Here’s how I often come up with philosophical ideas. I hear a theory that’s doing the rounds, I come up with criticisms of it, then I go back and find who actually supported it. Then I can spin the paper as “Contra X’s assertions in Y, …” But really what I care about is the …, and the fact that what I’m arguing against is well known. The downside of this is that sometimes I can spend a lot of time on step 2 before going back and checking whether anyone ever really supported the theory. Here’s an example of that in action.
A lot of people use Geach’s distinction between real change and mere Cambridge change.
That much I can support by the record. Here’s Cian Dorr (on page 52) and Peter Forrest and Chris Mortensen using the expression, and you can find others by doing a few Google searches.
Some people introduce this distinction by examples. For instance, when Socrates died, that was a real change in Socrates, but a mere ‘Cambridge’ change in Xanthippe, for she acquired a new property, being a widow, without really changing.
OK, I’m struggling to find citations for this already, but I’m sure I heard the example somewhere. It’s not the kind of example I would have made up.
Other people claim that the difference between the two types of change is that real change involves change in intrinsic properties.
I say lots of people believe this without, it seems, any support, and Dorr and Forrest and Mortensen also seem to assume it. That’s why I picked their uses above. But not as many people as I thought assume it. Indeed, as far as I can tell from online searching, this isn’t how Geach defines the distinction. So the rest of this note will be an attack on a theory that doesn’t seem to be widely defended. But I think it’s what a lot of people think. So here goes. Even if people don’t believe this, I’ve got a reason for being interested in whether real change lines up with change in intrinsic properties, one that I might get to below.
Let’s see if that claim can hold up. That is, let’s see if we can plausibly identify real change in an object with it changing its intrinsic properties. I’m going to argue there are three cases that suggest intrinsicness is not really central to the real change/mere Cambridge change distinction.
Go back to the Socrates/Xanthippe example. There’s certainly an intuitive difference between Socrates’s change and Xanthippe’s change. It would be fun to have a more modern example. It’s a decent, if imperfect, methodological rule than any philosophical point can be illustrated with an example from Ulysses, so let’s start there.
When Molly starts her affair with Blazes Boylan, Molly becomes an adulterer and Leopold becomes a cuckold. To me, at least, there’s an asymmetry between these changes. It’s a real change in Molly, but a ‘Cambridge’ change in Leopold. It might be an important change in Leopold, but then Xanthippe’s becoming a widow was presumably important from her perspective too.
The important point is that this is not an intrinsic change in Molly. Had Bloom been killed by the anti-semites in Barney Kiernan’s pub before the affair started, well it wouldn’t have been an affair, and Molly wouldn’t have been an adulterer. (Actually I’m not sure on that last bit. I don’t think the text is explicit on whether Boylan is married, which is I suppose relevant to its being an affair or not. And I know I’m messing around with the timeline a little to have Bloom’s fight in Barney Kiernan’s be before the affair starts. It’s not a perfect example.) So we have a real/Cambridge change distinction without it being the case that one of the changed properties is intrinsic and the other is extrinsic.
This is perhaps not the most troubling example. There’s a sense (not an entirely easy to articulate sense, but a sense) in which Molly becomes an adulterer by acquiring new intrinsic properties, but Leopold need not change his intrinsic properties to become a cuckold. Well that’s not quite right either, because if Bloom doesn’t change intrinsic properties at any moment he dies, what with electrical activity in the brain being crucial for life and all. And dead people are not cuckolds, as we noted earlier. But still there’s a sense in which intrinsic properties are doing the work.
The second example is one I’ve used previously. Assume a is the fusion of b and some other stuff. God then instantly replaces b with c, which happens to be an intrinsic duplicate of b. This looks like a real change in a, it’s changed its parts, but it hasn’t changed any intrinsic properties, at least on Lewis’s conception of intrinsic properties.
The final example involves lots of contentious assumptions, but I think they are all at least plausible. (And more importantly, they don’t undermine each other.) The first is that there could be objects for which Newtonian billiard ball mechanics is true. So all collisions are perfectly elastic, and don’t involve deformations. The second is that the at-at theory of motion is true, so the velocity of an object at a time is not an intrinsic property of it at that time. The third is that changing direction is a real change, not just a Cambridge change. The combination of these is that when one of the billiard balls strikes another, and hence changes direction, there’s a real change there without change in intrinsic properties.
What’s the importance of all this? Well, it matters to debates about temporary intrinsics. I’m interested, for various reasons, in theories that deny that there are any temporary intrinsic properties. One of the objections to those theories is that they deny there is any real change. But this objection requires on the identification of real change with change in intrinsic properties. If that identification fails, as these three cases suggest, the objection is no good.