the problem of the copula

ID: f0ddce1a-d113-48a3-9d34-fd82f7e4613a
MTIME: [2025-07-17 Thu 22:24],[2024-12-25 Wed 16:07]
REVIEW_SCORE: 2.0

copula (n.) The name for the existence verb, which is English is "to be".

It establishes a relation between two things that from one persepective is as featureless as you can get it to be, but from another the most restrictive. In a syllogistic approach, a copula makes reasoning possible; therefore all apologia for syllogism absolve the copula with a surrounding axiomatic justification: "We are reasoning within the confines of an abstraction", or "we are only saying things inside the portion of universe where things can be said".

Older, bolder philosophers committed to the conceit of the ontology more seriously - see:

• Leibniz with his "identity of indistinguishables", a claim he was making as part of what we would today call a foundations project, but what he called a theodicy.
• Aristotle, who made a non-relational foundation of "ontology" and "identity" in his theory before attempting to rest his categories upon it.
• Vaisesika, which came by identity in a more roundabout fashion but still began with a rational understanding of the universe, presupposing it made sense, and therefore that the unit of sensemaking was part of reality - that the operation(s) represented by the copula (artha, bhava, tatparya) weren't conveniences of cognition, but somehow out there in the world.

To those for whom reality feels solid, not to be trifled with, the copula is a weighty fact, and the restricted reasoners of today who use it in similar fashion without following through to similar consequence represent a bitterness in the intertext.

Phenomenologists construct a partial recovery of the concept by asserting that the copula does represent an essential cognitive or conceptual process, central to the process of sensemaking. In this interpretation, it's an almost empty assertion of relation, which can be refined and overloaded any which way the thinker likes.

We like Wittgenstein, who likes to opt out of the contentions about the reality or otherwise of these games, and notes that they are all useful ways of moving through the world once you have taken the trouble to name their use. At this point in my thinking, everything is rhetoric until proven otherwise (which fortunately it will never be).

This node is a singleton!