The Role of Function in Conventional Reality

Function Without Intrinsic Power

Substantialist metaphysics habitually attempts to reify function into an intrinsic property—positing that an object possesses inherent 'causal powers' or functional capacities operating from its own side. Under this assumption, a knife is assumed to possess an intrinsic 'cutting power'.

Take a key. Its power to open a door seems to belong to it, cut into its teeth. But the key opens only this lock, only while the metal holds its shape, only when a hand turns it and the door is not jammed. Drifting in interstellar space, or offered to the wrong lock, it opens nothing. The opening is not stored in the key and released when it meets the lock. Key, lock, hand and opening are designated together, and the 'power to open' is not found apart from them.

An entity does not act independently from its own side; action is designated in dependence on its relations, not produced by a relational process standing behind it.

Neither Solid Nor Powerless

Two opposite conclusions are drawn from the same premise. The substantialist reasons that if a thing really works, it must have a solid essence of its own; the sceptic, finding no such essence, concludes that things must be powerless illusions. Both assume that function needs an essence. They differ only on whether the essence is there.

Drop the premise and both conclusions go. A bridge carries the traffic, a medicine eases a fever, a contract binds two companies—and none of them does so by virtue of an essence. Each works as designated, in dependence on everything it is identified with, and works reliably, which is all that function ever was.

Why Convention Seems Too Weak to Work

Everything argued so far meets a resistance that argument alone does not dissolve. A reader can grant that nothing is found under analysis and still feel, underneath, that 'merely conventional' means 'not quite real'—that if the world really works, something solid must be holding it up. Three habits of thought sustain the feeling. The first equates being real with being independent, so that whatever depends is a lesser grade of real. The second hears 'designation' as 'label', something stuck on afterwards that changes nothing. The third pictures all efficacy as substance pushing substance, so that where no substance is found there seems to be nothing to do the pushing. Together they make it almost impossible for the habitual mind to imagine how convention could have any power at all.

Look, then, at what convention does. A rectangle of printed paper, designated as money, is handed across a counter, and a house changes hands; a family moves in, and children grow up in its rooms. A disc of red light at an intersection stops a forty-tonne truck, a bus full of commuters and a child on a bicycle, all at once, without touching any of them. Two words spoken before witnesses—'I do'—reorder two lives, two families and the shape of decades. None of these powers sits in the paper, the light or the words. Take the designation away and the paper is scrap, the light a coloured lamp, the words a noise. Yet nothing in the world is more effective.

It is tempting to treat these as a special category—social facts, as John Searle calls them, built on top of a layer of 'brute facts' that work on their own (The Construction of Social Reality, 1995). The analysis of this book allows no such layer. The fire that boils the kettle, the ice that numbs the palm and the bread that feeds the body are designated in the same way and function in the same way: fully, reliably, and without anything found from its own side. The social cases are simply the ones in which the dependence is easiest to see. Hold a cup of coffee in the morning: the warmth spreading into both palms, the bitter edge on the tongue, the slow lift of attention as the first sip lands. Every element of it—cup, warmth, taste, the one who tastes—is designated, and the morning is not one degree less good for it.

The substantialist has it backwards. It is not that convention manages to work in spite of lacking an anchor. An anchor would stop it working. A coin whose value owed nothing to anyone could buy nothing; a red that was red from its own side, depending on no eye, could signal nothing to a driver; an inherent coldness, as Chapter 5 showed, could never be felt. What has its nature from its own side cannot respond, combine or change, and so cannot do anything. The tremendous power of the world—to feed, to warn, to bind, to heal, to delight—is the power of what is dependent and empty: nothing in it is fixed, so nothing stops it acting.

Nāgārjuna met the same doubt about his own words. If all things are empty, his opponent objected, then his statement of emptiness is empty too, and can refute nothing. He replied that one magically created man can stop another (Vigrahavyāvartanī 23): empty things act on empty things, and that is the only acting there is. The clearest case of all is the person. The mere I of Chapter 9—designated on the aggregates and found nowhere—is the one who keeps a promise for forty years, who forgives, who raises a child, who sits through the night with the dying. Nothing about it is anchored. Nothing about it is weak.

Emptiness and Function

Nāgārjuna gathers the point into a single verse: for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible (MMK 24.14). If a thing existed from its own side, it could not depend on causes to arise, and it could not act as a cause in turn; it would be frozen in its own nature (MMK 24.16–20).

Emptiness is not a void that negates conventional reality; nor is it a structural openness lying beneath conventional reality. It is simply the absence of the fixed essence that would make change impossible. Their working and their emptiness are one appearance, seen from two sides.

Objection: Powers and Dispositions

A sophisticated defender of intrinsic natures may concede that categorical properties such as shape and size are relational, and fall back on powers. On the dispositional essentialism of philosophers such as Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics, 2007), a property simply is a power to produce certain effects, and these powers are what things really have. Salt is soluble whether or not it is ever placed in water.

But a power is identified only through its manifestation, and a manifestation always requires a partner. Solubility is a power to dissolve in water; it cannot even be described without the water. C. B. Martin, himself a defender of powers, emphasized that dispositions manifest only together with their 'reciprocal disposition partners': the salt's solubility and the water's capacity to dissolve it are two sides of one event (The Mind in Nature, 2008). Pressed one step further, this is the Madhyamaka point. A power that is what it is only in relation to its partner is not intrinsic; it is co-defined, like fire and fuel. Powers theory, taken seriously, does not rescue intrinsic nature. It shows, in the language of contemporary metaphysics, why there is none.

A Lived Example: A Chair

At the end of a long day, a chair is above all something to sink into; its function is designated by tired legs. To a small child the same chair is a fort or a climbing frame; to a cat, a perch in the sun; to a removal crew, an awkward weight on the stairs. None of these is the chair's true function, hidden in the wood. Each is real, each works, and each is designated in dependence on who meets the chair and why.

The chair is not thereby diminished. It holds the tired body perfectly well. What drops away is only the assumption that its functions sit inside it, waiting, before anyone comes along.