Donald Cary Williams (28 May 1899 – 16 January 1983), usually cited as D. C. Williams, was an American philosopher and a professor at both the University of California Los Angeles (from 1930 to 1938) and at Harvard University (from 1939 to 1967).
Life Williams was born in Crows Landing, California in 1899. As a teenager he was greatly interested in classics, English literature, poetry, and science fiction. He was a lifelong fan of the works of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and H. G. Wells. He studied English at Occidental College, California, and then English and Philosophy at Harvard University where he received an AM in Philosophy in 1925. He continued to study Philosophy and Psychology at UC-Berkeley. One of his teachers there was Jacob Loewenberg, and one of his peers was Arthur E. Murphy. In 1927 he returned to Harvard and obtained his PhD under the supervision of Ralph Barton Perry. He submitted his thesis – titled A Metaphysical Interpretation of Behaviorism – on 1 April 1928. In that same year he married Katherine Pressly Adams, who he knew from his time at UC-Berkeley. They had two sons: Donald Jr. and David. Williams was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and studied philosophy in France and Germany, 1928–29.
Upon his return to the United States he was an instructor at Harvard in 1929 and then an instructor at UCLA in 1930. He stayed for several years at UCLA, becoming Assistant Professor and associate professor. In 1938 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for the project Studies in Empirical Realism. This was the culmination of a research programme he had embarked on as part of the flourishing of realism started by Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Samuel Alexander, the New Realists, and Critical Realists. In 1939 he was a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard; then Associate Professor and eventually Professor. He spent the rest of his career at Harvard, arguing for realism, constructing a trope ontology, and advocating a four-dimensionalist theory of time, among many other things such as defending the legitimacy of inductive inference. As a teacher he lectured for several decades mostly on metaphysics and the history of philosophy, influencing many students who went on to have successful careers and make an impact on analytic philosophy such as Roderick Chisholm, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and David Lewis. He retired from Harvard in 1967 to Fallbrook, California where he continued to write philosophy, maintain his correspondence, read papers at universities in California and elsewhere, and host philosophical friends. He died in 1983.
Work Williams wrote on a wide range of philosophical topics, namely, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of science, probability theory, induction, philosophy of history, ethics, and history of philosophy. In what follows, only his more significant and influential contributions are surveyed.
Empiricism and realism Williams thinks the goal of empiricism is to describe and explain the 'foreground of experience' and to 'intelligibly and credibly construct our account of the rest of the world'. The traditional understanding of empiricism, going back to John Locke, accepts the foreground of experience as the ground from which we construct our concepts and confirm certain conclusions that inform us of the rest of the world, especially other parts that are not experienced.
According to Williams, empiricism says that a posteriori knowledge is known inductively. He further thought that induction is not restricted to experience and its content or restricted to science. Induction has 'ontological reach' to things in themselves.Williams, Donald C. 'William James and the Facts of Knowledge' In In Commemoration of William James 1842-1942, Columbia University Press, 1942, p. 99 This means that empiricism and realism are compatible. He thus endorsed ‘empirical realism’. He describes empirical realism as follows: Our "empirical realism" is realistic in the most venerable sense, that it affirms there is valid knowledge of the nature and existence of a world distinct from our perceptions and independent of them, and a fortiori distinct from and independent of our thought and speech about it, and yet empiricistic in the classical sense that it affirms that all knowledge, including this, consists of conceptual constructions collected from and confirmed by sensory experience.
Induction and probability He also published a book on the problem of induction, The Ground of Induction (1947), which argued that the reliability of statistical sampling solves Hume's skepticism about induction. He argued that inference from the past to the future, or more generally from the observed to the unobserved, should be seen in terms of inferring from sample to population; for example, inferring that because 48% of a sample of voters vote Democrat, probably about 48% of all voters vote Democrat. This inference is (probabilistically) justified, Williams said, by the necessary mathematical truth that the vast majority of large samples of a population approximately match the population in composition. Thus (unless there is definite evidence to the contrary) the population probably approximately matches the sample in proportion.
Metaphysics: ontology For Williams, ontology is the study of the categories of being. The subject matter of ontology is traditionally examined using an analytic mode of inquiry. An analysis of some X is in terms of X's parts, whatever X might be. Analysis gets us the nature of X. Analysis in this sense is the classic decompositional sense, giving explanatory priority to parts over wholes. Analytic ontology is one branch of metaphysics.Williams, Donald C. 'The Elements of Being' In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, Charles C. Thomas, 1966, p. 74
A main issue in analytic ontology is the distinction between object and property. An object can have many properties. A property can be had by many objects. This chair has the property of being red, being made of wood, being hard, etc. This chair and every other chair in this room (say) all have the one property: being red. The first case has to do with predication. The second has to do with resemblance, and in particular, with resemblance among ordinary objects in intrinsic respects.
In 'The Elements of Being', Williams points out that the fact that two red chairs resemble each other with respect to colour is explained in terms of the fact that each chair has a certain kind of part or aspect that exactly resembles each other. The 'red-part' of this chair and the 'red-part' of that chair exactly resemble each other and this grounds the fact that each chair resembles the other with respect to colour. These 'parts' are 'fine', 'thin', or abstract in a certain sense, the sense that is associated with the idea that an abstract entity is a certain kind of part of a whole.Williams, Donald C. 'The Elements of Being' In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, Charles C. Thomas, 1966, p. 85 These parts are also particulars. And they are particular as each chair. Hence they are abstract particulars, which Williams dubbed 'tropes'.Williams, Donald C. 'The Elements of Being' In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, Charles C. Thomas, 1966, p. 78 Such an analysis explains resemblance among ordinary objects in intrinsic respects.
The red-part of this chair plays the role of being a property, a property had by the chair. It does this because in order for the property being red to be 'of' the chair it must be an abstract part of the chair and it must 'manifest' Redness, i.e., manifest its kind. This chair, in fact, is nothing more than its abstract parts or tropes. This chair is a certain mereological sum of tropes, namely, the sum that 'concurs' in a single region of spacetime. Such an analysis explains how an object can have many properties – it does so in virtue of it having several tropes as abstract parts.
One benefit of Williams's trope theory is that objective resemblance among ordinary objects in intrinsic respects is explained without positing universals as members of a primitive category of being. Another benefit is that his theory explains facts about predication without positing substances as members of a primitive category of being. Williams posits tropes as members of a fundamental category of being and then derives the category of universality and substance from tropes. Abstract particulars ground concrete particulars and abstract universals. This makes his theory a one-category ontology. Tropes comprise the one fundamental category of being. Keith Campbell carries this argument forward in Abstract Particulars (1990).
There are several objections in the literature against Williams's trope theory. And there are just as many philosophers who defend and develop the view. Contentious issues include the individuation of tropes, the nature of the concurrence relation that unifies tropes into concrete objects, the nature of the resemblance relation, the nature of universals, Williams's account of predication, the simplicity of tropes (whether a basic trope is really a simple entity). And much more. These issues are part of on-going disputes in metaphysics.
The main argument for trope theory is that it is the most ontically parsimonious hypothesis with the greatest explanatory power. As Williams remarks, he found trope theory 'so serviceable that it may well be true'. It posits one category of being but at the same time explains the distinction between object and property, explains objective resemblance among ordinary objects in intrinsic respects, and explains facts about predication (of concrete particulars). Trope can also play the role of events and truthmakers and serve as the contents of mental acts such as perception and play the role of mental acts and states themselves. His trope theory remains a strong candidate for being the best explanation we have in analytic ontology. See also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Williams.
Metaphysics: cosmology Cosmology is the study of the contents of the world and how its contents are related to each other in the loosest sense. Typically, cosmology is studied from a speculative perspective, that is, a constructive perspective that involves inductively inferring the probable truth of a certain world hypothesis based on various pieces of evidence. For Williams, time and space fall under the study of cosmology. Speculative cosmology is the other branch of metaphysics, along with analytic ontology. As D.M. Armstrong notes, this distinction between analytic ontology and speculative cosmology is a division within metaphysics.Armstrong, D.M. 'Reply to Forrest' In Ontology, Causality, and Mind: Essays in Honour of D.M. Armstrong, (eds.) J. Bacon, K. Campbell, L. Reinhardt, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 66 As such, ontology does not exhaust metaphysics.