David Malet Armstrong (8 July 1926 – 13 May 2014), often D. M. Armstrong, was an
Australian philosopher. He is well known for his work on
metaphysics and the
philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a
factualist ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities ex ...
, a
functionalist theory of the
mind, an
externalist
Internalism and externalism are two opposite ways of integration of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of de ...
epistemology, and a
necessitarian conception of the
laws of nature.
[
] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
in 2008.
[
]
Keith Campbell said that Armstrong's contributions to metaphysics and epistemology "helped to shape philosophy's agenda and terms of debate", and that Armstrong's work "always concerned to elaborate and defend a philosophy which is ontically economical, synoptic, and compatibly continuous with established results in the natural sciences".
Life and career
After studying at the
University of Sydney, Armstrong undertook a B.Phil. at the
University of Oxford and a Ph.D. at the
University of Melbourne. He taught at
Birkbeck College
, mottoeng = Advice comes over nightTranslation used by Birkbeck.
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £4.3 m (2014)
, budget = £109 ...
in 1954–55, then at the University of Melbourne from 1956 to 1963. In 1964, he became
Challis Professor
The Challis Professorship are professorships at the University of Sydney named in honour of John Henry Challis, an Anglo-Australian merchant, landowner and philanthropist, whose bequests to the University of Sydney allowed for their establishmen ...
of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where he stayed until his retirement in 1991. During his career, he was a visiting lecturer at a number of institutions including
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the worl ...
,
Stanford, the
University of Notre Dame, the
University of Texas at Austin and
Franklin and Marshall College
Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is a private liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It employs 175 full-time faculty members and has a student body of approximately 2,400 full-time students. It was founded upon the merger of Frankli ...
.
[
]
In 1974, when the University of Sydney's Philosophy department split into two departments—the Department for General Philosophy and the Department for Traditional and Modern Philosophy—Armstrong joined the latter along with
David Stove and
Keith Campbell, while the former department pursued more radical politics and taught courses on
Marxism and
feminism. The two departments were reunified in 2000.
Armstrong married Jennifer Mary de Bohun Clark in 1982 and had step children. He previously married Madeleine Annette Haydon in 1950.
[
] He also served in the
Royal Australian Navy, in which his father had been a commodore.
[
]
In 1950, Armstrong formed an Anti-
Conscription
Conscription (also called the draft in the United States) is the state-mandated enlistment of people in a national service, mainly a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and it continues in some countries to the present day un ...
Committee with David Stove and Eric Dowling (R. E. Dowling), all three former students of
John Anderson John Anderson may refer to:
Business
* John Anderson (Scottish businessman) (1747–1820), Scottish merchant and founder of Fermoy, Ireland
* John Byers Anderson (1817–1897), American educator, military officer and railroad executive, mentor of ...
, the Australian philosopher, and all later to be academic philosophers, who then began to support conscription and also believed that anti-conscription opinions ought to be suppressed.
To mark the 50th anniversary in 2014 of Armstrong's appointment to the Challis Chair of Philosophy at Sydney University,
''Quadrant'' magazine published a tribute to him (originally written in 1991) by David Stove and an overview of Armstrong's work by
Andrew Irvine.
Philosophy
Armstrong's philosophy is broadly naturalistic. In ''Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics'', Armstrong states that his philosophical system rests upon "the assumption that all that exists is the space time world, the physical world as we say". He justifies this by saying that the physical world "seems obviously to exist" while other things "seem much more hypothetical". From this fundamental assumption flows a rejection of
abstract objects
In metaphysics, the distinction between abstract and concrete refers to a divide between two types of entities. Many philosophers hold that this difference has fundamental metaphysical significance. Examples of concrete objects include plants, hum ...
including
Platonic forms
The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas is a philosophical theory, fuzzy concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas. According to this theory, ideas in thi ...
.
Armstrong's development as a philosopher was influenced heavily by
John Anderson John Anderson may refer to:
Business
* John Anderson (Scottish businessman) (1747–1820), Scottish merchant and founder of Fermoy, Ireland
* John Byers Anderson (1817–1897), American educator, military officer and railroad executive, mentor of ...
,
David Lewis, and
J. J. C. Smart
John Jamieson Carswell Smart (16 September 1920 – 6 October 2012), was a British-Australian philosopher and was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of sc ...
, as well as by
Ullin Place
Ullin Thomas Place (24 October 1924 – 2 January 2000), usually cited as U. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. After several years at the University of A ...
,
Herbert Feigl
Herbert Feigl (; ; December 14, 1902 – June 1, 1988) was an Austrian- American philosopher and an early member of the Vienna Circle. He coined the term "nomological danglers".
Biography
The son of a trained weaver who became a textile designer, ...
,
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine." He was a representative of the generation of British ord ...
and
G. E. Moore
George Edward Moore (4 November 1873 – 24 October 1958) was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the founders of analytic philosophy. He and Russell led the turn from idea ...
. Armstrong collaborated with C. B. Martin on a collection of critical essays on
John Locke and
George Berkeley.
Armstrong's philosophy, while systematic, does not spend any time on social or ethical matters, and also does not attempt to build a
philosophy of language. He once described his slogan as 'Put semantics last'
and, in ''Universals & Scientific Realism'', he rebuts an argument in favour of Plato's theory of forms that rely on semantics by describing "a long but, I think, on the whole discreditable tradition which tries to settle ontological questions on the basis of semantic considerations".
Metaphysics
Universals
In metaphysics, Armstrong defends the view that universals exist (although Platonic uninstantiated universals do not exist). Those universals match up with the fundamental particles that science tells us about.
[
] Armstrong describes his philosophy as a form of
scientific realism
Scientific realism is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted.
Within philosophy of science, this view is often an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" T ...
.
Armstrong's universals are "sparse": not every predicate will have an accompanying property, but only those which are deemed basic by scientific investigation. The ultimate ontology of universals would only be realised with the completion of physical science.
Mass would thus be a universal (subject to mass not being discarded by future physicists). Armstrong realises that we will need to refer to and use properties that are not considered universals in his sparse ontology—for instance, being able to refer to something ''being a game'' (to use the example from
Wittgenstein's ''
Philosophical Investigations''). Armstrong then suggests that a
supervenience relation exists between these second order properties and the ontologically authentic universals given to us by physics.
Armstrong's theory of universals treats relations as having no particular ontological difficulty, they can be treated in the same way non-relational properties are. How Armstrong's theory of universals deals with relations with varying adicities has been raised as an issue by Fraser MacBride. MacBride argues that there can be relations where the number of terms in the relation varies across instances. Armstrong's response is to affirm a theory he describes as the Principle of Instantial Invariance, wherein the adicity of properties are essential and invariant. According to Armstrong, complex relations which seem to challenge the principle are not ontologically real but are second-order properties that can be reduced to more basic properties that subscribe to the Principle of Instantial Invariance.
Armstrong rejects
nominalist accounts of properties that attempt to align properties simply with classes. Coextension is a problem they face: if properties are simply classes, in a world where all blue things are also wet, and all wet things are also blue, class nominalists are unable to draw a distinction between the property of being blue and being wet. He provides an analogy to the argument in ''
Euthyphro'': to say that electrons are electrons because they are part of the class of electrons puts the cart before the horse. They are part of the class of electrons ''because'' they ''are'' electrons.
In Armstrong's view, nominalisms can also be criticised for producing a blob theory of reality. Objects have structure: they have parts, those parts are made of molecules, which are in turn made up of atoms standing in relation to one another, which are in turn made up of subatomic particles and so on. Blobbiness also threatens Platonic universals: a particular instantiating a universal in a world of Platonic universals becomes a matter of the blob-particular having a relation to a universal ''elsewhere'' (in the Platonic heaven, say), rather than having an internal relation in the way that a chemical element does to a constituent atom.
Armstrong further rejects nominalisms that deny that properties and relations exist in reality because he suggests that these sorts of nominalisms, specifically referring to what he calls class nominalism, and resemblance nominalism, postulate primitives of either class membership or resemblance.
This primitive results in a vicious regress for both kinds of nominalisms, Armstrong suggests, thus motivating his states-of-affairs based system that unites properties by postulating a primitive tie of instantiation based on a fact-ontology, called states of affairs.
In terms of the origin of Armstrong's view of universals, Armstrong says his view of universals is "relatively unexplored territory" but points to
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions ...
's 1970 paper 'On Properties' as a possible forerunner. He also says that "Plato in his later works, Aristotle and the Scholastic Realists were ahead of contemporary philosophy in this matter, although handicapped by the relative backwardness of the science and the scientific methodology of their day".
States of affairs
Central to Armstrong's philosophy is the idea of
states of affairs In philosophy, a state of affairs (german: Sachverhalt), also known as a situation, is a way the actual world must be in order to make some given ''proposition'' about the actual world true; in other words, a state of affairs is a ''truth-maker'', ...
("facts" in Russell's terminology): in ''Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics'', Armstrong claims that states of affairs are "''the'' fundamental structures in reality". A state of affairs roughly put is an instantiation of a particular and a universal: a state of affairs might be that a particular atom exists, instantiating a universal (say, that it is of a particular element, if chemical elements are ultimately accepted as part of Armstrong's universals). The particulars in Armstrong's ontology must have at least one universal—just as he rejects uninstantiated universals, he also rejects "unpropertied particulars".
Armstrong argues that states of affairs are distinct things in ontology because they are more than the sum of their parts. If some particular ''a'' has a non-symmetric relation ''R'' to another particular ''b'', then ''R (a, b)'' differs from ''R (b, a)''. It may be the case that ''R (a, b)'' obtains in the world but ''R (b, a)'' does not. Without states of affairs instantiating the particulars and universals (including relations), we cannot account for the truth of the one case and the falsity of the other.
Laws of nature
Armstrong's theory of universals gives him the basis for an understanding of laws of nature as being relations between universals, a non-
Humean account of laws of nature proposed independently by Armstrong,
Michael Tooley
Michael Tooley (born 1941) is an American philosopher, now emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, best known for his contributions to metaphysics.
Education and career
He has a BA from the University of Toronto and earned his Ph.D. in ...
, and
Fred Dretske
Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske (; December 9, 1932 – July 24, 2013) was an American philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
Biography
Born to Frederick and Hattie Dretske, Dretske first planned to be ...
. This account posits that the relations between universals are truthmakers for the statements about physical laws, and it is realist as it accepts that laws of nature are a feature of the world rather than just a way we talk about the world. Armstrong identifies the laws as holding between universals rather than particulars as an account of laws involving just particulars rather than universals would not adequately explain how laws of nature operate in the case of
counterfactuals
Counterfactual conditionals (also ''subjunctive'' or ''X-marked'') are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactual ...
.
To illustrate the theory,
Stephen Mumford gives the example of ''all ravens are black''. Under the theory of Armstrong, Tooley and Dretske, there is a relation of necessity between the universals ravenhood and blackness, rather than there being a relationship with every single raven. This allows the explanation of laws of nature that have not been instantiated. Mumford cites the frequently-used example of the
moa bird: "It is supposed that every bird of this now-extinct species died at a young age, though not because of anything in its genetic makeup. Rather, it died mainly because of some virus that just happened to sweep through the population. One bird could have escaped the virus only to be eaten by a predator on the day before its fiftieth birthday." Under the theory of Armstrong, Tooley and Dretske, such a coincidence would not be a law of nature.
Dispositions
Armstrong rejects
dispositionalism, the idea that dispositional properties (or powers as they are sometimes referred to) are ontologically significant and have an important role in explaining
laws of nature. Armstrong believes that the challenge that dispositionalism presents for his account of laws of nature is not in the case of ''manifested'' dispositions (say, a glass dropping on the ground and breaking) but ''unmanifested'' dispositions (the fact that counter factually if one were to drop the glass on the ground, it ''would'' break). Armstrong simply states that the disposition is simply in the nature of the instantiated properties of the thing which is supposed to have the disposition.
Truth and truthmakers
Regarding truth, Armstrong holds to what he describes as a "maximalist version" of
truthmaker theory
Truthmaker theory is "the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists". The basic intuition behind truthmaker theory is that truth depends on being. For example, a perceptual experience of a green t ...
: he believes that every truth has a truthmaker, although there doesn't necessarily exist a one-to-one mapping between truth and truthmaker. The possibility of one to many relations between truths and truthmakers is a feature that Armstrong believes allows truthmaker theory to answer some of the criticisms levelled at older correspondence theories of truth (of which he believes truthmaker theory to be an improved version). Negative truths have truthmakers in Armstrong's account: he gives the example of a wall that is painted green. The wall being painted green is a truth for the proposition that it is ''not'' painted white ''and'' the proposition that it is ''not'' painted red and so on.
The difficulty in providing an adequate account of truthmakers for events in the past is one reason Armstrong gives for rejecting
presentism—the view that only the present exists (another reason being the incompatibility of such a view with
special relativity). Presentists, Armstrong argues, must either deny that truthmakers are needed for statements about the past, or account for them "by postulating rather strange truthmakers".
Mind
Armstrong holds to a physicalist, functionalist theory of the mind. He initially was attracted to
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine." He was a representative of the generation of British ord ...
's ''
The Concept of Mind'' and the rejection of Cartesian dualism. Armstrong did not accept behaviourism and instead defended a theory he referred to as the "central-state theory" which identifies mental states with the state of the central nervous system. In ''A Materialist Theory of Mind'', he accepted that mental states such as consciousness exist, but stated that they can be explained as physical phenomena. Armstrong attributes his adoption of the central-state theory to the work of
J. J. C. Smart
John Jamieson Carswell Smart (16 September 1920 – 6 October 2012), was a British-Australian philosopher and was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of sc ...
—specifically the paper 'Sensations and Brain Processes'—and traces the lineage from there to
Ullin Place
Ullin Thomas Place (24 October 1924 – 2 January 2000), usually cited as U. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. After several years at the University of A ...
's 1956 paper 'Is Consciousness a Brain Process?'
Stephen Mumford said that Armstrong's ''A Materialist Theory of Mind'' "represents an authoritative statement of Australian materialism and was, and still is, a seminal piece of philosophy".
Epistemology
Armstrong's view of knowledge is that the conditions of knowledge are satisfied when you have a
justified true belief that you arrived at through a reliable process: that is, the belief was caused by some factor in the external world (hence the label of externalism). Armstrong uses the analogy of a
thermometer: as a thermometer changes to reflect the temperature of the environment it is in, so must one's beliefs if they are reliably formed. The connection between knowledge and the external world, for Armstrong, is a
nomological
In philosophy, nomology refers to a "science of laws" based on the theory that it is possible to elaborate descriptions dedicated not to particular aspects of reality but inspired by a scientific vision of universal validity expressed by scientific ...
relationship (that is, a law of nature relationship). Here, Armstrong's view is broadly similar to that of
Alvin Goldman and
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, . The intuitions that lead to this kind of externalism led
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving epistemic justification), and logic.
From 1963 to 1982, ...
towards an account of knowledge that added the requirement for 'properly-functioning' cognitive systems operating according to a design plan.
Belief
On the question of the relationship between
belief
A belief is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition is true. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take ...
s and
knowledge, Armstrong defends a "weak acceptance" of the belief condition, namely that if a person can be said to know some thing ''p'', he or she believes ''p''. In a paper for the
Aristotelian Society
The Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy, more generally known as the Aristotelian Society, is a philosophical society in London.
History
Aristotelian Society was founded at a meeting on 19 April 1880, at 17 Bloomsbury Squar ...
, Armstrong rejects a series of linguistic arguments for a rejection of the belief condition which argue that one can have knowledge without having belief because a common usage of the word 'belief' is to imply lack of knowledge—Armstrong gives the example of if you asked a man on a railway station whether the train has just left and he said "I believe it has", you would take from this that he does not ''know'' that it has.
[
]
Armstrong also argues that contradictory beliefs show that there ''is'' a connection between beliefs and knowledge. He gives the example of a woman who has learned her husband is dead but cannot bring herself to ''believe'' her husband is dead. She both believes and disbelieves her husband is dead: it just happens that one of her two beliefs is justified, true and satisfies some knowledge conditions.
Armstrong presents a response to
Colin Radford's modified version of the "unconfident examinee" example. A student is asked when Queen Elizabeth I died, and he hesitatingly answers "1603" and exhibits no confidence in his answer. He has forgotten that at some point previously, he studied English history. Radford presents this as an example of knowledge without belief. But Armstrong differs on this: the unconfident examinee has a belief that Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, he knows that she died in 1603, but he does not ''know that he knows''. Armstrong rejects the
KK Principle—that to know some thing ''p'', one must know that one knows ''p''.
Armstrong's rejection of the KK Principle is consistent with his wider externalist project.
[
]
Bibliography
Books
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Selected articles
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Miscellaneous
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See also
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Moderate realism
* "
The Nature of Mind"
References
Further reading
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External links
Guide to the Papers of David Armstrong*
P. Forrest'Armstrong, D.M.' in ''A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand''(archived)
David Armstrong (1926-2014), Sydney philosopher(video)
Armstrong speaks about his teacher John Anderson
{{DEFAULTSORT:Armstrong, David Malet
1926 births
2014 deaths
20th-century Australian philosophers
21st-century Australian philosophers
Analytic philosophers
People from Melbourne
Epistemologists
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Metaphysicians
Philosophers of mind
University of Sydney alumni
University of Sydney faculty