exhibits a common characteristic is the extent to which it is not properly randomized and is therefore not a good statistical sample.
On the other hand, a statistical sample is a highly contrived type of group. In fact, it isn’t really a group at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. It would make more sense to call it an antigroup. It seems clear that most groups do contain members that share common characteristics and can therefore be said to have essences.
For instance, it always makes sense to talk about manufactured items as having essences. If someone goes to the trouble of inventing, designing and then producing something, it will likely have a use or a purpose. Spoons and forks are used for eating food. Windows let in light, but keep out insects, wind and rain. Shoes protect our feet. A wastepaper basket is used to collect a small amount of trash before it is emptied into a larger trash can.
Now, it is possible to make a spoon or a fork that could not be used to eat food. You could make a spoon out of chocolate, for instance. But then surely someone would say, “A milk chocolate fork isn’t a real fork; it just looks like a fork.” Similarly, you might want to say that windows that let in hardly any light were not real windows, and shoes that didn’t protect your feet were not real shoes, and so on. In other words, manufactured items have essences that make them what they are, and if the characteristics that constitute this essence are missing, then the item in question is not what it pretends to be.
It is important to realize, however, that even here, things are not as straightforward as one would like. Windows in cars are often tinted so dark that very little light gets through them, and the purpose of many shoes is merely to decorate feet, or make them appear attractive. While it is difficult to imagine why anyone would manufacture something that didn’t have a clear use or purpose, and therefore some characteristic that was essential to it, it is often difficult, when you come face to face with the thing in question, to say precisely what that essential characteristic is. Until recently, I would have said that a spoon was meant to lift food, while a fork was meant to stab it, and that you would probably never find a spoon that stabbed. In order to say this with confidence, I did a quick search on the net and immediately found something called a “spork,” which is a spoon with small tines, and which it is therefore appropriate to describe as “a spoon that stabs.”
We also experience plants and animals as belonging to groups and having defining characteristics. It is true that this is sometimes problematic. For instance, we use the word tree to refer to both giant sequoias and tiny bonsai plants. I find it difficult to lump these two under the same Platonic concept, as it were. As well, I suppose that one way of looking at animals is to see whether or not they have hooves. But to divide even-toed from odd-toed hoofed animals, and therefore to divide rhinoceroses from hippopotamuses, but link horses and tapirs, makes taxonomy seem arbitrary and trivial. However, I think most people are happy enough with the way our language divides up the more common animals and plants of our experience. The dog in front of me is a dog, the flower in my hand is a flower, and whether or not I am right to experience these things as members of larger groups is not the issue: what is important is that this is how I experience the world.
Because so much of our experience is of things that belong to intensionally-definable groups, or groups whose members share common characteristics–or, to say the same thing in another way, characteristics that they must have in order to be included in the group–it seems reasonable to ask if all groups are definable in this way. Do all groups–do all groups with the exception of good statistical samples–have essences?
The answer is no. There are many groups whose members do not share common characteristics, apart from the fact that they all belong to the same group. An example is the group of students enrolled at a particular school. Nothing links them except their presence at the school, or their possession of an ID card issued by the school, or their names being entered on a school registration list, which are all restatements or elaborations of the fact that they are enrolled at the same school. Indeed, it would be surprising if there was a common characteristic that actually defined the students in a group like this.
Perhaps one could say that all the students lived in the various neighborhoods serviced by the school. But this doesn’t solve the problem. First, in a given school, there are likely to be students who do not come from the neighborhoods serviced by the school–a small number, perhaps, but even one will refute the idea that the students are defined by their place of residence. And secondly, if I define the school as one that services specific neighborhoods, as is the case with most public elementary schools, for instance, then this “defining characteristic” is erased. It is not a reason to include any student in the school population, but only a reason not to exclude him or her. (This point can be more easily seen if you suppose that there is more than one school that services the same neighborhoods. Say that there is one coeducational school and two single-sex schools, one for boys and one for girls. The fact that one is a girl of the right age, and living in one the right neighborhoods, does not determine which of the two schools she should attend, but only which school she cannot attend, that is, the school for boys.)
Other examples of groups whose members have no common characteristics would be (1) subscribers to a magazine, (2) people travelling on the same bus, (3) the books in a public library, (4) all the people listening to a song on the radio at the same time, and (5) members of any type of sports team. To clarify all of these examples, I will give one more. Do all the animals that live in a forest have characteristics which define them as belonging to that forest? No. The foxes are foxes, and the birds are birds, and as such, they share one or more common characteristics with the other foxes and birds. But the animals in general share no common characteristics. It is true to say that they share a common geography, but to say that their defining characteristic is that they all live in the forest is simply to beg the question.
The same may be said of the other examples listed above. The only thing linking the magazine’s subscribers is the fact that they all subscribe to the magazine. The only thing linking the people on the bus is that they are all on the bus. The books in a public library are simply those that the library has bought. The people listening to the song are simply those whose radios are on, and who are listening to the same station. And the members of any sports team are simply those who have been selected to play for that team. None of these constitute reasons to be included in any of the above groups, but are merely restatements of the fact that they are in fact included. There is nothing that unites them, nothing that puts them under the same roof (except, of course, that they are under that same roof).
And so now, the question is a clear one: are national populations more closely analogous to pencils, penguins and pentagons, all of which are easily defined intensionally and so have clear membership criteria, or are they more like school populations, where the group has no membership criteria, and is therefore defined solely by who, at this moment, belongs to the group? Do national populations have a unity that suggests that all members should possess at least one identical characteristic, or are they instead more like animals in a forest, sharing only geographical limitations?
To answer this, it is necessary only to ask what would cause the citizens of a given country to develop a national characteristic. Clearly, there are only two possibilities: they could be born with it, in which case the characteristic would be inherited, or they could acquire it through experience. However, it can’t be inherited, because if it were, no immigrant could ever acquire the characteristic. Therefore, in any country that allowed immigration, it would therefore never be true of all the citizens of that country that they had their country’s national characteristic.
On the other hand, let’s say the characteristic could be acquired through experience. But if that were true, then every immigrant would be able to acquire it, and that would mean that i
t wasn’t a national characteristic exclusively of the people who originally inhabited that geographical location.
In other words, if you can’t acquire a characteristic through experience, the immigrant shows that it can’t be a national characteristic, and if you can acquire it through experience, the immigrant shows that it wasn’t a national characteristic in the first place. The only conclusion to be drawn is that there is no such thing as a national characteristic. To identify ourselves with a nation, and to think this indicates more than where we were born or what passport we carry, is simply a mistake.
For other works by Laird Stevens, please visit www.lairdstevens.com
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