I am interested in your logical or linguistic intuitions here. Consider
(*) There is someone called ‘Peter’, and Peter is a musician. There is another person called ‘Peter’, and Peter is not a musician.
Is this a contradiction? Bear in mind that the whole conjunction contains the sentences “Peter is a musician” and “Peter is not a musician”. I am corresponding with a fairly eminent philosopher who insists it is contradictory.
Whether or not (*) is a contradiction depends on its logical form. I say the logical form is as follows, where 'Fx' abbreviates 'x is called 'Peter'' and 'Mx' abbreviates 'x is a musician':
LF1. (∃x)(∃y)[Fx & Mx & Fy & ~My & ~(x =y)]
In 'canonical English':
CE. There is something x and something y such that x is called 'Peter' and x is a musician and y is called 'Peter' and y is not a musician and it is not the case that x is identical to y.
There is no contradiction. It is obviously logically possible — and not just logically possible — that there be two men, both named 'Peter,' one of whom is a musician and the other of whom is not.
I would guess that your correspondent takes the logical form to be
LF2. (∃x)(∃y)(Fx & Fy & ~(x = y)) & Mp & ~Mp
where 'p' is an individual constant abbreviating 'Peter.'
(LF2) is plainly a contradiction.
My analysis assumes that in the original sentence(s) the first USE (not mention) of 'Peter' is replaceable salva significatione by 'he,' and that the antecedent of 'he' is the immediately preceding expression 'Peter.' And the same for the second USE (not mention) of 'Peter.'
If I thought burden-of-proof considerations were relevant in philosophy, I'd say the burden of proving otherwise rests on your eminent interlocutor.
But I concede one could go outlandish and construe the original sentences — which I am also assuming can be conjoined into one sentence — as having (LF2).
So it all depends on what you take to be the logical form of the original sentence(s). And that depends on what proposition you take the original sentence(s) to be expressing. The original sentences(s) are patient of both readings.
Now Ed, why are you vexing yourself over this bagatelle when the barbarians are at the gates of London? And not just at them?
Let's begin by reviewing some grammar. 'Walking' is the present participle of the infinitive 'to walk.' Present participles are formed by adding -ing to the verb stem, in our example, walk. Participles can be used either nominally or adjectivally. A participle used nominally is called a gerund. A gerund is a verbal noun that shares some of the features of a verb and some of the features of a noun. Examples:
Walking is good exercise. Sally enjoys walking. Tom prefers running over walking. Rennie loves to talk about running.
As the examples show, gerunds can occur both in subject and in object position.
Participles can also be used adjectivally as in the following examples:
The boy waving the flag is Jack's brother. Sally is walking. The man walking is my neighbor. The man standing is my neighbor Bob; the man sitting is his son Billy Bob. The Muslim terrorist cut the throat of the praying journalist.
Fused Participles
Now what about the dreaded fused participles against which H. W. Fowler fulminates? In the following example-pairs the second item features a fused participle:
She likes my singing. She likes me singing.
John's whistling awoke her. John whistling awoke her.
Sally hates Tom's cursing. Sally hates Tom cursing.
If you have a good ear for English, you will intuitively reject the second item in these pairs. They really should grate against your linguistic sensibility even if you don't know what it means to say that gerunds take the possessive. That is, a word immediately preceding a gerund must be in the possessive case. A fused participle, then, is a participle used as a noun preceded by a modifier, whether a noun or a pronoun, that is not in the possessive.
Fused participles, most of them anyway, are examples of bad grammar. But why exactly? Is it just a matter of non-standard, 'uneducated,' usage? 'I ain't hungry' is bad English but it is not illogical. Fused participles are not just bad usage, but logically bad inasmuch as they elide a distinction, confusing what is different.
This emerges when we note that the members of each of the above pairs are not interchangeable salva significatione. It could be that she likes my singing, but she doesn't like me. And if she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me singing or doing anything else.
In the second example, it could be that the first sentence is false but the second true. It could be that John, who was whistling, awoke her, but it was not his whistling that awoke her, but his thrashing around in bed.
The third example is like the first. It could be that Sally hates the sin, not the sinner. She hates Tom's cursing but she loves Tom, who is cursing.
Is every use of a fused particular avoidable? This sentence sports a fused participle:
The probability of that happening is near zero.
The fused participle is avoided by rewriting the sentence as
The probability of that event's happening is near zero.
But is the original sentence ungrammatical without the rewriting? Technically, yes. One should write
The probability of that's happening is near zero
although that is perhaps not as idiomatic as the original. In any case, one would have to be quite the grammar nazi to spill red ink over this one.
According to Panayot Butchvarov, "Fused participles are bad logic, not just bad usage." ("Facts" in Cumpa, ed., Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann, Ontos Verlag, 2010, p. 87.) In Skepticism in Ethics, Butch claims that a fused participle such as 'John flipping the switch' is as "grammatically corrupt" as 'I flipping the switch.' (Indiana UP, 1989, p. 14.)
I think Butch goes too far here. Consider the sentence I wrote above:
And if she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me singing or doing anything else.
I don't agree that this sentence is grammatically corrupt. It strikes me as grammatically acceptable, fused participle and all. It expresses a clear thought, one that is different from the thought expressed by
And if she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like my singing or my doing anything else.
The first is true, the second false. If she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me when I am singing, shaving, showering, or doing the third of the three 's's.
So we ought not say that every use of a fused participle is grammatically corrupt. We ought to say that fused participles are to be avoided because they elide the distinctions illustrated by the above three contrasts. The trouble with 'I hate my daughter flunking the exam' is not that it is ungrammatical but that it fails to express the thought that the speaker (in the vast majority of contexts) has in mind, namely, that the object of hatred is the flunking not the daughter.
Ontological Relevance?
What does this have to do with ontology?
Some of us maintain that a contingent sentence such as 'John is whistling' cannot just be true: it has need of an ontological ground of its being true. In other words, it has need of a truth-maker. Facts are popular candidates for the office of truth-maker. Thus some of us want to say that the truth-maker of 'John is whistling' is the fact of John's whistling. Butchvarov, however, rejects realism about facts. One of his arguments is that we have no way of referring to them. Sentence are not names, and so cannot be used to refer to facts.
But 'John's whistling' fares no better. It stands for a whistling which is an action or doing. It does not stand for a fact. For this reason, some use fused participles to refer to facts. Thus, the fact of John whistling. Butch scotches this idea on the ground that fused participles are "bad logic" and "grammatically corrupt."
I don't find Butchvarov's argument compelling. As I argued above, there are sentences featuring fused participles that are perfectly grammatical and express definite thoughts. My example, again, is 'If she doesn't like me, then she doesn't like me singing or doing anything else.' So I don't see why 'John whistling' cannot be used as a name of the fact that is the truth-maker of 'John is whistling.'
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.
To utter a declarative sentence is to say it. But the saying of a declarative sentence need not be an asserting of it or its content. Suppose I want to give an example of a declarative sentence in a language class. I say, "The average temperature on Mars is the same as on Earth." I have not made an assertion in saying this (false) sentence, but I have said something. So saying and asserting are not the same.
That's one argument. Here is another. One says one's prayers but in so doing one does not make assertions. Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae is not an assertion.
But this is not quite right. Allahu akbar — God is great — said by someone would constitute an assertion. And the same goes for the 'Who art in heaven' clause of the first sentence of the Pater Noster. It looks form these examples as if assertions can be part of prayer. So perhaps I should say the following. What is specifically prayerful about prayers is nothing assertive but something entreating, supplicatory, and the like.
But even this is not quite obvious. The contemplation of the existence and attributes of God is by itself arguably a form of prayer, a form free of supplication and entreaty. And then there is this marvellous quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — anything less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.
So my second argument may not work. But the first one does.
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.
UPDATE (7/31): The following entry is deeply confused. But I will leave it up for the sake of the commenters, David Gordon and AJ, who refuted it. In my defense I will say something Roderick Chisholm once said about himself in a similar connection, namely, that I wrote something clear enough to be mistaken.
…………..
The following two sentences are in the active and passive voices, respectively:
1. Tom said that someone was in the vicinity.
2. Someone was said by Tom to be in the vicinity.
Both sentences 'say the same thing,' i.e., express the same proposition, the same thought, the same Fregean Gedanke. Aren't active-to-passive and passive-to-active transformations in general truth- and sense-preserving? But the two sentences have different entailments.
(2), which is de re, entails that someone was in the vicinity. (1), which is de dicto, does not entail that someone was in the vicinity. But if the two sentences have different entailments, then they cannot express one and the same proposition.
The puzzle expressed as an aporetic triad:
A. (1) and (2) express the same proposition.
B. (2) entails a proposition — Someone was in the vicinity — that is not entailed by (1).
C. If p, q are the same proposition, then for any proposition x, p entails x iff q entails x.
The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.
How do we solve, or perhaps dissolve, this puzzle?
2. There are some purely fictional characters, e.g., Sherlock Holmes.
(1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist. But (2) also seems to be true. And yet they cannot both be true if 'are' has the same sense in both sentences.
London Ed is against "messing about with the copula" as he puts it. Thus he is opposed to making a distinction between two senses of 'are' in alleviation of our dyad's apparent inconsistency. Is there another way to solve the problem?
One way is to look for ontologically noncommittal paraphrases of those sentences that appear to commit us to fictional items. Roderick Chisholm has some suggestions for us. Consider the sentence
3. There is no detective who is as famous as Holmes.
Chisholm's paraphrase:
To say that there is no detective who is as famous as Holmes is to compare two numbers. (1) The first is the number of people who interpret Holmes as the name of a detective; and (2) the second is the number of people who interpret some name other than Holmes as the name of a detective. The comparative statement tells us that the first number is larger than the second. (A Realistic Theory of Categories, CUP 1996, pp. 122-123.)
Boiled down, we have
3P. The number of people of who take 'Holmes' to be the name of a detective is greater than the number of people who take some name other than 'Holmes' to be the name of a detective.
Very clever. Off the top of my head, (3P) looks to be an adequate paraphrase that does not commit us to the existence of a fictional entity. But if the paraphrastic method is to work, it must work against every example. Just one recalcitrant example counts as a "spanner in the works." What about this example of mine:
4. Obama is a worse liar than Pinocchio.
Perhaps we can paraphrase away the reference to Pinocchio with
4P. The traits we know Obama to possess are more indicative of mendacity than the traits we attribute to the character named 'Pinocchio.'
Questions for London Ed (and anyone else who is following this):
a. Do you endorse this paraphrastic approach? If not, why not?
b. Van Inwagen says things that imply that he thinks that the paraphrastic approach does not work. Why does he say this? Does he have examples of sentences that cannot be treated by this approach?
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.
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.'
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.
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
to
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.
While apparently conceding that empty proper names have an 'inferential role', rightly underscores the need for me to demonstrate that its meaning is just this role, i.e. to demonstrate that the 'inferential semantics' is a sufficient as well as a necessary explanation of (empty) proper names.
Here are some arguments to elucidate this inferential role, and to show that it is sufficient to explain everything we need to know about empty proper names (indeed, all proper names, but leave that aside for now).
Argument 1. Proper names are neither descriptive nor object-dependent.
Consider the meaning of the following two sentences:
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. Frodo has large feet.
I have argued that at least part of the semantics of the proper name 'Frodo' is to join the predicate 'hobbit' in the first sentence to the predicate 'has large feet' in the second. It allows us to infer 'some hobbit has large feet'. And by repeated use of this inference in successive propositions in a narrative, it allows us to connect an increasingly complex description to each character in the narrative. It tells us which character we are talking 'about' by telling us which description to increase. Does it have any further function than this? Is it descriptive? Does it mean something like "hobbit called 'Frodo'"? No, for consider
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. There is another hobbit called 'Frodo'.
Clearly if there can be two characters in a narrative with the same name (as sometimes there are), the indefinite description 'called N' is not sufficient to individuate the character. Or consider
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. Frodo might not have been called 'Frodo'
This implies 'some hobbit called Frodo might not have been called Frodo', which is not inconsistent, so long as 'some hobbit' is read with wide scope. I won't argue this at length here, but it is easy to show that all the arguments which Kripke levels at the description theory of names can be reused or reinterpreted in the case of empty names. But if an empty proper name is non-descriptive and if there is no object that it corresponds to (either real or intentional), the simplest explanation is that its meaning is its inferential properties.
BV Comment 1. I take it that your view is that no indefinite or definite description supplies the meaning (sense) of any empty name. You rely on Kripke-type arguments. But distinguish:
a. Reference is not routed through sense, but direct
and
b. Names lack sense entirely.
It might be that while the reference of a name is not routed through an associated sense, the name nevertheless has a sense. Your view, however, rules that out. And doesn't Kripke speak of a sense that "fixes the reference" of a name without being part of the mechanism by which reference is achieved? But let's not get sidetracked into Kripke exegesis!
If I understand you, you want to maintain that names and other singular referring devices such as indexicals and demonstratives are purely syntactical devices. I honestly don't see how that could be true. I gave the example earlier of the first-person singular pronoun. Assume that when Frodo says 'I am hungry' he refers directly to Frodo and not via a special reference-mediating I-sense. Still, any use of 'I' has as part of its meaning that a producer of such a linguistic token is a person or a (potentially) self-conscious being, a being that can speak or think.
In this connection, David Kaplan speaks of character as opposed to content. "The character of an expression is set by linguistic conventions and, in turn, determines the content of the expression in every context." (Themes from Kaplan, p. 505) The character of the pure indexical 'I' is given by the rule:
'I' refers to the speaker or writer. (505)
My criticism, then, is that if the semantics of singular referring devices reduces to the inferential roles these words play, then there is no accounting for Kaplanian content since that does not vary with context or inferential role.
Leaving aside idexicals and demonstratives, all or most names seem to have associated with them a semantic content which cannot be reduced to the purely syntactical. Consider the song Carmelita about an apparently purely fictional character named 'Carmelita.' That name carries the sense 'female.' And the same goes for the wicked Felina in Marty Robbins' El Paso. There are male names, female names, and unisex names. If Carl is married to Carla, then you know the marriage is not same-sex.
Argument 2. Referential insulation
Consider the first sentence above: "There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'". This is indefinite, i.e. it does not tell us which hobbit is called 'Frodo'. Specifically, even if hobbits are mentioned in some earlier part of the narrative, this sentence on its own does not generate any further inferences about hobbits. It is a 'referential insulator', it does not 'refer backwards' to any previous sentence.The second sentence "Frodo has large feet", by contrast, does refer back. But only to the first sentence. Any third sentence can refer back to this one, and a fourth sentence to the third, and we can construct a whole referential chain, each of which refers back to the previous link. But the chain stops at the first sentence, the insulating sentence. This suggests that the second definite sentence, or back-referring sentence, has meaning only insofar as it refers back. But its back-reference is exhausted by its inferential properties. Ergo etc.
BV Comment 2. Suppose I grant the the meaning of 'Frodo' in the second sentence is exhausted by its back reference to 'Frodo' in the first sentence. This back reference is entirely intralinguistic: it is a word-word relation, not a word-world relation. So far, so good. Consider this quantified sentence:
(Ex) (x is a hobbit called 'Frodo' & x has large feet).
'Frodo' in the second sentence — 'Frodo has large feet' — plays the role of the second bound variable in the above quantified sentence, and that role is purely syntactical. The second sentence is synonomous with 'He has large feet' in the context in question.
So perhaps what you are up to is this: You want to construe names as pronouns used anaphorically as opposed to demonstratively. You are of course aware of the ambiguity of a sentence like 'Feser inscribed his book.' That could mean that Feser inscribed Feser's book, in which case 'his' is being used anaphorically, or it could mean that Feser inscribed some other person's book, in which case 'his' is being used demonstratively. Suppose I say 'Feser inscribed his book' while pointing to Peter. Then 'his' refers to an extralingusitc item, Peter. On the first disambiguation, however, 'his' is syntactically bound to 'Feser' and the reference is an intralinguistic back reference.
Here is the problem. 'Frodo' in the first sentence cannot be construed as a pronoun used anaphorically. You cannot introduce 'Frodo' without packing some meaning into it. And that is exactly what you do when you say that Frodo is a hobbit. Surely you don't think that 'hobbit' is a purely syntactical device. We agree of course that 'hobbit' has a null extension, but it must have some intension, and that intension cannot be reduced to syntax. Hence 'Frodo' when first introduced has to have some meaning that is irreducible to syntax or inferential role.
Even if back reference is exhausted by inferential properties, and the meaning of a back-referring term reduces to its syntactic role, surely the meaning of a name — even if it is empty — cannot on its first introduction be reduced to its syntactic role.
In short, your "ergo, etc." is a non sequitur.
Argument 3. Definition not object-dependent.
The definition of the name 'Frodo' occurs in the first sentence ("There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'"). This tells us that any subsequent usage of 'Frodo' refers back to this sentence. But it is a general existential proposition. On the assumption that general existential propositions aren't object-dependent, it follows that we can define a proper name without requiring an object. Given that we can define its meaning without having an object, it follows that its meaning is not object-dependent.
BV Comment 3: This argument seems OK in relation to empty names. Do you mean it to apply to non-empty names as well?
Argument 4. Pronouns are not object-dependent.
Consider
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. He has large feet.
Clearly the pronoun 'he' refers back to the first sentence, not to any object. But the two sentences together do not signify any more than the two 'Frodo' sentences above. But if the two 'Frodo' sentences have the same meaning as two object-independent sentences, it follows that the two 'Frodo' sentences are object-independent also.
BV Comment 4. To be true, your thesis has to be modified: Pronouns used anaphorically are not object-dependent.
Suppose you don't know that prosciutto is called 'prosciutto.' But you want some anyway and you know what it looks like. You belly up to the deli counter, point to the delectable item, and say 'I want some of this!' Surely the meaning of the demonstrative pronoun 'this' in this context is object-dependent.
But the same goes for the pure indexical 'I.' The indexical reference is achieved without a demonstration — there is no need to point to oneself when saying 'I' — but 'I' is secure against reference failure. One cannot token 'I' without referring to something. So 'I' used indexically — not as a Roman numeral say — is object-dependent for its meaning.
What follows are some ideas from London Ed about a book he is writing. He solicits comments. Mine are in blue.
The logical form thing was entertaining but rather off-topic re the fictional names thing. On which, Peter requested some more.
Let’s step right back. I want to kick off the book with an observation about how illusion impedes the progress of science. It looks as though the sun is going round the earth, so early theories of the universe had the earth standing still. It seems as though objects are continuously solid, and so science rejected the atomists’ theory and adopted Aristotle’s theory for more than a millenium.
A final example from the psychology of perception: in 1638, Descartes takes a eye of a bull and shows how images are projected onto the retina. He finally disproves the ‘emissive theory of sight’. The emissive theory is the naturally occurring idea that eyesight is emitted from your eye and travels to and hits the distant object you are looking at. If you ask a young child why you can’t see when your eyes are shut, he replies (‘because the eyesight can’t get out’).
Scientific progress is [often] about rejecting theories based on what our cognitive and perceptual framework suggests to us, and adopting theories based on diligent observation and logic.
We reject ‘eyebeams’. We reject the natural idea that the mental or sensitive faculty can act at a distance. When we look at the moon, science rejects the idea that a little ethereal piece of us is travelling a quarter of a million miles into space. Yet – turning to the main subject of the book – some philosophers think that objects themselves somehow enter our thoughts. Russell writes to Frege, saying “I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high”. Kaplan mentions, with apparent approval, the idea that the proposition ‘John is tall’ has two components: the property expressed by the predicate ‘is tall’, and the individual John. “That’s right, John himself, right there, trapped in a proposition”. The dominant theory in modern philosophical logic is ‘direct reference’, or object-dependent theories of semantics: a proper name has no meaning except its bearer, and so the meaning of ‘John is tall’ has precisely the components that Kaplan describes.
BV: I too find the notion that there are Russellian (as opposed to Fregean) propositions very hard to swallow. If belief is a propositional attitude, and I believe that Peter is now doing his grades, it is surely not Peter himself, intestinal contents and all, who is a constituent of the proposition that is the accusative of my act of belief. The subject constituent of the proposition cannot be that infinitely propertied gnarly chunk of external reality, but must be a thinner sort of object, one manageable by a finite mind, something along the lines of a Fregean sense.
The purpose of the proposed book is to advance science by showing how such object-dependent theories are deeply mistaken, and also to explain why they are so compelling, because of their basis on a cognitive illusion as powerful as the illusions that underlie the geocentric theory, or the emissive theory of sight.
What is the illusion? The argument for object dependence is roughly as follows
(1) We can have so-called ‘singular thoughts’, such as when we think that John is tall, i.e. when we have thoughts expressable [expressible] by propositions [sentences, not propositions] whose subject term is a proper name or some other non-descriptive singular term.
(2) A singular term tells us which individual the proposition is about, without telling us anything about it. I.e. singular terms, proper names, demonstratives, etc. are non-descriptive. They are ‘bare individuators’.
BV: This is not quite right. Consider the the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.' This is an indexical expression. If BV says, 'I am hungry,' he refers to BV; if PL says 'I am hungry,' he refers to PL. Either way, something is conveyed about the nature of the referent, namely, that it is a person or a self. So what Ed said is false as it stands. A use of 'I' does tell us something about the individual the sentence containing 'I' is about.
Examples are easily multiplied. Apart from the innovations of the Pee Cee, 'she' tells us that the individual referred to is female. 'Here' tells us that the item denoted is a place, typically. 'Now' picks out times. And there are other examples.
There are no bare items. Hence there cannot be reference to bare items. All reference conveys some property of the thing referred to. But variables may be a counterexample. Consider 'For any x, x = x.' One could perhaps uses variables in such a way that there is no restriction on what they range over. But it might be best to stay away from this labyrinth.
One criticism, then, is that there are no bare individuators. A second is that it is not a singular term, but a use of a singular term that individuates. Thus 'I' individuates nothing. It is PL's use of 'I' that picks out PL.
(3) If a singular term is non-descriptive, its meaning is the individual it individuates. A singular term cannot tell us which individual the proposition is about, unless there exists such an individual.
The course of the book is then to show why we don’t have to be forced into assumption (3). There doesn’t have to be (or to exist) an individual that is individuated. The theory of non-descriptive singular terms is then developed in the way I suggested in my earlier posts. Consider the inference
Frodo is a hobbit Frodo has large feet ——- Some hobbit has large feet
I want to argue that the semantics of ‘Frodo’ is purely inferential. I.e. to understand the meaning of ‘Frodo’ in that argument, it is enough to understand the inference that it generates. That is all.
BV: 'Frodo' doesn't generate anything. What you want to say is that the meaning of 'Frodo' is exhausted by the inferential role this term plays in the (valid) argument depicted. Sorry to be such a linguistic prick.
What you are saying is that 'Frodo,' though empty, has a meaning, but this meaning is wholly reducible to the purely syntactical role it plays in the above argument. (So you are not an eliminativist about the meanings of empty names.) But if the role is purely syntactical, then the role of 'Frodo' is the same as the role of the arbitrary individual constant 'f' in the following valid schema:
Hf Lf ——- (Ex)(Hx & Lx).
But then what distinguishes the meaning of 'Frodo' from that of 'Gandalf'?
Meinongian nonentities are out. Fregean senses are out. There are no referents in the cases of empty names. And yet they have meaning. So the meaning is purely syntactical. Well, I don't see how you can squeeze meaning out of bare syntax. Again, what distinguishes the meaning of the empty names just cited? The obviously differ in meaning, despite lacking both Sinn and Bedeutung.
We don’t need an object-dependent semantics to explain such inferences, and hence we don’t need object-dependence to explain the semantics of proper names. If an inferential semantics is sufficient, then the Razor tells us it is necesssary: Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.
BV: You should state explicitly that you intend your inferential semantics to hold both for empty and nonempty names.
And now we see the illusion. The proposition
John is thinking of Obama (or Frodo, or whomever)
has a relational form: “—is thinking of –”. But it does not express a relation. The illusion consists in the way that the relation of the language so strongly suggests a relation in reality. It is the illusion that causes us “to multiply the things principally signified by terms in accordance with the multiplication of the terms”.
That’s the main idea. Obviously a lot of middle terms have been left out. Have at it.
BV: So I suppose what you are saying is that belief in the intentionality of thought is as illusory as the belief in the emissive theory of sight. Just as the the eye does not emit an ethereal something that travels to the moon, e.g., the mind or the 'I' of the mind — all puns intended! — does not shoot out a ray of intentionality that gloms onto some Meinongian object, or some Thomistic merely intentional object, or some really existent object.
You face two main hurdles. The first I already mentioned. You have to explain how to squeeze semantics from mere syntax. The second is that there are theoretical alternatives to the view that intentionality is a relation other than yours. To mention just one: there are adverbial theories of intentionality that avoid an act-object analysis of mental reference.
It is a well-known and puzzling fact that proper names are ambiguous. According to the US telephone directory, Frodo Baggins is a real person (who lives in Ohio). But according to LOTR, Frodo Baggins is a hobbit. Not a problem. The name ‘Frodo Baggins’ as used in LOTR, clearly has a different meaning from when used to talk about the person in Ohio. So the argument below is invalid:
Frodo Baggins is a hobbit Frodo Baggins is not a hobbit Some hobbit is not a hobbit.
This is because both premisses could be true, but the conclusion could not be true. So your claim that the validity of arguments using fictional names has ‘nothing to do with any semantic property’ is incorrect.
Well, ex contradictione quodlibet. Since anything follows from a contradiction, the conclusion of the above syllogism follows from the premises. So the above argument is valid in that it instantiates a valid argument-form, namely:
p ~p — q
Obviously, there is no argument of the above form that has true premises and a false conclusion. So every argument of that form is valid or truth-preserving.
You invoke a Moorean fact. But we have to be very clear as to the identity of this fact.
It is a Moorean fact that proper names, taken in abstraction from the circumstances of their thoughtful use, are not, well, proper. They are common, or ambiguous as you say. It is no surprise that some dude in Ohio rejoices under the name 'Frodo Baggins.'
But so taken, a name has no semantic properties: it doesn't mean anything. It is just a physical phenomenon, whether marks on paper or a sequence of sounds, etc. Pronounce the sounds corresponding to 'bill,' 'john, 'dick.' Is 'dick' a name or a common noun, and for what? How many dicks in this room? How many detectives? How many penises? How many disagreeable males, 'pricks'? How many men named 'Dick'? Consider the multiple ambiguity of 'There are more dicks than johns in the room but the same number of bills.'
A name that has meaning (whether or not it refers to anything) is always a name used by a mind (not a voice synthesizing machine) in definite circumstances. For example, if the context is a discussion of LOTR, then my use and yours of 'Frodo' has meaning: it means a character in that work, despite the fact that in reality there is no individual named. And as long as we stay in that context, the name has the same meaning.
And the same holds in the context of argument. In your argument above 'Frodo Baggins' has the same meaning in both premises.
You can't have it both ways: you can't maintain that 'Frodo Baggins' is a meaningless string that could mean anything in any occurrence (a fictional character, a real man, his dog, a rock group, a town, etc.) AND that it figures as a term in an argument.
To sum up. Whether a deductive argument is valid or not depends on its logcal form. If there is a valid form it instantiates, then it is valid. The validity of the form is inherited by the argument having that form. But form abstracts from semantic content. So the specific meaning of a name is irrelevant to the evaluation of the validity of an argument in which the name figures. But of course it is always assumed that names are used in the same sense in all of their occurrences in an argument. So only in this very abstract sense is meaning relevant to the assessment of validity.
Cicero was a Roman Tully was a philosopher —– Some Roman was a philosopher.
Quite simply, there is no middle term. The example is an instance of the dreaded quaternio terminorum. But of course we learned at Uncle Willard's knee that Cicero = Tully. Add that fact as a premise and the above argument becomes valid. As a general rule, any invalid argument can be rendered valid by adding one or more premises.
So sameness of reference is not sufficient for sameness of name. 'Cicero' and 'Tully' have the same reference, but they are different names. They are both token- and type-different. Since they are different names, that fact must be accommodated in the form diagram, which looks like this:
Fa Gb — (Ex)(Fx & Gx).
This form is clearly invalid. The most one can squeeze out of these premises using Existential Generalization is '(Ex)Fx & (Ex)Gx.'
It is worth pointing out that the use of the different signs 'a' and 'b' does not entail that a is not identical to b; it leaves open both the possibility that a = b and the possibility that ~(a = b). It is because of the second of these possibilities that the argument-form is invalid.
Commenter Edward Ockham in a comment on the old blog wanted to know why, given that we had to add a premise to make the Cicero argument valid, we don't have to add a premise to make the Alexander argument valid. That argument, from the days when men were men and went around 'seizing' women, proceeds thusly:
Alexander seized Helen Alexander did not seize Helen —– Someone seized and did not seize Helen.
Ockham wants to know why we don't have to add an identity premise to secure the validity of this argument. But what premise would he have us add? It can't be 'Alexander is Alexander' for that is necessarily true and therefore true whether or not both occurrences of 'Alexander' in the original argument are coreferential. Presumably, Ockham wants us to supply '"Alexander" is coreferential in both of its occurrences.' But this goes without saying. There in no need to affirm this in a separate premise since it is implied by the fact that 'Alexander' in both occurrences is a token of the same word-type. We needn't say what is plainly shown. (He said with a sidelong glance in old Ludwig's direction.)
Ockham is bothered by the possibility of equivocation. Well, either there is an equivocation on 'Alexander' or there isn't. If there is an equivocation, then the argument instantiates an invalid form, and Ockham's contention collapses. If there is no equivocation, then the argument instantiates a valid form but it is not the case that both premises are true; so again Ockham's contention collapses. Either way, his contention collapses.
Either we capture the reference [of a name] in the form, and my objection collapses. Or you concede that the form covers only the visible or audible outward form of the word. In which case, my specious Alexander argument really does have the right form, and we have to add on the condition about reference, and my point stands.
I grasp something like the first horn. If 'a' occurs two or more times in a form diagram, then no argument of that form has an equivocation on a term whose place is held by 'a.' This is to say that the form diagram enforces coreferentiality on any terms whose place is held by 'a' in the form schema. Otherwise, the argument would not be of the form in question.
Ockham wants to have it both ways at once. He wants his argument A to be of valid form F without F enforcing coreferentiality on the occurrences of 'a' in A. This is just impossible. If there is an equivocation on 'a,' then A does not instantiate F. But if A does instantiate F, then there cannot be any equivocation of 'a.' Why? Because the form does not permit it. The form enforces coreferentiality.
Now look back at the Cicero argument. It is invalid because its form (depicted above) is invalid and the argument has no valid form. But I don't say that the invalid form enforces lack of coreferentiality on the singular terms whose place is held in the diagram by 'a' and 'b.' I say instead that the invalid form permits coreferentiality of these terms. Thus there is an asymmetry between the Alexander and Cicero cases.
1. Another claim which is nearly Moorean. I claim that the following argument is valid:
Frodo is a hobbit Frodo has large feet Some hobbit has large feet
I am not saying that the premisses are true. Clearly if there are no such things as hobbits, the first sentence has to be false. But it [the argument] is valid. The premisses can't be true and the conclusion false. If there were such a thing as Frodo, and if he was a hobbit, and if he had large feet, it has to be the cases that some hobbit (him) has large feet. So the argument is valid.
[. . .]
2. Assuming the argument above is valid, what fact makes it valid? I claim that it is a purely semantic property of the proper name 'Frodo'. I.e. it is in virtue of the meaning of 'Frodo' that the premisses cannot be true with the conclusion false. By 'purely semantic', I mean a feature of the term that it continues to possess even though it has no extension, i.e. there is nothing it refers to or denotes.
Stylistic comment: I would strike “continues to possess” and substitute “possesses.” After all it can't be your view that purely fictional names go from having extensions to not having them.
Substantive comment: What you say in #1 above seems correct. But now you take a turn that is reasonably resisted. You want to know what makes the Frodo argument valid. I say it is valid because it has a valid form:
a is F a is G ergo Some F is G.
It is this form that makes it impossible for an argument having this form to have true premises and a false conclusion. It has nothing to do with any semantic property of a substituend of the arbitrary individual constant, 'a.' Whether the subject matter of an argument is fiction or fact makes no difference to its validity or to the explanation of its validity. Logic abstracts from content; hence it treats 'Frodo,' 'Noah,' 'Churchhill' and 'Obama' the same, as substituends of an arbitrary individual constant.
It is not clear what you are claiming. Are you saying that there is a semantic property that only (purely) fictional names have? And what is this semantic property? Does 'Noah' have it as well?
Here is one guess at what you might mean. Purely fictional names, as such, do not and cannot have existing referents. Otherwise they wouldn't be purely fictional. Given, as you believe, that (a) the only referents are existing referents, and that (b) there are no modes of existence/being, you seem to be saying that purely fictional names, qua purely fictional names, do not and cannot have referents, full stop. Now if every sentence in which such a name figures is false (as you seem to believe), then there is no argument featuring purely fictional names that has true premises and a false conclusion. Therefore every such argument is by default valid (given the technical definition of validity that we both accept).
Is that what you mean?
If yes, then perhaps the semantic property you are talking about is the propery of necessarily not having a referent. Call this property 'P.' Now is P an intrinsic property of a name like 'Frodo' or is it a relational property? But surely there is no intrinsic property of a name that makes it a purely fictional name, and thus a name necessarily extensionless. What makes a name purely fictional is primarily the intention of the author, and secondarily the intentions of the readers (listeners, etc) who are complicit with the author in the fictional enterprise.
This is not Moorean. Someone could claim that the argument is valid because 'Frodo', if meaningful, refers to a non-existing thing, and because it refers to the same non-existing thing in both premisses. Some arguments against:
Comment: Why do you ignore the simplest and most obvious explanation of validity, the one I gave above?
(i) The Razor: why posit non-existing things in order to explain a matter of logic, when a semantic explanation would suffice? E.g. we don't need weird entities to explain the validity of 'every bachelor is unmarried, some people are bachelors, some people are unmarried'.
Comment: One problem is that I don't understand what you mean by a semantic explanation of validity. I grant you that the Frodo argument is valid: anyone who argues in accordance with the pattern embodied in that argument argues correctly. But I don't see that this has anything to do with whether the terms in the argument have non-null extensions. A Meinongian will say that 'Frodo is a hobbit' is true. But I am prepared to grant you that the sentence is false. But it doesn't matter since we know from Logic 101 that a valid argument can have false premises and a false conclusion.
(ii) "Frodo is a hobbit, he has large feet, some hobbit has large feet" is also valid. Do we need strange entities to explain the validity of arguments containing pronouns?
(iii) "Frodo is a hobbit who has large feet, some hobbit has large feet" is also valid. Do we need strange entities to explain the validity of arguments containing the word 'who'?
(iv) "Frodo is a hobbit with large feet, some hobbit has large feet" is also valid. Do we need strange entities to explain this? (My hunch is that the Meinongian will give up on this point. The onus is then on him to explain the difference between this one and any of the previous ones).
Comment: The validity of each of the variant arguments can be explained in the manner I indicated.
3. Now for the radical claim: the inferential property above is both necessary and sufficient to explain fictional individuation. Necessary is obvious. If we don't accept the validity, we could suppose that each token of the term 'Frodo' referred to a different character, and thus no two sentences in LOTR was ever about the same character. Clearly no one could understand the story if that were so. Sufficient is not so obvious, I will not defend that here.
Comment: Now you have really lost me. First of all, what is the inferential property? Presumably you mean that empty names have a property that explains the validity of (all? Some?) of the arguments in which they figure. What property is that? The property of being necessarily extensionless? Then why don't you say that?
And what is fictional individuation? You don't think that Frodo is a genuine individual. If he were, he would be a nonexistent individual and you reject such individuals. So there is no individual, Frodo. But if there is no individual, then there is no question of individuation in either the epistemological or the ontological sense of this term. Presumably, you mean by 'individuate' pick out, single out, identify in a way that supports cross-referencing? You need to explain this.
If this is what you mean, then on your view there is no Frodo to pick out or single out in thought. On your nominalism, all there is is the name. And you can't eke by with that alone. When I think about Frodo, I am not thinking about 'Frodo.' In fact, I can think about Frodo even if I have temporarily forgotten what his name is. Suppose I am thinking about the corpulent side-kick of Don Quixote, but have forgotten his name. I am thinking about Sancho Panza despite my not remembering that his name is 'Sancho Panza.'
Any adequate theory has to distinguish among: empty names, tokenings thereof, and tokenings thereof with understanding. If a voice synthesizer makes the sound associated with 'Frodo,' then the name is tokened, but nothing semantic is going on.
4. The really really radical claim: the semantic feature that explains individuation in fiction also explains individuation 'in reality'. So radical I won't try to defend it here. The defence would be roughly on the lines of: the same phenomenon cannot have two different causes. Same effect = same cause, which is a well accepted principle of scientific explanation. Obviously this would require defending that the effect is the same: I won't go into that here. The main pillars of the theory are (1) and (2) above. Inferences involving fictional names are valid, even though the premisses are never true. And the explanation of their validity does not involve Meinongian objects.
Comment: Once again, you haven't told us what individuation is. That word is a piece of philosophical jargon, not of ordinary language. No sentence containing it could count as Moorean. So you have to explain the term. And you have to meet my objection that there cannot be individuation in either the epistemological/semantic or ontological sense if there is no individual. How do you avoid embracing this inconsistent triad:
There are no fictional individuals. Questions about individuation makes sense only if there are individuals. Fictional names individuate.
I should think that your “really really radical claim” is hopeless. There is a huge difference between a genuine individual such as Obama and Frodo. You won't be able to paper over this difference especially since you reject Meinongian individuals and Plantingian haecceity properties.
