Abstract:

The permissible and the forbidden are privative opposites: each is a lack of the other. The good and the bad, by contrast, are polar opposites: badness is anti-goodness, not non-goodness. What about the fitting and the unfitting, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the apt and the inapt, the warranted and the unwarranted? Is unfittingness non-fittingness or anti-fittingness, inappropriateness non-appropriateness or anti-appropriateness? This essay argues that each of these “aptic” categories stands in a privative rather than a polar relation to its opposite. More generally, there is no coherent notion of anti-fittingness, no inversely charged flipside to aptness, to be found. Establishing these claims will require an investigation of the different types of oppositeness, as well as the development of several tests for distinguishing distinct varieties of opposites from one another. What emerges is a better appreciation of the nature of fittingness and the other aptic categories, as well as an argument for taking up oppositeness as a serious philosophical topic that is ripe for further exploration.