Existence – Page 8 – Maverick Philosopher

Peter van Inwagen, “A Theory of Properties,” Exposition and Critique

This entry is a summary and critique of Peter van Inwagen's "A Theory of Properties," an article which first appeared in 2004 and now appears as Chapter 8 of his Existence: Essays in Ontology (Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 153-182.) Andrew Bailey has made it available on-line. (Thanks Andrew!) I will be quoting from the Existence volume. I will also be drawing upon material from other articles in this collection. This post is a warm-up for a review of the book by me commissioned by a European journal. The review wants completing by the end of February. Perhaps you can help me. Comments are enabled for those who know this subject.

Exposition

1. The Abstract and the Concrete.

Platonism is "the thesis that there are abstract objects." (153) Van Inwagen uses 'object' synonomously with 'thing,' 'item,' and 'entity.' (156) Everything is an object, which is to say: everything exists. Thus there are no nonexistent objects, pace Meinong. There are two categories of object, the abstract and the concrete. These categories are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Thus for any x, x is either abstract or concrete, but not both, and not neither. Van Inwagen is a bit coy when it comes to telling us what 'abstract' and concrete' mean; he prefers a roundabout way of introducing these terms. He stipulates that the terms and predicates of ordinary, scientific, and philosophical discourse can be divided into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes. The denotata of the members of these two classes of terms and predicates, if they have denotata, are concrete and abstract objects. Thus 'table,' 'God,' and 'intelligent Martian,' if they pick out anything, pick out concreta, while 'number,' 'the lion,' (as in 'The lion is of the genus Felis') and 'sentence' (as in 'The same sentence can express different propositions in different contexts'), pick out abstracta. (154) (See footnote * below)

Van Inwagen holds that platonism is to be avoided if at all possible. On platonism, there are abstract objects. This characteristic thesis does not entail, but it is consistent with, the proposition that there are also concrete objects. Van Inwagen is a platonist who accepts both abstract and concrete objects but thinks we would be better of if we could avoid commitment to abstract objects. Why? Well, apart from considerations of parsimony, the difference between members of the two categories is abysmal (my word): "the differences between God and this pen pale into insignificance when they are compared with the differences between this pen and the number 4 . . . ." (156) Such a radical difference is puzzling. So it would be preferable if the category of abstracta were empty. That the category of concreta cannot be empty is obvious: we know ourselves to be concreta. (157) Van Inwagen goes on to belabor the point that the things we can say about concrete things are practically endless, while little can be said about abstracta.

In short, reality, unlike ancient Gaul, "is divided into two parts . . . ." (158, emphasis added). The two parts of reality are radically disjoint. Everything is either abstract or concrete, nothing is both, and nothing is neither. Among the abstracta are instantiated properties. Instantiation or 'having' would seem to forge a connection between the disjoint realms. But the instantiation relation is "abstract and external." (206, 242) So it too resides in the realm of abstracta and hence (as it seems to me) does nothing to mitigate the radical dualism or span the abyss that yawns between reality's two parts. So if we could eke by without abstracta, that would be preferable. But we cannot manage without them, says van Inwagen. (158)

2. Why We Need Abstract Objects.

The short reason is that we need them because we need properties, and properties are one sort of abstract object, along with propositions and "proper relations." (240) A proper relation is a relation whose adicity is two or more; van Inwagen thinks of properties as one-place relations and propositions as zero-place relations. Every abstract object is a relation (a relation-in-intension) in the broad or improper sense, and everything else is a substance, a concrete object. (239)

But why do we need properties? We need properties because things have common features. The class of humans, for example, has something in common. This appears to be an existential claim: there is something, humanity, that the members of this class share. Platonists take the appearance at face value while nominalists maintain that the appearance is a mere appearance such that in reality there are no properties. How do we decide the issue that divides the platonists and the nominalists? Here van Inwagen is referring to what he calls "austere" nominalists, the nominalists more standardly called extreme: those who deny that there are properties at all. There are also the nominalists van Inwagen calls "luxuriant" nominalists, the ones more standardly called moderate: those who admit the existence of tropes or individual accidents or particularized properties. (203, 203 fn 5) The extreme nominalist denies that there are properties at all — a lunatic view if I may inject my opinion — while the moderate nominalists admit properties but deny that they are universals. Platonists are not austere nominalists because they accept properties; they are not luxuriant nominalists because they accept universals.

3. Van Inwagen's Method.

The method derives from Quine. We start with the beliefs we already have, couched in the sentences we already accept. We then see if these sentences commit us to properties. We do this by translating these sentences into "the canonical language of quantification." (160) If we need to quantify over properties for the sentences we accept as true to count as true, then we are ontologically committed to the existence of properties. If, on the other hand, we can 'paraphrase away' the apparent reference to properties in the sentences we accept that appear to refer to properties, then the ontological commitment is merely apparent.

Van Inwagen's main idea here is that our discourse commits us to quantification over properties, and thus to the existence of properties. We deduce the existence of properties from certain sentences we accept. The argument is not epistemological: it does not seek to provide evidence for the existence of properties. Nor is it transcendental, or an inference to the best explanation. (167) The operative methodological principle, if there is one, is only this: "if one does not believe that things of a certain sort exist, one shouldn't say anything that demonstrably implies that things of that sort exist." (167)

Example. We accept 'Spiders share some of the anatomical features of insects.' (159) This says nothing different from 'There are anatomical features that insects have and spiders also have.' This then is translated into canonical English. I will spare you the rigmarole. The upshot is that there are anatomical features. Hence there are properties.

The most promising way of rebutting platonism so derived is by finding a paraphrase of the original sentence that says the same thing but does not even seem to commit its acceptor to properties. (The nominalists would of course have to do this for every sentence proposed by platonists that supposedly commits its users to abstracta.) Van Inwagen, predictably, argues against the paraphrastic way out. Nominalist paraphrases are not to be had. (164-167)

4. Van Inwagen's Theory of Properties.

Given that there are properties, what are they like? What are the properties of properties? To specify them is the task of a theory of properties. What follows is my list, not his, but gleaned from what he writes. Properties are

a. abstract objects, as we have already seen. As abstract, properties are non-spatiotemporal and causally inert. (207) Better: abstract objects are categorially such as to be neither causally active nor causally passive.

b. universals, as we have already gleaned, with the exception of haecceities such as the property of being identical to Plantinga. (180) Van Inwagen has no truck with tropes. (241) See my Peter van Inwagen's Trouble with Tropes.

c. the entities that play the property role. And what role would that be? This is the role "thing that can be said of something." It is a special case of the role "thing that can be said." (175) Properties are things that can be said of or about something. Propositions are things that can be said, period, or full stop.

d. unsaturated assertibles. Things that can be said are assertibles. They are either unsaturated, in which case they are properties, or saturated, in which case they are propositions.

e. necessary beings. (207)

f. not necessarily instantiated. Many properties exist uninstantiated.

g. not all of them instantiable. Some unsaturated assertibles are necessarily uninstantiated, e.g., what is said of x if one says 'x is both round and square.'

h. such that the usual logical operations apply to them. (176) Given any two assertibles, whether saturated or unsaturated, there is 'automatically' their conjunction and their disjunction. Given any one assertible, there is 'automatically' its negation.

i. abundant, not sparse. There is a property corresponding to almost every one-place open sentence with a precise meaning. The 'almost' alludes to a variant of Russell's paradox that van Inwagen is fully aware of but that cannot be discussed here. (243) Thus, contra David Armstrong, it is not the task of what the latter calls "total [empirical] science" to determine what properties there are. Perhaps we could say that properties for van Inwagen are logical fallout from one-place predicates. (My phrase) But since properties are necessary beings, there are all the properties there might have been; hence they 'outrun' actual one-place predicates. (My way of putting it.)

j. not parts or constituents in any sense of the concrete things that have them. Indeed, it makes no sense to say that an assertible is a part of a concrete object. And although properties or unsaturated assertibles are universals, it makes no sense that such an item is 'wholly present' in concrete objects. (178) Concrete things are 'blobs' in David Armstrong's sense. They lack ontological structure. "Their only constituents are their parts, their parts in the strict and mereological sense." (243)

k. not more basic ontologically than the things whose properties they are. A concrete thing is not a bundle or cluster of properties. The very suggestion is senseless on van Inwagen's scheme. A property is an unsaturated assertible. It is very much like a Fregean (objective) concept or Begriff, even though van Inwagen does not say this in so many words. (But his talk of unsaturatedness points us back to Frege.) Clearly it would be senseless to think of a dog as a bundle of Fregean concepts. That which can be truly said of a thing like a dog, that it is furry, for example, is no part of the critter. (178-79)

I should point out that while talk of saturated and unsaturated assertibles conjures the shade of Frege, van Inwagen has no truck with Frege's concept-object dichotomy according to which no concept is an object, no object is a concept, and the concept horse is not a concept. You could say, and I mean no disrespect, that he 'peters out' with respect to this dichotomy: "I do not understand the concept-object distinction. The objects I call properties are just that: objects." (206, fn 11)

l. are not objects of sensation. (179) To put it paradoxically, and this is my formulation, not van Inwagen's, such perceptual properties as being blue and being oval in shape are not perceptible properties. One can see that a coffee cup is blue, but one cannot literally see the blueness of the coffee cup.

Critique

My readers will know that almost everything (of a substantive and controversial nature) that van Inwagen maintains, I reject and for reasons that strike me as good. Ain't philosophy grand?

1. Perceivability

I'll begin the critique with the last point. "We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties." (179) If van Inwagen can 'peter out,' so can I: I honestly don't know what to make of the second clause of the quoted sentence. I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light. Van Inwagen's claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue. Here I balk. If I don't see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I see (literally see, with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) that the cup is blue?

'That it is blue' is a thing that can be said of the cup, and said with truth. This thing that can be said is an unsaturated assertible, a property in van Inwagen's sense. Van Inwagen is telling us that it cannot be seen. 'That the cup is blue' is a thing that can be said, full stop. It is a saturated assertible, a proposition, and a true one at that. Both assertibles are abstract objects. Both are invisible, and not because of any limitation in my visual power or in human visual power in general, but because abstract objects cannot be terms of causal relations, and perception involves causation. Both types of assertible are categorially disbarred from visibility. But if both the property and the proposition are invisible, then how can van Inwagen say that "we see that certain things have certain properties"? What am I missing?

How can he say that we don't see the property but we do see the proposition? Both are abstract and invisible. How is it that we can see the second but not the first? Either we see both or we see neither. If van Inwagen says that we don't see the proposition, then what do we see when we see that the cup is blue? A colorless cup? A cup that is blue but is blue in a way different from the way the cup is blue by instantiatiating the abstract unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is blue'? But then one has duplicated at the level of abstracta the property that one sees at the concrete cup. If there is blueness at the cup and abstract blueness in Plato's heaven, why do we need the latter? Just what is going on here?

To van Inwagen's view one could reasonably oppose the following view. I see the cup (obviously!) and I see blueness at the cup (obviously!) I don't see a colorless cup. To deny the three foregoing sentences would be to deny what is phenomenologically given. What I don't literally see, however, is that the cup is blue. (Thus I don't literally see what van Inwagen says we literally see.) For to see that the cup is blue is to see the instantiation of blueness by the cup. And I don't see that. The correlate of the 'is' in 'The cup is blue' is not an object of sensation. If you think it is, tell me how I can single it out, how I can isolate it. Where in the visual field is it? The blueness is spread out over the visible surfaces of the cup. The cup is singled out as a particular thing on the desk, next to the cat, beneath the lamp, etc. Now where is the instantiation relation? Point it out to me! You won't be able to do it. I see the cup, and I see blue/blueness where the cup is. I don't see the cup's BEING blue.

It is also hard to understand how van Inwagen, on his own assumptions, can maintain that we see that certain things have certain properties. Suppose I see that Max, a cat of my acquaintance, is black. Do I see a proposition? Not on van Inwagen's understanding of 'proposition.' His propositions are Fregean, not Russellian: they are not resident in the physical world. Do I see a proposition-like entity such as an Armstrongian state of affairs? Again, no. What do I see?

Van Inwagen claims that properties are not objects of sensation; no properties are, not even perceptual properties. I should think that some properties are objects of sensation, or better, of perception: I perceive blueness at the cup by sight; I perceive smoothness and hardness and heat at the cup by touch. If so, then (some) properties are not abstract objects residing in a domain unto themselves.

Van Inwagen's view appears to have the absurd consequence that things like coffee cups are colorless. For if colors are properties (179) and properties are abstract objects, and abstract objects are colorless (as they obviously are), then colors are colorless, and whiteness is not white and blueness is not blue. Van Inwagen bites the bullet and accepts the consequence. But we can easily run the argument in reverse: Blueness is blue; colors are properties; abstract objects are colorless; ergo, perceptual properties are not abstract objects. They are either tropes or else universals wholly present in the things that have them. Van Inwagen, a 'relation ontologist' cannot of course allow this move into 'constituent ontology.'

There is a long footnote on p. 242 that may amount to a response to something like my objection. In the main text, van Inwagen speaks of "such properties as are presented to our senses as belonging to the objects we sense . . . ." How does this square with the claim on p. 179 that properties are not objects of sensation? Can a property such as blueness be presented to our senses without being an object of sensation? Apparently yes, "In a noncausal sense of 'presented.'" (243, fn 3)

How does this solve the problem? It is phenomenologically evident that (a definite shade of) blue appears to my senses when I stare at my blue coffee cup. Now if this blueness is an abstract object as van Inwagen claims then it cannot be presented to my senses any more than it can be something with which I causally interact.

2. But Is This Ontology?

Why does van Inwagen think he is doing ontology at all? It looks more like semantics or philosophical logic or philosophy of language. I say this because van Inwagen's assertibles are very much like Fregean senses. They are intensional items. (As we noted, he reduces all his assertibles to relations-in-intension.) Taking his cue from Quine, he seeks an answer to the question, What is there? He wants an inventory, by category, of what there is. He wants to know, for example, whether in addition to concrete things there are also properties, as if properties could exist in sublime disconnection from concrete things in a separate sphere alongside this sublunary sphere. That no property is an object of sensation is just logical fallout from van Inwagen's decision to install them in Plato's heaven; but then their connection to things here below in space and time become unintelligible. It does no good, in alleviation of this unintelligibility, to say that abstract blueness — the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is blue' — is instantiated by my blue cup. For instantiation is just another abstract object, a dyadic external relation, itself ensconced in Plato's heaven.

But not only the formulation of the question but also the method of attack come from Quine. Van Inwagen thinks he can answer what he and Quine idiosyncratically call the ontological question by examining the ontological commitments of our discourse. Starting with sentences we accept as true, he looks to see what these sentences entail as regards the types of entity there are when the sentences are properly regimented in accordance with the structures of modern predicate logic with identity.

The starting point is not things in their mind- and language-independent being, but beliefs we already have and sentences we already accept. The approach is oblique, not direct; subjective, not objective. Now to accept a sentence is to accept it as true; but a sentence accepted as true need not be true. Note also that if one sentence entails another, both can be false. So if sentences accepted as true entail the existence of properties in van Inwagen's sense, according to which properies are unsaturated assertibles, it is logically possible that there be no properties in reality. The following is not a contradiction: The sentences we accept as true entail that there are properties & There are no properties. For it may be — it is narrowly-logically possible that – the sentences we accept as true that entail that there are properties are all of them false. Not likely, of course, and there may be some retorsive argument against this possibility. But it cannot be ruled out by logic alone.

So there is something fishy about the whole method of 'ontological' commitment. One would have thought that ontology is concerned with the Being of beings, not with the presuppositions of sentences accepted as true by us. To put it vaguely, there is something 'transcendental' (in the Kantina sense) and 'subjective' and 'modern' about van Inwagen's Quinean method that unsuits it for for something that deserves to be called ontology.

This is connected with the point that van Inwagen's assertibles, saturated and unsaturated, are hard to distinguish from Fregean senses. They are denizens of Frege's Third Reich or Third World if you will, not his First Reich, the realm of primary reference. To illustrate: Venus is an item in the First World, while the senses of 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star' and the sense of the sentence 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' are three items all in the Third World. Senses, however, are logico-semantic items: their job is to mediate reference. Van Inwagen is arguably just hypostatizing items that are needed for us to secure reference — whether thinking reference or linguistic reference — to things that truly exist extramentally and extralinguistically.

Again, this is vague and sketchy. But good enough for a weblog entry! Is think my Czech scholastic friends will know what I am driving at.

3. Van Inwagen's Ostrich Realism and Commitment to Bare Particulars

Van Inwagen rejects both extreme and moderate nominalism. So he can't possibly be an ostrich nominalist. He is, however, as he himself appreciates, an ostrich realist or ostrich platonist. (214-15)

Suppose Max is black. What explains the predicate's being true of Max? According to the ostrich nominalist, nothing does. It is just true of him. There is nothing in or about Max that serves as the ontological ground of the correctness of his satisfying the predicate. Now 'F' is true of a iff 'a is F' is true. So we may also ask: what is the ontological ground of the truth of 'Max is black'? The ostrich reply will be: nothing. The sentence is just true. There is no need for a truth-maker.

The ostrich realist/platonist says something very similar except that in place of predicates he puts abstract properties, and in place of sentences he puts abstract propositions. In virtue of what does Max instantiate blackness? In virtue of nothing. He just instantiates it. Nothing explains why the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'x is black' is instantiated by Max. Nothing explains it because there is nothing to explain. And nothing explains why the saturated assertible expressed by 'Max is black' is true. Thus there is nothing concrete here below that could be called a state of affairs in anything like Armstrong's sense. There is in the realm of concreta no such item as Max-instantiating-blackness, or the concrete fact of Max's being black.

Here below there is just Max, and up yonder in a topos ouranos are 'his' properties (the abstract unsaturated assertibles that he, but not solely, instantiates). But then Max is a bare particular in one sense of this phrase, though not in Gustav Bergmann's exact sense of the phrase. (Bergmann is a constituent ontologist.) In what sense, then?

A bare particular is not a particular that has no properties in any sense of 'having properties'; a bare particular is a particular that has properties, but has them in a certain way: by being externally related to them. Thus bare particulars, unlike Aristotelean substances, have neither natures nor essences. Indeed, the best way to understand what a bare particular is is by contrast with the primary substances of Aristotle. These concrete individuals have natures by being (identically) natures: they are not externally related to natures that exist serenely and necessarily in Plato's heaven.

In this sense, van Inwagen's concrete things are bare particulars. There are no properties 'in' or 'at' Max; there are no properties where he is and when he is. What's more, on van Inwagen's scheme — one he shares with Chisholm, Plantinga, et al. — Max can only be externally related to his properties. This has the consequence that all of Max's properties are accidental. For if x, y are externally related, then x can exist without y and y can exist without x. So Max can exist without being feline just as he can exist without being asleep.

Could Max have been a poached egg? It is narrowly-logically possible. For if he has all of his properties externally, then he has all of his properties accidentally. Even if it is necessary that he have some set of properties or other, there is no necessity that he have any particular set. If properties are externally related to particulars, then any particular can have any set of properties so long as it has some set or other.

If you deny that concrete things are bare in the sense I have explained, then you seem to be committed to saying that there are two sorts of properties, PvI-properties in Plato's heaven and 'sublunary' properties at the particulars here below. But then I will ask two questions. First, what is the point of introducing PvI-properties if they merely duplicate at the abstract intensional level the 'real' properties in the sublunary sphere? Second, what justifies calling PvI-properties properties given that you still are going to need 'sublunary' properties to avoid saying that van Inwagen's concreta are bare particulars?

4. Existence

One can say of a thing that it might not have existed. For example, I can say this of myself. If so, it must be possible to say of a thing that it exists. For example, it must be possible for me to say of myself that I exist. As van Inwagen remarks, "it is hard to see how there could be such an assertible as 'that it might not have existed' if there were no such assertible as 'that it exists.'" (180) Existence, then, is a property, says van Inwagen, for properties are unsaturated assertibles, and 'that it exists' is an assertible.

There are many problems with the notion that existence is a first-level property on a van Inwagen-type construal of properties. Instantiation for van Inwagen is a full-fledged dyadic relation. (It is not a non-relational tie or Bergmannian nexus). He further characterizes it as abstract and external as we have seen. Now it is perfectly obvious to me that the very existence of Socrates cannot consist in his instantiation of any PvI-type property, let alone the putative property, existence. For given the externality of the instantiation relation, both Socrates and the putative property must 'already' exist for said relation to hold between them. So one moves in an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one tries to account for existence in this way.

This circularity objection which I have developed in painful detail elsewhere will, I expect, leave van Inwagen stone cold. One reason is that he sees no role for explanation in metaphysics whereas I think that metaphysics without explanation is not metaphysics at all in any serious sense. This is large topic that cannot be addressed here.

I'll mention one other problem for van Inwagen. I'll put it very briefly since this entry is already too long. Van Inwagen is a Fregean about existence; but on a Fregean view existence cannot be a first-level property. For Frege, 'x exists' where 'x' ranges over individuals is a senseless open sentence or predicate. There is no unsaturated assertible corresponding to it. I have a number of posts on van Inwagen and existence. Here is one. My latest published article on existence is "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novak and Novotny, eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, 45-75.

5. Haecceities

Among the properties, van Inwagen counts haecceities. They are of course abstract objects like all properties. But they are not universals because, while they are instantiable, they are not multiply instantiable. The property of being identical with Alvin Plantinga is an example van Inwagen gives. (180) This property, if instantiated, is instantiated by Plantinga alone in the actual world and by nothing distinct from Plantinga in any possible world. Plantingitas — to give it a name — somehow involves Plantinga himself, that very concrete object. For this property is supposed to capture the nonqualitative thisness of Plantinga. (Haecceitas is Latin for 'thisness.')

I submit that these haecceity properties are metaphysical monstrosities. For given that they are properties, they are necessary beings. A necessary being exists at all times in all possible worlds that have time, and in all worlds, period. Plantinga, however, does not exist in all worlds since he is a contingent being; and he doesn't exist at all times in all worlds in which he exists, subject as he is to birth and death, generation and corruption. I conclude that before Plantinga came into being there could not have been any such property as the property of being identical to Plantinga. I conclude also that in worlds in which he does not exist there is no such haecceity property. For at pre-Plantingian times and non-Plantingian worlds, there is simply nothing to give content to the unsaturated assertible expressed by 'that it is Alvin Plantinga.' (Alvin Plantingas hung out at those times and in those worlds, but not our Alvin Plantinga.) Plantinga himself enters essentially into the very content of his haecceity property.

But this is absurd because PvI-properties are merely intensional entities. No such entity can have a concrete, flesh and blood man as a constituent. Just as a PvI-property cannot be a constituent of a concretum such as Plantinga, Plantinga cannot be a constituent in any sense of 'constituent' of a PvI-property.

But if Plantinga hadn't existed, might it nonetheless have been true that he might have existed? (180). Van Inwagen says yes and introduces haecceities. Plantingitas exists in every world; it is just that it is instantiated only in some. I say no, precisely because I take haecceities to be metaphysical monstrosities.

Conclusion

I am not out to refute van Inwagen or anyone. Philosophical theories, except for some sophomoric ones, cannot be refuted. At most I am out to neutralize van Inwagen's theory, or rather his type of theory, to explain why it is not compelling and how it is open to powerful objections, only some of which I have adduced in this entry. And of course I do not have a better theory. I incline toward constituent ontology myself, but it too is bristling with difficulties.

As I see it, the problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble.

______________________

*At this point I should like to record a misgiving. If sentences (sentence types, not tokens) are abstract objects, and abstract objects are necessary beings as van Inwagen holds (cf., e.g., p. 242), then sentences are necessary beings. But sentences are tied to contingently existing languages and cannot exist apart from them. Thus 'I am hungry' is a sentence of English while 'Ich habe Hunger' is a sentence of German, and neither sentence can exist apart from its respective language. A natural language, however, would seem to be a contingent being: German came into existence, but it might never have come into existence. Given all this, a contradiction appears to follow: Sentences are and are not necessary beings.

John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism

The Australian philosopher John Passmore (1914 – 2004) is described in his Telegraph obituary as "an Andersonian radical, swept away, though not to the point of unquestioning devotion, by his Scottish-born philosophy professor, John Anderson . . . ." The influence of Anderson on Passmore is very clear from the latter's Philosophical Reasoning (Basic Books, 1969; orig. publ. 1961). The Andersonian Chapter Three, "The Two-Worlds Argument," is the cynosure of my current interest, in particular, the distinction Passmore makes between what he calls entity-monism and what he calls existence-monism. (Anderson, as far as I know does not use these terms and, as far as I know, they have found no resonance among the epigoni. The terms are not found in the index of A. J. Baker's Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986. And Quentin Gibson, The Existence Principle, Kluwer, 1998, p. 14, dismisses 'existence-monism' as a misleading label for Anderson's view.)

In this entry I will present the distinction and then comment critically upon it.

Passmore tells us that

Entity-monism is the doctrine that 'ultimately' there is only one real entity. What we normally regard as distinct things — whether they be chairs, or musical compositions, or human being — are, all of them, appearances of this one entity. (38)

[. . .]

Existence-monism is difficult to define in general terms. But we might put it thus: when we say that something exists, or that things of a certain kind exist, this exist or exists has an invariant meaning whatever the 'something' or the 'kind' may be, i.e. there are not sorts, or levels, or orders of existence. More accurately, what is asserted by 'X exists' can always be asserted by a proposition which contains an 'is' which has, in this sense, an invariant meaning. Existence-monism, unlike entity-monism, does admit of varieties. Philosophers might say, and have said, that to exist is to be perceived, or to be in process, or to be spatiotemporal, or to be a possible subject for physical investigation, or to be a thing with properties, and do on. (39, bolding added)

I have two criticisms.

1. There is first of all a slide from a semantic thesis, a thesis about meaning, to an ontological thesis, a thesis about being. Passmore conflates the semantic claim that 'exists' and cognates have an invariant meaning or sense with the ontological claim that there are no sorts or kinds or levels or orders or modes or ways of being/existence. But as I see it, one can consistently maintain both that (i) 'exists' and cognates is univocal in sense across all its uses and that (ii) there are different modes of existence. For this reason, (i) and (ii) are distinct theses.

Let me give a quick illustration. Carpets exist and bulges in carpets exist. In the sentence immediately preceding 'exist' is invariant in sense across both occurrences (both tokenings). And yet it makes good sense to say that carpets and bulges exist in different ways. A carpet can exist with or without a bulge; but no carpet bulge can exist without a carpet whose bulge it is. If a substance is defined as an entity logically capable of independent existence, then a carpet is a substance. But surely no bulge in a carpet is a substance. For no carpet bulge is logically capable of independent existence. It is rather an accident of the carpet as substance. Carpet and bulge exist in different ways: the carpet exists in itself; the bulge in another. Or: the carpet exists independently; the bulge dependently. To think of carpet and bulge as Humean "distinct existences" strains credulity. What we have here are not two Hume-distinct items that stand in a causal relation. Nor do they stand in a logical relation if such relationsd are defined over propositions. What we have here is irreducible existential dependence: the bulge depends in its existence upon the carpet, but not vice versa. To make sense of this example we need to speak of two different modes of existence.

Suppose you accept this. Surely the acceptance is logically consistent with saying that both carpets and bulges exist in the same sense of 'exist.' And what sense is that? It is the sense expressed by the so-called existential quantifier. A better name for it is 'particular quantifier.' In 'Some items are carpets' and 'Some items are bulges,' the predicate 'Some items are ___' has the same sense. And yet carpets and bulges, like faces and smiles, exist in different ways. Or at least one can with no breach of logical consistency maintain this ontological thesis while also holding to the semantic univocity of 'exists' and cognates. Just don't confuse the ontological with the semantic. Don't confuse ways of existing with senses of 'exists.'

Well, I hope you followed that. Now on to the second criticism where the going gets tougher.

2. Passmore clearly sees that one could not sensibly maintain that to be = to be water. "Nobody could now win credence who asserted that to be is to be a quantity of water, however plausible that doctrine might have looked to Thales." (39) And the reason would not be that we now know that water is not an element, or that there are stuffs other than water. The reason lies deeper. If to exist is to be water, then 'Water exists' would be equivalent to the tautology 'Water is water,' when it obviously isn't.

It seems clear that there is no kind of thing or kind of stuff that we could invoke to give descriptive content to existence in general. There is no K such that it will come out true that to be = to be a K or a quantity of K. No one will maintain that to be is to be a lump of coal or to be a cat or to be a quantity of hydrogen. There are two problems here. First, if to be = to be a K, then only Ks could exist. If to be is to be a cat, then only cats could exist: everything would be a cat. Not good! Second, even if there is some K that everything is, being K and existing are not the same. For to say that Ks exist is not to say that Ks are Ks.

What about: to be is to be spatiotemporal? One problem with this naturalist proposal is that it is circular. A thing cannot be spatiotemporal unless it exists in space-time. But then the proposal comes to this: for x to exist is for x to be spatiotemporal and exist. This point about circularity is equivalent to the second point I just made. To say of a spatiotemporal thing that exists is not to say that it is spatiotemporal. To give it a modal twist: it is necessary that spatiotemporal items be spatiotemporal, but contingent that any exist.

So it comes as a surprise when Passmore says, with respect to "To be is to have a place in Space-Time," that "this sort of difficulty does not arise," namely the difficulty in the water example. Why not? Because, "Space-Time is not the sort of thing to which existence is ascribed or which is used to distinguish one thing from another." (39) But surely we do ascribe existence to spacetime. And it is question-begging to say that spatiotemporality does not distinguish one thing from another: it distinguishes concrete things from abstract things. Granted, it does not distinguish items in space time, but neither does being a cat distinguish cats from one another.

So is seems to me that 'To be is to be water' and 'To be is to be spatiotemporal' are on a par. The only difference is that 'water' picks out a natural stuff-kind while 'spatiotemporal pickls out a mode of being.

Pace Anderson and Passmore, being cannot be identified with being spatiotemporal.

What then becomes of existence-monism? Existence-monism amounts to the claim that there is a single way of being or existence as opposed to two or more ways. Thus existence-monism is taken by Andersonians to rule out Plato's two-world theory according to which Forms exist atemporally while the phenomenal particulars that participate in them exist in a temporal way. But as I pointed out in my first criticism, one cannot validly infer a single way of being from a single use of 'exists.' Univocity at the level of sense doesn't entail modal sngleness at the level of being.

What reason, then, do we have to think that there is a single way of being? Well, you might say that it is evident to the senses that there are things in space and time. Fine, but that doesn't show that there is a way of being that is their way of being, even with the addition of the premise that everything that exists exists in space and time. That is, it does not show that we must distinguish between nature, existence, and mode of existence. Why can't we eke by with just nature and existence?

Besides, if there is exactly one way of being, and spatiotemporal items, which we know to exist, exist in that way, does it not follow that to be = to be spatiotemporal, that existence reduces to spatiotemporality? But we saw above under #2 that that can't be right: there is no F such that to exist = to be F. (Wel, there is one case, but it is a very specila one idneed!)

I suspect that we cannot speak of a way of being at all unless we speak of two or more ways of being. For what could motivate the tripartite distinction among nature, existence, and mode, if not examples like that of the carpet and the bulge where it is highly plausible to say that the items distinguished exist in diferent ways? I am assuming that one has not made the mistake exposed in #1 above, namely, the mistake of confusing senses and modes and sliding illicitly from the univocity of 'exists' to the singleness of mode of being.

There are three positions that want distinguishing:

Existence-Monism: There is exactly one mode of being.

Existence-Pluralism: There are two or more modes of being.

Existence-Nihilism: There are no modes of being.

The real debate is between the pluralists and the nihilists. The monist position of the Andersonians is the result of confusion. Or at least that is the way it looks at the moment. But we press on.

Arguing with Kripke over Existence

I now have in my hands Saul Kripke's Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, Oxford UP, 2013. The lectures were given over forty years ago in the fall of 1973. Why did you starve us for 40 years, Saul? It is not as if you did much in those years to improve the lectures beyond adding some footnotes . . . .

I for one find this 'new' book more interesting than Naming and Necessity because of its fuller treatment of existence, the juiciest, hairiest, and deepest of philosophical topics.

But I hit a snag on p. 6.

First Criticism

On this page Kripke accurately explains the Frege-Russell view of existence, a view which in the terminology of Frege can be put by saying that existence is not a first-level but a second-level concept. What 'exist(s)' expresses is a property of properties or concepts, the property of being instantiated. 'Tigers exists' says that the concept tiger has instances; 'Round squares do not exist' says that the concept round square does not have instances. But what does 'Tony exists' say? Nothing meaningful! Kripke:

To deny that it [existence] is a first-level concept is to deny that there is a meaningful existence predicate that can apply to objects or particulars. One cannot, according to Frege and Russell, say of an object that it exists or not because, so they argued, everything exists: how can one then divide up the objects in the world into those which exist and those which don't? (6)

This exposition of the 'Fressellian' view conflates two different reasons for thinking that existence is second-level only. One reason is that first-level predications of existence involve a category mistake. Russell famously claimed that a first-level predication of existence is senseless in the way that a first-level predication of numerousness is senseless. To give my own example, 'Terrorists are numerous' is meaningful and true; 'Ahmed the suicide bomber is numerous' is meaningless and (presumably) without truth-value. (After he detonates himself he still won't be numerous, only his body parts will!)

The first reason that first-level predications of existence are meaningless is because existence is the property of being instantiated and no "object or particular" can be meaningfully said to be instantiated. But note that if this is right, then it makes no sense to say that everything exists. For among everything are "objects or particulars" and they cannot be meaningfully said to exist. So the reason cited in the Kripke passage above cannot be a valid reason for the view that existence is not a first-level but is instead the second-level concept of instantiation. The reason Kripke gives presupposes that existence is first-level!

I was disappointed to see that Kripke glides right past this difficulty. The difficulty is that Kripke and Russell conflate two different reasons for the view that existence is second-level only. The one reason is that since existence is instantiation, it is meaningless to say of an individual (an "object or particular") that it is instantiated. The other reason is that everything exists. But again, if everything exists, then individuals exist whence it follows that it cannot be meaningless to predicate existence of individuals.

Another way of looking at the matter is that there are two senses of 'meaningless' in play and they are being confused. In the first sense, a meaningless predication is one that involves a category mistake. Thus 'Socrates is numerous' is meaningless in this sense as is 'Some triangles are anorexic.' In the second sense a meaningless predication is one that is true but would be pointless to make. If everything exists, then one might think that there is no point in saying of any particular thing that it exists. There is a failure of contrast. But since not everyone is a philosopher, there would be some point in saying of Anna-Sofia that she is a philosopher. (If, however, one were at a convention all of whose attendees were known to be philosophers, there would be no point in my introducing you to Anna-Sofia by saying 'Anna-Sofia is a philosopher.' Nonetheless what I would be saying would be true and free of category-error.)

We must distinguish between the following two claims:

A. 'Socrates exists' is meaningless because Socrates is not of the right category either to exist or not exist: Socrates is an individual, not a concept or property or propositional function.

and

B. 'Socrates exists' is meaningless because everything exists and thus to say of any particular thing that it exists is pointless.

Much of what it is pointless to say is meaningful, and true to boot. If I were to walk up to a woman on the street and exclaim, 'I exist,' and she didn't shrink back in horror, she might say 'True, but so what? Everything exists.' In the shallows of everyday life we don't go around saying 'I exist' and 'Things exist.' But 'I exist' and 'Things exist' are deep truths and the beginnings of the philosopher's wisdom. (For the religionist, however, the initium sapientiae is timor Domini.)

My thesis contra Kripke is this. One cannot give as a reason for the Frege-Russell doctrine, according to which first-level predications of existence are meaningless in the sense of involving category error, the proposition that everything exists and that predicating existence of any particular thing is meaningless in the sense of pointless. But that is what Kripke does in the passage quoted, which is why I call it confused. That everything exists is, pace Meinong, an exceedingly plausible proposition to maintain. But if so, then individuals exist and it must be possible to say — meaningfully in the first sense — of any given individual that it exists.

In short, 'Everything exists' is not a good reason to maintain that existence cannot be meaningfully — in the first sense — predicated of individuals.

Second Criticism

Later in the Locke Lectures, at p. 37 f., Kripke points out that the Frege-Russell logical apparatus seems to allow for a definition of 'x exists' in terms of

1. (Ǝy)(x = y).

Kripke then remarks that "it is hard for me to see that they [Frege and Russell] can consistently maintain that existence is only a second-level concept (in the Fregean terminology) and does not apply to indivduals." (37) Kripke's point is that on the above definition 'exists' is an admissible first-level predicate contra the official 'Fressellian' doctrine according to which 'exists' is never an admissible first-level predicate.

Here too I think Kripke is missing something. What he misses is that existence defined in terms of (1) is not genuine existence, the existence that admits of a contrast with nonexistence, and that genuine existence is what Frege and Russell were trying to explicate, even though they failed quite miserably in my humble opinion.

I say that our logical luminaries, Frege and Russell, can consistently maintain that existence is exclusively second-level because defining 'x exists' in terms of (1), though extensionally correct, does not capture what it is for any existing item to exist. For all it says is that a thing that 'already' (in the logical not temporal sense) exists is identical to something. That's not exactly news. Given that Socrates exists, of course he is identical to something, namely, Socrates! That's utterly trivial. Frege and Russell were trying to get at something non-trivial when they kicked existence upstairs to the second level of concepts and propositional functions.

What were they trying to get at? They were trying to get at what one typically means when one either affirms or denies the existence of an individual that is not given in sense perception but for which one has a concept. God, for example. When the theist affirms the existence of God he does not say of something whose existence he presupposes that it is identical to something. Rather, he affirms that the attributes constitutive of deity are jointly exemplified when it is at least epistemically possible that they not be jointly exemplified. To put it in Fregean jargon, the theist affirms that the marks (Merkmalen) of the concept (Begriff) God are instantiated by one and the same individual when it is at least epistemically possible that the marks not be jointly instantiated. Quite simply, the theist affirms that the concept God has an instance. He does not affirm that God has a property (Eigenschaft). He speaks not of God, but of the concept God. The atheist's denial is then the denial that the divine attributes are jointly exemplified. He denies that the concept God has an instance. He does not deny that God lacks the property (Eigenschaft) of existence. There is no such property. And not because everything has it, but because (he thinks) the existence/nonexistence contrast would be inexplicable if everything had it. Existence that contrasts with nonexistence is instantiation. There is no existence/nonexistence contrast at the level of individuals, but there is such a contrast at the level of concepts with existence construed as instantiation and nonexistence construed as non-instantiation.

Or suppose I wonder at my sheer existence, my being 'here,' when as seems obvious I might never have been 'here,' might never have existed at all. So wondering, I am not wondering at my identity with something but at that which makes it possible for me to be identical to something, namely, the fact that I exist. If I exist, then necessarily I am identical to something, namely, myself. But what is it for me to exist when it is at least epistemically possible that I not exist? (I would say that it is really and not merely epistemically possible that I not exist, that I am really and not merely epistemically a contingent being; though how I know this is an interesting question in modal epistemology or rather the epistemology of modal knowledge/belief.) On the Frege-Russell approach, one is driven to posit some sort of individual concept or haecceity property the instantiation of which is the existence of me. But that leads to terrible difficulties (covered in mind-numbing detail in my existence book) that I can't rehearse now.

Frege and Russell were trying to explain how there can be a meaningful contrast between existence and nonexistence on the assumption that everything exists. (Given that everything exists, one cannot say that some items have the property of existence and some items do not. As Kripke puts it, p. 37, "Things are not of two kinds, existers and nonexisters.") Our logical grandpappies thought that to capture the contrast they had to kick existence upstairs to the second level, the level of concepts, properties, propositional functions and the like, and then reinterpret existence as instantiation or, in Russell's jargon, as a propositional functions' being "sometimes true."

My thesis has long been that this leads to disaster. See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.

By making this ascensive move they removed existence from individuals and at the same time removed from individuals the distinction of essence and existence, Sosein and Sein, essentia and esse, pick your terminology. Having situated the existence/nonexistence contrast at the second level, no contrast remains at the first level, the level of individuals or particulars. Yet these individual must exist if they are to instantiate properties. But then either (i) each individual necessarily exists — which is absurd — or (ii) genuine existence cannot be noncircularly defined in terms of (1), in terms of identity-with-something-or-other.

Let's explore this a bit.

Kripke points out that 'Everything exists,' i.e. 'Everything is identical to something,' i.e.

2. (x)(Ǝy)(x = y)

is a theorem of quantification theory and thus necessarily true. (p. 37) But from

3. □(x)(Ǝy)(x = y)

one cannot validly infer

4. (x)□(Ǝy)(x = y).

That is, from 'Necessarily, everything is identical to something' one cannot validly infer 'Everything is necessarily identical to something,' i.e., 'Everything necessarily exists.'

Surely most individuals exist contingently: each of these individuals is possibly such that it does not exist. Socrates exists but is possibly nonexistent. The predicate 'possibly nonexistent' is first-level. It is true of Socrates because he is not identical to his existence (in the manner of a necessary being) but really distinct from his existence. Clearly, the possible nonexistence of Socrates — a feature he actually possesses — cannot be identified with his possible non-identity with something, namely, Socrates. Socrates is not possibly non-identical to Socrates. If existence is self-identity, then nonexistence is serlf-diversity, and possible nonexistence is possible self-diversity. But surely Socrates' possible nonexistence is not his possible self-diversity.

What this shows is that the definition of 'x exists' in terms of '(Ǝy)(x = y)' does not capture genuine existence, the existence that admits of a contrast with nonexistence. Because of this, Frege and Russell can contrary to what Kripke maintains consistently hold both that (a) existence is a second-level property and that (b) 'x exists' is definable in terms of '(Ǝy)(x = y).' They can consistently hold this because 'exists' so defined has nothing to do with genuine existence, the existence that admits of a contrast with nonexistence.

Arguing with Brightly over Ficta

Earlier I wrote that the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad:

1. There are no purely fictional items.

2. There are some purely fictional items.

The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think that each is true.

David Brightly comments:

May I offer the following resolution of the paradox? I say that 'purely fictional' does not function as a concept term. Instead, it is ambiguous between two interpretations. On the one hand, it behaves like the pseudo-concept 'inexistent'. To say that Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic is to deny that Bone exists. [BV: Biconditionality seems too strong. If N is a purely fictional F, then N doesn't exist; but if N doesn't exist, it does not follow that N is purely fictional.] The same goes whatever name and concept term we substitute for 'Bone' and 'alcoholic'. This leads us to assert

1. There are no purely fictional items.

On the other hand, I say that 'fictional and 'purely fictional' appear to be concept terms because sentences like

Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic

arise via a surface transformation of

Purely fictionally, Bone is an alcoholic

and inherit their meaning and truth value. We can understand the latter as asserting that

Some work of fiction says that Bone is an alcoholic.

We take this as true, as evidenced by the work of Hamilton, and running the transformation in reverse gets us to

Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic.

Taking 'purely fictional alcoholic' as a predicate, which it superficially resembles, by Existential Generalisation we arrive at

There is some purely fictional alcoholic,

and hence to

2. There are some purely fictional items.

and apparent contradiction with (1).

The idea of a surface transformation may well appear controversial and ad hoc. But the phenomenon occurs with other pseudo-concept terms, notably 'possible'. We have

Bone is a possible alcoholic <—> Possibly, Bone is an alcoholic
Bone is a fictional alcoholic <—> Fictionally, Bone is an alcoholic.

On the left we have 'possible' and 'fictional' which look like concept terms but cannot be consistently interpreted as such. On the right we have sentential operators which introduce an element of semantic ascent which is not apparent on the left. It's precisely because 'possible' and 'fictional' involve hidden semantic ascent that they do not work as concept terms.

Response

I am afraid I don't quite understand what David is saying here despite having read it many times. This could be stupidity on my part. But I think we do need to explore his suggestion that there is an equivocation on 'purely fictional items.' Let me begin by listing what we know, or at least reasonably believe, about purely fictional characters.

First of all, we know that George Bone never existed: that follows from his being purely fictional.

Second, we know or at least reasonably believe that Bone is a character created by its author Patrick Hamilton, a character who figures in Hamilton's 1941 novel, Hangover Square. Just as the novel was created by Hamilton, so were the characters in it. Admittedly, this is not self-evident. One might maintain that there are all the fictional characters (and novels, stories, plays, legends, myths, etc.) there might have been and that the novelist or story teller or playwright just picks some of them out of Plato's topos ouranos or Meinong's realm of Aussersein. I find this 'telescope' conception rather less reasonable than the artifact conception according to which Bone and Co. are cultural artifacts of the creative activities of Hamilton and Co. Purely fictional characters are made up, not found or discovered. It is interesting to note that fingere in Latin means to mold, shape, form, while in Italian it means to feign, pretend, dissemble. That comports well with what fiction appears to be. Of course I am not arguing from the etymology of 'fiction.' But if you have etymology on your side, then so much the better.

Now there is a certain tension between the two points I have just made. On the one hand, Bone does not exist. On the other hand, Bone is not nothing. He is an artifact of Hamilton's creativity just as much as the novel itself is in which he figures. How can he not exist but also not be nothing? If he is not nothing, then he exists.

If Bone were to exist, he would be a human person, a concrete item. But there is no such concretum. On the other hand, Bone is not nothing: he is an artifact created by Hamilton over a period of time in the late '30s to early '40s. Since Bone cannot be a concrete artifact — else Hamilton would be God – Bone is an abstract artifact. Thus we avoid contradiction. Bone the concretum does not exist while Bone the abstract artifact does. This is one theory one might propose. (Cf. Kripke, van Inwagen, Thomasson, Reicher, et al.)

Note that this solution does not require the postulation of different modes of existence/being. But it does require that one 'countenance' (as Quine would say) abstract objects (in Quine's sense of 'abstract') in addition to concrete objects. It also requires the admission that some abstract objects are contingent and have a beginning in time. The theory avoids Meinongianism but is quasi-Platonic. London Ed needs a stiff drink long about now.

Now let's bring in a third datum. We know that there is a sense in which it is true that Bone is an alcoholic and false that he is a teetotaler. How do we reconcile the truth of 'Bone is an alcoholic' with the truth of 'Bone does not exist'? There is a problem here if we assume the plausible anti-Meinongian principle that, for any x, if x is F, then x exists. (Existence is a necessary condition of property-possession.) To solve the problem we might reach for a story operator. The following dyad is consistent:

3. According to the novel, Bone is an alcoholic

4. Bone does not exist.

From (3) one cannot validily move via the anti-Meinongian principle to 'Bone exists.' But if 'Bone is an alcoholic' is elliptical for (3), then 'Bone is a purely fictional character' is elliptical for

5. According to the novel, Bone is a purely fictional character.

But (5) is false. For according to the novel, Bone is a real man.

The point I am making is that 'Bone is a purely fictional character' is an external sentence, a sentence true in reality outside of any fictional context. By contrast, 'Bone is an alcoholic' is an internal sentence: it is true in the novel but not true in reality outside the novel. If it were true outside the novel, then given the anti-Meinongian principle that nothing can have properties without existing, Bone would exist — which is false.

I think Brightly and I can agree that a purely fictional man is not a man, and that a purely fictional alcoholic is not an alcoholic. And yet Bone is at least as real as the novel of which he is the main character. After all, there is the character Bone but no character, Son of Bone. In keeping with Brightly's notion that there is an equivocation on 'purely fictional item,' we could say the following. 'Bone' in the internal sentence 'Bone is an alcoholic' doesn't refer to anything, while 'Bone' in the external sentence 'Bone is a purely fictional character' refers to an abstract object.

We can then reconcile (1) and (2) by replacing the original dyad with

1* There are no purely fictional concreta

2* There are some purely fictional abstracta.

The abstract artifact theory allows us to accommodate our three datanic or near-datanic points. The first was that Bone does not exist. We accommodate it by saying that there is no concretum, Bone. The second was that Bone is a creature of a novelist's creativity. We accommodate that by saying that what Hamilton created was the abstract artifact, Bone*, which exists. Bone does not exist, but the abstract surrogate Bone* does. The third point was that there are truths about Bone that nevertheless do not entail his existence. We can accommodate this by saying that while Bone does not exemplify such properties as being human and being an alcoholic, he encodes them. (To employ terminology from Ed Zalta.) This requires a distinction between two different ways for an item to have a property.

I do not endorse the above solution. But I would like to hear why Brightly rejects it, if he does.

A Cartesian Argument Against Meinong

The following is excerpted from my "Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory" in The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: A Collegial Evaluation, ed. Larry Lee Blackman, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, pp. 57-73, excerpt pp. 67-68.

If anything can count as an established result in philosophy, it is the soundness of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum 'argument.' Thus to the query, 'How do I know that I exist?', the Cartesian answer is that the very act of doubting that one exists proves that one indubitably exists. Now this may not amount to a proof that a substantial self, a res cogitans, exists; and this for the reason that one may doubt whether acts of thinking emanate from a metaphysical ego. But the cogito certainly does prove that something exists, even if this is only an act of thinking or a momentary bundle of acts of thinking. Thus I know with certainty that my present doubting is not a nonexistent object. But if Meinong were right, my present doubting could easily be a nonexistent object, indeed, a nonexistent object that actually has the property of being indubitably apparent to itself.

For on Meinongian principles, I could, for all I could claim to know, be a fictional character, one who cannot doubt his own existence. In that case, the inability to doubt one's own existence would not prove that one actually exists. This intolerable result certainly looks like a reductio ad absurdum of the Meinongian theory. If anything is clear, it is that I know, in the strictest sense of the word, that I am not a fictional character. My present doubting that I exist is an object that has the property of being indubitable, but cannot have this property without existing. It follows that there are objects whose actual possession of properties entails their existence. This implies the falsity of Meinong's principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein, and with it the view that existence is extrinsic to every object. Forced to choose between Descartes and Meinong, we ought to side with Descartes.

The Existent Round Square

One of Russell's objections to Meinong was that the denizens of Aussersein, i.e., beingless objects, are apt to infringe the Law of Non-Contradiction. Suppose a Meinongian subscribes to the following principle:

Unrestricted Satisfaction (US): Every definite description is such that some object satisfies it.

For any definite description we can concoct, there is a corresponding object or item, in many cases a beingless object or item. From (US) we infer that some object satisfies the definite description, 'the existent round square.' This object is existent, round, and square. So the existent round square exists, which is a contradiction. This is one Russell-type argument.

A similar argument can be made re: the golden mountain. By (US), not only is some object the golden mountain, some object is the existent golden mountain. This object is existent, golden, and a mountain. So the existent golden mountain exists, which is false, though not contradictory. This is a second Russell-type argument.

Are these arguments compelling refutations of Meinong's signature thesis? Here is one way one might try to evade the Russellian objections, a way similar to one Meinong himself treads. Make a distinction between nuclear properties and extranuclear properties. (See Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects, Yale UP, 1980, p. 42) Nuclear properties are those that are included in an object's Sosein (so-being, what-being, quiddity). Extranuclear properties are those that are not so included. The distinction can be made with respect to existence. There is nuclear existence and extranuclear existence. 'Existent' picks out nuclear existence while 'exists' picks out extranuclear existence.

This distinction blocks the inference from 'The existent round square is existent, round, and square' to the 'The existent round square exists.' Similarly in the golden mountain case. You will be forgiven for finding this distinction between nuclear and extranuclear existence bogus. It looks to be nothing more than an ad hoc theory-saving move.

But there may be a better Meinongian response. The Russellian arguments assume an Unrestricted Characterization Principle:

UCP: An object exemplifies each of the properties referenced in the definite description it satisfies.

From (US) we get the object, the existent golden mountain, and the object, the existent round square. But without (UCP) one cannot move to the claim that the existent golden mountain exists or to the claim that the existent round square exists.

A Meinongian can therefore defeat the Russellian arguments by substituting a restricted characterization principle for (UCP). And he can do this without distinguishing between nuclear and extranuclear existence.

The Grand Central Conundrum in the Philosophy of Fiction

As I see it, the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad:

1. There are no purely fictional items.

2. There are some purely fictional items.

The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think that each is true.

(1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist. George Harvey Bone, the main character in Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel Hangover Square, does not now and never did exist. He is not a real alcoholic like his creator, Patrick Hamilton, who was a real alcoholic. What is true is that

3. Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic.

That (3) is true is clear from the fact that if a student wrote on a test that Bone was a teetotaler, his answer would be marked wrong. But if (3) is true, then, given that nothing can satisfy a predicate unless it exists, it follows that

4. Bone exists

and, given the validity of Existential Generalization, it follows that

5. There is a purely fictional alcoholic.

But if (5) is true, then so is (2).

It should now be spectacularly obvious what the problem is. There are two propositions, each the logical contradictory of the other, which implies that they cannot both be true, and yet we have excellent reason to think that both are true.

Now what are all the possible ways of solving this problem? I need a list. London Ed et al. can help me construct it. Right now all I want is a list, a complete list if possible, not arguments for or against any item on the list. Not all of the following are serious contenders, but I am aiming at completeness.

A. Dialetheism. Accept dialetheism, which amounts to the claim that there are true contradictions and that the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is false.

B. Paraphrasticism. Reject (2) by attempting to show that sentences such as (3) can be paraphrased in such a way that the apparent reference to ficta is eliminated. For example, one might offer the following paraphrase of (3): 'Hamilton wrote a story implying that here is an alcoholic named Bone.' The paraphrastic approach works only if every reference to a fictional item, whether it be a person or place or event or fiction, can be paraphrased away. (As Kripke and others have noted, there are fictional fictions, fictional plays for example, such as a fictional play referenced within a play.)

C. Logic Reform. Reject Existential Generalization (off load existence from the particular quantifier) and reject the anti-Meinongian principle that nothing can satisfy a predicate (or exemplify a property) unless it exists. One could then block the inference from (3) to (2).

D. Ontology Reform. Reject (1) by arguing that fictional items, without prejudice to their being purely fictional, do exist. Saul Kripke, for example, maintains that a fictional character is an abstract entity that "exists in virtue of more concrete activities of telling stories, writing plays, writing novels, and so on . . . the same way that a nation is an abstract entity which exists in virtue of concrete relations between people." (Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, Oxford UP, 2013, p. 73.) Or one might hold that fictional items are abstract items that exist necessarily like numbers.

E. Dissolutionism. Somehow argue that the problem as posed above is a pseudoproblem that doesn't need solving but dissolving. One might perhaps argue that one or the other of the dyad's limbs has not even a prima facie claim on our acceptance.

F. Neitherism. Reject both limbs. Strategy (A) rejects LNC. This strategy rejects the Law of Excluded Middle. (Not promising, but I'm aiming for completeness.)

G. Mysterianism. Accept both limbs but deny that they are mutually contradictory. Maintain that our cognitive limitations make it either presently or permanently impossible for us to understand how the limbs can be both true and non-contradictory. "They are both true; reality is non-contradictory; but it is a mystery how!"

H. Buddhism. Reject the tetralemma: neither (1) nor (2), nor both, nor neither.

I. Hegelianism. Propose a grand synthesis in which thesis (1) and antithesis (2) are aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved. (I have no idea what this would look like — again, I want a complete list of options.)

First question: Have I covered all the bases? Or are there solution strategies that cannot be brought under one of the above heads? If you think there are, tell me what you think they are. But don't mention something that is subsumable under one of (A)-(I).

Second question (for London Ed): under which head would you book your solution? Do you favor the paraphrastic approach sketched in (B) or not? Or maybe Ed thinks that the problem as I have formulated it is a pseudoproblem (option (E)).

Be a good sport, Ed, play along and answer my questions.

London Paraphrastics Questioned

To block the inference from

1. Frodo is a hobbit

2. There are hobbits

we can invoke story operators and substitute for (1)

1*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a hobbit.

From (1*) one cannot validly infer (2). So far, so good. But what about the true

3. Frodo is a purely fictional character

given that the following is plainly false:

3*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a purely fictional character. (?)

How do we block the inference from (3) to

4. There are purely fictional characters. (?)

At this juncture, London Ed makes a paraphrastic move:

Note that 'fiction' just means what is contrived, or made up, or invented. To say that Frodo 'is' a fictional character is simply to say that he is made up, which itself no more than saying that someone (Tolkien) made him up.

Indeed, that is what 'fiction' means, 'pure fiction' leastways. 'Fiction' is from the Latin fingere. So Ed would paraphrase (3) as

3P. Someone (Tolkien) made up (created, invented, contrived) Frodo.

Now if the paraphrase is adequate, then (3) does not commit us ontologically to anything beyond Tolkien. It does not commit us to the existence of fictional characters. Ed wants to avoid views like that of van Inwagen according to which purely fictional items exist. It is worth noting that Ed agrees with van Inwagen about the univocity of 'is' and 'exists.' There are no modes of existence/being for either of them. And for both the one sense of 'is'/'exists' is supplied adequately and completely by the existential quantifier of modern predicate logic. Both are thin theorists when it comes to existence.

But is (3P) an adequate paraphrase of (3)?

I don't think so. If Tolkien made up Frodo, but Frodo does not exist, then what did Tolkien create? A mere modification of his own consciousness? No. He created a character that outlasted him and that cannot be identified with any part of Tolkien's body or mind. Tolkien ceased to exist in 1973. But no one will say that the character Frodo simply vanished in 1973. When Tolkien ceased to exist, his mental contents ceased to exist. But when the writer ceased to exist, Frodo did not stop being a quite definite fictional character. So Frodo cannot be identified with any mental content of Tolkien. Nor could Frodo be said to be an adverbial modification of one of Tolkien's acts of thinking.

I grant that Frodo is an artifact. He came into being by the creative acts of Tolkien and is dependent on Tolkien for his coming into being, and perhaps even tied to Tolkien for his very identity: essentiality of origin for ficta. Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR. Frodo is an artifact that came into being and can pass out of being. This makes Frodo a contingent artifact. What's more, Frodo is not merely a content in Tolkien's mind: he can be thought about and understood and referred to by many different minds. So Frodo has a curious status: he is in one way dependent and in another independent.

Now I claim that if one admits that there are different modes of being/existence, one can make sense of this. Fictional characters have a dependent mode of being, but they are, nonetheless, items in their own right. They obviously don't exist in the way a fiction writer exists. But it would be false to say that they don't exist at all. After all, Frodo cannot be identified with a mental content of Tolkien.

So while it is true that someone made up Frodo, as Ed rightly insists, that does not suffice to show that Frodo does not exist.

Ed's paraphrase is inadequate. And so he is stuck with the problem of blocking the inference from (3) to (4).

……………………

UPDATE (7/31). I said above, "Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR." That's not quite right. If all the copies of LOTR were destroyed tomorrow, Frodo would continue on as a cultural artifact in the oral tradition for as long as that tradition was maintained. But once that tradition petered out, it would be all over for Frodo if there were no physical copies of LOTR (electronic or otherwise) or writings about LOTR on hand. The dependence of abstract cultural artifacts on human beings, their practices and memories, is not easy to understand. We are in the realm of Hegel's objektiver Geist.

London Ed on Peter van Inwagen on Fiction

Comments by BV in blue.

Inwagen gives persuasive arguments that there is only one sort of existential quantifier, that we cannot quantify over ‘things’ that are in some sense ‘beyond being’, and that ‘exists’ means the same as ‘is’ or ‘has being’. No review of his work would be complete without a careful discussion of these arguments, but as I agree with them, I will not discuss them here.

The problem I want to discuss is with his main thesis. He aims to explain what he calls ‘fictional discourse’, namely discourse like “There are characters in some 19th-century novels who are presented with a greater wealth of physical detail than is any character in any 18th-century novel." Such sentences are true, according to him, but when we translate them into quantifier-variable idiom, we have to use the existential quantifier which, on his view, is equivalent to ‘exists’. This seems to imply that fictional characters like Tom Sawyer and Mr Pickwick exist. Inwagen bites the bullet, and argues that they do exist. They are abstract objects, which exist in exactly the way that numbers exist. So when we say, in a work of literary criticism, that “Mrs Gamp is a character in a novel”, the proper name ‘Mrs Gamp’ refers to an abstract or ‘theoretical’ entity.

BV: I don't think Ed is representing van Inwagen correctly here. Numbers cannot come into being, but it is plausible to hold that fictional characters do. So while fictional characters, for van Inwagen, are abstract entities, he remains noncommittal on the question whether they are abstract artifacts in the way that chess could be thought of as a abstract artifact, or instead abstract non-artifacts like numbers and cognate platonica. See the last paragraph of "Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities."

This leads to the following problem. Inwagen argues that when a sentence like “Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s” appears in a work of fiction, it is not true. Indeed, it is not even false, since it does not make an assertion at all (Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities, p.148, footnote 15). But when it appears in a work of literary criticism, as ‘literary discourse’, it is true. But if it is true, it seems to imply that there was some individual who is [in] the extension of the property expressed by ‘boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s’, and yet there was no such individual.

Inwagen resolves the problem as follows. Tom Sawyer the fictional character exists, but he does not have the property ‘boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s’. Nor does Mrs. Gamp have properties such as being old, being fat and so on. He concedes that this sounds odd (Creatures of Fiction, p. 304-5), but he argues there is something rather like it in a familiar philosophical doctrine, namely Descartes’ thesis that a person such as Jones is an immaterial substance, and so cannot have properties like ‘being tangible’, ‘weighing 220 lbs’ and so on, but only properties appropriate to immaterial objects, such as ‘thinking about Vienna’, ‘being free from pain’ and so on. Descartes says that Jones bears a relation to the properties on the former list that is not the relation of ‘having’ or ‘exemplifying’ but, rather, the relation of “animating a body” that has or exemplifies the property. We say that Jones is about six feet tall, but we should really say ‘animates a body that is six feet tall’: “what looks like predication in ordinary speech is not always predication”.

Thus when we say that Tom Sawyer is the main character in a well-known book of the same name, we are saying something that is true because the copula ‘is’ signifies the relation of having or exemplifying. But if we say, in literary discourse, that Tom is a boy, or that he is a resident of Mississippi, it is true because the copula signifies a quite different relation, which Inwagen calls ‘holding’.

BV: This is an accurate summary of van Inwagen's position as I understand it.

Problems

Bill has already identified some problems with Inwagen’s thesis. For example, he says that when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But according to Inwagen, I am thinking of an abstract or theoretical entity, and no theoretical entity has gender.

I shall not discuss these (although I broadly agree with them), but will mention some further ones.

1. Plot summaries. I discussed plot summaries in a comment to Bill’s post. We have a clear notion of what counts as a ‘correct’ summary. E.g. “Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother Sid” is correct, “Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his sisters Lizzie, Jane, Kitty, Lydia and Mary” is clearly not. But this notion of ‘correctness’ is close enough to the notion of truth that Inwagen’s theory needs to deal with it. If we assimilate it to Inwagen’s notion of truth in ‘literary discourse’, i.e. if we regard a statement in a plot summary as of the same kind as “Mrs Gamp is a character in a novel”, then we have the problem that plot summaries are written ‘in universe’, and that the names of the characters refer to the characters as characters, and not as abstract theoretical entities. But if we assimilate plot summaries to condensed versions of the original literary work, we have the problem of how they can be ‘correct’ at all. It is fundamental to Inwagen’s account that sentences in a work of fiction do not make assertions at all, and so cannot admit of truth or falsity – or correctness or incorrectness.

BV: Ed's point here seems to be that van Inwagen cannot account for the correctness of plot summaries. It is clear that some summaries are correct or accurate and that some are not. Now a summary of a piece of fiction is either itself a piece of (severely condensed) fiction, in which case it contains sentences that are, on van Inwagen's theory, neither true nor false, or it is not a piece of fiction but a piece of writing containing true sentences about the content of the fictional work being summarized. This disjunction appears to be a dilemma. For on the first disjunct, it is hard to see how a plot summary could be correct or true. But the second disjunct is also unacceptable. For suppose the summary contains the sentence 'Mrs Gamp is a fat old lady.' Then 'Mrs Gamp' in this sentence takes an abstract existent as its referent, an existent that does not HAVE but HOLDs the properties of being fat, being old, and being a lady, when the novel is not about abstract objects at all, but is about concrete objects one of which HAS, but does not HOLD, the properties of being fat, old and a lady.

A very astute criticism that may in the end hit the mark. I don't know.

Suppose I write a three-sentence novella:

It was a dark and rainy night. Shaky Jake, life-long insomniac, awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by the rythm of the rain, and deciding he needed a nightcap, grabbed his flashlight and his raincoat and headed for the Glass Crutch bar and grill, a local watering hole a half a mile from his house. Bellying up to the bar, he said to the 'tender: "One scotch, one bourbon, one beer."

A correct plot summary: An insomniac awakened by the rain goes to a bar for a drink.

An incorrect summary: A philosopher in La Mirada, California, dreaming about the ontological argument, is awakened when an earthquake causes a copy of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature to fall on his head.

Ed's question is how the first summary can be correct and the second incorrect if fictional sentences 'in universe' as Ed writes, lack truth-values. I am not convinced that there is a problem here. For a summary to be correct it doesn't have to be true of anything; it merely has to reproduce in condensed form the sense of the the piece of fiction summarized. I can take in the sense of a sentence without knowing whether it is true or false. A summary merely boils down the sense of the original.

2. ‘Sincere’ fiction. Not all fiction is ‘insincere’, i.e. knowingly made up. What if a sincere but deluded person writes a long account about characters (angels, spirits etc) and events which were ‘revealed’ to him in a vision? Contra Inwagen, his claims are assertions, and are capable of truth or falsity.

BV: But is this a case of literary fiction? The delusive account is fictional in that it is false, but that might be different use of 'fictional.' Why can't van Inwagen insist that literary fiction is by definition 'insincere' in Ed's sense?

3. Story-relative reference. Any serious account of fiction needs to deal with the way that names in fiction (and empty names generally) are able to identify or individuate within the story by telling the reader which character is being talked about. Inwagen needs to explain how such story-relative reference works, for his theory does not address it. He also has the problem that ‘literary discourse’ also seems to use story-relative reference. Consider the story (A) “A man called Gerald and a boy called Steve were standing by fountain. Steve had a drink”, and the statement (B) “In the second sentence the proper name ‘Steve’ identifies Steve." Statement (B) is true, and so is ‘literary discourse’, according to Inwagen, and so ‘Steve’ in (B) identifies an abstract object. But it clearly ‘refers back’ to the ‘Steve’ in (A). How can a term referring to an abstract object also refer back to a character in a story, when the character is not an abstract object?

BV: Van Inwagen might respond by saying that in (B) ''Steve' identifies Steve only in the sense that 'Steve' in the second sentence has 'Steve' in the first sentence as antecedent. So there is no (extralinguistic) reference at all, and 'Steve' in (B) does not pick out an abstract object.

Note the ambiguity of 'Ed signed his book.' It could mean that Ed signed Ed's book. Or it could mean that Ed signed a book belonging to someone distinct from Ed. (Suppose, while pointing at Tom, I say to Peter, "Ed signed his book.") In the first case, 'his' exercises no (extralinguistic) reference. In the second case it does.

4. The problem is worse in the case of names whose emptiness is in doubt. Suppose I make a reference statement: “Luke 1 v5 refers to Zachary, a high priest at the temple”. Like many characters in the New Testament, we are not certain whether Zachary existed or not. If he did exist, the name in my reference statement refers to him. If not, according to Inwagen, it refers to an abstract object. How can the semantics of the sentence be so utterly different without my knowing? For I don’t know whether Zachary existed or not, and so I don’t know what the semantics of the reference statement is. But surely I do.

BV: I don't think van Inwagen will have any trouble with this objection. Suppose we don't know whether Zachary existed or not. Our not knowing this is not the same as our not knowing whether he is nonfictional or fictional. For we know that the NT is not a work of fiction — assuming that, necessarily, every work of fiction involves pretence on the part of its author or authors. If we agree that the NT is not a work of fiction and it turns out that Zachary never existed, then van Inwagen can say that no one had all the properties ascribed to Zachary. His theory does not require him to say that 'Zachary' refers to an abstract object.

5. What about statements where we say what the author says? For example “Dickens says that Mrs Gamp is fat”. Inwagen would classify this as literary discourse, but if so, the token of ‘Mrs Gamp’ refers to an abstract object. But Dickens is surely not saying that an abstract object is fat?

The general problem, and here I think I am agreeing with Bill, is that the semantics of proper names as used in fiction (or ‘sincere’ fiction) doesn’t seem to be enormously different from the semantics of the same names as used in ‘literary discourse’. Yet, according to Inwagen, the difference is as enormous as it gets.

Do Purely Fictional Items Exist? On Van Inwagen’s Theory of Ficta

A character in a novel is an example of a purely fictional item provided that the character is wholly 'made up' by the novelist. Paul Morphy, for example, is a character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players but he is also a real-life 19th century New Orleans chess prodigy. So Paul Morphy, while figuring in a piece of fiction, is not a purely fictional item like Captain Ahab or Sancho Panza or Frodo.

Earlier I said that it is a datum that Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist. Saying that it is a datum, I implied that it is not something that can be reasonably questioned, that it is a 'Moorean fact.' After all, most of us know that Frodo is a purely fictional character, and it is obvious — isn't it? — that what is purely fictional does not exist. Whatever is purely fictional does not exist looks to be an analytic proposition, one that merely unpacks the sense of 'purely fictional.'

But then after I uploaded my entry I remembered something that van Inwagen says in his essay Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities (in Existence: Essays in Ontology, CUP 2014, p. 105):

The lesson I mean to convey by these examples is that the nonexistence of [Sherlock] Holmes is not an ontological datum; the ontological datum is that we can use the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' to say something true.

I think this sentence would make more sense if van Inwagen had 'linguistic datum' for the second occurrence of 'ontological datum.' If the nonexistence of Holmes is a datum, then it is an ontological datum; but the fact that we can use the sentence in question to say something true is a linguistic datum.

In any case, PvI is saying the opposite of what I was saying earlier. I was saying something that implies that the nonexistence of Holmes is an ontological datum in virtue of his being a purely fictional entity whereas PvI is saying in effect that Holmes exists and that his existence is consistent with his being purely fictional. One man's datum is another man's (false) theory!

To sort this out, we need to understand PvI's approach to ficta.

Van Inwagen's Theory of Fictional Entities

We first note that van Inwagen holds to the univocity of 'exists' and 'is.' The ontological counterpart of this semantic thesis is that there are no modes of being/existence. He also has no truck with Meinongian Aussersein. Bear in mind that Aussersein is not a mode of being. And bear in mind that the doctrine of Aussersein is not the same as, and goes far beyond, the thesis that there is a weak mode of being had by the fictional Mrs. Gamp and her ilk. The thesis of Aussersein is that

M. Some items are such that they have no being whatsoever.

For van Inwagen, (M) is self-contradictory. He thinks that it entails that something is not identical with itself, which, if the entailment went through, would amount to a reductio ad absurdum of (M). (95) Now I have argued that van Inwagen is wrong to find (M) self-contradictory. But let's assume that he is right. Then it would follow, in conjunction with the univocity thesis, that everything exists and indeed in the same sense of 'exists.' And what sense is that? The sense supplied by the existential quantifier of standard modern predicate logic. Van Inwagen is thoroughly Quinean about existence. There is nothing more to existence than what existential quantification expresses. I call this a dogma of analysis. Fo an attempt at refutation, see my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.

Now consider the sentence

1. Tom Sawyer is a character in a novel by Mark Twain.

By van Inwagen's lights, when (1) is translated into the quantifier-variable idiom it can be seen to imply that Tom Sawyer exists. I won't repeat van Inwagen's tedious rigmarole, but the idea is simple enough: (1) is plainly true; (1) cannot be supplied with an ontologically noncommittal paraphrase; and (1) ontologically commits us to the existence of the fictional character, Tom Sawyer. This is plausible and let's assume for present purposes that it is right: we accept (1) as true, and this acceptance commits us to the existence of a referent for 'Tom Sawyer.' Tom Sawyer exists! The same goes for all pure ficta. They all exist! They exist in the same sense that you and I do. Indeed, they actually exist: they are not mere possibilia. (What I just said is, strictly, pleonastic; but pleonasm is but a peccadillo when precision is at a premium.)

But now we have a problem, or at least van Inwagen does. While we are ontologically committed to the existence of purely fictional characters by our use and acceptance of true sentences such as (1), we must also somehow accommodate everyone's firm conviction that purely fictional characters do not exist. How?

When we say that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, we can be taken to express the proposition that "No one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds . . . ." (105, emphasis added) There are properties that fictional characters HAVE and those that they HOLD. Among the properties that fictional characters HAVE are such logical properties as existence and self-identity, and such literary properties as being a character in a novel, being introduced in chapter 6, being modelled on Sancho Panza, etc. Among the properties fictional characters HOLD are properties like being human, being fat, having high blood pressure, being a resident of Hannibal, Missouri, and being a pipe-smoking detective.

What van Inwagen is doing is making a distinction between two modes of property-possession. A fictional item can possess a property by having it, i.e., exemplifying it, in which case the corresponding sentence expresses an actual predication. For example, a use of 'Tom Sawyer was created by Mark Twain' is an actual predication. A fictional item can also possess a property by holding it. For example, 'Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of Mississippi River in the 1840s' is not an actual predication but a sentence that expresses the relation of HOLDING that obtains between the fictional entity and the property expressed by 'was a boy who grew up, etc.'

With this distinction, van Inwagen can defang the apparent contradiction: Tom Sawyer exists & Tom Sawyer does not exist. The second limb can be taken to express the proposition that no one exemplifies or HAS the properties HELD by the existing item, Tom Sawyer.

To put it in my own way, what van Inwagen is maintaining is that there really is an entity named by 'Tom Sawyer' and that it possesses (my word) properties. It exemplifies some of these properties, the "high-category properties," but contains (my word) the others but is not qualified (my word) by them. Thus Mrs Gamp contains the property of being fat, but she does not exemplify this property. Analogy (mine): The set {fatness} is not fat: it holds the property but does not have (exemplify) it.

For van Inwagen, creatures of fiction exist and obey the laws of logic, including the Law of Excluded Middle. So they are not incomplete objects. On a Meinongian approach, Tom Sawyer is an incomplete nonexistent object. For van Inwagen, he is a complete existent object. Now although I am not aware of a passage where van Inwagen explicitly states that purely fictional entities are abstract objects, this seems clearly to be entailed by what he does say. For Tom Sawyer exists, and indeed actually exists — he is not a merely possible being — but he does not interact causally with anything else in the actual world. He does not exist here below in the land of concreta, but up yonder in Plato land. So if abstract entities are those that are causally inert, Tom Sawyer is an abstract object. That is consistent with what van Inwagen does explicity say, namely, that "creatures of fiction" are "theoretical entities of [literary] criticism." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, p. 53.)

Some Questions about/Objections to van Inwagen's Theory

1. The theory implies that Sherlock Holmes exists, and exists as robustly as I do. That he exists follows from there being truths about him. That he exists as robustly as I do follows from the rejection of Meinongian nonentities and the rejection of modes of being/existence (and also of degrees of being/existence). But when I think about Sherlock I seem to myself to be thinking about something that does not exist. For I know that Sherlock is a purely fictional item, and I know that such items do not exist. If I am asked to describe the object of my thinking, I must describe it as nonexistent, for that is how it appears. So what should we say? Should we say that when I think of Sherlock, unbeknownst to myself, I am thinking of an existing abstract object? Or should we say that there are two objects, the one I am thinking of, which is nonexistent, and the existent abstract object?

Either way there is trouble. Surely I am the final authority as to what I am thinking of. It is part of the phenomenology of the situation that when I think about a detective that I know to be purely fictional I am thinking about an item that is given as nonexistent. But then the existing abstract object is not the same as the object I am thinking of. Van Inwagen's abstract surrogate exists; the object I am think of does not exist; ergo, they are not the same object.

On the other hand, if there are two objects, and it is van Inwagen's surrogate object that I am really thinking of when I think of Sherlock, then I am always in error when I think of pure ficta. I appear to myself to be thinking about nonexistent concreta when in reality I am thinking about existent abstracta.

2. When I think of Sherlock, I think of a man, and when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But no abstract object has sex organs. So either I am not thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, and a systematic error infects my thinking of pure ficta, or I am thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, namely, a man or a woman, in which case I am not thinking of an abstract existent.

3. When I think of Mrs Gamp as fat, I think of her as exemplifying the property of being fat, not as holding the property or containing it or encoding (Zalta) it. But then I cannot be thinking about an existent abstract object, for no such object is (predicatively) fat.

According to the Meinongian, when one think about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about a fat woman who does not exist. According to van Inwagen, when one thinks about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about an existing abstract object that is (predicatively) neither a woman not fat. Pick your poison!

I say neither theory is acceptable.

A Possible Objection to My Critique

"In the articles you cite, van Inwagen doesn't address our thinking about fictional items. He is not doing descriptive psychology or phenomenology; his approach is linguistic. He argues that fictional discourse — discourse about fictional items — commits us ontologically to fictional entities. He then tries to square this commitment with our acceptance of such sentences as 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.' Your objections, however, are phenomenologically based. So it is not clear that your objections hit their target.

In response I would say that no adequate theory of fictional discourse or fictional objects can abstract away from the first-person point of view of one who thinks about fictional objects. Such linguistic reference as we find in a sentence such as (1) above is parasitic upon intentional or thinking reference. But this is a very large and a very hairy theme of its own. See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.

Thinking About Frodo

Let me attack yesterday's puzzle from a different angle. The puzzle in one sentence: we think about things that do not exist; but how is this possible given that they do not exist?

Here is the problem set forth as an aporetic hexad:

1. When I think about Frodo, as I am doing right now, I am thinking about, precisely, Frodo: not about some semantic or epistemic intermediary or surrogate or representative. I am thinking about a concrete, albeit nonexistent, item. I am not thinking about an idea in my mind, or a mental image, or any mental content; nor am I thinking about an abstract entity of any kind such as a property; nor am I thinking of a word or a phrase or anything linguistic.

2. Thinking about (thinking of) is a relation the relata of which are a subject who thinks and an object thought of. Thinking is triadic: ego-cogito-cogitatum.

3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, then all its relata exist/are.

4. There are no different modes of existence/being. This is the ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis of the univocity of 'exists' and 'is' and cognates.

5. To exist is to exist extramentally and extralinguistically, where the minds in question are finite.

6. Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist.

The limbs of the hexad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. To solve the problem we must reject one of the limbs. But which one? (6) is a datum, and (5) is an unproblematic definition. So the the candidates for rejection are (1)-(4). I'll take these in reverse order.

Deny (4): There are two modes of being, esse reale and esse intentionale. When we say, with truth, that Frodo does not exist, we mean that he lacks esse reale. But we can still think about him in a manner to satisfy (1)-(3) since he has merely intentional being.

Deny (3): Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution. There are items that have no being at all, and there are genuine relations that connect existents such as minds to beingless items in the realm of Aussersein.

Deny (2): Thinking-of is not relational, whether or not the obtaining of a relation requires that all its relata exist. This can be developed in different ways. Adverbial theories, Brentano's theory, Butchvarov's theory.

Deny (1): One way to deny (1) is via abstract artifactualism. A number of philosophers, including van Inwagen, have been putting forth some version of this view. The idea is that purely fictional items such as Frodo are created by the authors of works of fiction in which they figure. They are a peculiar species of abstract object since they come into being, unlike 'standard' abstract objects. They exist, but they are abstract. Meinong, by contrast, held that they are concrete but do not exist or have any being at all. Here is a paper that defends artifactualism against some objections by Sainsbury.

Now, gentlemen, pick your poison! Which limb will you deny? I claim, though this is but a promissory note, that no theory works and that the problem, though genuine, is insoluble.

London Ed on Reference to What is Not

Two weeks in Greece passed both quickly and slowly. No access to internet or phone, much walking (on a lonely hillside I found a deserted monastery built on the ruins of a 6th century pagan temple) and much thinking. In particular, thinking about the 'Meinongian' thesis that there are objects that do not exist, and that 'there are Fs' can be understood in a 'wide' or unrestricted sense, so that nonexistent entities are to be included [in the ] domain of quantification and discourse, but also in a 'narrow' sense, including only existing objects.

You implictly defend this view often, but explicitly here: "the crux of the matter is whether there are different ways of existing, or different modes of existence. I say there are …". Here is a brief critique of this view. Consider:

(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo

(2) There is no such thing as Frodo

I think we both agree that both of these propositions* are true. If so, what are we to make of the following argument?

BV: Yes. We can call them data sentences. They record Moorean facts.

(3) Proposition (1) is of the form 'aRb', where a = 'Tom', R = 'is thinking of' and b = 'Frodo'

BV: Permit me a quibble. You don't want to say that a = 'Tom,' you want to say that 'a' is a placeholder for 'Tom.' Likewise for the other terms. It seems to me that you are making two very minor mistakes. One is use-mention confusion; the other is confusing a placeholder with an abbreviation. Sorry to be such a pedant!

I would add that if we distinguish between grammatical and logical form, then proposition (1) is of the grammatical form, aRb. It is at least conceivable that the deep logical form of (1) be something else. Brentano, no slouch of a philosopher, would read (1) as nonrelational, as having the form of 'Tom is a Frodo-thinker.' An adverbialist would take (1) as having the form of 'Tom is thinking Frodo-ly.'

(4) The truth of a proposition of the form 'aRb' always implies the truth of 'for some x, x = b and aRx', and hence the truth of 'for some x, x = b.'

BV: Agreed if you insert 'logical' right before 'form' in (4).

(5) [Interpreting (4)] If Tom is thinking of Frodo then there is such a thing as Frodo.

(6) [from (5) and (1), modus ponens] There is such a thing as Frodo.

(7) [(6) and (2)] Contradiction.

BV: For this reductio ad absurdum to be formally valid, you need an auxiliary premise to the effect that 'For some x, x = b' asserts the existence of b. In other words, you must read the particular quantifier 'For some x, ___ x ___' as an existential quantifier, where an existential quantifier expresses existence, where existence is real, i.e., mind-independent, existence. It is at least a question whether existence can be reduced to someness!

We might attempt to resolve the contradiction as follows. We should read (6) as asserting existence in some wide or unrestricted quantification sense, as follows:

(6A) There is such a thing[w] as Frodo

where 'thing[w]' ranges over all kinds of things, existent and non-existent. Likewise, we should read (2) as asserting existence in some narrow or restricted quantification sense, as follows:

(2A) There is no such thing[n] as Frodo

where 'thing[n]' ranges only over real or existing things. Where there is ambiguity, there is no real contradiction. To assert that Frodo is a thing in the wide sense does not contradict the assertion that he is not a thing in the narrow sense.

BV: I have been toying with a solution something like this, except that it is not strictly Meinongian. For Meinong, items like Frodo have no being whatsoever. That is his famous doctrine of Aussersein. I have been toying with the idea that they have being all right, but merely intentional being, esse intentionale as opposed to esse reale, where these are two different modes of being/existence. Lukas Novak, who shares with me the idea that thinking is genuinely relational, denies that it is impossible to refer to what has no being. See Lukas Novak on Reference to What is Not. It looks like I am fighting a war on two fronts, the London front and the Prague front.

My objection is as follows.

BV: Your objection, I take it, is to a solution along the lines I sketched.

Consider:

(8) Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo, but he is wrong

The conjunct 'but he is wrong' is a negation, and in order to be a negation, what it negates must have the same sense as what is asserted (inside the belief context). Having the same sense includes the terms having the same range, and so the range of the term 'thing' as it occurs in the assertion must be identical to the range of the same term as it occurs (although elided) in the negation. I.e. (8) can be expanded into

(8A) Tom thinks that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo, but it is not the case that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo

where 'x' indicates sameness of range. I.e. if the range in the assertion is narrow, it is so in the negation, and likewise if it is wide. Thus the range of the term 'thing' is irrelevant.

BV: Now you've lost me completely. There is clearly a difference between (1) — Tom is thinking of Frodo — and 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo.' I don't understand why you shifted to the latter sentence. To think about x is not to think that there is such a thing as x, nor is it to think that there is not such a thing as x. It is just to think about x.

At this point in the dialectic I don't know what you are up to. From previous discussions, your aim was to pin a certain exportation fallacy on me, the fallacy of moving from

Tom is thinking of Frodo

There exists an x such that x = Frodo & Tom is thinking of x.

That is clearly a non sequitur; I recognize it as such, and I don't commit it. If Tom is thinking of Frodo, then Tom is thinking of something; but it doesn't follow that this thing exists. On Meinong's theory, Tom is thinking of a beingless item. On my theory, he is thinking of an item that has esse intentionale but not esse reale. On Meinong's theory, intentionality is a relation, but the object relatum has no being at all. On my theory, is a relation, but the object relatum has merely intentional being.

Yet the form of 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo' is also 'aRb', where a is 'Tom', b is 'Frodo', and R is 'thinks that there is such a thing as'. If premiss (4) above were true, then from (8) we could derive 'there is such a thing such that Tom thinks that there is such a thing as it', which would mean Tom was right, rather than wrong.

My solution to the problem, as I have argued before, is to reject premiss (4). 'Tom is thinking of Frodo' has the grammatical form 'aRb', but that is not its logical form. Clearly its logical form includes an internal quantifier, i.e. a quantifier that is included inside the belief operator, but cannot be legitimately exported outside.

BV: Now I think I see what you are up to. You take

(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo

to have the logical form of

(9) Tom is thinking that Frodo exists.

And then your point is that (9) does not entail

(10) Frodo exists.

I agree that the inferential move from (9) to (10) is invalid. But I think it is a mistake that (1) can be replaced by (9). Suppose I am thinking of something. It might be London's Trafalgar Square or Boston's Scollay Square. The former exists (last time I checked) but the latter no longer exists. Clearly I can have either thought without the additional thought that the square in question exists or does not exist. To think about something is not eo ipso to think that the thing in question exists — or to think that it does not exist.

Perhaps I have misunderstood you.

___________________
*Proposition: (def) a sentence capable of truth or falsity, and so not a question, a command or a prayer.

Divine Simplicity, the Formal Distinction, and the Real Distinction

If I understand Duns Scotus on the divine simplicity, his view in one sentence is that the divine attributes are really identical in God but formally distinct. (Cf. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate 2005, p. 111) I can understand this if I can understand the formal distinction (distinctio formalis) and how it differs from the real distinction (distinctio realis). This will be the cynosure of my interest in this post.

There appear to be two ways of construing 'real distinction.' On the first construal, the real distinction is plainly different from the formal distinction. On a second construal, it is not so clear what the difference is. I have no worked-out view. In this entry I am merely trying to understand the difference between these two sorts of distinction and how they bear upon the divine simplicity, though I will not say anything more about the latter in this installment.

First Construal of 'Real Distinction'

On the first construal, the real distinction is to be understood in terms of separability. But 'separable' has several senses. Here are my definitions of the relevant senses. I am not trying to exposit Thomas or any scholastic. I am merely trying to get to the truth of the matter.

D1. Individuals x, y are mutually separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that x exist without y, and y exist without x.

Example. The separability of my eyeglasses and my head is mutual: each can (in a number of different senses of 'can' including the broadly logical sense) exist without the other. This distinction is called real because it has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality. It is not a merely verbal distinction like that between 'eyeglasses' and 'spectacles.'

D2. Properties F, G are mutually separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that F be instantiated by x without G being instantiated by x, and vice versa.

Example. Socrates is both seated and speaking. But he is possibly such as to be the one without the other, and the other without the one. He can sit without speaking, and speak without sitting. The properties of being seated and speaking, though co-instantiated by Socrates, are mutually separable. Of course, this does not imply that these properties can exist uninstantiated.

D3. Individuals x, y are unilaterally separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair x, y exist without the other, but not the other without the one.

Example. A (primary) substance S and one of its accidents A. Both are individuals, unrepeatables. But while A cannot exist without S, S can exist without A. Second example. Consider a fetus prior to viability. It is not an accident of the mother, but a substance in its own right. Yet it cannot exist apart from the mother, while the mother can exist apart from it. So what we seem to have here are two individuals that are unilaterally separable.

D4. Properties F, G are unilaterally separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair F, G be instantiated by x without the other being instantiated, but not the other without the one.

Example. Suppose Socrates is on his feet, running. His being on his feet and his running are unilaterally separable in that he can be on his feet wthout running, but he cannot be running without being on his feet.

D5. Items (whether individuals or properties) I, J are weakly separable =_df I, J are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable.

On the first construal of 'real distinction,' it comes to this:

D6. Items (whether individuals or properties), I, J are really distinct =_df I, J are weakly separable.

My impression is that when Scotists speak of the real distinction they mean something identical to or very close to my (D6). Real distinctness is weak separability. Two items, whether individuals or properties, are really distinct if and only if they are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable. According to Alan B. Wolter ("The Formal Distinction" in John Duns Scotus, 1265-1965, eds. Ryan and Bonansea, CUA Press, 1965, pp. 45-60),

In the works of Aquinas, for example, the term ['real distinction'] seems to have two basically different meanings, only one of which corresponds to the usage of Scotus, Ockham, or Suarez. For the latter, the real distinction is that which exists between individuals, be they substances or some individual accident or property. It invariably implies the possibility of separating one really distinct thing from another to the extent that one of the two at least may exist apart from the other. (p. 46)

Second Construal of 'Real Distinction'

On a Thomist view, my essence and my existence are not really distinct on the first construal of 'real distinction' because they are mutually inseparable: neither can be without the other. This strikes me as entirely reasonable. My individual essence is nothing without existence, and there are no cases of pure existence. I am not now and never have been an existence-less essence, nor a bit of essence-less existence. And yet Thomists refer to the distinction between (indvidual) essence and existence in finite concrete individuals as a real distinction. So 'real distinction' must have a second basic meaning, one that does not require that really distinct items be either mutually or unilaterally separable. What is this second basic meaning? And how does it differ from the Scotistic formal distinction?

Seeking an answer to the first question, I turn to Feser's manual where, on p. 74, we read:

But separability is not the only mark of a real distinction. Another is contrariety of the concepts under which things fall . . . . For example, being material and being immaterial obviously exclude one another, so that there must be a real distinction between a material thing and an immaterial thing. A third mark sometimes suggested is efficient causality . . . .

In this passage, Feser seems to be saying that there is one disinction called the real distinction, but that it has more than one mark. He does not appear to be maintaining that 'real distinction' has two different meanings, one that requires separability and another that does not. On the next page, however, Feser makes a distinction between a "real physical distinction" and a "real metaphysical distinction" where the former requires separability but the latter does not. He goes on to say that for Scotus and Suarez a necessary condition of any real distinction in created things is that the items distinguished be separable: "a distinction is real only when it entails separability." (75)

The Formal Distinction

I asked: "What is the second basic meaning of 'real distinction'?" The answer I glean from Feser is that the second meaning is real metaphysical distinction, a distinction that does not require separability. Now for my second question: How does this real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction? According to Cross, "the formal distinction is the kind of distinction that obtains between (inseparable) properties on the assumption that nominalism about properties is false." (108) Feser describes it as a third and intermediate kind of disinction that is neither logical nor real. (75) Both what Cross and Feser say comport well with my understanding of the formal distinction.

Consider the distinction between a man's animality and his rationality. They are clearly distinct because there are animals that are not rational, and there are rational beings that are not animals. It is also clear that the distinction is not purely logical: the distinction is not generated by our thinking or speaking, but has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality. Is it then a real distinction? Not if such a distinction entails separability. For it is not broadly logically possible that the rationality of Socrates exist without his animality, or his animality without his rationality. Anything that is both animal and rational is essentially both animal and rational. (Whereas it is not the case that anything that is both sitting and speaking is essentially both sitting and speaking.) So the Scotist, for whom the reality of a real distinction entails separability, says that what we have here is a formal distinction, a distinction between two 'formalities,' animality and rationality, that are really inseparable but formally distinct.

My second question, again, is this: How does the real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction? In both cases, the distinction is not purely logical, i.e., a mere distinctio rationis. So in both cases the distinction has a basis in reality. Further, in both cases there is no separability of the terms of the distinction. Socrates cannot be rational without being an animal, and he cannot be an animal without being rational. Similarly, he cannot exist without having an essence, and he cannot have an essence without existing.

So what is the difference between the real metaphysical distinction (that Feser distinguishes from the real physical distinction) and the formal distinction? If I understand Feser, his view is that the formal distinction collapses into the virtual distinction, which is a logical distinction, hence not a real distinction, whereas the real metaphysical distinction is a real distinction despite its not requiring separability. But what is the virtual distinction?

The Virtual Distinction

Feser tells us that a logical distinction is virtual "when it has some foundation in reality." (73) A virtual distinction is a logical distinction that is more than a merely verbal distinction. He gives the example of a man's nature which, despite its being one thing, can be viewed under two aspects, the aspect of rationality and the aspect of animality. The distinction between the two aspects is not real but virtual. The virtual distinction thus appears to be identical to the formal distinction.

Accordingly, the difference between the real metaphysical distinction and the formal distinction is that the first is real despite its not entailing separability while the second is logical despite having a foundation in reality. I hope I will be forgiven for not discerning a genuine difference between these two kinds of distinction. Feser suggests that the difference may only be a matter of emphasis, with the Thomist emphasizing the logical side of the virtual/formal distinction and the Scotist emphasizing the real side. (76)

Should we then irenically conclude that the metaphysical real distinction of the Thomists (or, to be cautious, of Feser the Thomist) is the same as the formal distinction of (some of) the Scotists?

Essence and Existence Again

I am afraid that matters are much messier. Suppose you agree that essence and existence in Socrates are neither mutually nor unilaterally separable. Suppose you also agree that Socrates is a contingent being: he exists (speaking tenselessly) but there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. The second supposition implies that Socates does not exist just by virtue of his essence: his existence does not follow from his nature. Nor is his existence identical to his essence or nature, as it is in the ontologically simple God. So they must be distinct in reality. But — and here comes trouble — this real distinction in Socrates as between his essence and his existence cannot be a distinction between inseparable aspects. Animality and rationality are inseparable aspects of Socrates' nature; but essence and existence cannot be inseparable aspects of him. If they were inseparable, then Socrates would exist by his every nature or essence. This seems to imply that the metaphysical real distinction is not the same as the formal distinction. For the metaphysical real distinction between essence and existence requires separability of essence and existence in creatures.

Aporetic Conclusion

It looks like we are in a pickle. We got to the conclusion that the real metaphysical distinction is the same as the formal distinction. But now we see that they cannot be the same. Some may not 'relish' it, but the 'pickle' can be savored as an aporetic polyad:

1. Socrates is a metaphysically contingent being.

2. Metaphysical contingency entails weak separability (as defined above) of essence and existence.

3. Nothing is such that its essence and existence are weakly separable.

The triad is logically inconsistent.

Solution by (1)-denial. One cannot of course maintain that Socrates is metaphysically necessary. But one could deny the presupposition upon which (1) rests, namely, the constituent-ontological assumption that Socrates is compounded of essence and existence. On a relation ontology, essence-existence composition makes no sense.

Solution by (2)-denial. One could try to show that contingency has an explanation that does not require weak separability of essence and existence.

Solution by (3)-denial. One could argue that the individual essence of Socrates can be wthout being exemplified along the lines of Plantinga's haecceity properties.

Each of these putative solutions brings trouble of its own.

Book Notice: Elmar J. Kremer, Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller’s Approach to God

I recall a remark by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Philosophische Lehrjahre to the effect that the harvest years of a scholar come late. That was certainly true in the case of the Australian philosopher Barry Miller (1923-2006). His philosophical career culminated in a burst of productivity. In roughly the last decade of his long life he published a trilogy in philosophical theology: From Existence to God (1992), A Most Unlikely God (1996), and The Fullness of Being (2002). I reviewed the first two in the journals and made substantial comments on a manuscript version of the third. Miller kindly acknowledged my help at the end of the preface of the 2002 book. So I was pleased to be of some small service on Miller's behalf by refereeing Kremer's manuscript for Oxford UP and supplying the blurb below when it was accepted by Bloomsbury.

Reviews of Analysis of Existing

“Barry Miller’s philosophical theology clearly shows how a philosopher can think rigorously about God without caving into fashionable and facile refutations of theism. In this study of his writings, Elmar Kremer provides an exemplary account of his sophisticated arguments while discussing their value and cogently defending them against a number of objections. Kremer’s welcome book is both a fine introduction to Miller and a significant contribution to philosophy of religion.” – Brian Davies, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, USA,

“Barry Miller was a brilliant philosophical theologian with an original argument for, and development of, the Thomist idea of God as the entity whose essence is existence. Unfortunately Miller's ideas have not been given the attention they deserve. In part this is because he made few concessions to the reader. In this book Elmar J. Kremer provides the 'clear, well-developed exposition' that Miller's ideas deserve. I recommended it highly to all interested in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, or theology.” – Peter Forrest, Retired Professor of Philosophy, University of New England, Australia,

“Barry Miller's penetrating work in philosophical theology has not received the attention it deserves. It is therefore with pleasure that I recommend the first book-length treatment of Miller's work, Elmar J. Kremer's Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God.” – William F. Vallicella, Retired Professor of Philosophy, USA,

“Kremer's book consists of philosophically acute, painstaking scholarship. It is a very fine introduction to Miller’s highly original work on the metaphysics of theism.” – Bruce Langtry, Senior Fellow in Philosophy, The University of Melbourne, Australia,

What Exists Exists

Reflecting on the seeming tautology, 'What exists exists,' Jacques Maritain writes,

This is no tautology, it implies an entire metaphysics. What is posited outside its causes exercises an activity, an energy which is existence itself. To exist is to maintain oneself and to be maintained outside nothingness; esse is an act, a perfection, indeed the final perfection, a splendid flower in which objects affirm themselves. (A Preface to Metaphysics, Sheed and Ward, 1939, pp. 93-94)

This is the sort of writing, florid and French, that drives analytic philosophers crazy and moves them to mockery. But I think Maritain is here expressing an important insight. Let me see if I can explain it with as little reliance as possible on Maritain's Thomistic machinery.

1. A tautology is a logical truth, a truth true in virtue of its logical form alone. Now it certainly does seem that 'What exists exists' is true in virtue of its logical form alone. Write it like this: For any x, if x exists, then x exists. By Universal Instantiation, we get if a exists, then a exists, which is of the form, if p then p, which is equivalent to p or not-p, which is the Law of Excluded Middle.

2. On the other hand, it has been clear for a long time that 'exist(s)' is no ordinary predicate. To say of an item that it exists is not to characterize it or classify it. Existence is not a classificatory concept. It doesn't partition neutral items into two classes, the existent ones and the nonexistent ones. Pace Meinong, there are no nonexistent items. And existence certainly does not partition existing items into two classes, the existing and the nonexisting. When I say of a thing that it exists I am saying that it is not nothing. I am not saying that it is F or G, but that it is. I am pointing to its sheer being or existence.

3. The same goes for 'What exists, exists.' Although it can be used to express a tautology, it can also be used non-tautologically. Used non-tautologically, it does not say that that-which-exists is that-which-exists; it says that that-which-exists exists. In other words, it does not say, tautologically, that beings are beings; it says, non-tautologically, that beings are.

4. Somewhere in The Enneads Plotinus writes, "It is by the One that all being are beings." But there would be no need to drag The One into the picture if 'all beings are beings' is a tautology. Tautologies do not need truth-makers. Plotinus' point, of course, is that it is by the One that all beings are. They are in virtue of the One; their Being derives from the One. Whether or not that it true, we understand what is being said and we understand that 'all beings are being' is not a tautology.

5. Metaphysics targets the existence of that-which-exists, the Being of beings, the esse of entia, das Sein des Seienden. Thus metaphysics presupposes a difference between existence and the existent. But existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana once observed. (Scepticism and Animal Faith, Dover, 1955, p. 48, orig. publ. 1923.) And so the logician will try to knock the wind out of the metaphysical sails by trying to accommodate the difference between existence and what exists in some such aseptic fashion as the following:

x exists =_df for some y, y = x.

Accordingly, existence is identity-with-something-or-other. 'Exists' as a load-bearing predicate gets replaced by some purely logical machinery: the particular quantifer, a bound variable, the identity sign, and a free variable. Existence for the logician is a 'thin' topic. Thin to the point of being anorexic. It is just logical bones bare of metaphysical meat.

6. Well, why not be a thin theorist? I have written a lot on this topic, so now I will be very brief. While it is of course true that everything that exists is identical to something, namely, itself, this presupposes that the things in question exist in a sense that cannot be captured by the above definition. Another way of putting the point is that the above definition is circular. For it amounts to

x exists =_df for some y that exists, y = x.

If I want to know what it is for something to exist, I learn nothing by being told that it is identical to something that exists, although that is of course true.

7. Getting back to Maritain, he is right as against the thin theorists: existence is a metaphysically weighty topic. 'What exists exists' can be given a non-tautological reading. But on the thin theory, it could only amount to the tautological 'What is identical to something is identical to something.' But whether existence is a perfection, or indeed the final perfection, or rather the opposite, as Santayana and Sartre would maintain, is a further question.

8. Unfortunately, no resolute thin theorist will be persuaded by anything I or anyone says to abandon his theory. All my dialectic can do is lead the reader to a point where he either gets it or he doesn't, where he either sees it, or he doesn't. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

It's a bit like arguments over religion. If you think that religion is nothing but a tissue of childish superstitions, will I ever be able to convince you otherwise? No. For it is not a matter of analytical intelligence, but of insight, or rather, in your case a lack of insight.