Language, Philosophy of – Page 11

Morning Star and Evening Star

London Ed of Beyond Necessity does a good job patiently explaining the 'morning star' – 'evening star' example to one of his uncomprehending readers. But I don't think Ed gets it exactly right. I quibble with the following:

Summarising:
(1) The sentence “the morning star is the evening star” has informational content.
(2) The sentence “the morning star is the morning star” does not have informational content.
(3) Therefore, the term “the morning star” does not have the same informational content as “the evening star”.

One quibble is this. Granted, the two sentences differ in cognitive value, Erkenntniswert. (See "On Sense and Reference" first paragraph.) The one sentence expresses a truth of logic, and thus a truth knowable a priori. The other sentence expresses a factual truth of astronomy, one knowable only a posteriori. But note that Frege says that they differ in cognitive value, not that the one has it while the other doesn't. Ed says that the one has it while the other doesn't — assuming Ed is using 'informational content' to translate Erkenntniswert. There is some annoying slippage here.

More importantly, I don't see how cognitive value/informational content can be had by such subsentential items as 'morning star' and 'evening star.' Thus I question the validity of the inference from (1) & (2) to (3). Neither term gives us any information. So it cannot be that they differ in the information they give. Nor can they be contrasted in point of giving or not giving information. Information is conveyable only by sentences or propositions.

I say this: neither of the names Morgenstern (Phosphorus) or Abendstern (Hesperus) have cognitive value or informational content. (The same holds, I think, if they are not proper names but definite descriptions.) Only indicative sentences (Saetze) and the propositions (Gedanken) they express have such value or content. As I see it, for Frege, names have sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung), and they may conjure up subjective ideas (Vorstellungen) in the minds of their users. But no name has cognitive value. Sentences and propositions, however, have sense, reference, and cognitive value. Interestingly, concept-words (Begriffswoerter) or predicates also have sense and reference, but no cognitive value.

I also think Ed misrepresents the Compositionality Principle. Frege is committed to compositionality of sense (Sinn), not compositionality of informational content/cognitive value. So adding the C. P. to his premise set will not validate the above inference.

The ‘Is’ of Identity and the ‘Is’ of Predication

Bill Clinton may have brought the matter to national attention, but philosophers have long appreciated that much can ride on what the meaning of 'is' is.

Edward of London has a very good post in which he raises the question whether the standard analytic distinction between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication is but fallout from an antecedent decision to adhere to an absolute distinction between names and predicates. If the distinction is absolute, as Frege and his epigoni maintain, then names cannot occur in predicate position, and a distinction between the two uses of 'is' is the consequence. But what if no such absolute distinction is made? Could one then dispense with the standard analytic distinction? Or are there reasons independent of Frege's function-argument analysis of propositions for upholding the distinction between the two uses of 'is'?

To illustrate the putative distinction, consider

1. George Orwell is Eric Blair

and

2. George Orwell is famous.

Both sentences feature a token of 'is.' Now ask yourself: is 'is' functioning in the same way in both sentences? The standard analytic line is that 'is' functions differently in the two sentences. In (1) it expresses identity; in (2) it expresses predication. Identity, among other features, is symmetrical; predication is not. That suffices to distinguish the two uses of 'is.' 'Famous' is predicable of Orwell, but Orwell is not predicable of 'famous.' But if Blair is Orwell, then Orwell is Blair.

Now it is clear, I think, that if one begins with the absolute name-predicate distinction, then the other distinction is also required. For if 'Eric Blair' in (1) cannot be construed as a predicate, then surely the 'is' in (1) does not express predication. The question I am raising, however, is whether the distinction between the two uses of 'is' arises ONLY IF one distinguishes absolutely and categorially between names and predicates.

Fred Sommers seems to think so. Referencing the example 'The morning star is Venus,' Sommers writes, "Clearly it is only after one has adopted the syntax that prohibits the predication of proper names that one is forced to read 'a is b' dyadically and to see in it a sign of identity." (The Logic of Natural Language, Oxford 1982, p. 121, emphasis added) The contemporary reader will of course wonder how else 'a is b' could be read if it is not read as expressing a dyadic relation between a and b. How the devil could the 'is' in 'a is b' be read as a copula?

This is what throws me about the scholastic stuff peddled by Ed and others. In 'Orwell is famous' they seem to be wanting to say that 'Orwell' and 'famous' refer to the same thing. But what could that mean?

First of all, 'Orwell' and 'famous' do not have the same extension: there are many famous people, but only one Orwell. But even if Orwell were the only famous person, Orwell would not be identical to the only famous person. Necessarily, Orwell is Orwell; but it is not the case that, necessarily, Orwell is the only famous person, even if it is true that Orwell is the only famous person, which he isn't.

If you tell me that only 'Orwell' has a referent, but not 'famous,' then I will reply that that is nominalism for the crazy house. Do you really want to say or imply that Orwell is famous because in English we apply the predicate 'famous' to him? That's ass-backwards or bass-ackwards, one. We correctly apply 'famous' to him because he is, in reality, famous. (That his fame is a social fact doesn't make it language-dependent.) Do you really want to say or imply that, were we speaking German, Orwell would not be famous but beruehmt? 'Famous' is a word of English while beruehmt is its German equivalent. The property, however, belongs to neither language. If you say there are no properties, only predicates, then that smacks of the loony bin.

Suppose 'Orwell' refers to the concrete individual Orwell, and 'famous' refers to the property, being-famous. Then you get for your trouble a different set of difficulties. I don't deny them! But these difficulties do not show that the scholastic view is in the clear.

This pattern repeats itself throughout philosophy. I believe I have shown that materialism about the mind faces insuperable objections, and that only those in the grip of naturalist ideology could fail to feel their force. But it won't do any good to say that substance dualism also faces insuperable objections. For it could be that both are false/incoherent. In fact, it could be that every theory proposed (and proposable by us) in solution of every philosophical problem is false/incoherent.

Time, Truth, and Truth-Making: An Antilogism Revisited and Transmogrified

Earlier, I presented the following, which looks to be an antilogism. An antilogism, by definition, is an inconsistent triad. This post considers whether the triad really is logically inconsistent, and so really is an antilogism.

1. Temporally Unrestricted Excluded Middle: The principle that every declarative sentence is either true, or if not true, then false applies unrestrictedly to all declarative sentences, whatever their tense.
2. Presentism: Only what exists at present exists.
3. Temporally Unrestricted Truth-Maker Principle: Every contingent truth has a truth-maker.

Edward objects: "First, I don't see why the three statements are logically inconsistent. Why can't the truthmaker for a future tense statement exist now, in the present?"

Objection sustained. The triad as it stands is not logically inconsistent.

'Miss Creant will die by lethal injection in five minutes.' Let this be our example. It is a future-tensed contingent declarative. By (1) it is either true or, if not true, then false. By (3), our sample sentence has a truth-maker, an existing truth-maker obviously, if it is true. By (2), the truth-maker exists only at present. Edward is right: there is no inconsistency unless we add something like:

4. If a sentence predicts a contingent event which lies wholly in the future, and the sentence is true, then the truth-maker of the sentence, if it has one, cannot exist at any time prior to the time of the event.

(4) is extremely plausible. Suppose it is true now that Miss Creant will die in five minutes. The only item that could make this true is the event of her dying. But this event does not now exist and cannot exist at any time prior to her dying.

So our antilogism, under Edwardian pummeling, transmogrifies into an aporetic tetrad which, he will agree, is logically inconsistent.

The solution, for Edward, is obvious: Deny the Temporally Unrestricted Truth-Maker Principle as stated in (3). Of course, that is a solution. But can Edward show that it must be preferred to the other three solutions? After all, one could deny Presentism, and many distinguished philosophers do. I would hazard the observation that the majority of the heavy-hitters in the 20th century Anglosphere were B-theorists, and thus deniers of Presentism. Or one could deny Unrestricted LEM, or even (4).

Although I said that (4) is extremely plausible, one could conceivably deny it by maintaining that the truth-makers of future-tensed sentences are tendencies in the present. For example, I say to wifey, "Watch it! The pot is going to boil over!" Assuming that that's a true prediction, one might claim that it is the present tendencies of the agitated pasta-rich water that is the truth-maker.

Please note also that I too could solve the tetrad by denying Unrestricted T-maker. Not by rejecting T-makers tout court in the Edwardian manner, but by restricting T-makers to contingent past- and present-tensed declaratives. I hope Edward appreciates that the above problem does not give aid and comfort to his wholesale rejection of T-makers.

One can always solve an aporetic polyad by denying one of its limbs. Sure. But then you face other daunting tasks. One is to show in a compelling way that your preferred solution should be preferred by all competent practitioners. You have to show that your solution is THE solution and not merely a solution relative to your background assumptions and cognitive values. A school-immanent solution is no final and absolute solution. Another task is to show that your solution can be embedded in a theory that does not itself give rise to insoluble problems.

Could Qualia Terms and Neuroscience Terms Have the Same Reference?

I made the point that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, 'This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.' To which a Viet Nam veteran, altering the example, replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuro-scientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain…, he isn't claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality. And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states. Well, I have my doubts . . . .

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

The basic idea is that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweisen). Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.

Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)

It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.

Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.

The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.

Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)

In vino veritas.

Sentences as Names of Facts: An Aporetic Triad

There are good reasons to introduce facts as truth-makers for contingently true atomic sentences. (Some supporting reasoning here.) But if there are facts, and they make-true contingent atomic sentences, then what is the semantic relation between these declarative sentences and their truth-makers? It seems we should say that such sentences name facts. But some remarks of Leo Mollica suggest that this will lead to trouble. Consider this aporetic triad:

1. 'Al is fat' is the name of the fact of Al's being fat.
2. 'Al is fat' has a referent only if it is true.
3. Names are essentially names: a name names whether or not it has a referent.

Each limb of the triad is very plausible, but they can't all be true. The conjunction of (1) and (3) entails the negation of (2). Which limb should we abandon? It cannot be (1) given the cogency of the Truth Maker Argument and the plausible assumption that the only semantic relation between a sentence and the corresponding fact is one of naming.

(2) also seems 'ungiveupable.' There are false sentences, and there may be false (Fregean) propositions: but a fact is not a truth-bearer but a truth-maker. It is very hard to swallow the notion that there are 'false' or nonobtaining facts. If 'Al is fat' is false it is because Al and fatness do not form a fact. The existence of a fact is the unity of its constituents. Where there is the unity of the right sort of constituents you have a fact; where there is not, you don't.

As for (3), suppose that names are only accidentally names, than a name names only on condition that it have a referent. We would then have to conclude that if the bearer of a name ceases to exist, that the name ceases to be a name. And that seems wrong. When Le Verrier put forth the hypothesis of an intra-Mercurial planent that came to be called 'Vulcan,' he did not know whether there was indeed such a planet, but he thought he had good evidence of its existence. When it was later decided that there was no good evidence of the planet in question, 'Vulcan' did not cease to be a name. If we now say, truly, that Vlucan does not exist we employ a name whose naming is not exhausted by its having a referent.

So it seems that names name essentially. This is the linguistic analog of intentionality: one cannot just think; if one thinks, then necessarily one thinks of something, something that may or may not exist. If I am thinking of something, and it ceases to exist, my thinking does not cease to be object-directed. Thinking is essentially object-directed. Analogously, names are essentially names.

So far, then, today's triad looks to be another addition the list of insolubilia. The limbs of the triad are more reasonably accepted than rejected, but they cannot all be true. A pretty pickle.

By the way, I insist on the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.

Atomic Sentences, Negation, and Direct Reference

Edward argues:

Now I claim that in systems where there is no distinction between predicate and sentence negation, we have ‘direct reference’. This is easily shown. Direct reference in a singular sentence is when the sentence is meaningless when the singular subject fails to refer. Assume that ‘a is F’ is not meaningless. If it is true, then there is a referent for ‘a’. If it is not true, the sentential negation ‘It is not the case that a is F’ is true. If sentential negation is equivalent to predicate negation, it follows that ‘a is non-F’ is true, and so a exists, and so, there is a referent for ‘a’. But (by excluded middle) either ‘a is F’ is true, or its contradictory (the sentential negation) is true. In either case, ‘a’ has a referent. Thus if ‘a is F’ is not meaningless, ‘a’ has a referent. Conversely if ‘a’ does not have a referent, ‘a is F’ is meaningless. But that is Direct Reference, as I have defined it.

This reasoning strikes me as correct. The notion of an atomic sentence is foundational for modern predicate logic (MPL). For such sentences there is no distinction between predicate and sentence negation. And given Edward's definition of 'direct reference,' I am persuaded that MPL entails direct refence for the subject terms of atomic sentences.

Note that I am substituting 'atomic sentence' for Edward's 'singular sentence.' Every atomic sentence (whether monadic or relational) is singular, but not every grammatically singular sentence is atomic. Or at least that is not obviously the case. Thus it is far from obvious that 'Peter smokes,' which is grammatically singular, is logically atomic. If one holds, with Russell, that grammatically proper names are definite descriptions in disguise, then the grammatically singular 'Peter smokes' will have an analysis that is existentially general.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the subject term of an atomic sentence is what Russell called a logically proper name and distinguished from a grammatically proper name. So what Edward has shown is that Direct Reference holds for logically proper names. But this does not show that Direct Reference holds for ordinary names, grammatically proper names, such as 'Edward' in 'Edward is English' or 'Peter' in 'Peter smokes.'

Direct Reference for grammatically proper names, whether nonvacuous or vacuous (e.g. 'Vulcan') is false. But as far as I can see MPL is not committed to Direct Reference for such names. So while I am persuaded by Edward's reasoning above, I am not sure what its relevance is.

Negative Existentials and the Causal Theory of Reference: Notes on Donnellan

Causal theories of reference strike me as hopeless. Let's see how they fare with the problem of negative existentials.

There are clear cases in which 'exist(s)' functions as a second-level predicate, a predicate of properties or concepts or propositional functions or cognate items, and not as a predicate of individuals. The affirmative general existential 'Horses exist,' for example, can be understood as making an instantiation claim: 'The concept horse is instantiated.' Accordingly, the sentence does not predicate existence of individual horses; it predicates instantiation of the concept horse.

This sort of analysis is well-nigh mandatory in the case of negative general existentials such as 'Flying horses do not exist.' Here we have a true sentence that cannot possibly be about flying horses for the simple reason that there aren't any. (One can make a move into Meinong's jungle here, but there are good reasons for not going there.) On a reasonable parsing it is about the concept flying horse, and says of this concept that it has no instances.

The same analysis works for negative singular existentials like 'Pegasus does not exist.' Pace Meinong, everything exists. So, given the truth of 'Pegasus does not exist,' 'Pegasus' cannot be taken as naming Pegasus. Since 'Pegasus' has meaning, contributing as it does to the meaning of the true sentence, 'Pegasus does not exist,' and since 'Pegasus' lacks a referent, a natural conclusion to draw is that the meaning of 'Pegasus' is not exhausted by its reference: it has a sense whether or not it has a referent. So, along Russellian lines, we may analyze 'Pegasus does not exist' as, 'It is not the case that there exists an x such that x is the winged horse of Greek mythology.' Or we can take a page from Quine and say that nothing pegasizes. What we have done in effect is to treat the singular term 'Pegasus' as a predicate and read the sentence as a denial that this predicate applies to anything.

In this way the paradox attaching to singular negative existentials is removed. But the Russell-Quine analysis is based on the assumption that names are definite descriptions in disguise (Russell) or else transformable into predicates (Quine). But how does one deal with the problem of negative existentials if one denies the Russell-Quine approach to proper names, holding instead that they refer directly to their nominata, and not via the sense of a definite description or Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions?

Keith Donnellan tackles this problem in "Speaking of Nothing" (reprinted in S. P. Schwarz, ed., Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds, Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 216-244).

Consider 'Santa Claus does not exist.' What does a child come to learn when he learns this truth? He does not learn, as a Russellian would have it, that nothing in reality answers to (satisfies) a certain
description; what he learns is that the historical chain leading back from his use of 'Santa Claus' ends in a 'block':

     When the historical explanation of the use of a name (with the
     intention to refer) ends in this way with events that preclude any
     referent being identified, I will call it a "block" in the history.
     In this [Santa Claus] example, the block is the introduction of the
     name into the child's speech via a fiction told to him as reality
     by his parents. (237)

Having defined 'block,' Donnellan supplies a rule for negative existence statements, a rule which he says does not purport to supply the meaning of negative existentials but their truth-conditions:

     If N is a proper name that has been used in predicative statements
     with the intention to refer to some individual, then 'N does not
     exist' is true if and only if the history of those uses ends in a
     block. (239)

'God' would appear to satisfy the antecedent of this conditional, so Donnellan's theory implies that 'God does not exist' is true if and only if the history of the uses of 'God' ends in a block.

There is something wrong with this theory. If 'God does not exist' is true, then we may ask: what makes it true? What is the truthmaker of this truth? The most natural answer is that extralinguistic reality makes it true, more precisely, the fact that reality contains nothing that could be referred to as God. There is nothing linguistic about this truthmaker. Of course, if 'God does not exist' is true, then 'God' does not refer to anything, and if 'God' does not refer to anything then the sentence 'God does not exist' is true. But the wholly nonlinguistic fact of God's nonexistence is not identical to the partially linguistic fact of 'God''s not referring to anything. Why not? Consider the following modal argument:

   1. God's nonexistence, if it obtains, obtains in every possible world.
   2. The fact of 'God''s not referring to anything obtains in only some
   possible worlds. (Because the English language exists in only some
   worlds.)
   Therefore
   3. The two facts are distinct.

The argument just given assumes in its initial premise Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he necessarily exists, and if he does not, then he is impossible. But I don't need this assumption. I can
argue as follows:

   5. God's nonexistence, if it obtains, obtains in some possible worlds.
   6. Among these possible worlds, some are worlds in which English does
   not exist.
   Therefore
   7. There is at least one world in which neither God nor the English
   language exists, which implies that God's nonexistence in that world
   cannot have as truthmaker any fact involving the name 'God.'

Let me put it another way. If 'God does not exist' is true, then the same fact can be expressed in German: 'Gott existiert nicht.' This is one fact expressible in two different languages. But the fact of
'God''s not referring to anything is a different fact from the fact of 'Gott''s not referring to anything. The facts are different because they involve different word-types. Therefore, neither fact can be
identical to the fact of God's nonexistence.

Since the two facts are different, the wholly nonlinguistic fact of God's nonexistence cannot have as a truth-condition the partially linguistic fact of the history of uses of 'God' ending in a block, contrary to what Donnellan says. If one assertively utters 'God does not exist,' and if what one says is true, then extralingustic reality must be a certain way: it must be godless. This godlessness of reality, if it indeed obtains, cannot be tied to the existence of any contingent language like English.

Note that the descriptivist need not fall into Donnellan's trap. When he assertively utters 'God does not exist' he says in effect that all or most of the properties associated with the use of 'God' — such
properties as omniscience, etc. — are not instantiated: nothing in extralinguistic reality has them. Since these properties can be viewed as having an objective, extralinguistic existence, the descriptivist needn't tie the existence/nonexistence of God to the existence of any contingent language.

Singular Meaning

Edward Ockham of Beyond Necessity is back from his Turkish holiday and reports that, besides lazing on the beach at Bodrum, he

. . . spent some time thinking about singular concepts. Do you accept singular meaning? Either you hold that a proper name has a meaning, or not (Aquinas held that it does not, by the way). If it does, then what is it that we understand when we understand the meaning of a proper name? The scholastics held that there was a sort of equivalence between meaning and signifying ("unumquodque, sicut contingit intelligere, contingit et significare"). What I signify, when I use a term in the context of a proposition, is precisely what another person understands, when he grasps that proposition that I have expressed.

Do I accept singular meaning? That depends on what we mean by 'meaning' and by 'singular.' Let's see if we can iron out our terminology.

1. Without taking 'sense' and 'reference' in exactly the way Frege intended them to be taken, I would say that 'meaning' is ambiguous as between sense and reference. Unfortunately, Edward seems to be using 'meaning' to mean 'sense.' Of course, he is free to do that.

2. Edward also uses the word 'signify.' I should like him to explain exactly how he is using this word. Is the signification of a proper name the same as what I am calling its sense? Or is the signification of a proper name its referent? Or neither? Or both?

3. Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Peter is tired' in the presence of both Peter and Edward. My assertion is intended to convey a fact about Peter to Edward. The latter grasps (understands) the proposition I express by my assertive tokening of the sentence in question. And of course I understand the same proposition. What I signify — 'express' as I would put it — by my use of 'Peter' is what Edward understands when he grasps the proposition I express.

4. Now the issue seems to be this. Is the meaning or signification or sense I express, and that I understand, when I say 'Peter' a singular meaning? More precisely: is it an irreducibly singular meaning, one that cannot be understood as logically constructed from general concepts such as man, philosopher, smoker?

5. I say No! I don't deny that 'Peter' has a sense. It has a sense and a referent, unlike 'Vulcan' which has a sense but no referent. But the sense of 'Peter' is not singular but general. So, to answer Edward's question, I do not accept singular meaning.

Corollary: the haecceity of Peter – Peterity to give it a name — cannot be grasped. All thinking is general: no thinking can penetrate to the very haecceity and ipseity of the thing thought about. One cannot think about a particular except as an instance of multiply exemplifiable concepts/properties. This is 'on all fours' with my earlier claim that there are no singular or individual concepts. The individual qua individual is conceptually ineffable. So if we know singulars (individuals) at all, we do not know them by conceptualization.

If Edward disagrees with this he must tell us exactly why. He should also tell us exactly how he is using 'proposition' since that is another potential bone of contention. Is he a Fregean, a Russellian, or a Geachian when it comes to propositions? Or none of those?

Are There Logically Simple Propositions?

Leo Carton Mollica e-mails:

Your most recent post (for which many thanks) inspired the below-expressed argument, and I was curious as to your opinion of it . . . . I think it has something behind it, but right now I feel uncertain about my examples in (2).

0. There is something curious about the relation between a proposition or declarative sentence and the terms or words that compose it: the list L ("Christ," "Judas," "betrays") clearly differs, at the very least in not having a truth value, from the sentence "Judas betrays Christ," yet nothing immediately presents itself as the ground G of this difference. One plausible candidate for G is some kind of union or togetherness amongst the members of L present in "Judas betrays Christ" and not in L itself, but this proposal is open to a serious challenge.

1. Suppose we accept Barry Miller's thesis, from "Logically Simple Propositions," that some declarative sentences have only one semantic element. His favorite such sentence is the Romanian "Fulgura," whose only constituent word translates (if I remember aright) the English "brightens," and which is interesting in requiring no actual or implied subject to form a complete sentence (like "It's raining" in English, but without the dummy subject).

2. Now, the lone word in "Fulgura" seemingly can occur outside any proposition. If, for example, someone were to ask me to recite my favorite Romanian word, or to translate "brightens" into Romanian, it would be strange to take me as telling them something false, or to have them respond "No, it isn't," upon my replying with "fulgura." There would, however, be nothing strange about the sentence "Fulgura" being false and someone telling me as much. [. . .]

3. Even in such simple sentences, therefore, there is a distinction between the sentence and the words contained therein, for one can be had without the other. But the ground of this distinction cannot be any union or togetherness among the words that enter into the sentence for the simple reason that no union or togetherness amongst items can be had without distinct items to unify or bind together. It can, therefore, be at least plausibly argued that the general ground of the difference between a sentence and its constituent words is no kind of union or togetherness.

I take Mr Mollica's basic argument to be this:

a. If there are logically simple sentences/propositions, then the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.
b. There are logically simple sentences/propositions.
Therefore

c. The problem of the unity of the proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.

My response is to reject (b) while granting (a). I discussed the question of logically simple sentences/propositions with Barry Miller back in the '90s in the pages of Faith and Philosophy. My "Divine Simplicity: A New Defense (Faith and Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 4, October 1992, pp. 508-525) has an appendix entitled "Divine Simplicity and Logically Simple Propositions." Miller responded and I counter-responded in the July 1994 issue, pp. 474-481. It is with pleasure that I take another look at this issue. I will borrow freely from what I have published. (Whether this counts as plagairism, depends, I suppose, on one's views on diachronic personal identity.)

A. A logically simple proposition (LSP) is one that lacks not only propositional components, but also sub-propositional components.Thus atomic propositions are not logically simple in Miller's sense, since they contain sub-propositional parts. A proposition of the form a is F, though atomic, exhibits subject-predicate complexity.

B. Miller's examples of LSPs are inconclusive. Consider the German Es regnet ('It is raining'). As Miller correctly notes, the es is grammatical filler, and so the sentence can be pared down to Regnet, which is no doubt grammatically simple. He then argues:

Now there is no question of Regnet being a predicate; for as a proposition it has a complete sense, whereas as a predicate it could have only incomplete sense. Hence, Regnet and propositions like it seem logically simple. (Barry Miller, "Logically Simple Propositions," Analysis, vol. 34, no. 4, March 1974, p. 125.)

I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Miller is confusing propositions with the sentences used to express them. Regnet and fulgura are grammatically simple. But it scarcely follows that the propositions they express are logically simple. What makes them one-word sentences is the fact that they express propositions; otherwise, they would be mere words. So we need a sentence-proposition distinction. But once that distinction is in place then it becomes clear that grammatical simplicity of sentence does not entail logical simplicity of the corresponding proposition.

C. It is also unclear how any intellect like ours could grasp a proposition devoid of logical parts, let alone believe or know such a proposition. To believe that it is snowing, for example, is to believe something logically complex, albeit unified, something formulatable by some such sentence as 'Snow is falling.' So even if there were logically simple propositions, they could not be accusatives of minds like ours. And if propositions are defined as the possible accusatives of propositional attitudes such as belief and knowledge, then the point is stronger still: there cannot be any logically sinple propositions.

D. So it seems to me that 'the problem of the list' or the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is one that pertains to every sentence/proposition. It is a problem as ancient as it is tough, and, I suspect, absolutely intractable. For a glimpse into the state of the art, I shamelessly recommend my June 2010 Dialectica article, "Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition."

Atomic Sentences and Syncategorematic Elements

According to Fred Sommers (The Logic of Natural Language, p. 166), ". . . one way of saying what an atomic sentence is is to say that it is the kind of sentence that contains only categorematic expressions." Earlier in the same book, Sommers says this:

In Frege, the distinction between subjects and predicates is not due to any difference of syncategorematic elements since the basic subject-predicate propositions are devoid of such elements. In Frege, the difference between subject and predicate is a primitive difference between two kinds of categorematic expressions. (p. 17)

Examples of categorematic (non-logical) expressions are 'Socrates' and 'mammal.' Examples of syncategorematic (logical) expressions are 'not,' 'every,' and 'and.' As 'syn' suggests, the latter expressions are not semantic stand-alones, but have their meaning only together with categorematic expressions. Sommers puts it this way: "Categorematic expressions apply to things and states of affairs; syncategorematic expressions do not." (164)

At first I found it perfectly obvious that atomic sentences have only categorematic elements, but now I have doubts. Consider the atomic sentence 'Al is fat.' It is symbolized thusly: Fa. 'F' is a predicate expression the reference (Bedeutung) of which is a Fregean concept (Begriff) while 'a' is a subject-expression or name the reference of which is a Fregean object (Gegenstand). Both expressions are categorematic or 'non-logical.' Neither is syncategorematic. And there are supposed to be no syncategorematic elements in the sentence: there is just 'F' and 'a.'

But wait a minute! What about the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order? That juxtaposition is not nothing. It conveys something. It conveys that the referent of 'a' falls under the referent of 'F'. It conveys that the object a instantiates the concept F. I suggest that the juxtaposition of the two signs is a syncategorematic element. If this is right, then it is false that atomic sentence lack all syncategorematic elements.

Of course, there is no special sign for the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in 'Fa.' So I grant that there is no syncategorematic element if such an element must have its own separate and isolable sign. But there is no need for a separate sign; the immediate juxtaposition does the trick. The syncategorematic element is precisely the juxtaposition.

Please note that if there were no syncategorematic element in 'Fa' there would not be any sentence at all. A sentence is not a list. The sentence 'Fa' is not the list 'F, a.' A (declarative) sentence expresses a thought (Gedanke) which is its sense (Sinn). And its has a reference (Bedeutung), namely a truth value (Wahrheitswert). No list of words (or of anything else) expresses a thought or has a truth value. So a sentence is not a list of its constituent words. A sentence depends on its constituent words, but it is more than them. It is their unity.

So I say there must be a syncategorematic element in 'Fa' if it is to be a sentence. There is need of a copulative element to tie together subject and predicate. It follows that, pace Sommers, it is false that atomic sentences are devoid of syntagorematic elements.

Note what I am NOT saying. I am not saying that the copulative element in a sentence must be a separate sign such as 'is.' There is no need for the copulative 'is.' In standard English we say 'The sea is blue' not 'The sea blue.' But in Turkish one can say Deniz mavi and it is correct and intelligible. My point is not that we need the copulative 'is' as a separate sign but that we need a copulative element which, though it does not refer to anything, yet ties together subject and predicate. There must be some feature of the atomic sentence that functions as the copulative element, if not immediate juxtaposition then something else such as a font difference or color difference.

At his point I will be reminded that Frege's concepts (Begriffe) are unsaturated (ungesaettigt). They are 'gappy' or incomplete unlike objects. The incompleteness of concepts is reflected in the incompleteness of predicate expressions. Thus '. . . is fat' has a gap in it, a gap fit to accept a name such as 'Al' which has no gap. We can thus say that for Frege the copula is imported into the predicate. It might be thought that the gappiness of concepts and predicate expressions obviates the need for a copulative element in the sentence and in the corresponding Thought (Gedanke) or proposition.

But this would be a mistake. For even if predicate expressions and concepts are unsaturated, there is still a difference between a list and a sentence. The unsaturatedness of a concept merely means that it combines with an object without the need of a tertium quid. (If there were a third thing, then Bradley's regress would be up and running.) But to express that a concept is in fact instantiated by an object requires more than a listing of a concept-word (Begriffswort) and a name. There is need of a syncategorical element in the sentence.

So I conclude that if there are any atomic sentences, then they cannot contain only categorematic expressions.

The Aporetics of Singular Sentences

I should issue a partial retraction. I wrote earlier,"The TFL representation of singular sentences as quantified sentences does not capture their logical form, and this is an inadequacy of TFL, and a point in favor of MPL." ('TFL' is short for 'traditional formal logic'; 'MPL' for 'modern predicate logic with identity.' )

The animadversions of Edward the Nominalist have made me see that my assertion is by no means obvious, and may in the end be just a dogma of analytic philosophy which has prevailed because endlessly repeated and rarely questioned. Consider again this obviously valid argument:

1. Pittacus is a good man
2. Pittacus is a wise man
—–
3. Some wise man is a good man.

The traditional syllogistic renders the argument as follows:

Every Pittacus is a wise man
Some Pittacus is a good man
—–
Some wise man is a good man.

This has the form:

Every P is a W
Some P is a G
—–
Some W is a G.

This form is easily shown to be valid by the application of the syllogistic rules.

In my earlier post I then repeated a stock objection which I got from Peter Geach:

But is it logically acceptable to attach a quantifier to a singular term? How could a proper name have a sign of logical quantity prefixed to it? 'Pittacus' denotes or names exactly one individual. 'Every Pittacus' denotes the very same individual. So we should expect 'Every Pittacus is wise' and 'Pittacus is wise' to exhibit the same logical behavior. But they behave differently under negation.

The negation of 'Pittacus is wise' is 'Pittacus is not wise.' So, given that 'Pittacus' and 'every Pittacus' denote the same individual, we should expect that the negation of 'Every Pittacus is wise' will be 'Every Pittacus is not wise.' But that is not the negation (contradictory) of 'Every Pittacus is wise'; it is its contrary. So 'Pittacus is wise' and 'Every Pittacus is wise' behave differently under negation, which shows that their logical form is different.

My objection, in nuce, was that 'Pittacus is wise' and 'Pittacus is not wise' are contradictories, not contraries, while 'Every Pittacus is wise' and 'Every Pittacus is not wise' ('No Pittacus is wise') are contraries. Therefore, TFL does not capture or render perspicuous the logical form of 'Pittacus is wise.'

To this, Edward plausibly objected:

As I have argued here before, ‘Pittacus is wise’ and ‘Pittacus is not wise’ are in fact contraries. For the first implies that someone (Pittacus) is wise. The second implies that someone (Pittacus again) is not wise. Both imply the existence of Pittacus (or at least – to silence impudent quibblers – that someone is Pittacus). Thus they are contraries. Both are false when no one is Pittacus.

I now concede that this is a very good point. A little later Edward writes,

The thing is, you really have a problem otherwise. If 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is not wise' are contradictories, and if 'Socrates is not wise' implies 'someone (Socrates) is not wise', as standard MPC holds, you are committed to the thesis that the sentence is not meaningful when Socrates ceases to exist (or if he never existed because Plato made him up). Which (on my definition) is Direct Reference.

So you have this horrible choice: Direct reference or Traditional Logic.

But must we choose? Consider 'Vulcan is uninhabited.' Why can't I, without jettisoning any of the characteristic tenets of MPL, just say that this sentence, though it appears singular is really general because 'Vulcan' is not a logically proper name but a definite description in disguise? Accordingly, what the sentence says is that a certain concept — the concept planet between Mercury and the Sun — has as a Fregean mark (Merkmal) the concept uninhabited.

Now consider the pair 'Socrates is dead' – 'Socrates is not dead.' Are these contraries or contradictories? If contraries, then they can both be false. Arguably, they are both false since Socrates does not exist, given that presentism is true. Since both are false, both are meaningful. But then 'Socrates ' has meaning despite its not referring to anything. So 'Socrates' has something like a Fregean sense. But what on earth could this be, given that 'Socrates' unlike 'Vulcan' names an individual that existed, and so has a nonqualitative thisnsess incommunicable to any other individual?

If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'Socrates' is its referent, then, given that presentism is true and Socrates does not exist, there is no referent in which case both sentences are meaningless.

So once again we are in deep aporetic trouble. The proper name of a past individual cannot have a reference-determining sense. This is because any such sense would have to be a Plantingian haecceity-property, and I have already shown that these cannot exist. But if we say that 'Socrates' does not have a reference-determining sense but refers directly in such a way as to require Socrates to exist if 'Socrates' is to have meaning, then, given presentism, 'Socrates' and the sentence of which it is a part is meaningless.

Hypostatization and Plural Reference

In Plural Reference, Franklin Mason writes that "Vallicella is often a delight, but upon occasion he annoys me to no end." Apparently I remind him of a "philosophical pugilist," a former colleague perhaps, who is obnoxious in the manner of all-too-many analytic philosophers. (One such told me once that if one is not willing to become a bit of an asshole in a philosophical discussion one is not taking it seriously.) Now I probably irritate Mason in a number of ways since I am an outspoken conservative while he is a liberal. But the proximate source of his umbrage is a comment I made in a quick and polemical entry entitled In Debt We Trust. There I wrote:

One of the people interviewed [in the movie In Debt We Trust] states that "Society preaches the gospel of shopping." That is the sort of nonsense one expects to hear from libs and lefties. First of all, there is no such thing as society. To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of hypostatization.

Mason protests:

When one begins a sentence with "society", one does not thereby assent to the existence of some bizarre, spatially disconnected entity whose parts are people. (Well, very few mean any such thing, and those who do are invariably deeply misguided philosophers. Plain folk never mean any such thing. Philosophers hardly ever mean such a thing. ) One uses "society" to refer plurally to, well, a plurality of people.

I sympathize with Mason's irritation. I once wrote a post in which I approvingly quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's great essay "Self-Reliance" the line, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Tony Flood, the anarcho-capitalist, took me to task for presupposing that there is some entity 'society' above and beyond its members. But of course I presupposed no such thing and I was annoyed by Flood's objection. Clearly, what Emerson meant, and what I approved of, was the idea that the members of society engage in a sort of tacit conspiracy with one another to the end of enforcing conformity.

Our nominalist friend 'Ockham' pulled the same thing on me once. I used a sentence featuring the word 'property' and he took my use of that term as committing me to properties in some realist acceptation of the term. It annoyed me and struck me as a perverse refusal to take in the plain sense of what I wrote. Suppose I say, of a certain person, 'She has many fine attributes.' That is an ontologically noncommittal form of words and as such neutral in respect of the issue that divides nominalists and realists.

I submit, however, that Mason goes too far when he confidently asserts that "Plain folk never mean any such thing." I strongly suspect that the lady I was quoting never in her life thought about the issue now under discussion. She was most likely just repeating some liberal boilerplate she had picked up second-hand. She was probably confused and meant nothing definite when she said, "Society preaches the gospel of shopping." If she meant nothing definite, then Mason cannot confidently claim that "Plain folk never mean any such thing." And precisely because the lady meant nothing definite it is important to point out that one commits the fallacy of hypostatization if one assumes that for every substantive there is a corresponding substance. If I pinned the lady down, she would probably deny that there is some entity distinct from every member of society, an entity that preaches the gospel of shopping. But then I would ask her what she did mean. Did she mean that every member of society preaches said gospel? Or only that some do? I would get her to accept the latter. And then I would get her to admit that she was allowing those few people, advertisers, for example, to influence her. By showing her that there was no such thing as 'society,' I would be 'empowering' her — to use a squishy liberal word — I would make her see that she was not confronting some irresistible Power, but that she had the power to resist the siren song of the advertisers.

The reason this is important is that liberals have a tendency to remove responsibility from the agent and displace it onto something external to the agent such as 'society.' Thus 'society' made the punk kill the pharmacist, etc.

So, contra Mason, many people do confusedly think of society as some irresistible Power over against them to which blame can be assigned. It would be a mistake to think that no one commits the fallacy of hypostatization.

The topics of plural reference and plural predication are very difficult. Probably my best post on these topics is Irreducibly Plural Predication: 'They Are Surrounding the Building.' See also Collective Inconsistency and Plural Predication, A Problem with the Multiple Relations Approach to Plural Predication, The Hatfields and the McCoys, and I Need to Study Plural Predication.

C. J. F. Williams’ Analysis of ‘I Might Not Have Existed’

There are clear cases in which 'exist(s)' functions as a second-level predicate, a predicate of properties or concepts or propositional functions or cognate items, and not as a predicate of individuals. The affirmative general existential 'Horses exist,' for example, is best understood as making an instantiation claim: 'The concept horse is instantiated.' Accordingly, the sentence does not predicate existence of individual horses; it predicates instantiation of the concept horse.

This sort of analysis is well-nigh mandatory in the case of negative general existentials such as 'Flying horses do not exist.' Here we have a true sentence that cannot possibly be about flying horses for the simple reason that there aren't any. (One can make a Meinongian move here, but if possible we should try to get by without doing so.) On a reasonable parsing, 'Flying horses do not exist' is about the concept flying horse, and says of this concept that it has no instances.

But what about singular existentials? Negative singular existentials like 'Pegasus does not exist' pose no problem. We may analyze it as, 'It is not the case that there exists an x such that x is the winged horse of Greek mythology.' Or we can take a page from Quine and say that nothing pegasizes. What we have done in effect is to treat the singular term 'Pegasus' as a predicate and read the sentence as a denial that this predicate applies to anything.

Problems arise, however, with affirmative singular existentials such as 'I exist' and with sentences like 'I might not have existed' which are naturally read as presupposing the meaningfulness of 'I exist' and thus of uses of 'exists' as a first-level predicate. Thus, 'I might not have existed' is construable in terms of the operator 'It might not have been the case that ____' operating upon 'I exist.'

C.J.F. Williams, following in the footsteps of Frege, maintains the draconian thesis that all meaningful uses of 'exist(s)' are second-level. He must therefore supply an analysis of the true sentence 'I might not have existed' that does not require the meaningfulness of 'I exist.' His suggestion is that

     . . . my assertion that I might not have existed is the assertion
     that there is some property . . . essential to me, which I alone
     possess, and which might never have been uniquely instantiated . .
     (What is Existence?, Oxford 1981, p. 104)

Williams is suggesting that for each individual x there is a property H such that (i) H is essential to x in the sense that x cannot exist except as instantiating H; and (ii) H, if instantiated, is instantiated by exactly one individual. Accordingly, to say that x might not have existed is to say that H might not have been instantiated. And to say that x exists is to say that H is instantiated.

This analysis will work only if the right properties are available. What is needed are essentially individuating properties. Suppose Ed is the fastest marathoner. Being the fastest marathoner distinguishes Ed from everything else, but it does not individuate him since it is not bound up with Ed's identity that he be the fastest marathoner. Ed can be Ed without being the fastest marathoner. So Ed's existence cannot be equivalent to, let alone idenctical with, the instantiation of the property of being the fastest marathoner since this is an accidental property of anything that possesses it, whereas the existence of an individual must be essential to it. After all, without existence a thing is nothing at all!

On the other hand, Ed's existence is not equivalent to his instantiation of any old essential property such as being human since numerous individuals possess the property whereas the existence of an individual is unique to it.

What is needed is a property that Ed alone has and that Ed alone has in every possible world in which he exists. Such a property will be essentially individuating: it will individuate Ed in every possible world in which Ed exists, one of these being the actual world.

Williams suggests the property of having sprung from sperm cell S and ovum O. Presumably Ed could not have existed without this origin, and anything possessing this origin is Ed. The idea, then, is that the existence of Ed is the instantiation of this property.

The property in question, however, is one that Michael Loux would call 'impure': it makes essential reference to an individual or individuals, in this case to S and O. Since S and O each exist, the question arises as to how their existence is to be analyzed.

For an analysis like that of Williams to work, what is needed is a property that does not refer to or presuppose any existing individual, a property that somehow captures the haecceity of Ed but without presupposing the existence of an individual. If there were such a haecceity property H, then one could say that Ed's existence just is H's being instantiated.

But as I argue in tedious detail in A Paradigm Theory of Existence and in this post such haecceity properties are creatures of darkness. That is one of the reasons I reject Frege-style theories of existence.

Existence, real pound-the-table existence, belongs to individuals. The attempt to 'kick it upstairs' and make it a property of properties or concepts or propositional functions is completely wrongheaded, pace such luminaries as Frege, Russell, and their epigoni.

An Argument for Direct Reference

Edward Ockham uses ‘Direct Reference’ to refer to "the theory that part or all of the meaning of a proper name requires the existence of a named object." This implies that a proper name cannot have a meaning unless there exists an object it names. He then gives the following argument:

A term signifies either a property or an object. But properties are repeatable. A property like being white, or running, or being bald can be instantiated by many individuals. Even a property that can only be had by one individual at a time (being the tallest living philosopher) can be instantiated by different individuals at successive times, or could be instantiated by a different individual than the one that possesses it now. If a proper name like 'Socrates' signified a property, even a unique property, it would make sense to say that this individual is Socrates on Tuesday, but that someone else is Socrates on Wednesday. Or that this individual is Socrates today, but might not have been Socrates. But that makes no sense. A proper name does [NOT] signify something that is repeatable, therefore does not signify a property. Therefore it signifies an object. Therefore an object is part or all of the meaning of a proper name, and the theory of Direct Reference, as defined above, is true.

As it stands, this argument is not compelling. To be compelling, it would have to close off the 'haecceity escape route.' Haecceitas is Latin for 'thisness.' Let us say that H is an haecceity property, an haecceity for short, if and only if H is a first-level property which, if instantiated, is instantiated by the same individual ('object' in Edward's terminology) at every time and in every possible world in which it is instantiated. Accordingly, 'the tallest living philosopher' does not express an haecceity property: it has different instances at different times and at different possible worlds, even though at a given time in a given world it has only one instance. If there are haecceity properties, then they are not repeatable, i.e., multiply instantiable, whether at different times or in different worlds.

Consider the property of being identical to Socrates. If there is such a property, it can serve as the sense of 'Socrates,' or, to use Edward's word, that which 'Socrates' "signifies." In the case of a vacuous proper name such as 'Vulcan,' the property of being identical to Vulcan could serve as its sense. If this is tenable, then 'Vulcan' is a genuine proper name despite it having no referent, and the Direct Reference theory as defined above is false.

Haecceities can either be nonqualitattive or qualitative. Identity-with-Socrates is an example of a nonqualitative haecceity. But one can imagine an haecceity property that is compounded out of qualitative properties where the latter are not tied to specific individuals in the way in which identity-with-Socrates is tied to the individual Socrates. The logical construction goes like this. We first form the huge conjunction K1 of all the qualitative properties that Socrates instantiates in the actual world. K has as conjuncts being snubnosed, being married, being a plebeian, being poor, etc. We do the same for every possible world in which Socrates exists. This yields a series of conjunctive properties, K1, K2, K3, etc. We then make a monstrous disjunctive property each disjunct of which is one of the Ks. This property is Socrates' qualitative haecceity. It is a property but it is clearly not repeatable (multiply instantiable). If there are such properties, they defeat Edward's argument above.

I myself do not believe in haecceity properties, nonqualitative or qualitative. See A Difficulty With Haecceity Properties. My point is that Edward's argument above is not compelling unless he can persuasively exclude them.

Now, given that I reject haecceity properties, I ought to find the above argument compelling. But this lands me in a quandry. For I hesitate to say that 'Vulcan' or 'Pegasus' are not proper names. They seem to be perfectly good proper names albeit vacuous. If so, then no part of their meaning involves the existence of a referent, and the DR theory is false.

Or consider 'Moses.' Was there some one man who received, or claimed to receive, the Torah from YHWH on Mount Sinai? Aren't we strongly tempted to say that the meaning of 'Moses' is what it is whether or not Moses existed? If we say that, then it can be no part of the name's meaning that it have an existing referent. Nor can it be any part of the name's meaning that there be a causal chain leading back to an initial baptism. If Moses never existed, then there was nothing to baptize.

The Reference Relation: Internal or External?

What is (linguistic) reference? Is it a relation? Edward the Ockhamist assumes that it is and issues the following request: "To clarify, could I ask both you and Bill whether you think the reference relation is ‘internal’ or ‘external’?"

Here is an inconsistent tetrad:

1. 'Frodo' refers to Frodo
2. 'Frodo' exists while Frodo does not.
3. Reference is a relation.
4. Relations are existence-symmetrical: the terms (relata) of a relation are such that either all exist or none exist.

Since the members of this quartet cannot all be true, which one will Edward reject? Given what he has said already, he must reject (4). But (4) is exceedingly plausible, more plausible by my lights than (1). I myself would reject (1) by maintaining that there is no linguistic reference to the nonexistent. It is not there to be referred to!

For me, reference is a relation. Is it internal or external? Being the same color as is an example of an internal relation. If a and b are both red, then that logically suffices for a and b to stand in the same color as relation. Suppose I paint ball a red and then paint ball b (the same shade of) red; I don't have to do anything else to bring them into the aforementioned relation. You could say that an internal relation supervenes upon the intrinsic properties of its relata.

But to bring the two balls into the relation of being two feet from each other, I will most likely have to do more than alter their intrinsic properties. So being two feet from is an external relation. If the balls fall out of that relation they needn't change in any intrinsic respect. But if the balls cease to stand in the same color as relation, then they must alter in some intrinsic respect.

In sum, internal relations supervene on the intrinsic properties of their relata while external relations do not.

Suppose 'Max' is the name of my cat. Then 'Max' as I use it has a definite meaning. The sound I make when I say 'Max' and the cat are both physical items. Surely they do not stand in a semantic relation. No physical item by itself means anything. So the semantic relation must connect a meaningful word (a physical item such as a sound or marks on paper 'animated' by a meaning) with the physical referent, the cat in our example. Suppose the meaning (sense, connotation) of 'Max' is given by a definite description: the only black male feline that enjoys linguine in clam sauce. Then the relation between the meaningful word 'Max' and the cat will be external since that meaning (sense, connotation) is what it is whether or not the cat exists.

If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'Max' = Max, then the semantic relation of reference is internal. For then the relation is identity, and identity is an internal relation.

So it seems that whether reference is external or internal depends on whether reference is routed through sense or is direct. I incline toward the view that reference, since routed through sense, is an external relation.