Fiction and Alienans Adjectives

David Brightly comments:

As you use them, the terms 'fictional', 'intentional', 'possible', 'incomplete', and others like 'past' have a distinctive effect on the concept terms they qualify. Ordinary adjectives have the effect of narrowing the extension of the concept term they qualify: the red balls are a subset of the balls, the female prime ministers are a subset of the prime ministers, and so on. The terms in question have the opposite effect. They appear to widen, or indeed offset altogether, the extension of the qualified concept. They are thus potent alienating terms. So the question arises, What is the relation (if any) between the concepts 'fictional person' and 'person', between 'intentional object' and 'object', and 'possible X' and 'X'? Ordinary qualification can be uniformly understood in terms of set intersection. Is there a uniform explanation underlying these alienating qualifications?

1. First of all, contrary to what David says, there are plenty of ordinary adjectives that do not narrow the extension of the terms they qualify. There are redundant adjectives, alienans adjectives, and there is the construction known as the contradictio in adiecto. For example, 'decoy' in 'decoy duck' is an ordinary adjective despite its being an alienans adjective; it is just as ordinary as 'female' in 'female duck,' which I call a specifying adjective and which does narrow the extension of the noun 'duck.' I see no reason to say that specifying adjectives are the only ordinary ones.

2. We can agree on this: red balls are a proper subset of balls, and female prime ministers are a proper subset of prime ministers. We will also agree that round balls are a subset of balls, though not a proper subset, and that female girls are an improper subset of girls. We could say that the last two examples illustrate the null case of specification. We could make a distinction between properly specifying and improperly specifying adjectives corresponding to the distinction between proper and improper subsets.

3. We can also agree that specificatory qualification (but not all qualification) can be uniformly understood in terms of set intersection if the intersection is non-null. The set of cats and the set of dogs has an intersection, but it is the null set. Intersection is defined over all sets, disjoint or not, hence one cannot say that the set of dogs and the set of cats do not intersect. They intersect all right; it is just that their intersection is empty. 'Canine cat' is an example of a contradictio in adiecto which reflects the fact that the corresponding sets are disjoint. 'Canine' does not specify 'cat.' It does not divide the genus into two species, the canine cats and the non-canine cats.

4. I can't, pace David, think of an example in which an adjective widens the extension of the term it qualifies. Can you? For example, 'former' in 'former wife' does not widen the extension of 'wife.' It is not as if there are two kinds or species of wives, former and present. Tom's former wife is not his wife. 'Former' does not narrow the extension either. It is an alienans adjective. It is the same with 'artificial leather.' Alligator leather and cowshide are two kinds of leather, but artificial and real are not two kinds of leather.

5. We will agree that all or most the following constructions from ordinary, i.e., non-philosophical English feature alienans adjectives, adjectives that shift or 'alienate' or 'other' the sense of the term they qualify:

former wife
decoy duck
negative growth
faux marble
ex-priest
putative father
artificial leather
legally dead
male chauvinist (on one disambiguation of its syntactic ambiguity; see article below)
generational chauvinist (I am a generational chauvinist when it comes to popular music: that of my generation is superior to that of the immediately preceding and succeding American generations.)
quondam inamorata
socially contagious (see here)

6. Note that the adjective in 'alienans adjective' is not alienans! Note also that 'putative' and 'artificial' function a little differently. Exercise for the reader: explain the difference and formulate a general test for alienans adjectives.

7. Observe that 'artificial' in 'artificial insemination' is not an alienans adjective in that artificial insemination is indeed insemination, albeit by artificial means. Whatever the means, you are just as pregnant. So whether an adjective is alienans or not depends on the context. A false friend is not a friend, but false teeth are teeth.

8. We now come to more or less controversial examples:

same-sex marriage (Conservative position: same-sex marriage is not marriage)
relative truth (I have a post on this)
material implication (see here)
epistemically possible
derivative intentionality
fictional man
merely intentional object
merely possible animal ('The chimera is a merely possible animal.')
future individual
incomplete individual

Is a (purely) fictional man a man? You might be tempted to say yes: Hamlet is fictional and Hamlet is a man, so Hamlet is a fictional man. But the drift of what I have been arguing over the last few days is that a fictional man is not a man, and that therefore 'fictional' functions as an alienans adjective. But I am comfortable with the idea that a merely possible man is a man. What is the difference?

There might have been a man distinct from every man that exists. (Think of the actual world with all the human beings in it, n human beings. There could have been n + 1.) God is contemplating this extra man, and indeed the possible world or maximal consistent state of affairs in which he figures, but hasn't and will not ever actualize him or it. What God has before his mind is a completely determinate merely possible individual man. There is only one 'thing' this man lacks: actual existence. Property-wise, he is fully determinate in respect of essential properties, accidental properties, and relational properties. Property-wise the merely possible extra man and the actual extra man are exactly the same. Their quidditative content is identical. There is no difference in Sosein; the only difference is Sein, and Sosein is indifferent to Sein as Aquinas, Kant, and Meinong would all agree despite their differences. As Kant famously maintained, Sein is not a quidditative determination, or in his jargon 'reales Praedikat.'

For this reason a merely possible (complete) man is a man. They are identical in terms of essence or nature or quiddity or Sosein, these terms taken broadly. If God actualizes the extra man, his so doing does not alter the extra man in any quidditative respect. Otherwise, he ould not be the same man God had been contemplating.

9. Brightly hits upon a happy phrase, "alienating qualifications." In my first bullet list we have examples of alienating qualifications from ordinary English. I expect Brightly will agree with all or most of these examples. His questioin to me is:

Ordinary qualification can be uniformly understood in terms of set intersection. Is there a uniform explanation underlying these alienating qualifications?

If Brightly is looking for a test or criterion I suggest the following:

Let 'FG' be a phrase in which 'F' is an adjective and 'G' a noun. 'F' is alienans if and only if either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, a decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, and a relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart attack? It may or may not be. One cannot validly move from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack' is alienans.

Now it is obvious that a decoy duck is not a duck, and that a roasted turkey is not a turkey, but the cooked carcass of a turkey; but it is not so obvious that a fictional man is not a man, while a merely possible man is a man. To establish these controversial theses — if 'establish' is not too strong a word — requires philosophical inquiry which is of course very difficult and typically inconclusive. But once we have decided that a certain philosophical phrase is an alienating qualification, then my test above can be applied.

Posted

November 26, 2013

Adjectives, Fiction and Fictionalism, Language Matters, Language, Philosophy of

Bill Vallicella

Tags:

Comments

7 responses to “Fiction and Alienans Adjectives”

David Brightly

November 27, 2013

Hello Bill,
I completely agree that there are some not so interesting alienans terms such as ‘decoy’, ‘artificial’, ‘faux’, ‘false’.

X is a false, etc, G
X looks like/behaves like a G but isn’t a G

‘Decoy’ and ‘artificial’ add extra meaning: for purposes of deception and man-made.
‘Former’, ‘ex’, ‘quondam’, ‘one-time’ also have a common structure

X is a former, etc, G
X was a G but isn’t now

The more interesting alienating terms I have in mind include ‘past’, ‘putative’, ‘apparent’, ‘intentional’, and above all ‘possible’. These are the cases where I claim that the qualifying term widens the unqualified term.

Caesar was a Roman
Caesar is a past Roman

Arguably, the past Romans, if there be any, are Romans, so the extension of ‘past Roman’ appears to be a superset of the extension of ‘Roman’.

It’s thought that JR murdered Whitechapel prostitutes
JR is the putative murderer of Whitechapel prostitutes

Most murderers are known to be murderers. Some murderers may have escaped suspicion altogether. But generally those thought to be murderers form a superset of the murderers.

It appeared that Jones had a heart attack
Jones had an apparent heart attack

Again, most heart attacks presumably look like heart attacks, so we could say that the merely apparent heart attacks extend the heart attacks.
In the previous post you say

The point is rather that when I read the play there appears before my mind a merely intentional object, one that I know is fictional, and therefore, one that I know is merely intentional. (my italics)

‘one’ here is anaphoric on ‘object’, I think, which suggests that the merely intentional objects extend the objects.

Possibly, Murray will win Wimbledon again
Murray is a possible second-time Wimbledon winner

It’s generally accepted that the possible includes the actual, so ‘possible’ is extension-widening.
The idea is that in these examples, the first sentence contains a quoted sentence which undergoes a transformation to arrive at the second sentence of the example. The form of the second sentence appears to refer to a hard-to-comprehend object. Hamlet can be seen to fit this pattern:

In the eponymous play, Hamlet is a Prince of Denmark
Hamlet is a fictional Prince of Denmark

Likewise ‘past’ if we take ‘Caesar was a Roman’ to be understood as

Once upon a time, ‘Caesar is a Roman’, was true.

Reply
BV

November 27, 2013

Thanks for the response, David.
>>Arguably, the past Romans, if there be any, are Romans, so the extension of ‘past Roman’ appears to be a superset of the extension of ‘Roman’.<< I don't follow you. Surely the set of past Romans is not a superset of the set of present Romans. Nor is it a superset of the set of past, present, and future Romans. What am I missing?

Reply
David Brightly

November 27, 2013

Hi Bill,
The argument I have in mind goes like this. How many Romans are there? According to Wikipedia there are 2,645,907 of them. These people form the extension of the concept Roman. Julius Caesar presumably falls under the concept past Roman and also under the concept Roman. But he wasn’t counted in the 2013 census. So the extension of the concept Roman seems to be at least one bigger than we thought. An ordinary concept term like ‘female’, when conjoined with ‘Roman’ does not have this strange widening effect on the extension of Roman. This suggests that ‘past’ does not signify a concept and casts doubt on the comprehensibility of ‘past Roman’.

Reply
BV

November 29, 2013

What do you mean by ‘Roman’? Do you mean the term to apply to the present residents of the city of Rome, Italy? Presumably that is what you mean if you note that there are some 2.6 million of them. But then J. C. does not fall under the concept *Roman*
I am afraid I don’t understand you at all.

Reply
David Brightly

November 29, 2013

I mean ‘citizen of Rome’. Perhaps I could put it this way:

1. JC is a past Roman.
2. A past Roman is a Roman (if not, what city is a past Roman a citizen of?)
3. Why, when we count the Romans, do we not count JC? By (1) and (2) he is, after all, a Roman.

Contrast with:

4. Livia Montalbano is a female Roman.
5. A female Roman is a Roman.
6. When we count the Romans we unproblematically count Livia.

Reply
BV

November 30, 2013

Still not clear. By ‘citizen of Rome’ do you mean ‘present citizen of Rome’? If yes, then your question answers itself. If you mean ‘past or present citizen of Rome, then we do count JC.
We agree that a past Roman is a Roman. Now the past Romans are a proper subset of the past or present Roman, and the past Romans are disjoint from the present Romans.
There is no way that ‘past’ can widen the extension of ‘Roman.’

Reply
David Brightly

November 30, 2013

Hello Bill,
I plead unable to commit myself to either of the alternatives you offer me. My position is that ‘present X’ and ‘past X’ are problematic terms just as ‘fictional X’ is a problematic term, and for analogous reasons. My 1–3 are intended to bring this out. But here is further argument:
a) I don’t think I can mean ‘present citizen of Rome’ because then (1) would become ‘JC is a past present citizen of Rome’. Interpreting ‘past’ and ‘present’ as ordinary conjunctive terms like ‘female’ renders this self-contradictory.
b) I don’t think I can mean ‘past or present citizen of Rome’ because then we obviously should count JC when we count the Romans, and the puzzle then becomes why we don’t.
c) I don’t think I’m equivocating on ‘Roman’. Certainly not in 4–6 which are unproblematic.
My contention remains that ‘past’ is strongly alienating.

Reply

Fiction and Alienans Adjectives

Comments

7 responses to “Fiction and Alienans Adjectives”

Leave a Reply to David Brightly Cancel reply