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Monday::Dec 04, 2023

Proper Parts

T

he idea of blogging has been drifting back up in my life, and I’m going to try taking another shot at keeping to it regularly.

I was recently exposed to the “Tibbles the Cat paradox”, which has to do with how we conceptualize parts and wholes. The question, which receives a far fuller treatment here at the Siris Blog, has to do with a Cat on a Mat, named Tibbles. The question goes — let us consider Tibbles without his tail, an entity we could call Tibbs. Is Tibbs a cat?

Brandon at Siris breaks down various positions that one could have, but I find myself wondering about a specific aspect of the setup of this problem, which has to do with the first question itself (before discussions of removals of single hairs and whatnot). Namely—what does it mean to consider Tibbles without his tail?

In the discussion, Brandon seems to take for granted that “considering Tibbles without his tail” and “considering Tibbles with his tail cut off” are equivalent, but this is by no means obvious to me. I actually find it quite difficult to comprehend what it means to think about “just that part of Tibbles that does not include his tail” if his tail is in fact attached to him! What does it mean to ignore the muscular and neurological connections to that tail when contemplating “Tibbs”? A cat with its tail cut off is very different from a cat with some kind of metaphysical cloth draped over its tail, protecting it from consideration.

The point gets more interesting I realize that I am quite able to consider Tibbles’s tail as an “object” divorced from its whole. If you say “let’s talk about the part of a cat that is its tail”, I have no problem dropping into this mindset. But if you say “let’s consider the part of a cat that is everything but its tail”, I immediately pause. The proposed topic does not feel like a natural part, or a natural object of contemplation. Rather, it feels contrived; I can imagine no circumstance in which such a conversation would come up, outside of arcane philosophical discussion, and this points feels salient to the question of identity.

You cannot just take any two “regions” of an object and pretend that they are a “part” in the ordinary sense of the word — language about this will quickly break down. We can discuss the chassis of a car, or its brake line, or suspension system. All of these are clearly parts of the car, and parts in very different senses, but we can easily consider them as objects of the mind. But if you were to say “consider the part of this car that is everything except the right front wheel”, one begins to sense a punchline coming on. This random line-drawing seems to have nothing to do with parts and wholes.

Therefore, when asked whether Tibbles-considered-except-for-one-hair is a cat, I respond that Tibbles-considered-except-for-one-hair is not even a proper object of thought, much less a cat! If you remove a hair from Tibbles, of course he is still a cat, and in fact the same cat as he was before (just undergoing a change of potentialities). But it’s nonsense to say “Let’s think about this cat in front of us exactly as he is, but not all of him”. Either the hair is there, or it is not; and if it is there, it merits consideration as a part of Tibbles. If you want to not consider the hair, you will just have to remove it; pretending gets you nowhere.