Hylomorphism Overcomes the "Grain Problem"

In the two installments on "Physicalism and Hylomorphism" I explained my own take on hylomorphism that's somewhat unique today (perhaps in a later post I will explain just how it differs from other versions by David Oderberg, Kathrin Koslicki, Kit Fine, Etc). My version specifically identifies the form of an object with the way its material parts are arranged. One example from Aristotle is the syllable 'cat'. The proposition embodied by the word 'cat' is made manifest by the way the letters are arranged. The proposition is dependent on the letters and the syntax of the word for its instantiation in the world, but that is not the same as saying it is identical to its material parts. The form of a chair is revealed through the way the Oak is arranged, it is not identical with the Oak itself.

One advantage to hylomorphism is that it solves what Wilfred Sellars called the "grain problem" in his 1965 paper, "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem". Specifically, Sellars took this as a problem for materialism: how could it be that the world is exhausted by physiological events yet our experience of that world is homogenous. The material world is exhausted by heterogeneous parts and yet our experience is of a smooth, homogenous world. E.g. when we look at water we have, for all intents and purposes, a homogenous experience of one liquid substance (or some may call it a 'lump' like gold). But water is made up of two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen; two heterogenous parts that are not perceived when we experience water.

The hylomorphist has a ready answer to this conundrum. What we perceive when we look at a liquid like water is a bunch of heterogenous parts organised in such a way that they compose one thing. The parts, in a sense, become one. Just as the word 'cat' is one proposition made up of three parts organised in the appropriate way so too with any substance made up of form and matter. The form is what gives any bunch of heterogeneous parts its unity. Just as when we listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony we don't describe a C- here or a D note there we talk about the melody as a whole and any reference we might make to single notes is only to complement how they fit into the rest of the melody. Each heterogeneous part then, is only important in the context in which it finds itself relative to the whole.

So if the world is built on the Aristotelian model then we wouldn't expect a completely grainy world but one that is largely homogeneous.