Author: Bill Vallicella

‘Platonic’ Propositions: A Consideration Contra. The Argument from Intrinsic Intentionality

Commenter John put the following question to me:

Which Platonist theories of propositions did you have in mind in your original post, and what are the problems involved in accepting such views?

I had in mind a roughly Fregean theory.  One problem with such a view is that it seems to require that propositions possess intrinsic intentionality.  Let me explain.

Propositions: A Broadly Fregean Theory Briefly Sketched

On one approach, propositions are abstract items. I am not suggesting that propositions are products of abstraction.  I am using 'abstract' in the (misconceived) Quinean way to cover items that are not in space, or in time, and are not causally active or passive.  We should add  that no mind is an abstract item.  Abstracta, then, are neither bodies nor minds. They comprise a third category of entity. Besides propositions, numbers and (mathematical) sets are often given as candidate members of this category. But our topic is propositions.

For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely psychologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.  Like its German counterpart, the English 'thought' is ambiguous. It could refer to an act of thinking, a mental act, or it it could refer to the intentional object or accusative of such an act.  Some use the word 'content,' but it has the disadvantage of suggesting something contained in the act of thinking.  But when I think of the river Charles, said river is not literally contained in my act of thinking.  A fortiori for Boston's Scollay Square which I am now thinking about: it no longer exists and so cannot be contained in anything.  The same is true when I think that the Charles is polluted or that Scollay Square was a magnet for sailors on shore leave. Those propositions are not  psychological realities really contained in my or anyone's acts of thinking.  And of course they are not literally in the head.  You could say that they are in the mind, but only if you mean that they are before the mind.

A proposition for Frege is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:

1. The sea is blue.
2. The sea is blue.
3. Die See ist blau.
4. Deniz mavidir.

(Since Turkish is an agglutinative language, the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')

The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That 'same thing' is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by (assertively) uttering them or otherwise encoding them.  The proposition is one to their many.  (I have just sounded a Platonic theme.) And unlike the sentence-tokens, the proposition is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Herewith, a second Platonic theme. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.  

So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content or sense can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages.  We also need to account for the fact that the same thought can be expressed by the same person at different times in the same or different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. It is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.  Similarly with judgments and beliefs: they are derivatively true if true.   For Frege, propositions are the primary truth bearers or vehicles of the truth-values.  

There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. Therefore, a string of marks cannot be either true or false.  It is the office of minds to mean. Matter means nothing. 

One could agree that a string of marks  or a sequence of noises cannot, as such, attract a truth-value, but balk at the inference that therefore propositional meanings (senses) are self-subsistent, mind-independent abstract items.  One might plump for what could be called an 'Aristotelian' theory of propositions according to which a sentence has all the meaning it needs to attract a truth-value in virtue of its being thoughtfully uttered or otherwise tokened by someone with the intention of making a claim about the world.  The propositional sense would then be a one-IN-many and not a Platonic one-OVER-many.  The propositional sense would be a unitary sense but not a sense that could exist on its own apart from minds or mean anything apart from minds.

But how would the Aristotelian account for necessary truths, including the truths of logic, which are true in worlds in which there are no minds?  Here the Platonist has an opportunity for rejoinder.  Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there are no minds and/or nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that necessarily true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds. The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.

Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One cannot just believe. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition or dictum. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the occurrent belief state is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)

A Consideration Contra

Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. There are all of these entities that there could have been.  Each necessarily exists although only some are necessarily true.  As necessarily existent and indeed necessarily existent in themselves and from themselves, they have no need of minds to 'support' them.  Hence they are not mere accusatives of mental acts.  They are apt to become accusatives but they are not essentially accusatives. They can exist without being accusatives of any mind. To borrow a phrase from Bernard Bolzano, they are Saetze an sich.  They are made for the mind, and transparent to mind, but they don't depend for their existence on any mind, finite or infinite.

Even more salient for present purposes is that these Platonic propositions are not only existent in themselves but also meaningful in themselves: they do not derive their meaning from minds.  It follows that they possess intrinsic intentionality.  At this juncture an aporetic tetrad obtrudes itself.

A. Fregean propositions are non-mental representations: they are intrinsically representative of state of affairs in the world.

B. Fregean propositions are abstract items.

C. No abstract item possesses intrinsic representational power.

D. Fregean propositions exist.

The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true.  One can therefore reasonably argue from the conjunction of the first three to the negation of the fourth.

How are God and Truth Related?

By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God.

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of  many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, is the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. 

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept.  Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate  'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.  

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.  

Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds.  But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or for, a mind.  If there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

Some Questions About Animal Suffering and Religious Belief

This just in from Karl White:
A couple of questions.
 
1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God.
 
Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike 'potential.'
 
So in your view does that imply that there is no amount of evil that could rule it out? If the entire planet were like Auschwitz would that still not rule it out? (And it is estimated that roughly 150 million animals are slaughtered per day for human consumption, so it could plausibly be maintained that for animals the world is a kind of Auschwitz.)
 
No. The idea is that the existence of evils that are necessary for a greater good are logically compatible with the existence of an all-good God. So the goods have to outweigh the evils.  It follows that there has to be a limit to how much evil there is.
 
And let's leave out of the present discussion the human slaughter of humans and animals, for that belongs under the rubric 'moral evil,' whereas the topic under discussion is natural evil. One question for a separate post is whether natural evil is itself a species of moral evil, namely, the evil perpetrated by fallen angels. But for now I will assume that natural evil is not a species of moral evil; I will assume that it is not the result of free agency.
 
To put it more formally: is there any state of affairs, call it X, that would rule out the existence of God?
 
Yes. Just one case of pointless or unjustified evil would rule out the existence of God.
 
I am uncomfortable with the idea of saying yes, as I suspect it pushes the notion of an omni-God toward the brink of meaninglessness. We generally think that if a proposition cannot be proven or disproven then it is in a certain sense meaningless or at best useless. The Theist will reply that the existence of God is a unique case and fine, but I still feel that we are within our rights to ask for some form of verification without having the whole concept of God becoming meaningless.
 
I rather doubt that  a proposition is meaningful iff it is verifiable. Consider the following proposition
 
a) My grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on 1 January 1940.
 
By Bivalence, (a) is either true, or if not true, then false.  And this is so even though it is impossible now to determine (a)'s truth value.  Since (a) must either be true or false, it must be meaningful, despite its unverifiability.  Similarly for 
 
b) The execution of Sophie Scholl (of White Rose fame) was not a pointless evil.
 
(b) is meaningful but not empirically verifiable in the present life.
 
Note also, that if one is a verificationist, there is no need to mess around with the problem of evil: one can put paid to all (synthetic) claims about God, such as the claim that God exists, by maintaining that they are meaningless because not empirically verifiable in the here and now.
 
2. You push the pragmatic, Pascalian line about the benefits of believing in God quite regularly. But isn't there a sort of question-begging to this, in that it assumes only beneficial consequences? What if someone reads the Quran, sees the lines about killing non-believers and thinks "I may as well, because if God exists, he'll reward me, and if he doesn't, it doesn't matter anyway." Or if someone adopts a religion that promotes the total subjection of women?
 
My Pascalianism is not blanket; it kicks in only in specific circumstances.  Islam is "the poorest and saddest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), It is clearly an inferior religion as compared to Christianity (morally if not metaphysically) if it (Islam) is a religion at all as opposed to a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a Christian heresy (Chesterton).  It was founded by a warrior who was arguably a fraud and it enjoins immoral practices such the genital mutilation of girls, the subjection of women, and the slaughter of 'infidels.' . So if one exercises due doxastic diligence one excludes Islam and other pseudo-religions from the Pascalian option.
 
The Pascalian move is made in a situation like the following.  One is a serious and sensitive human being who cares about his ultimate felicity.  One is alive to the vanity of this world. One is psychologically capable of religious belief and appreciates that God and the soul are Jamesian live options. One is intellectually sophisticated enough to know that God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. One appreciates that not to choose to live as if God and the soul are real is to choose to live as if they are not real.  One understands that it is prudentially irrational to suspend judgment.  At this point the Pascalian reasoning kicks in.
 
By the way, my Pascalian move is merely reminiscent of he great Pascal; I am not concerned with accuracy to the details of his view.  I write as a kind of 'existentialist.' What matters is how I live here and now and what helps me here and now.  I borrow what is useful and appropriable by me here and now; I am not committed to the whole Pascalian kit-and-kaboodle.

More on Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil with Responses to Caiati and Pollack

Vito Caiati, to whom I responded earlier, replies:

In your excellent response to my email on animal suffering and theism, you write, “If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might help with the existential-psychological problem.” This is precisely the sort of help that you have provided me, and I sincerely thank you it. I have struggled with the problem of animal pain and suffering most of my life, and it has long poked into my theistic beliefs like a sharp thorn. In considering the empirical fact of the baby elephant’s atrocious death, I now see that I assumed what instinctively horrified me was objectively evil and hence pointlessly evil. I now understand that, although I continue to hate the empirical fact, this assumption is unwarranted.

I am fortunate to have attracted Dr. Caiati as a correspondent.  The attraction of the like-minded is one of the beauties of blog. The formulation in the penultimate sentence above, however, is not quite right.  If a state of affairs is objectively evil, it does not follow that it is pointlessly evil. It may or may not be. As I see it, the pointlessly evil is a proper subset of the objectively evil. Everything pointlessly evil is objectively evil, but not conversely. Evils can be justified by greater goods that they subserve. They remain evils, however,  even if justified. It could be — it is possible for all we know — that predation is justified by a greater good unattainable without predation.  And this is so whether or not we can know, or even imagine, what this greater good might be. The main point here is that there is reason to doubt whether an event or a state of affairs that is  objectively evil is also pointlessly evil.  

The following two propositions cannot both be true:

1) God (defined in terms of the standard omni-attributes) exists.

2) Pointless (unjustified, gratuitous) evils exist.

So if (2) is true, then (1) is false. But how do we know that (2) is true? Is (2) true? What the skeptical theist will point out is that we cannot directly and validly infer (2) from

3) Objective evils exist.

This allows the theist 'doxastic wiggle room.'   He is not rationally compelled to abandon theism in the face of (3). (1) and (3) can both be true.  And this is so even if I cannot explain how it is possible that they both be true.

Vito continues:

I had thought to place my instinctive reaction on a different plane than St. Paul’s declaration that one can see “that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the things that have been made,” in that the latter involves a two stage intellectual process, that of (1) the perception of an empirical fact, the existence and nature of the universe, and (2) the attribution of this fact to the action of some conscious cause, that is, to the action of a predefined concept of a Creator God, as understood in the Judaic and early Christian traditions. In the case of the baby elephant, I believed that the additive [additional] conceptual stage was not involved, since my emotional reaction was akin to what most of humanity feels when encountering a horrendous evil, such as a pointless cruelty or murder. In other words, I took it as an instinctive moral reaction that preceded any conceptualization. As such, I assumed that its source was inherent in my moral essence as a man and hence prior to discursive argument. From what you write, I now see that I was probably wrong in making this assumption, since the empirical event gives me only the right to my emotional reaction and not to any larger philosophical claims as to the nature of God that I would care to derive from it.

Vito understands me quite well.

To give the Pauline two-step a Kantian twist: I am filled with wonder by "the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." That is the first step.  The second step is to infer straightaway that there must be a transcendent Creator of the universe who is also the Source of the moral law within me.  One can reasonably doubt the validity of that immediate inference.  (And if you try to mediate it by the adducing of some further proposition, then the skeptic will train his sights upon that proposition.) By the same token, one can reasonably doubt that the extremely strong, pervasive, and obtrusive appearance of unjustified natural evil is a veridical appearance, and thus that the objective evil of predation is a pointless or unjustified evil.

Malcolm Pollack, responding to my first response to Caiati, and targeting my claim that in the end one must decide what to believe and how to live, writes:

"One must decide.” Well, yes — but how? Bill shows us that reason alone has insufficient grounds for a verdict; neither case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Upon what do we fall back, then? [. . .]

So — if reason is helpless to acquit, and conscience votes to convict, then what is left for the believer? Only the persistence of his sense of the transcendent, and the yearning to believe. If we are to let God off the hook, the problem of “pointless evil” must simply be set aside as a mystery beyond our comprehension. Can we do it? Ought we do it?

I am not sure that Malcolm understands quite what I mean when I say that "one must decide what to believe" in the final analysis and with respect to a matter like this. He wants to how one decides. Answer: You just do it after having reviewed all the considerations pro et contra.  It's a free decision. There is no algorithm.  There is no decision procedure that one can mechanically follow. The considerations pro and con do not decide the matter. What you "fall back upon" is is your own free choice to either believe that (1) or to believe that (2). You stop thinking and perform an act of will. Thought is endless and its conclusions are inconclusive. Thought goes around and around.  To take a stand one must jump of the merry-go-round.

"But isn't that arbitrary?" Of course, in one sense of 'arbitrary.' But not in the sense of being random or uninformed by rational considerations pro and con that precede the decision. The necessity of action, the necessity of an abrupt shift from the plane of thought to the plane of action, ought to dawn on one once one sees that (i) one must act, and that (ii) reasons, taken singly or collectively, do not necessitate a course of action.  This is most obvious when one is in a state of 'doxastic equipoise,' that situation in which the considerations pro and the considerations con cancel out.  But even if one set of reasons strikes one as stronger than the other, opposing, set, one still has to stop thinking and decide to act on the stronger set of reasons. For if one continues thinking, one will almost certainly modify if not reject one's initial assessment.

There are all these considerations that speak for God and all these others ones that speak against God, the loudest being those having to do with evil.  The Leibnizian "Gentlemen, let us calculate" cuts no ice in a situation like this.  As I said, there is no algorithm. There is no rational procedure that does the work  for me.   The work is done by an act of will, informed, but not necessitated, by the reasons that  the intellect surveys.  It would be nice if there were reasons the contemplation of which would force me this way or that in a matter like the one before us. The truth, however, is that I am forced, not to believe this or that, but to take responsibility for what I believe whatever it is.

Seeing as how I cannot achieve the fixation of belief by continuing to mull over reasons pro and con, I achieve said fixation by an act of will.

"Why not suspend belief?"  One is free to do that, of course. One might just take no position on the question whether God exists or not and whether there are pointless evils or not.  But the taking of no position is itself a free decision. One decides not to decide. Not to decide is to decide. Now this might be theoretically reasonable, but for beings like us, interested (inter esse)  beings,  this is practically and prudentially unreasonable.

Consider the question of the existence of the (immortal) soul. Can one prove its existence? No. Can one prove its nonexistence? No. Are there good arguments on both sides? Yes. Is the cumulative case on the one side stronger than the cumulative case on the other? Possibly. But you still have to decide what you will believe in this matter and how you will live. 

Suppose you decide to suspend judgment and forget about the whole matter. You will then live as if there is no (immortal) soul and not attend to its care or worry about its future well-being.  You will not have committed yourself theoretically, but you will have committed yourself existentially. Should the soul prove to exist, then you will have acted imprudently.  You will have acted in a prudentially irrational way.

If, on the other hand, you live as if God and the soul are real, and it turns out that they are not, what have you lost?  Nothing of any value comparable to the value of what you will gain if God and the soul turn out to be real and you lived in the belief that they are real. I put this question to an atheist a while back and he replied, "You lost your intellectual integrity."  Not so!  For both belief and unbelief are rationally acceptable.  

So I will say the following to Malcolm.  Not everyone is psychologically capable of religious belief, but if you are, and if you agree that it could be the case for all we know that God and the soul are real, and that the pro arguments have weight even f they are not rationally compelling, then I say: go ahead and believe and act in accordance with the beliefs.  What harm could it do?

And it might make you a better man.  For example, if you believe that you will be judged post-mortem for what you did and left undone in this life, then this belief might contribute to your being a better man than you would have been without this belief — even if the belief  turns out to be false.   Religion does not have to be true to be life-enhancing and conducive to human flourishing.  If, however, you believe it not to be true, then you won't live in accordance with it, and it will not have any life-enhancing effect.

A Reason to Try to ‘Make it’

One  reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success is not a worthy final goal of human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters.  He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds is in a position to appreciate the ultimate insignificance of both worldly success and worldly failure, not that most of the successful ever do. 

Their success traps them.  Hence the sad spectacle of the old coot, a good flight of stairs from a major coronary event, scheming and angling for more loot and land when in the end a man needs only — six feet.

They Have No Views

My cats eat, sleep, play, and sleep some more. They have no views. But the value of being adoxastos is lost on them.  I do not envy them.  I am glad that I am a man. Man alone among the animals is more than an animal.  Man's distinction consists both in his having views and in his ability to examine them like Socrates, to suspend them like the Pyrrhonian skeptic and to transcend them like the mystic. 

Man is also distinguished by his wretchedness. No mere animal, strictly speaking, is wretched.  Animal suffering never gets the length of wretchedness. Man is wretched because he is great. Therein lies the Pascalian paradox of the human predicament.