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Titolo: Tigger Nominalism

TIGGER NOMINALISM 
A review of Marion Taniqua's Tigger Nominalism: An Historical Approach
to Animal Metaphysics (forthcoming OUP 1998)
(Review reproduced here from the British Journal of Animal
Metaphysics, vol. 23(4), 1997, pp. 36-39.)
 
1.Introduction 
2.The History 
3.The Substantive Philosophy 
3.1.The Tigger Question Again 
3.2.What is Tigger Nominalism? 
3.3.Some Evidence: The Argument from Pooh 
3.4.The Power of Tigger Nominalism 
4.Conclusion 
References  
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1. Introduction
In 1926 A.A. Milne asked the following question: "When Tigger, having
left Eeyore's Gloomy Place and rounded the west side of the 100-Akre
Wood and bounced by Piglet's house and past the Heffalump trap and
below the Six Pine Trees, comes across Rabbit and his many relations,
what does Tigger see?" Notoriously, Milne himself never answered this
question. Its intricacies have vexed philosophers ever since. (For
those who are unfamiliar with this area there is a map available to
help trace Tigger's route.)
In her important new book, Tigger Nominalism, Marion Taniqua
identifies Milne's so-called Tigger Question as the beginning of a
major new discipline in philosophy, what we now call Animal
Metaphysics. (It is sometimes referred to as Australian or Antipodean
Animalia, after the countries from which many of its leading thinkers
have come.) Taniqua claims that contemporary feline metaphysics, in
particular, was anticipated in interesting ways by Milne's (admittedly
implicit) Tigger metaphysics.
2. The History
In the first part of her book Taniqua traces the genesis of animal
metaphysics. The thesis that results is provocative. According to
Taniqua there have been two main stages in the development of animal
metaphysics: Angst Animal Metaphysics and Analytical Animal
Metaphysics. After bright beginnings with A.A. Milne, animal
metaphysics passed through a period of "continental adolescence" (the
Angst period), during which it stagnated under terminological
obscurity and the destructive blurring of boundaries between animal
metaphysics and literature. Characteristic of this period are the
well-known comments by Martin Heidegger in his 1929/1930 lecture
course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. (These remarks were
apparently intended as an outline for some sort of anti-naturalist
conception of the status of animal metaphysics. But nobody knows for
sure what they mean.)
The adolescent features of the Angst period are largely responsible
for its almost total neglect in studies of the history of animal
metaphysics. We modern (analytic) animalians find it very difficult to
acknowledge that what was going on in those early, angsty times was
really a species of animal metaphysics. We prefer to see it as
something entirely different: perhaps poetry, perhaps comedy, but
certainly not animal metaphysics.
On the other hand, the work being done in the current period (the
Analytic period) reflects the growing maturity of the discipline as it
emerges from its continental adolescence. A key feature of Analytic
Animal Metaphysics is its renewed commitment to that early, Milnean
clarity. In Ch. 4 Taniqua gives an historical account of the reasons
behind the unique Australian contribution to Analytic Animal
Metaphysics. Why have Australians made so much of the going? The fact
that Tigger is taken in and looked after by Kanga and Roo (Milne 1928:
34) plays a big part in Taniqua's story.
This is a major re-thinking of the history of animal metaphysics and,
like all good history, it moves beyond mere antiquarianism. It
promises to have a significant impact on the ways in which future
animalians will approach the substantive philosophical issues of the
discipline.
3. The Substantive Philosophy
3.1. The Tigger Question Again
In the second part of the book, Taniqua steps forward from
arena-setting into the nitty-gritty. Her aim is to give us an
illustration of the possibilities opened up by the history she has
just told. The way she does this is to return to the beginning, to
A.A. Milne, to offer a fresh interpretation of the deep structure of
that famous Tigger Question. Recall the question:
"When Tigger, having left Eeyore's Gloomy Place and rounded the west
side of the 100-Akre Wood and bounced by Piglet's house and past the
Heffalump trap and below the Six Pine Trees, comes across Rabbit and
his many relations, what does Tigger see?"
According to Taniqua, the real question being asked is this: 
"What, for Tiggers, distinguishes the classes of tokens that mark off
a rabbit-type from those classes that do not?"
3.2. What is Tigger Nominalism?
Having identified this starting point, Taniqua then goes on to defend
an answer to the Tigger Question according to which Tiggers are
moderate nominalists (nominalism is the only thing that Tiggers like
in moderation). Tiggers, when bouncing below the Six Pine Trees, see
rabbits with properties and relations; Milne's question refers, after
all, to "Rabbit and his many relations". But they see those properties
and relations as particulars rather than as universals. They are
tropes. Furthermore, it is of the essence of being a Tigger to believe
that a rabbit-type is marked off by resemblance classes of the
relevant tropes. This is a bold new claim. Contrary to the prevailing
view that it is dogs who are the paradigm nominalists, it turns out
that an important form of nominalism has the committed support of
Tiggers, a type (so to speak) of cat.
3.3. Some Evidence: The Argument from Pooh
In developing these claims, Taniqua relies heavily on a much neglected
passage in Milne's "In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets into a Tight
Place" (Milne 1926: Ch. 2) in which Winnie-the-Pooh, after coming
across a large hole in a sandy bank, utters the following remarkable
words:
"Aha! ... If I know anything about anything, that hole means Rabbit
... and Rabbit means Company ... and Company means Food and
Listening-to-Me-Humming and such like. "
Counter-intuitively, but for reasons that she outlines in painstaking
detail, Taniqua takes "Rabbit" here to designate a type rather than
token. Further, she takes "Company" to be the colloquial word used by
Pooh (a bear, Taniqua reminds us, of Very Little Brain) to designate
the resemblance relation that rabbit-tokens have to each other, namely
Rabbit-Resemblance (RR). So although Pooh might not himself fully
grasp the meaning of his own words, his claim that "Rabbit means
Company" means: "For a token to belong to the type Rabbit is for RR to
hold between the tropes of that token and each of the tropes of the
exemplars (or paradigm tokens) of the class of rabbits".
As for how all this bears on the Tigger Question -- on what Tiggers
see -- it is well known, Taniqua points out, that Tiggers and Poohs
share very similar ontological commitments, even if they don't share a
taste in honey.
(An attentive reader may have noted by this point that Pooh's further
claim that "Company means Food" could be taken as a hint that, at
least for bears of Very Little Brain, resemblances are not the end of
the explanatory story. Perhaps there is something more basic? Taniqua
explores this issue briefly, but in the end falls back on her initial
conclusion: with the exception of the issue of internal relations,
which I discuss further below, resemblances are the end of the story.
Or at least, they are so if one sticks to the standard Pooh Heuristic
of opting for simplicity -- that is, for primitives -- as early and as
often as possible.)
3.4. The Power of Tigger Nominalism
Taniqua demonstrates the explanatory power of this brand of nominalism
by showing how it can be used to avoid some of the classic
difficulties that have plagued resemblance analyses of type-token
relationships.
In Ch. 8, for instance, she takes up another familiar Tigger
difficulty, the Tigger Language Problem. Why do Pooh and friends
always talk in terms of what Tiggers (the type) like, rather than in
terms of what Tigger (the particular) likes? Why does Tigger say:
"Climbing trees is what they [Tiggers] do best" (Milne 1928: 60),
rather than "Climbing trees is what I do best?" (that this latter
statement turns out to be false -- Tiggers only being able to climb
upwards not downwards because their tails get in the way -- is
irrelevant for present purposes.)
The resemblance nominalist appears to have an obvious reply. Pooh & Co
speak this way because to be Tigger is to be a Tigger; and that means
being a member of the natural class of Tiggers, where the existence of
such a class is to be explained by reference to the fact of
resemblances that hold between the members of the class. These
resemblances are primitives.
This reply, however, immediately runs up against a major problem:
there is only one Tigger token. (Taniqua speculates that this point
may be related to the haecceities claims currently being made about
cats.) But resemblance is supposed to be a primitive dyadic relation.
And dyadic relations require two terms. So if resemblance determines
type, and there is nothing for Tigger (the particular) to resemble,
how can being Tigger (the particular) be analysed as being a token of
the Tigger type? The Tigger Language Problem seems to be a serious
threat to resemblance nominalism.
Nevertheless the Tigger nominalist, as Taniqua sees it, has a good
answer available. For Tiggers and Poohs, resemblance is an internal
relation. They understand this in the following sense. The relation RR
in which two rabbit tropes stand to each other is an internal relation
if and only if in every possible world in which those two rabbit
tropes exist with their natures unchanged, the two tropes stand in
relation RR to each other. One way of understanding this is to say
that resemblance relations between rabbit tropes necessarily flow from
the existence of tropes of the appropriate sort. If the tropes exist
then, necessarily, so does the resemblance.
Tiggers and Poohs take this point a step further. In their view it
means that resemblances between rabbit tropes are an "ontological free
lunch" (to use the phrase that Taniqua borrows from another
illustrious Antipodean). In other words, if you are prepared to buy
rabbit tropes in hard ontological currency, then you get the
resemblances free of ontological charge. Tiggers and Poohs can use the
resemblances without paying for them, and without treating them with
too much ontological seriousness. This fits well with the general
Tigger propensity not to take anything too seriously (rabbit-tropes
excepted, naturally). So, to be a Tigger nominalist is to hold that
type-membership is determined by resemblance classes of tropes, but
that resemblance is founded upon the particular tropes themselves. It
is the latter that are the ultimate ground for attributing type. The
Tigger Nominalist's spade turns on tropes, not on the resemblances
between them.
But then the fact that there is only one Tigger-token poses no danger
to our strategy. To say that Tigger is a Tigger is just to say that if
there was another particular, Trigger, with the appropriate sorts of
tropes, then Tigger would, by virtue of Tigger's tropes (things which
he currently possesses), stand in the appropriate resemblance relation
to Trigger. (This shows, I think, just how interesting Tiggers really
are. They seem to be shy with universals, and yet playing with
possibilia is what they do best.) So long as Tigger has the tropes
that he has, then, his loneliness does not mean that we, qua Tigger
nominalists, are barred either from recognising the Tigger-type, or
from saying that the Tigger-type is determined through (potential or
actual) resemblance relations. Tigger nominalism solves the Tigger
Language Problem.
(Actually, things are a little more complicated than that. Recall the
following line which occurs three times in the Tigger Song: "The most
wonderful thing about Tiggers is I'm the only one". This raises the
possibility that a lack of other Tiggers is an essential feature of
the Tigger type, that Triggers are impossibilities. Some animal
metaphysicians think that this would defeat any resemblance-based
nominalism, including Tigger nominalism. For we could no longer appeal
to the "if-then" strategy used above; there would be no "ifs" about
it. Now, in response to this, a Tigger nominalist might well want to
query whether, in such a situation, we would be dealing with a type at
all. But Taniqua is shiftier than that. She manages to avoid the issue
altogether by taking Tigger's loneliness to be merely a contingent
fact. Readers will have their own views on whether that is a plausible
interpretation of the Tigger Song.)
4. Conclusion
As always, there is room for disagreement with the some of Taniqua's
conclusions. Her interpretation of the Tigger Song is a case in point.
In the end, however, this book will probably be set apart more by the
ambition and depth of its historical sweep than by its substantive
metaphysics. That is not to say that the Tigger Nominalism outlined in
Part II of the book is not a step forward in the debate. It
undoubtedly is. It's just to say that Part I of the book, with its
bold re-reading of the history of animal metaphysics, has prepared the
ground for even greater steps forward. That alone should be enough to
ensure that Tigger Nominalism becomes a classic in the field.
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References
Armstrong, David. 1989. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction.
Boulder: Westview Press.
Fitzgerald, H. On Tika, Dogs and Cats. 
Heidegger, Martin. 1983. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik.
Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit (Winter Semester Lectures, 1929-1930),
Gesamtausgabe Vol. 29/30, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.
Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Legg, C. With Thanks to Duns Scotus. 
Milne, A.A. 1926. Winnie-the-Pooh, with illustrations by E.H. Shepard.
London: Methuen & Co Ltd.
Milne, A.A. 1928. The House at Pooh Corner, with illustrations by E.H.
Shepard. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.
Parsons, J. Cockatoo Utilitarianism.

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