Existence – Page 18 – Maverick Philosopher

Modality and Existence

Steven Nemes, who may prove to be my nemesis, e-mails:

I'm enjoying your book so far. I'm starting the constructive half of it now, and am going to reread the chapter "The Ground of the Contingent Existent" after a quick skim over it recently. I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but upon hearing some of the theories of existence you cover in the book, the thought in my head is "Man, this obviously can't be right. How could anyone think this?" But the philosophers in question are much smarter than me, so maybe my surprise at their theories is improper.

I have a question now regarding possible worlds, what is true-in-W, etc.

You make the point in your book that it is the fact that my existence is contingent that makes it true in some worlds that I exist and false in others. And it is the necessary existence of the Paradigm that would make it true in every possible world that he exists, rather than vice versa. This all seems very correct to me, but I am wondering about its consequences.

As I recall, my thought was along the following lines. The biconditionals

N. x is a necessary being iff x exists in all metaphysically possible worlds

C. x is a contingent being iff x exists in some but not all possible worlds

are neutral with respect to reductions of the RHS to the LHS or vice versa. So we can legitimately ask: Is a necessary being necessary because it exists in all worlds, or does it exist in all worlds because it is necessary? And: Is a contingent being contingent because it exists in only some worlds, or does it exist in only some worlds because it is contingent? My answer was that existence in all/some worlds is grounded in, and explained by, the different ways of existing of the Paradigm and what depends on it.

It seems the principle, then, is that what is possible depends upon what is actual, depends upon the potentialities that exist in what is actual, etc. Would you agree to this?

That's the next step, but my principle was merely that possible worlds talk is a very useful façon de parler, a graphic manner of speaking that allows us to picture modal relations in extensional terms using the machinery of quantification, but that necessity and contingency of existence cannot consist in, or be constituted by, existence in all/some worlds.

But I do take the next step, though I didn't work it out in the book. The Paradigm is the numero uno necessary existent and as such the ground of all actualities other than itself, but also the ground of all possibilities. Mere possibilities, after all, are not nothing, and so have some ontological status shy of actuality. So I had the not entirely original thought that mere possibilities could be identified with powers of the Paradigm.

Are there bad consequences of this, however? It seems like there is nothing actual sufficient to ground the truth of a typical counterfactual of creaturely freedom about nonexistent agents, like "If Bill the Bald Bostonian were offered the chance, he'd freely agree to murder the Yankees star pitcher". Does that mean it isn't true in any possible world? Can there be any truths about nonexistent agents and their free actions at all, assuming the only kind of free action is libertarian-free action? Can their be any truths in other possible worlds about what existent agents would freely do?

Underlying your question is whether there could be nonexistent but possible individuals. The conclusion I came to in the book was that all mere possibilities are general in nature, hence not involving specific individuals. Before Socrates came into existence there was no merely possible Socrates, though there was the possibility of there existing a snub-nosed sage, married to a shrewish wife, who was given to moments of abstraction when he communed with his daimon, etc. To get a feel for the issue here, imagine someone prophesying the coming of Socrates, master dialectician, fearless questioner of powerful men, who ran afoul of them, got sentenced to death, etc. Imagine the prophet being asked, after Socrates is on the scene, whether the Socrates in existence is the one he prophesied, or a numerically different one. My claim is that this question makes no sense. Before Socrates came into existence, there was no individual Socrates.

I was pushed into this view by my arguments against haecceity properties and also by my vew that existence is not a property added to a pre-formed fully individuated essence, but the unity of an individual's constitutents. Accordingly, existence individuates so that there is no individuation apart from existence, hence no merely possible individuals.

Misgivings About Deflationary Theories of Truth

1. From my survey of the literature, there are four main types of truth theory being discussed: substantive theories, nihilist (for want of a better label) theories, deflationary theories, and identity theories. Let me say just a little about the first two main types and then move on to deflationism. The Commenter (William Woking) will be sure to disagree with me about deflationism, which is good: by abrasion the pearl (of wisdom) is formed. Or as I read on a T-shirt at a road race recently: No pressure, no diamonds.

2. Substantive theories maintain that truth is (i) a metaphysically substantive item, presumably a property or relation, (ii) susceptible of non-trivial analysis or explication. Correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories count as substantive theories. Such theories purport to analyze truth in terms of other, presumably more basic, terms such as a relation of correspondence or adequation to 'reality' or to facts as in Veritas est adequatio intellectus ad rem. Or in terms of coherence of truth-bearers (beliefs, propositions, etc.) among themselves. Or in terms of conduciveness to human flourishing as in William James' "the true is the good by way of belief." Or in terms of broadly epistemic notions such as rational acceptability or warranted asseribility as in the Putnamian-Peircean 'Truth is rational acceptability at the ideal limit of inquiry.'

The latter is not a good proposal for reasons I won't go into now, but it illustrates the project of giving a substantive theory of truth. One tries to analyze truth in more basic terms. One tries to give an informative, noncircular answer to the question, What is truth? The sunbstantive approach is in the Granbd Tradition deriving from Plato wherein one asks What is X? for many values of 'X.'

The substantive approach to truth can be summed up in three propositions:

A. The facts about truth are not exhausted by the substitution-instances of the equivalence schemata 'p' is true iff p and *p* is true iff p.

B. There is a substantive property of truth common to all and only truths.

C. This substantive property is analyzable.

3. The 'nihilist' as he is known in the truth literature rejects substantive theories, not because they are substantive, but because they are theories. He may grant that truth is a deep, substantial, metaphysically loaded, ontologically thick, topic. But he denies that one can have a theory about it, that one can account for it in more basic terms: truth is just too basic to be explained in more fundamental terms. The nihilist accepts (A) and (B) above but denies (C).

4. The deflationist, like the nihilist, rejects substantive theories of truth. The difference is that the deflationist holds that an account of truth is possible albeit in very 'thin' terms, while the nihilist denies that any account is possible thick or thin: truth is too basic to be accountable. Nihilism allows truth to be a thick (metaphysical) topic. Deflationism disallows this. Deflationists deny (A), (B), and (C).

5. The deflationist makes a big deal out of certain perfectly obvious equivalences and he tries to squeeze a lot of anti-metaphysical mileage out of them. Here are two examples, one involving a declarative sentence, the other involving a proposition. Note that asterisks around a sentence, or around a placeholder for a sentence, form a name of the proposition expressed by the sentence.

E1. 'Grass is green' is true iff grass is green.

E2. *Grass is green* is true iff grass is green.

Note that such biconditionals express logical, not material, equivalences: they are not just true but true across all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds. With respect to such biconditionals, there is no possible situation in which the RHS is true and the LHS false, or vice versa. If asked for the ground of this necessity, I would say it resides in the mere logic of the truth predicate. Saying this, I do not concede that there is nothing more to truth than the merely syntactic role played by 'true ' in equivalences like the above.

Now let us assume something which, though false, will simplify our discussion. Let us assume that there is no other type of use of the truth predicate other than the uses illustrated in logical equivalences like the foregoing. (Thus I am proposing that we ignore such uses as the one illustrated by 'Everything Percy says is true.')

The deflationist thesis can now be formulated as follows: There is nothing more to truth than what is expressed by such truisms as the foregoing equivalences. Thus there is no metaphysically substantive property of truth that the LHS predicates of 'Grass is green' or of *Grass is green.* The content on both sides is exactly the same: 'is true' adds no new content. 'Is true' plays a merely syntactic role. In terms of Quine's disquotationalism (which is a version of the deflationary approach), 'is true' is merely a device of disquotation. 'Is true' has no semantic dimension: it neither expresses a substantive property, nor does it refer to anything. Truth drops out as a topic of philosophical inquiry. There is no such property susceptible of informative explication in terms of correspondence, coherence, rational acceptability, or whatnot. The question What is truth? gets answered by saying that there is no such 'thing' as truth: there are truths, and every such truth reduces via the equivalence schema to a sentence or proposition in which the truth predicate does not appear. Accordingly, there is nothing all truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths. There is only a multiplicity of disparate truths. But even this says too much since each 'truth' reduces to a sentence or proposition in which 'true' does not appear.

6. Now for my misgivings about deflationism. But first three preliminary points.

a. Equivalence is symmetrical (commutative); if p is equivalent to q, then q is equivalent to p. But explanation is asymmetrical: if p explains q, then q does not explain p. From ' p iff q' one cannot infer 'p because q' or 'q because p.' 'p iff q' is consistent with both. Connected with the asymmetry of explanation is that equivalences do not sanction reductions. Triangularity and trilaterality are logically equivalent properties, but it doesn't follow that either reduces to the other.

b. If two items are equivalent, then both are propositions or sentences. There cannot be equivalence between a sentence or proposition and something that is neither.

c. To define equivalence we need to recur to truth. To say that p, q are logically equivalent is to say that there is no possible situation in which p is true and q false, or q true, and p false.

Now what is the deflationist saying? His thesis is negative: there is nothing to truth except what is captured in the the equivalence schemata and their substitution-instances. Consider

E. *p* is true iff p.

First Misgiving: The truth of the biconditional is not in question. But equivalences don't sanction reductions. From (E) one cannot infer that the LHS reduces to the RHS, or vice versa. But the deflationist is saying that the LHS reduces to, and is explained by, the RHS. But what is his justification for saying this? Why not the other way around? Why not say that p because *p* is true?

Second Misgiving: For an equivalence to hold, both sides must be true (or false). Suppose both sides are true. Then, although the predicate 'true' does not appear on the RHS, the RHS must be true. So, far from dispensing with truth, the equivalence schemata and their instances presuppose it!

You don't get it, do you? Let me try an analogy with existence. A deflationist about existence might offer this equivalence schema:

F. Fs exist iff something is an F. (E.g., 'Cats exist iff something is a cat.')

Squeezing this triviality hard, our deflationist announces that 'exist' plays a merely syntactic role and that there is no substantive property of existence. But is it not obvious that if something is an F, then that thing must exist? Are you quantifying over a domain of nonexistents? If yes, then the equivalence fails. But if you are quantifying over a domain of existents, then the existence of those existents is being presupposed. So, even though 'exist' does not occur on the RHS of (F), existence is along for the ride. Same with (E). Even though 'true' does not occur on the RHS of (E), truth is along for the ride. In both cases, existence and truth in meaty substantive senses are being presupposed.

Third Misgiving. 'Grass is green' and 'It is true that grass is green' have exactly the same content. That is perfectly obvious and denied by no one. 'Is true' adds no new content. But how is it supposed to follow that truth is not a substantive property? What follows is that truth is not a content property. How do our deflationist pals get from 'Truth is not a content property' to 'Truth is not a substantive property'? Isn't it obvious that truth refers us outside the content of the proposition or sentence?

Compare existence. A thing and the same thing existing have exactly the same quidditative content. The fastest runner and the existing fastest runner are numerically the same individual. Does it follow that existence is not a property? No, what follows it that existence is not a quidditative property. Same with truth. There is no difference in content between p and true p. But it makes a world of difference whether p is true or false just as it makes a world of difference whether an individual exists or not.

Fourth Misgiving. If p and q are equivalent, then both are propositions. The instances of (E) therefore do not get us outside the 'circle of propositions.' But isn't it obvious that whether or not a sentence or a proposition or a belief (or any truthbearer) is true or false depends on matters external to the truthbearer?

Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: An Aporetic Tetrad

It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist. A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist. A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations are existence-symmetric: if R relates a and b, then either both relata exist or both do not exist. Both the stronger and the weaker claims rule out the possibility of a relation that relates an existent and a nonexistent. (So if Cerberus is eating my cat, then Cerberus exists. And if I am thinking about Cerberus, then, given that Cerberus does not exist, my thinking does not relate me to Cerberus. This implies that intentionality is not a relation, though it is, as Brentano says, relation-like (ein Relativliches).)

But if presentism is true, and only temporally present items exist, then no relation connects a present with a nonpresent item. This seems hard to accept for the following reason.

I ate lunch an hour ago. So the event of my eating (E) is earlier than the event of my typing (T). How can it be true that E bears the earlier than relation to T, and T bears the later than relation to E, unless both E and T exist? But E is nonpresent. If presentism is true, then E does not exist. And if E does not exist, then E does not stand in the earlier than relation to T. If, on the other hand, there are events that exist but are nonpresent, then presentism is false.

How will the presentist respond? Since E does not exist on his view, while T does, and E is earlier than T, he must either (A) deny that all relations are existence-symmetric, or deny (B) that earlier than is a relation. He must either allow the possibility of genuine relations that connect nonexistents and existents, or deny that T stands in a temporal relation to E.

To fully savor the problem we cast it in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. All relations are either existence-entailing or existence-symmetric.

2. Earlier than is a relation.

3. Presentism: only temporally present items exist.

4. Some events are earlier than others.

Each limb of the tetrad is exceedingly plausible. But they cannot all be true: any three, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining limb. For example, the first three entail the negation of the fourth. To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs. Now (4) cannot be rejected because it is a datum.

Will you deny (1) and say that there are relations that are neither existence-entailing nor existence-symmetric? I find this hard to swallow because of the following argument. (a) Nothing can have properties unless it exists. Therefore (b) nothing can have relational properties unless it exists. (c) Every relation gives rise to relational properties: if Rab, then a has the property of standing in R to b, and b has the property of standing in R to a. Therefore, (d) if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.

Will you deny (2) and say that earlier than is not a relation? What else could it be?

Will you deny presentism and say that that both present and nonpresent items exist? Since it is obvious that present and nonpresent items cannot exist in the present-tense sense of 'exists,' the suggestion has to be that present and nonpresent (past or future) items exist in a tenseless sense of 'exist.' But what exactly does this mean?

The problem is genuine, but there appears to be no good solution, no solution that does not involve its own difficulties.

Aquinas on Why Being Cannot Be a Genus

At 998b22 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that being cannot be a genus. Thomas Aquinas gives his version of the argument in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, ch. 25, para. 6. I find the presentation of the doctor angelicus clearer than that of the philosophus. After quoting Thomas' argument, I will offer a rigorous reconstruction and explanation of it. The argument issues in an important conclusion, one highly relevant to my running battle with the partisans of the 'thin' conception of being.

The Anton C. Pegis translation reads as follows:

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Hume on Belief and Existence

Section VII of Book I of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is relevant to recent investigations of ours into belief, existence, assertion, and the unity of the proposition. In this section of the Treatise, Hume anticipates Kant's thesis that 'exists' is not a real predicate, and Brentano's claim that the essence of judgment cannot consist in the combining of distinct concepts.

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The Copula: Adorno Contra Heidegger

Time was when I was much interested in the philosophers of the Frankfurter Schule. That was in the 'seventies and 'eighties. Less interested now, I am still intrigued by Adorno's critique of Heidegger. Is it worth anything? For that matter, are Heidegger's ideas worth anything? Let's see.

I will explain one aspect of Heidegger's notorious Seinsfrage, an aspect centering on the role of the copula in predicative sentences/judgments. True-blue Heideggerians may not recognize much of their Master here, but I'm a thinker not an exegete. I will also consider what Adorno has to say in criticism of Heidegger in the section on the copula in Negative Dialektik.

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Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions: A Two-Fold Ripoff

(This was written 30 January 2006. Paul Edwards, though he made some significant contributions to contemporary philosophy, was a notorious Heidegger-hater. I slap him around good in this piece, ending with a nice polemical punch. He asked for it, and he deserves it. Not that I think that much of Heidegger. Recently, controversy about the old Nazi has erupted anew. More on that later today or tomorrow.)

I recently purchased, but then returned, Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions (Prometheus, 2004) when I found that it is nothing but an overpriced reprint of previously available materials. Twenty dollars for a thin (129 pp.) paperback is bad enough, especially given the mediocre production values of Prometheus Books; but the clincher was my discovery that there is nothing in this volume that has not appeared elsewhere. Edwards and his editors didn’t even bother to change the British quotation conventions in two of the reproduced articles to their Stateside counterparts.

There is also the question of the quality of Edward’s Heidegger-critique, a topic that needs to be treated more fully in a separate post. But for now a comment on Edwards’ refutation-strategy in his second chapter, "Heidegger’s Quest for Being." (What follows summarizes, but also extends, the discussion in my article, "Do Individuals Exist?" Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XX (1995), pp. 195-220, and my book A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002), Chapter 4.)

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Wonder at Existence

Existence elicited nausea from Sartre's Roquentin, but wonder from Bryan Magee:

. . . no matter what it was that existed, it seemed to me extraordinary beyond all wonderment that it should. It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn't there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation — the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation — nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. (Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 13)

What elicited Magee's wonderment was the self-evident sheer existence of things in general: their being as opposed to their nonbeing. How strange that anything at all exists! Now what could a partisan of the thin conception of Being or existence make of Magee's intuition of existence?

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Nausea at Existence

Existence is often 'invisible' to analytic types well-versed in logic, for existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana sagely remarked in Scepticism and Animal Faith (Dover, 1955, p. 48) It is so odious, in fact, that they need to mask it under the misnamed 'existential' quantifier. So I need to resort to extreme methods to bring it into view I will quote from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.

Now it goes without saying that I don't agree with Sartre that existence is an unintelligible surd. For me it is the opposite of unintelligible. But what I will borrow from Sartre is the insight that existence is extralogical: it is precisely not what Quine said it was whn he said that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage.

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Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part Two

Near the end of Part One of this two-part series, I wrote,

. . . Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He fails to see that human freedom is in no way diminished by an individual's free acceptance of an objective constraint on his behavior. This is because human freedom is finite freedom; only an infinite freedom, a divine freedom, would be diminished by objective constraints.

This may well be the crux of the matter. But we need to explore it in greater depth. For a theist, God is the absolute. But Sartre famously denies God on the ground that a for-itself-in-itself is impossible: see Being and Nothingness. For Sartre the God-denier, man is the absolute. But there is no Man, only men. Man is an abstraction. So the absolute fractures into finite individual subjectivities, each of which exists contingently. Here is a crucial passage:

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Is Meinong’s Theory of Objects “Obviously Self-Contradictory?” Van Inwagen Says ‘Yes’

Relevant to my interest in the philosophy of existence is Peter van Inwagen's "McGinn on Existence" which is online here, and published in Andrea Bottani and Richard Davies (eds.), Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic, Ontos Verlag, 2006, pp. 105-129. On p. 108 we read:

. . . Meinong's theory has a rather more important defect than its incorporation of the idea of modes of being, and that is that it's self-contradictory — obviously self-contradictory. Here is one way of bringing out the contradiction in the theory: Meinongianism entails that there are things that participate in neither mode of being, things that have no being of any sort; but if there are such things, they obviously have being. For a thing to have being is for there to be a such a thing as it is; what else could being be? Now this defect in Meinong's theory — its being obviously self-contradictory — is avoided by certain recent theories whose proponents describe themselves as Meinongians, philosophers such as Terence Parsons and Richard Routley, among others. I call these people neo-Meinongian, since, although their theories incorporate many Meinongian elements, they reject a component of Meinong's theory of objects that I consider essential to it, the doctrine of Aussersein, a doctrine an immediate consequence of which is the self-contradiction that I just called your attention to: that there are things of which it is true that there are no such things. (Emphasis in original.)

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Pavel Tichý on Descartes’ Meditation Five Ontological Argument

This post is the fourth in a series on Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God" (J. Phil., August 1979, 403-420). In section II we find a critique of Descartes' Meditation Five ontological argument. Tichý claims to spot two fallacies in the argument. I will argue that only one of them is a genuine fallacy. One could present the Cartesian argument in Tichý's jargon as follows:

1. The requisites of the divine office include all perfections.
2. Existence is a perfection.
Therefore
3. The divine office is occupied.

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More on Tichý on Existence: One of His Arguments Examined

This post is a sequel to Pavel Tichý on Existence. There I explained Tichý's theory as a variation on the Fregean theory and made a start on a critique of it. Here I examine an argument of his for it. He writes,

If existence were a property ascribable to individuals, then the force of such an ascription could only be to the effect that the individual in question is indeed one of the individuals there are. But since any individual is, trivially, one of the individuals there are, all ascriptions of existence would be tautologically true. If existence were properly raised in regard to individuals, then a negative answer to such a question would be self-defeating: it would suggest that no question has in fact been asked and that, accordingly, no answer is called for in the first place. Genuine existence questions would be answerable wholesale and a priori in the affirmative. ("Existence and God," Journal of Philosophy, August 1979, pp. 404-405)

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Pavel Tichý on Existence

This post consists of some notes and commentary on Section I of Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXXVI, no. 8, August 1979. Section I of Tichý's article is about designation and existence. Section II exposes two fallacies in Descartes' ontological argument. Section III provides a valid reconstruction of Anselm's Proslogion III ontological argument. This post comments on section I only. I didn't discuss Tichý in my otherwise rather thorough book on existence, so this post is yet another postscript to A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

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Milton Munitz on Boundless Existence, Cosmic Spirituality, and the Meaning of Life

The last book Milton K Munitz published before his death in 1995 is entitled Does Life Have a Meaning? (Prometheus, 1993). It is a fitting capstone to his distinguished career and exemplifies the traits for which I admire him: he is clear and precise like a good analytic philosopher, but he evinces the spiritual depth conspicuous by its absence in most analysts. Philosophy for him was not a mere academic game: he grappled with ultimates. Herewith, some notes toward a summary and critique of Munitz's position on the meaning-of-life question. I will also draw upon his penultimate book, The Question of Reality (Princeton 1990), as well as Existence and Logic (NYU Press, 1974) and The Mystery of Existence (NYU Press, 1974). These titles will be abbreviated by 'LM,' ' QR,' 'EL,' and 'ME,' respectively. Words and phrases enclosed in double quotation marks are quotations from Munitz; otherwise I use single 'quotation' marks.

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