'What is (a) process?'

Prof Johanna Seibt (University of Aarhus)

Abstract: The question has rarely been asked in the history of metaphysics and the aim of the lecture will be both to explain the reasons for this omission and to approach an answer by sketching basic elements of General Process Theory (GPT), the first systematic analytical process ontology after Whitehead.  GPT is an approach in analytical ontology, but connections can be drawn to process thought in contemporary continental process thought, especially at the level of metaphilosophical criticism. GPT is the product of what I call inductive category construction—it is based on the insight that contemporary analytical ontology still is strongly influenced by “the myth of substance,” a theoretical paradigm that frames ontology as the inquiry into thing-like, concrete, particular, fully determinate, countable units.  Leaving traditional linkages between category features behind, GPT is a monocategoreal ontology based on concrete, indeterminate, non-particular, dynamic individuals called ‘general processes’ or ‘dynamics.’  I briefly explain why this type of category holds out the prospect of overcoming the Eurocentrism of the ontological tradition (including Whitehead’s philosophy of organism)—in order to define entities (truthmakers) in terms of which speakers of all of the world’s languages can justify their inferential commitments, particularism must be left behind.  I set out some core elements of the GPT framework, which uses five parameters for the classification of processes and is partly formalized using “Leveled Mereology,” i.e., a mereology with a non-transitive part-relation. Some of the mereological distinctions that are used to classify types of dynamics characterize how an entity exists in space and time, but in a more differentiated way than the usual binary option of either having temporal parts or else not having them. I address the question of what is ‘dynamic’ or ‘occurrent’ about the postulated general processes or dynamics, if these are also, as I suggest, (parts of) the truth-makers for sentences about things.  As argued in Seibt 1997 and 2008, the two terminological contrasts standardly used in current ontology, the contrasts between perduring and enduring entities, and between occurrents and continuants, respectively, cannot fully capture the way in which common sense reasoning conceives of existence in time. In order to reconstruct our reasoning about persistence and change, we need to distinguish between two forms of dynamicity, developmental dynamicity and continuous dynamicity.  Taken up a recent exchange between Rowland Stout and Helen Steward on this issue, I briefly sketch how the distinction between developmental and continuous dynamicity can be accounted for in GPT.  In conclusion I consider to what extent the lead question has been answered.

Comments: Ella Whiteley (Cambridge)