Month: February 2011

Why the Resistance to Modes of Being?

Why do so many distinguished philosophers  fail to appreciate that a doctrine of modes of being (modes of existence) is a live option?  Perhaps in the back of their minds is some such argument as the following:

Existence is instantiation
There are no modes of instantiation
Ergo
There are no modes of existence.

I grant that there are no modes of instantiation: either a concept is instantiated or it is not.  But existence is not instantiation.  I have gone over this ground many times before on this blog and in my existence book and in journal articles, so I will be very brief. 

I exist.  That's certain.  It is also certain that I am an individual and that no individual can be instantiated.  So if existence is instantiation, then there must be something distinct from me, a  concept or property or cognate item, the instantiation of which is (identically) my existence.  But now three points. First, there is no such concept or property.  Such a property would have to be a haecceity property and there are none.   Second, even if there were such a property, I wouldn't be able to grasp it.  Individuum ineffabile est.  Equally ineffable is a property of the form identity-with-a, where 'a' denotes an individual.  Third, to account for the existence of an individual in terms of the instantiation of some concept or property is blatantly circular:  if a first-level property instantiated,then it is instantiated by something that exists. 

So the above argument is not sound. Let's try another:

'Exists(s)' is univocal
If there are modes of existence, then 'exist(s)' is not univocal
Ergo
There are no modes of existence.

I concede the minor, but not the major.  Compare

1. Philosophers exist
2. Peter exists.

Both sentences are true, hence both are meaningful.  But 'exist(s)' does not have the same meaning in both.  (1) makes an instantiation claim: it says that the concept philosopher or the property of being a philosopher is instantiated.  But (2), quite plainly, does NOT make an instantiation claim.  So 'exist(s)' in the two sentences cannot be univocal in sense.  But it is not equivocal in the way 'bank' is in

3. No Boston bank (financial instituiton) is situated on the bank of the river Charles.

We could say that the equivocity of 'exist(s)'as between (1)and (2) is a systematic equivocity in that the senses are connected. How? Well, if there are philosophers, if philosophers exist, then there must be at least one person, Peter say,  who exists and who is a philosopher.  And if Peter, who is a philosopher, exists, then we can straightaway infer that philosophers exist.

So is it not perfectly obvious that 'exist(s)' is not univocal?  Note the ambiguity of

4. Wisdom exists.

(4) could be taken to mean that wisdom has instances, that there are wise people.  But it could also be taken to mean that wisdom itself exists.  So from this one example it is clear that 'exist(s)' is not univocal.

The second argument, then, is as unsound as the first.  At this point the establishmentarians may try to ENFORCE univocity by stipulating that 'exist(s)' SHALL MEAN  'is instantiated.'  But that has all the advantages of theft over honest toil, and besides, two can play that game.  I could, with more justice, stipulate that there is no legitimate use of 'exist(s)' except as a first-level predicate.

Finally, they may argue as follows:

If there are modes of existence, then existence is a property of individuals.
Existence is not a property of individuals
Ergo
There are no modes of existence.

Whether this argument is sound depends on what is meant by 'property.'  Existence is obviously not a quidditative property of any individual.  And existence is not a property of individuals if that is taken to imply that existents instantiate existence. But surely existence belongs to individuals and is in this sense a property of them. Accordingly, I reject  this third argument by denying the minor.

So as far as I can see the case against modes of existence is extremely weak. 

Quentin Gibson (1913 – 2001)

I first became aware of the Australian philosopher Quentin Gibson when I discovered his book The Existence Principle. It was published in 1998, when Gibson was 85 years old, in the Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series, #75. My A Paradigm Theory of Existence appeared in the same series in 2002, #89. Our approaches are radically different:  I maintain what he denies, for one thing, that there are modes of existence. I discuss some of his ideas on pp. 15-22 of my book.

I learned here that Gibson is the son of W. R. Boyce Gibson  whose translation of Edmund Husserl's Ideen I studied as an undergraduate.  Small world.

Who Benefits From Public-Sector Unions?

An excellent piece by Michael Barone.  Excerpt:

The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. (emphasis added)

Is that clear?  You pay taxes.  Some of your tax dollars go to pay the salaries of so-called 'civil servants.'  Some of these 'civil servants' belong to unions that automatically deduct union dues from their salaries and funnel this cash to the union bosses and lobbyists who pressure Democrat Party legislators to do their bidding.  Legislators, being human, love their power and perquisities, and do whatever they can to hold onto them.  To stay in power they need votes which they get from the union members who vote as a block for the Dems to get as many goodies as they can.

So we the people are forced via taxation to support the fiscally irresponsible and unsustainable Democrat Big Government agenda. Would you say that that smacks of corruption?

The Solid Bourgeois

The solid bourgeois may dismiss as so much nonsense philosophy, poetry, and other products of questers and romantics — all the while subscribing to the socially sanctioned nonsense of some respectable established church.

Be neither bourgeois nor bohemian, the one to the exclusion of the other. The true maverick is that dialectical blend, the sublatedness (Aufgehobensein) of both, that blend known as the BoBo, the bourgeois bohemian.

Existence and Completeness

Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:

. . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence of reality.  This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.

In other words, existence is completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (Tertium Non Datur).  Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists.

Why can't there be complete nonexistent objects?  Imagine the God of Leibniz, before the creation, contemplating an infinity of possible worlds, each of them determinate down to the last detail.  None of them exists or is actual.  But each of them is complete.  One of them God calls 'Charley.'  God says, Fiat Charley! And Charley exists.  It is exactly the same world which 'before' was merely possible, only 'now' it is actual.

So why should completeness entail existence?

 

Wholes, Parts, and Modes of Being

Do wholes and their parts exist in different ways?  The analytic establishment is hostile to modes of being, but its case is weak.  Indeed some establishmentarians make no case at all; they simply bluster and asseverate and beg the question.  I wonder how a member of the establishment would counter the following argument.  Consider a house made of bricks and nothing but bricks, and let's list some pertinent truths and see what follows.

1. The house exists.
2. The bricks exist.
3. The house is composed of the bricks, all of them, and of nothing else, and is not something wholly distinct from them or in addition to them.
4. The bricks can exist without the house, but the house cannot exist without the bricks.
5. The relation between the house and the bricks is neither causal nor logical.
Therefore
6. The house has a dependent mode of existence unlike the bricks. 

Peter van Inwagen, one of those establishmentarians who is hostile to the very idea of there being modes of being, will deny (1) as part of his general denial of artifacts.  If artifacts do not exist at all, then questions about how they exist, or in what way or mode, obviously lapse.  But it is evident to me that if we have to choose between denying artifacts and accepting modes of being, then we should accept modes of being!

(2) is undeniable as is (3):  it would obviously be absurd to think of the house as something over and above its constituents, as if it could exist even if they didn't.  The house is just the bricks arranged house-wise.  This is consistent with the truth of (1).  The fact that the house is just the bricks arranged house-wise does not entail that the house does not exist. 

(4) is equally evident and is just a consequence of (3).  I put the point modally but I could also make it temporally: before the Wise Pig assembled the bricks into a house fit to repel the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf, there was no house, but there were the bricks.

(5)  is also obviously true.  The bricks, taken individually or collectively, do not cause the house.  Now an Aristotelian may want to speak of the bricks as the 'material cause' of the house, but that is not the issue.  The issue is whether the bricks are the efficient cause of the cause.  The answer to that is obviously in the negative.  Nor are the bricks the cause of the house in the Humean sense of 'cause,' or in any modern sense of 'cause.'  For one thing, causation is standardly taken to relate events and neither a house nor a set or sum of its constituents is an event.

Could we say that the relation between bricks and house is logical? No. Logical relations relate propositions and neither the bricks nor the house is a proposition.  It is not a relation of supervenience either since supervenience relates properties and neither bricks nor house is a property.

But I hear an objection. 

I agree with you that the house is not identical to the bricks and that the former depends on the latter but not vice versa.  Why not just say that the two are related counterfactually?  Had the bricks not existed, the house would not have existed either.  Why not  say that and be done with it?  The house depends on the bricks but not conversely.  But the dependence of one existent on another does not seem to require that there are different modes of existence.

True, had the bricks not existed, the house would not have existed.    But what is the truth-maker of this counterfactual?  Your objection is superficial.  Obviously the house is not the bricks.  Obviously the house is dependent on the bricks.  I say that the house, as a whole of parts, exists-dependently.  You said nothing that refutes this.

We should also ask whether it makes sense to speak of a relation between bricks and house. It is certainly not an external relation if an external relation is one whose holding is accidental to the existence of its terms.  If brick A is on top of brick B, then they stand in a dyadic external relation: each can exist without standing in the relation, which is to say that their being related in this way is accidental to both of them.  But a house and its bricks are not externally related: the house cannot exist apart from its 'relation' to the bricks. 

The best thing to say here is that the house has a dependent mode of existence.  The house exists and the bricks exist, but the house exists in a different way than the bricks do.  If you deny this, then you are saying that the house and the bricks exist in the same way.  And what way is that?  Independently.  But it is obvious that the house does not exist independently of the bricks.

I will end by suggesting that van Inwagen's strange denial of artifacts is motivated by his failure to appreciate that there are modes of being.  For if there are no modes of being, and everything that exists exists in the same way, then one is forced to choose between saying either that the house exists independently of its constituent bricks or that the house does not exist at all.  Since van Inwagen perceives that it is absurd to say that the house exists independently of its constituent bricks, he is forced to say that it does not exist at all.

But if there are modes of being we can maintain, rather more sensibly, both that the house exists and that it does not exist independently of its constituent bricks.

 

How Could I Be Wrong?

I say that there are beliefs.  An eliminativist contradicts me, insisting that there are no beliefs.  He cannot, consistently with what he maintains, hold that I have a false belief.  For if there are no beliefs, then there are no false beliefs.  But he must hold that I am wrong.  For if there are no beliefs, as he maintains, and I maintain that there are, then I am wrong. 

But if my being wrong does not consist in my holding a false belief, what does it consist in?  The eliminativist might say that my being wrong in this instance is my uttering or otherwise tokening of the sentence type 'There are beliefs' or  being disposed to utter or otherwise token the sentence-type 'There are beliefs.'  But a parrot could do that and you wouldn't say that a parrot is wrong about the philosophy of mind.

Utterances, inscriptions and the like, if they are to mean anything must have mind behind them.  See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.

Eliminativism is absurd.  If that's too quick for you, see the posts in the Eliminative Materialism category. 

Life is Hard

Even if your life is easy physically, economically, psychologically, and socially, it is bound to be difficult ethically, religiously, and  philosophically. Having solved the lower problems, the higher problems loom.

Two misfortunes.  One is to be so burdened with the lower problems that one is never in a position to tackle the higher.  Think of those whose energies are spent battling debt or obesity or substance abuse.  The other misfortune, or rather mistake, is to have solved the lower problems but to remain at their level without advancing.  Think of those who pile up loot far in excess of their needs while ignoring the condition of their souls, or the jocks who worship at the shrine of physical hypertrophy while allowing their minds to atrophy.

The higher his problems, the higher the man.

There is no escaping problems here below.  Life is a riddle and a predicament.