(revised on Medium) On Heraclitus and the secret nature of adverbs (series: notes to myself)

I used to teach my students to write without adverbs. If you state that “the car is red” you may be right or wrong, but adding “certainly” does not make your statement any more convincing or correct. 

Philosophers love their “arguablys” almost as much as lawyers love their “allegedlys” and criminals their “hypotheticallys”. But truths and falsehoods, fallacies and deductions, reasonings and explanations require no “ly”. Philosophers should not cover their backs, like lawyers and criminals, when writing. Adverbs, I taught my students, should go.

Years later, I still tell them to be wary of adverbs, for they make reasoning lazy, as if an “ostensibly” here and an “undoubtedly” there could replace evidence, arguments, proofs, actual information, a good inference or a causal explanation of why things may or may not be this or that way.

And yet… and yet … I recently realised that adverbs have a secret nature that I should have seen before.

We usually think in terms of things and properties of things. Philosophy is a shop full of tables and chairs, all favourite examples of what there is in the world. We even speak of the furniture of the world. This is our mammalian ontology. Totally Ikea. 

So, the car is red, or the car is running, or the red car is running, and so forth. That the car is brightly red and is running quickly add some information but only at a third level. There are things (first-order constants or variables, like the car a), properties of things (second-order relations, like red or R), and then properties of properties of things (third-order, like brightly). Set theory and any logical analysis start from here: R(a), or F(a,b) if the car is faster than the motorbike. “Incredibly” only modifies “faster”.

But… if you assume that the world is made of relations (recall: properties are just one-place relations, like the car is fast, which becomes a two-places if the car is faster than the motorbike) then adverbs become first-order qualifications of relations. Far from being redundant, they play the role that relations have in a world made of objects.

It took me decades to understand such an obvious point. There is an ontology made of things and their relations, in which adverbs are merely third-order qualifications of relations. But there is also a world made of relations, in which objects and adverbs are both second-order qualifications of clusters of relations (objects as nodes) and of relations themselves. Love constitutes Romeo and Juliet, and “tragically” is not a third-order detail you can omit, but a second-order qualification that is essential.

I was never convinced by Parmenides, even if he might not like adverbs and could do without them. But Heraclitus, whom I prefer (you see, I should have known better) must have adverbs. Because for him the world is made of events (still relations, of a special kind called transition state relations) that intersect and do so adverbially. For my stepping and the river’s flowing, when they come together, are linked by a fundamental and irreplaceable adverbs: once, never twice.

PS "Notes to myself" is available as a book on Amazon: ow.ly/sGyh50KfRra