Universals? Or... relations?

From Telkoth.net

Today's Philosopy Circle was supposed to be about Universals. The idea behind them - well, there are several ideas - but the gist of it is that you have forms of things - like maybe the color red, or the form of a person - and then things that we observe are merely instatiations of those things; somewhere, in or out of universe, or wherever else, the idea of red exists, and then things we see as red are reflections, at least in part, of that form: red. The other view, of course, is that this idea is ridiculous.

But that's not what we talked about! At least not in length. What we seemed to focus most on was what I'm going to call "Relations." We didn't really pin a name on it in class, but that seems best to me.

So what are Relations then? Things like space and time. But the point of debate was that people were having difficulty imagining relationships outside of space and time. We started with the basic premise that even if two things are exactly the same - let's take a couple spheres, for example - as long as they're in different places, you might still call them different things. Even though all their other properties are the same. Makes sense enough: location is as good a property as any. But this one girl couldn't grasp that if you now removed time and space from the universe, and had just had two spheres with all the same properties, that they could be different spheres. This is a little harder to word than I thought, so let me just put forth this example more clearly:

Suppose you have two spheres, and they have all the same properties - I dunno, color and smell - save that they're in two seperate places. You look at these two spheres and go "Gee, they sure seem exactly the same, but they're in two different places, they're obviously not the same thing."

Now remove all sense of space (and while you're at it, time), and consider these spheres? This one damn girl insisted that they must be the exact same thing... after all, there was nothing left to differentiate the two... the thing is, there is something to differentiate the two - you don't need space and time to form a relationship! They're just convenient relationships - relationships we're used to - but by the very virtue of saying "think of two spheres with exactly the same properties" you've in fact thought of two distinct spheres. They are related to each other as much without space as they are with space, the only difference being that we easily observe, and have named, "space."

So there was that. Really, I don't have any complaints about the girl - it was my first time really thinking about arbitrary relationships like this as well, and it doesn't help that the group is never very well focused.