Biblioteka Cyfrowa KLF UW (Digital Library of the Formal Linguistics Department at the University of Warsaw)

Bogusławski, Andrzej

Multiplicity Based on the Relations ‘know that’ and ‘did’ as Constitutive for the Reality. Inanimate Objects
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The fundamental pronouns: ‘someone’, ‘something’. Dualism vs. monism
There are two, and only two, fundamental and universal, as well as semantically 
primitive, pronouns which correspond to the two categories just distinguished − animate 
entities and inanimate objects − and which, from the linguistic-phenomenological 
point of view, irrevocably solve the issue between dualism and monism in favour of the 
former. 
We are indebted, above all, to  Wierzbicka’s works, beginning at least with her 
Semantic Primitives ( Wierzbicka 1972), for promoting the two primitives mentioned 
in the heading of this section and their unique binary contradistinction to the role of 
unshakable pillars of the universal semantic system. This pronominal contradistinction 
has been notoriously left unnoticed, ignored or neglected in philosophical refl ection; 
and largely the same thing applied also to the signifi cance of the pronouns. Of course, 
all dualists talked, e.g., about spirits and what they perceive ( Berkeley), about res 
cogitantes and res extensae ( Descartes), about rational beings and material things 
and so on. But the precise contradistinction of objects referred to as someone (in 
concatenations with know and did or their counterparts in other languages) and objects 
referred to as something is by no means common ground in philosophy. An important 
contribution to the study of the two pronouns and their philosophical weight is to be 
found in  Spaemann (1996). In my own refl ection the pronouns play the part of one of 
the pivot-stones of the entire analysis; it is easy to see that they fi gure prominently in 
nearly all my discussions so far (for one special investigation of some of the relevant 
linguistic facts, see my (1998b)).
First, there is the pronoun someone (somebody) as the English representative of 
the (universally valid) referential designator of knowers/agents. The other pronoun is 
something. This is the English version of the main referential pronominal expression 
for inanimate objects, applied in an equally universal manner. It will be remembered, 
however, that the pronoun something is also applicable to the remaining two classes of 
items, attributes and linguistic expressions, without reservations: ‘something’ covers 
whatever is not covered by ‘someone’. 
The two pronouns are mutually uninterexchangeable. Moreover, they can be proved 
not to be mutually related as infl ectional forms of one lexeme. The difference between 
them is purely semantic, as has been shown in my (2004b). In view of the utmost 
importance of this theme, I shall recall the main points of my discussion below. It is, 
in particular, this circumstance that provides the ultimate foundation for the dualistic 
outlook (mentioned at the beginning of this section) as the uniquely correct one (and 
it is, I could say, the dualistic Weltanschauung what the present book is all about).
Some thinkers object that whoever posits spiritual entities (“spirits”, as  Berkeley 
called them) radically different from material bodies, but somehow governing them, in 
fact postulates the presence of some mysterious homunculi inside human bodies, these 
Chapter V
282
homunculi turning out to be small or tiny entities of the same kind as ordinary (bodily) 
persons. Such a solution of the mind-body problem leads, so the objection goes, to an 
infi nite chain of ever smaller homunculi. 
This kind of ridiculing dualism is misconceived from the very beginning. It 
indeed amounts to indulging in a petitio principii where the reduction of everything 
to bodies is accepted, like a dogma, in advance of the entire debate. The linguistic-
-phenomenological answer to this quandary is that homunculi would anyway have to 
be classed among the objects called someone, not something. They could not be just 
small statues or pictures of mythological beings: such images would certainly be called 
something. Therefore, one had better stop at the starting point where objects called 
someone are simply accepted as ones that can in no way be got rid of and can in no way 
be reduced to bodies, i.e. to objects called something.
Entities named someone need not be called souls, spirits and so on. They can usefully 
be called just that way, viz. “entities named someone”. Even so, their “cohabitation” 
with their living or growing bodies and with the rest of the “material world”, i.e. with 
all the objects called something, can certainly appear to be puzzling to many. But the 
linguistic-phenomenological outlook allows for things to be puzzling and even predicts 
them to be so necessarily: primitive concepts will always be (somewhat) mysterious. 
Mythological narratives (materialistic and non-materialistic alike), which aim to 
dissipate the philosophical headaches by invoking prejudices, superstitions, misleading 
imagery and faulty quasi-reasonings, are merely a kind of self-deceit. When turned 
into philosophical propaganda, they become tools of spreading attitudes that can only 
be appraised as benighted. 
For reasons explained in the Introduction to this Chapter, inanimate objects must 
accompany objects called someone. More than that: each object of the latter kind, 
apart from the Omniscient Being (I shall disregard angels and devils), has a special 
inanimate object attached to it without which she cannot know anything or act upon 
anyone or anything. That special object is called her body. It can be defi ned in the 
following way, by describing a property of a knower/ignorant i: 
i did something with someone / something → 
→ i did something with somethingc ∈ C = c’ ∪ ... ∪  cn  
such that (i did something with someone / something → i did something with c). 
 


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University of Warsaw

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