Reflections on Gustav Bergmann's "Some Remarks on the Ontology of Ockham"

Here.

The flaw in the simplicity of medieval's metaphysics of substances and properties seems to be their lack of explanation for our understanding of relations between objects. Ockham objects to objectivity of relations by pointing out that, given three dogs sitting together, each has a sitting property, but the "threeness" of the three dogs is not a property of each dog, nor is it held 1/3 by each dog. But this objection can either mean that substances are real and relations less so, or that the idea of substance as basic to our ontology is somehow flawed.

Much of medicine, indeed much of all modern science, is the study of relations. Statistics is the study of the mathematics of relations. In medicine, the isolated case report can be quite useful, and some scientific research, for example of sunspots, can be seen as a time series study of a single subject. However, most modern scientific studies are of the properties of groups of subjects: for example, the epidemiology of morbidity and mortality rates, or statistical comparisons of a repeated measure across a group of subjects under different treatments. Comparing two groups of subjects via correlations within and across groups is a relational measure, similar in its simplest respects to Ockham's counting of a group of dogs.

As opposed to the medieval traditions, I tend to see substance and essence pragmatically, as anything that has a structure or function of interest. So, if we study the population of an island, that population is the substance under study. A sculpture can be a substance of which the art is the form and the clay is the matter, but when we study the silica of that clay, its particles are the form and chemical compounds are the matter. Seen as a essence of sorts, a population has collective properties of the substance of that population. So, considering Anselm's example, the substance of a pack of dogs would then have the property of its number of dogs. Whether we classify what is under study as having relational properties or properties of a substance, in this view, is mostly a matter of scale.

Studying relations sets up for a combinational explosion of ontology, or at least an explosion of the statistics that create an explosive epistomology of those combinations, something Ockham may have tried to avoid. That explosion is where we can use Ockham most: for the razor.