carry off convincingly--as, in my view, are various attempts to rise above the fray entirely by showing the questions here to be vague or meaningless in someway.

But now I'm getting long on hunches and short on details. Suffice it to say that, in my view at least, your very good question is still unsettled and unsettling.

Question Do ideas exist independently, out there in the ether, waiting to be discovered. For instance did the idea of the motor car exist say 1000 years ago before any human ever thought of it? Steve B. Accepted:January 25, 2006

Question Do ideas exist independently, out there in the ether, waiting to be discovered. For instance did the idea of the motor car exist say 1000 years ago before any human ever thought of it? Steve B.

Accepted:
January 25, 2006