Uncategorized – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Types, Tokens, and Logical Form

Black text by London Ed; my comments in blue.

Consider:

This parcel of land on the Thames is a bank.
A bank contains money.
*This parcel of land on the Thames contains money.

The two tokens of ‘bank’ are tokens of the same type, if I understand you correctly. So does the Thames argument above instantiate the following valid form?

This is an F
Every F is G
This F is G

Let's start with a Moorean fact: the argument is bad! But why is it bad? (Now we begin to philosophize.) Is it because one of the premises is false? Or because the reasoning is incorrect? That distinction, the one between truth/falsity of propositions and correctness/incorrectness of reasoning, would also seem to be Moorean, or damned near.

There are two approaches. One is to say that the Thames argument is valid because it it instantiates the valid form depicted, but that it is nevertheless unsound because the first premise is false. The other approach is to say that the argument involves an equivocation on 'bank' such that the argument falls afoul of quaternio terminorum, which is of course a formal fallacy. Thus on the second approach, the argument is invalid (because it instantiates an invalid form), but both premises are true.

Either way, the Thames argument is unsound. On the first approach it is unsound because it sports a false premise; on the second, because it has an invalid form.

'Unsound' is a terminus technicus; a term of the logician's art. 'Bad' is from ordinary language. But if we are talking about deductive arguments, the former term is a very close exegesis or exfoliation if you will of the Joe Sixpack word.

You seem to hold that if we substitute concrete tokens of the same type, then the resulting argument instantiates the form. And you also hold that to be a token of the same type means having the same spelling, and no more than that.

It’s the ‘and no more than that’ that I am having a problem with. I hold, and this is hardly an extreme or unorthodox position, that identically-spelled tokens can have (and often do have) different meanings, because meaning is a matter of convention. Sameness of spelling is never enough.

This forces me to think hard. We enter deep and troubled waters below the Moorean surface. Suppose Poindexter's (weak!) password at the money bank is kzw9*. Now consider this array:

kzw9*
kzw9*
kzw9*

How many passwords? One or three? A simple solution to this puzzle is to say that there are three tokens of the same type. (Note that a password need not be a word, though it can be ('password' is one dumbassed password): the above passwords are not words of any natural language.) The type in question here is not a word-type: it has no linguistic meaning. No token of this type has sense or reference.

It is like a key that unlocks a door. A token of a key-type has neither sense nor reference. it is just a little piece of metal that fits into the lock, etc. It has no semantic properties. Its properties are geometrical, metallurgical, and the like.

Now a word-token has a physical side, a body if you will. Thus 'bank' — that particular string of marks — has geometrical properties, color, etc. But it is not a word in virtue of being a physical item. It is a word only when animated by sense. Perhaps we could say that the sense is the soul of the word whose body is the physical sign.

So we need to distinguish two types. There is the physical type a token of which is the string of marks, 'bank.' And there is the word-type a token of which is the word, 'bank.'

Now I can answer Ed. He wrote,

You seem to hold that if we substitute concrete tokens of the same type, then the resulting argument instantiates the form. And you also hold that to be a token of the same type means having the same spelling, and no more than that.

That is not my view. For two words to be tokens of the same word-type it does not suffice that they have the same spelling. In fact, it is not even necessary: 'tire' and 'tyre' are (arguably) tokens of the same English word-type even though they are spelled differently.

Spelling pertains to the physical side of a word. For two tokens to be of the same word-type they must be animated by the same meaning.

Returning to the Thames argument, it is clear that there are two tokens of the 'bank' string-of-marks type. But whether there are two tokens of the same word-type or not depends on what the speaker intended.

We cannot extract the logical form of an argument be examining its physical features. We have to understand what the constituent sentences mean, and to understand what they mean, we have to understand what their constituent terms mean.

Meaning cannot be reduced to anything physical or to anything merely syntactical. Meaning brings mind into the picture. No mind, no meaning. This is why I insist that linguistic reference cannot be understood unless we understand what underlies it, mental reference, i.e., intentionality.

London Ed’s Metaphilosophy

This from a recent comment by Ed, see article below:

I am starting with a few claims, with the additional claim that the claims are Moorean. Not only do I claim we use fictional or empty names to tell people which individual we are talking about, I claim that this is uncontroversial. Developing a theory to explain the apparent contractions that arise from these Moorean facts is more difficult. But that's the business of philosophy: start with facts that are apparently uncontroversial, move to the contradictions that appear to arise from them, and uncover the hidden assumptions or premisses that lead to the contradictions. Deduce the falsity of the hidden premisses. We have already stumbled across one hidden premiss, hardly noticing it. We agree that the sentence " 'Frodo' refers to Frodo" is relational in form. That's also Moorean. But does it follow that a sentence which is relational in form, really expresses a relation?

So in overall summary. It is Moorean that there aren't and never were such things as hobbits, and hence never such persons as Frodo, Bilbo, Sam, Smeagol. But it is also Moorean that at the end of Lord of the Rings, Tolkien tells us which hobbits carried the ring to Mount Doom, and which hobbit fell into the fiery depths of the mountain, carrying the Ring. The rest is philosophy: is there any contradiction buried in these Moorean facts, and if not, how do we explain the appearance of contradiction?

Here is my distillation of Ed's approach:

1. There are certain facts that cannot be reasonably denied. Call them 'Moorean.'

2. Reflection upon Moorean facts often brings to light certain tensions or problems or apparent contradictions.

3. The contradictions that arise when we reflect on Moorean data are merely apparent. Data cannot be contradictory. (Sentences that record data are true, and truths cannot be contradictory.)

4. The merely apparent contradictions derive from hidden assumptions that are not Moorean.

5. The task of philosophy is to solve (dissolve?) the problems by exposing and rejecting the hidden assumptions that give rise to them.

6. The task of philosophy is conservative, not revisionary. Our ordinary ways of talking and thinking are in order as they stand. Any problems that arise are due to false assumptions that we bring to the Moorean data. Apparent inconsistencies that arise when when we reflect upon Moorean data are to be explained away as merely apparent.

To illustrate via an aporetic pentad:

a. 'Frodo' (or a tokening thereof) refers to Frodo.

b. Reference is a dyadic relation.

c. Every relation is such that if one of its terms (relata) exists, then all the others do as well.

d. 'Frodo' (or a tokening thereof) exists.

e. Frodo does not exist. (He is a purely fictional item.)

(a), (d), and (e) are all Moorean or as I say, 'datanic.' (b) and (c) are in contrast theoretical. If I understand Ed, he would say that (b) and (c) are the "hidden assumptions" that generate the contradiction in the pentad. To remove the contradiction, and with it the problem, it suffices to reject one or the other of the theoretical assumptions.

I am pretty sure that Ed will reject (b). He will not, I am sure, hold to (b) and reject (c) by maintaining that an existent can stand in a genuine relation to a Meinongian nonexistent. But then Ed owes us an account of what it is for 'Frodo' to refer to or be about Frodo, as opposed to Gandalf, if reference is not a relation. I suspect that any theory he gives will involve difficulties of its own.

How does my metaphilosophy differ from Ed's?

Ed seems to think that philosophical problems such as the one embodied in the above pentad are soluble by the exposure and rejection of false assumptions such as (b) above. There is no need for such exotic posits as Meinongian nonentities or merely intentional objects. Ed seems to think that the task of philosophy is to remove confusions and puzzles that arise when philosophers import false assumptions into the data, thereby causing trouble for themselves. The Moorean data are unproblematic, and we will come to see this when we sweep aside false theoretical assumptions.

My view is entirely different. The problems are genuine, but they do not have satisfactory solutions. It is no solution simply to reject (b) above without giving a positive account of what reference or aboutness is. (b) is not a gratuitous assumption we are making, but a plausibility, despite its not being a Moorean fact. One cannot simply reject it; one must put something it its place.

So Ed needs to tell us what his positive theory is. Once he presents it in a form clear enough to be discussed, then I will show why it is unsatisfactory. And I will do that with every theory that is proposed. If I am able to pull that off, then I will have given a very good reason to regard the problem as insoluble.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Slim Gaillard and Wine Spodiodi

This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day. It's Saturday night, the day's scribbling is done, and I just made myself a wine spodiodi. It is a sort of alcoholic sandwich with mean bourbon the meat and sweet wine the bread. I just made one with sangria, but it is usually made with port. Pour some wine into a glass, add some bourbon, then throw in some more wine. On the rocks or not as is your wont. Repeat as necessary.

From On the Road:

… one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …" He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Light up a cigarodi, mix yourself a wine spodiodi and then dig Slim Gaillard's Cement Mixer mentioned above. While you're at it, check out the cat on bass in this clip. Go, man, go! (Never did get around to reading John Clellon Holmes' Go.)

Stick McGhee, Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, 1947

Now you know where The Electric Flag, featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar, got their song Wine.

Jerry Lee Lewis has a version.

While we are digging the roots of rock, Rocket 88, 1951, may well be the first R & R number.

Ike Turner puts me in mind of Tina and It's Gonna Work Out Fine, 1961.

The Actuarial Absurdity of Obamacare

For Obamacare to work, the young must sign up. But will they? Why should they? Jeffrey H. Anderson:

In its government-run exchanges, Obamacare raises premiums for the young by suspending actuarial science. It forbids insurers from considering some variables that are actuarially relevant to health care, such as sex and health, while also limiting their ability to take age into account in an actuarially based way. Under ordinary principles of insurance, a healthy young person pays a lot less than a person nearing retirement. Under Obamacare, that’s not so. Yet President Obama’s centerpiece legislation depends upon young people’s willingness to pay these artificially inflated premiums.

Another reason the young are unlikely to show up in sufficient numbers is that Obamacare gives many of them an easy out: They can stay on their parents’ insurance free of charge until they’re 26. As for the rest, with the elimination of preexisting conditions as a barrier to buying health insurance, many will choose to go without coverage until they’re sick or injured.

In other words, Obama-care makes insurance more costly while simultaneously making it less necessary—especially for the young.

You ought to read the entire piece, especially if you are young and healthy.

The more I know about Obamacare, the more crack-brained (you can take that word in two senses) it appears. The burden of redistribution is to be borne by the young, precisely those least capable of carrying it.

An Untenable Analysis of ‘Sherlock Holmes is a Purely Fictional Character’

London Ed claims that

1. Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional character

means

2. Someone made up a story about a person called ‘Sherlock Holmes.'

I don't think this is right. Even if (1) and (2) are intersubstitutable salva veritate in all actual and possible contexts, they are not intersubstitutable salva significatione. They are not intersubstitutable in such a manner as to preserve meaning or sense. (1) and (2) don't have the same meaning.

First of all, it is not in dispute that Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional person, unlike, say, the 19th century American chess prodigy, Paul Morphy, who is the main character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players. (Available from Amazon.com for only a penny! The perfect Christmas gift from and to impecunious chess players.) A fictional object need not be a nonexistent object: Morphy is a fictional object inasmuch as he figures in the novel just mentioned, but he existed. Holmes never existed and never will. Hence the need to distinguish between the purely fictional and the fictional, and the fictional and the nonexistent.

Now let us assume that some fom of 'creationism' or 'artifactualism' is true: purely fictional objects are the mental creations of finite minds, human or not. They are literally made up, thought up, excogitated, invented not discovered. They are literally ficta (from L. fingere). On this approach, internally logically consistent ficta cannot be reduced to real, albeit mere, possibilia. For the merely possible belongs to the real, and cannot be made up; the purely fictional, however, is unreal and made-up.

Let us further assume that artifactualism about purely fictional items, if true, is true of metaphysical necessity. It will then be the case that (1) and (2) will be either both true or both false across all possible worlds. But they don't have the same meaning since one who understands (1) may easily reject (2) by holding some other theory of fictional objects, say, a Meinongian theory according to which Sherlock Holmes and his colleagues are mind-independent nonentities.

London Ed is making the following mistake. He thinks that 'x is mind-made' follows analytically from 'x is purely fictional' in the way that (to introduce a brand-new example) 'x is male' follows analytically from 'x is a bachelor.' 'Tom is a bachelor' and 'Tom is an umarried adult male' have the same meaning; the latter merely unpacks or makes explicit the meaning of the former. But (2) does not unpack the meaning of (1): it goes beyond it. It adds the controversial idea that purely fictional objects have no status whatsoever apart from the mental activities of novelists and other artistically creative persons.

Ed may be misled by the etymology of 'fictional.' Pace Heidegger, etymology is no sure guide to philosophical insight.

If you say that Tom is a bachelor but not an unmarried adult male, then you contradict yourself, not formally, but materially. But if you affirm both (1) and the negation of (2), then you involve yourself in no sort of contradiction. Some maintain that purely fictional objects are mind-created abstract objects. People who hold this do not violate the meaning of (1).

Liberal Complains of Obama’s Incompetence

A good read about one liberal's Obamacare cancellation. Excerpt:

Last week the frustration of people like Peter and me—Obamacare supporters who lost their current plans—was heard by the White House, which promptly panicked. On Thursday, President Obama announced a policy change that would allow insurance companies like Regence to keep customers like me on the old Wood plan for one more year. To that I say: Hah! Thanks for nothing.

The idea that an insurer like Regence can, or will, spin on a dime and revive our ol’ $587 Woody within the next six weeks is absurd. It skews the market and undermines the entire premise of the Affordable Care Act – which is that by balancing the halt (allowing pre-existing conditions) and the hale (forcing robust young adults to get in the pool), the exchanges will over time produce a system that offers quality health care at a price my family can afford.

Our liberal finally wakes up when Obama's incompetence affects him personally. But apparently he still doesn't care that Obama and the Dems lied brazenly, lied about their lies, continue to lie, bullshit, and prevaricate, and that when pushed to the wall, Obama tampered 'extra-legally' as pundits delicately put it with what his team referred to as "settled law." But deeper than all this is the crazy assumption that central planning by incompetent bureaucrats can be made to work when experience abundantly teaches that it doesn't.

Promises and Lies

This from David Fredosso:

Now embarrassed by his oft-repeated and false promise that “if you like your health plan you can keep it,” Obama has retreated to a new line of defense: Your old health plan had to be canceled because it was “junk.”

I object. It was not a promise that Obama repeatedly made; it was a false statement about a matter of fact easily checked. The matter of fact is what the PPACA says; it is easily checked by simply reading the law or having a staff member read the law and report on its contents to the president. So what Obama repeatedly did was make a false statement. That by itself does not get the length of a lie. But there are very good reasons to believe that he made his false statement time and again with the intention to deceive. For had he not engaged in deception, the bill would not have passed. It strains credulity to maintain that Obama did not know about a key provision of his signature piece of legislation, a provision without which the entire scheme is unworkable. Of course he knew. And being the consummate Chicago-machine political hustler that he is, he knew what he had to do to win, the glorious end justifying the contemptible means.

But what really interests me are the underlying conceptual and philosophical questions, and not our morally challenged president and his serial lies, prevarications, and other offenses against truth and truthfulness. What is a promise? What is a lie? How does a promise that one fails to keep differ from a lie? Many pundits confuse the former with the latter. Bill O'Reilly the other night juxtaposed the Obama lie with the Bush the Elder's 1988 "Read my lips" unfulfilled promise, as if the one is assimilable to the other. So let's think about it. My main question is this:

If I promise to do X, and fail to fulfill my promise, have I lied?

To answer this question we need to analyze the concept of promising.

Promising is future-oriented: if I promise at time t to do X, then, if I fulfill my promise and do X, X occurs at a time t* later than t. If I promise to drive you to Tucson, and I do in fact drive you to Tucson, then, necessarily, my driving you there occurs at a time later than the time of my promising. In other words, there is no promising with respect to the past, or even with respect to the present. Suppose I am just now sneezing without covering my mouth. I can promise to not to do that again, but I can't promise to not do what I am in the process of doing.

Now suppose that I promise on Monday to drive you to Tucson on Tuesday, but my vehicle is 'totaled' Monday night and no other vehicle is available for my use. Then I fail to fulfill my promise. But it doesn't follow that I lied when I promised to drive you to Tucson. For one cannot lie about what has not yet occurred. Here is an explicit argument:

a. Promises are about future contingent events
b. Future contingent events either do not exist or if they do exist they are not knowable now.
c. Lies are false statements made with the intention to deceive about events that are both existent and knowable now.
Therefore
d. No promise is a lie.

(b) requires a bit of commentary. If presentism is true, then only the present exists, in which case future events do not exist. If presentism is false and future events (tenselessly) exist, as they do on a B-theory of time, then they, or at least the modally contingent ones, are unknowable by us now.

I have been talking about sincere promises. Suppose I make a promise I have no intention of fulfilling. Or to be precise, I utter a form of words that are verbally of the sort one uses to make a promise, but these words are not animated by any intention to do as I appear to be promising. This is not a lie either. Deception is involved, but not a lie. For to lie I must make a statement about some actual state of affairs. But 'I promise to drive you to Tucson tomorrow' is not a statement about any state of affairs. Promising and stating are quite different. Promising is a performative: I make it the case that I promise to drive you to Tucson simply by uttering those words. There is nothing external to the words to represent or misrepresent either intentionally or non-intentionally.

George Bush the Elder, back in 1988, famously said, "Read my lips! No new taxes!" Did he lie? Of course not. On a charitable view, he made a promise he was unable to keep due to circumstances beyond his control. But even if he had no intention of keeping his promise, he still did not lie.

Bill Clinton wagged his finger at us and said, "I did not have sex with that woman!" Did he lie? Of course. He did in fact have oral sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.

There are at least two ways of failing to fulfill a promise. One can be prevented from fulfilling it by circumstances beyond one's control, or one can renege on the promise. Suppose that on Tuesday morning I just don't feel like carting you to Tucson, and refuse to do so even after promising to do so. Then I renege on my promise. If a person reneges on a promise, we say he broke his promise. A broken promise is not the same as an insincere promise. I can sincerely promise, on Monday, to meet Jake for lunch on Friday, but then break the promise.

Did Obama renege on his PPACA promise? No, for the simple reason that he made no promise. He made a false statement about the content of the PPACA bill that then became law.

Fredosso above uses the phrase "false promise." That strikes me as ambiguous as between 'insincere promise' and 'broken promise.' We should probably avoid the phrase 'false promise.' Truth-value does not come into the appraisal of performatives. Suppose I say to Ed, 'I promise to repay you on Friday.' If Ed says, 'Is that true what you just said,' then Ed shows that he does not understand the nature of promising. For another example, 'I hereby pronounce you man and wife,' said by a Justice of the Peace, is neither true nor false. Of course, if he says it, then it is true that he said it; but the saying itself is not true or false; therr is no reality external to the saying that the saying is about.

Here is a quickie argument:

Lies are all of them false
Promises are neither true nor false
Ergo
No promise, not even a 'false' promise, is a lie.

Further question: Is 'insincere' in 'insincere promise' an alienans adjective? Suppose I break my promise to you and you protest: You promised! I say, 'But I didn't mean it.' Is an insincere promise a promise? I am inclined to say that an insincere promise is not a promise while a broken promise is a promise.

Concluding Polemical Postscript. Obama lied, and health care died!

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Color

Here is a sampling, starting with the determinable and proceeding to some determinates:

Donovan and Joan Baez, Colors. I forgot how good this song is.
Hank Snow, Yellow Roses. I prefer the Ry Cooder cover, but it's not available.
Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses. Never could understand why this tune is almost never played on the
oldies stations.
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. For all you benighted qualia deniers out there. 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
Thelonious Sphere Monk, Blue Monk
Jimi Hendrix, Red House
Cream, White Room. You say this is not a song of color? What, is white not a color?
Los Bravos, Black is Black
Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale
Joan Baez, The Green, Green Grass of Home

Senses of ‘Absurd’ and the Difference between Nagel-Absurdity and Absolute Absurdity

I continue the investigation into existential meaning and absurdity. Earlier posts in this series are collected in the Meaning of Life category.

Let's take a step back and ask what we might mean by 'absurd' the better to isolate the sense or senses relevant to the question of the putative absurdity of human existence. I count the following main senses.

1. In the logical sense, 'absurd' means logically impossible or self-contradictory. Thus a round square is an absurdity as is a cat that is not a cat. A philosophizing cat, however, though nomologically impossible, is not an absurdity in the logical sense. In a reductio ad absurdum proof one proves a proposition by assuming its negation and then, with the help of unquestioned auxiliary premises, deriving a formal contradiction. One thus reduces the assumption to absurdity. 'Absurdity' here has a purely logical sense.

2. In the epistemic sense, a proposition is absurd if it is epistemically impossible, i.e., logically inconsistent with what we know. In ordinary English we often call propositions absurd that neither are nor entail logical contradictions. Thus if a Holocaust denier asserts that no Jew was executed by Nazis at Auschwitz, we say, "That's absurd!" meaning not that it is logically impossible — after all, it isn't — but that it contradicts what we know to be the case. The same goes for *There are whore houses on the Moon.* It is false, but more than that, it blatantly contradicts what everyone knows; so we say it is absurd.

3. We also apply 'absurd' to such nonpropositions as enterprises, schemes, undertakings, projects, plans, and the like. An 80-year-old with ankle problems tells me he intends to climb Weaver's Needle. I tell him his project is absurd. I am not saying that what he has in mind is logically impossible, or even that it is nomologically impossible, but that "there is a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality." (Thomas Nagel, "The Absurd," Mortal Questions, p. 13) Camus gives the example of a swordsman attacking machine gunners. That is an absurd project. The means chosen is radically unsuited for the end in view. The fantasies of transhumanist and cryonic physical-immortality-seekers I would call absurd. Ditto for the quest for the philosopher's stone, the perpetuum mobile, the classless society.

The above are all 'discrepancy' senses of 'absurd.' There is the self-discrepancy of a self-contradictory proposition such as *No cat is a cat.* There is the discrepancy of a false proposition such as *There are whore houses on the Moon* with what we all know is the case. There is the discrepancy between certain projects and plans with reality and its real possibilities. The logic and epistemic uses can be set aside: they are not directly relevant to the problem of the meaning of human existence. The third sense brings us in the vicinity of Nagel's use of 'absurd.'

4. Nagelian absurdity. Nagel's use of 'absurd' is also a 'discrepancy' use. As opposed to what? As opposed to an absolute use, to be explained in a moment. In his 1971 J. Phil. essay "The Absurd," Thomas Nagel maintains that "the philosophical sense of absurdity" arises from "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt." (13) "What makes life absurd" is the collision of "the two inescapable viewpoints," namely, the situated viewpoint from which we live straighforwardly, immersed in our projects and taking them in deadly earnest, and the objective, transcendental viewpoint from which we coolly comtemplate our lives and everything else sub specie aeternitatis. There is a discrepancy between the seriousness with which we take our projects and the indifference with which we view them from 'on high' under the aspect of eternity.This discrepancy is inescapable since both the subjective and objective viewpoints are essential to being human and they necessarily conflict.

5. Absolute Absurdity. Suppose our lives are Nagel-absurd. Does it follow that they are absolutely absurd? I define:

X is absolutely absurd =_df the existence of X is (modally) contingent but without cause or reason.

Some say the universe is absurd in this sense. It exists; it might not have existed; it exists without cause; it exists without reason or purpose. "It is just there, and that is all," to paraphrase Russell in his famous BBC debate with Copleston.

It seems obvious that our lives could be Nagel-absurd without being absolutely absurd. Suppose God created us to love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him in the next. Suppose this is true and is known or believed to be true. Then our existence, though modally contingent, would have both a cause and a reason (purpose). Our lives would have an objective meaning. But this objective meaning is consistent with our lives embodying an inescapable conflict between subjective and objective points of view such that a fully aware human being would not be able to shake off what Nagel calls "the philosophical sense of absurdity." Supposing my life objectively has a purpose and so cannot be absolutely absurd, it remains Nagel-absurd because our power of self-transcendence — which is essential to us — allows us to call into question every thing and every purpose and every sense-bestowing wider context, including God and God's purposes, and the divine milieu that presumably would be the ultimate context. As Nagel puts it in his 1971 essay: "If we can step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way." (17)

Indeed, even the existence of God himself, which cannot be absolutely absurd because God is causa sui and a necessary being, could be Nagel-absurd. God might reflect on his eternal life and his purposes and find them dubious and arbitrary. "Why did I limit my own power by creating free beings? Look at the mess they have made! Why did I bother? I was happy and self-sufficient and in no need of any creaturely images and likenesses." God might even think to himself: "I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is though my will, but whence then am I?" (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A613 B641, Kemp Smith tr. This is the only passage in the CPR that I would describe as 'chilling.')

Even if God reminds himself that, as a necessary being, he cannot fail to exist, the very fact that he contemplates his existence 'from outside' — assuming that he does so contemplate his existence — introduces willy-nilly an element of contingency and brute-factuality into his existence.

It would therefore appear that Nagel-absurdity does not entail absolute absurdity, that the former is logically consistent with objective meaningfulness. This can be see also in a third way. One key thesis of Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos is that mind is not a cosmic
accident. Mind in all of its ramifications (sentience, intentionality,
self-awareness, cognition, rationality, normativity in general) could
not have arisen from mindless matter. To put it very roughly, and in my
own way, mind had to be there already and all along in one way or
another. Not an "add-on" as Nagel writes, but "a basic aspect of
nature." (16) If this is right, then mind is not a fluke and not something that just exists without cause or reason purpose. Nature has aimed at it all along. So our existence as instances of mind is not absolutely absurd. But it can presumably still be Nagel-absurd. So again we see that Nagel-absurdity does not entail absolute absurdity.

Now when we ask whether human life is absurd, are we asking whether it is absolutely absurd or Nagel-absurd? I suggest that we are asking whether it is absolutely absurd. This question is not settled by life's being Nagel-absurd.

At this point someone might suggest that life's being Nagel-absurd, though it does not entail life's being absolutely absurd, is yet evidence for it. I don't see how it could be, but this question requires a separate post. My main purpose in this post was taxonomic. The main uses of 'absurd' are now on the table.

More On Same-Sex ‘Marriage’

Spencer of Cairo writes,

I've been following your writing on same sex marriage and I've got to say I think you have, in a certain sense, taken the bait. SSM proponents demand much of conservatives that they are in no position to demand. For instance, they demand that conservatives, in order to justify their views on marriage, indicate a single property or set of properties unique to the relationships that currently count as marriages. "All and only heterosexual couples have what common feature?" is the challenge.

You try to meet this demand by specifying potentiality to procreate. This is only true on a metaphysical understanding of "potentiality" – in the ordinary sense, 70-year-olds have lost that potentiality.

Spencer, I think you have misconstrued my argument. I did not use the word 'potentiality.' And I don't know what you mean by a metaphysical as opposed to an ordinary understanding of the term. Here is what I said:

It is biologically impossible that homosexual unions produce offspring. It is biologically possible, and indeed biologically likely, that heterosexual unions produce offspring. That is a very deep difference grounded in a biological fact and not in the law or in anything conventional. This is the underlying fact that both justifies the state's interest in and regulation of marriage, and justifies the state's restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples.

I did not make the (false) claim that every opposite-sexed couple has the power to procreate.

Unfortunately, I think conservatives do themselves great harm when they rely on metaphysics in the
marriage debate when they have recourse to other lines of response. I respect metaphysics, but it is rarely useful in politics.

I disagree completely. The same-sex marriage question and most if not all of the 'hot button' issues currently debated are metaphysical at bottom. Consider abortion. Everything rides on the status of the fetus. Is it a person in the normative sense, i.e., a rights-possessor? What are the criteria of descriptive and normative personhood? What are rights? In what are they grounded? These are metaphysical questions. A powerful anti-abortion argument is the potentiality argument. Underlying it, however, is broadly Aristotelian metaphysics. Those who reject this metaphysics will be opting for some metaphysical alternative. Questions about diachronic numerical identity arise, questions that are plainly metaphysical. (See Fission and Zygotes.) And so on.

I could show the same for most of the 'hot button' issues. In general, political philosophy rests on normative ethics which rests on a theory of human nature (philosophical anthropology), which is turn presupposes metaphysics. So metaphysics is unavoidable. One point I will concede, however, is that we ought to keep religion out of these discussions, assuming we are addressing fellow citizens as opposed to co-religionists.

Let me remind you that very often the law makes distinctions where there is no essential difference, as when we pick a certain age as the baseline for sexual consent. There is a certain kind of arbitrariness there, but one we must be stuck with in any event. So, essential difference is neither necessary nor sufficient for a difference in legal and social status.

You are making it sound as it it is wholly arbitrary where the law draws a line. I gave the example of driving. It is somewhat arbitrary, but not totally arbitrary, to make the legal driving age 16. There are excellent, non-arbitrary, reasons for not making it five or ten, or 25 or 30. These reasons are grounded in biological and psychological facts. As for the age of sexual consent, a non-arbitrary lower bound is provided by puberty. Similarly with voting and drinking alcohol. There is a range of arbitrarity between, say, 18 and 21. But there are excellent, non-abitrary reasons grounded in biological and developmental facts for keeping six year olds out of voting booths and bar rooms.

So I find your comment confused. No essential difference need be cited for making the driving age 16 rather than 17, but essential differences are relevant when we move beyond the range of arbitrarity. I am tempted to say that the lower and upper bounds on the range of arbitrarity are themselves non-arbitrary.

Applying this to same-sex 'marriage,' there is nothing arbitrary about the law's not recognizing SSMs when it recognizes OSMs. For there is the essential difference that procreation is impossible in a SSM but not in an OSM. Arbitrarity and a bit of unfairness come in when the law allows non-procreating OS couples to marry. But as I said, practical laws cannot cater to unusual cases.

A better response, and the one I use, is to challenge the challenge. Tell your interlocutor, "If I must produce some relevant property common to all heterosexual couples, then it should also be incumbent on you to specify what kinds of relationships can count as marriages, and what is the morally relevant property that all and only those relationships have. Since you think this kind of challenge is proper, you must already have something in mind to defend your side. So go on, then." SSM proponents hate this move, because it reveals how much their strategy relies upon burden-shifting and tacit double standards. I submit that your interlocutor probably won't even tell you how much change he is committing himself to, or what marriage should be. But suppose he says "Any two consenting adults, regardless of gender." Then ask him what is the special property that all and only couples have, that no threesome has. He will not have a persuasive answer.

I deny that your approach is better, though I grant that it is a reasonable one and does have the advantage of side-stepping the contentious metaphysical questions. But it has the disadvantage of entangling us in burden-of-proof considerations. You accuse the same-sexer of shifting the burden of proof. But he will reasonably demand to know why he should shoulder the burden. My position on burden-of-proof is that

In philosophy no good purpose is served by claims that the BOP lies on one side or the other of a dispute, or that there is a DP [defeasible presumption] in favor of this thesis but not in favor of that one. For there is no fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies. BOP considerations are usefully deployed only in dialectical situations in which some authority presides over the debate and lays down the rules of procedure and has the power to punish those who violate them. Such an authority constitutes by his decision the 'fact' that the BOP lies on one side rather than on the other. We find such authorities in courts of law. But there is no court of philosophy.

It is bad sort of conservative who stands on tradition and takes the way things have been as sufficient justification for their remaining so. The wise conservative admits that the presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things is defeasible. And so he takes the challenge of the same-sexer seriously. He tries to explain why the law should recognize OS but no SS unions as marriages. Furthermore, if he cannot meet the challenge, then he ought to re-evaluate and perhaps change his views about marriage. It would be unphilosophical of him to stand on tradition and ignore sincerely intended rational challenges to it.

Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

W. K. writes, and I reply:

I agree with most of that [Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too], except what I take to be your idea of dogma. You say that the 'dogmatic contents' of religion is 'where it is weakest' and 'dogmatics displaces inquiry'. In both cases, for Catholicism, this is not only a misconception but the opposite of what dogma is.

In the first case, the dogmatic contents of Catholicism are revealed by God, who cannot possibly err, so given sufficient rational grounds for believing that there is a God, and that he has indeed revealed himself to man, and that this revelation is to be found where it is claimed to be found, its dogmatic contents are where it is strongest. [. . .]

I can grant all your premises but one. As I see it, the dogmatic contents, i.e., the dogmatic propositions, of Catholicism are not revealed by God. They are at best human formulations of what is revealed by God, formulations that bear the mark of their human origin. As such, they are debatable, disputable, and starting points for inquiry. They are not indisputable certainties that must be accepted on pain of damnation. To discuss this concretely we need to examine some examples of dogmatic contents. Here are some:

God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural
light of reason from created things.
The divine attributes are really identical among themselves and with
the Divine Essence.
God is absolutely simple.

If these dogmas are revealed by God, where can we find them in the Bible? As far as I know, the Bible is silent on the question of divine simplicity, which is what the second two propositions articulate. The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), as set forth by Thomas Aquinas, has a noble philosophical pedigree, but no Biblical pedigree. I am not saying that God is not ontologically simple. In fact, I am inclined to say that God must be simple: otherwise he would not be absolute, and hence would not be God. (See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on this topic.) Nor am I saying that that DDS is inconsistent with what is in the Bible. Perhaps it is possible to render consistent the simple God of the philosophers with the living, acting, non-impassible God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who acts in history, takes sides in tribal warfare, hears and responds to prayers, etc. I am saying precisely this: the DDS is a human attempt to articulate in discursive terms the divine transcendence and aseity. As such, DDS is open to scrutiny and debate.

This ought to be obvious from the fact that prominent philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga, who are also classical theists, though not Catholics, question the DDS, and with good reason. Questioning it, they do not take themselves to be questioning divine revelation, nor are they questioning divine revelation. They are questioning a philosophical doctrine that has much to be said for it, but also much to be said against it. They are questioning something that is eminently questionable.

At this point one might try the following response. "Admittedly, DDS is not in the Bible; but it is taught by the Catholic Church, the one, true, holy, and universal church, the church founded by Christ himself who is God, a church presided over and guided by by the Holy Ghost (I don't use 'Holy Spirit' which is a Vatican II innovation) in all it conciliar deliberations with respect to faith and morals, a church, therefore, whose pronouncements on matters of faith and morals are infallible. Since the Roman church was founded by God himself, its epistemic credentials are absolutely impeccable, and everything it teaches, including DDS, is not only true, but known with absolute objective certainty to be true because it comes from an absolutely reliable Source, God himself."

Is the Roman church all that it claims to be? That is the question. If it is then everything it teaches, including the dogmas about its own divine origin and utter reliability (see here, scroll down to VI #s 1-20), are true. But is it all that it claims to be? You are free to believe it of course. But how do you know? If you say you know it because the Roman church teaches it, then you move in a circle of rather short diameter. You are saying in effect: The Roman church is God's very church because it claims to be, and its claims are true and certain because they made by God's very church, the church that God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, who is absolutely inerrant and trustworthy, established.

To avoid the circle, one must simply accept that the Roman church is all that it claims to be. But ought one not be unsettled by the fact that sincere, intelligent adherents of other Christian denominations (let alone adherents of other faiths such as Judaism and Islam) reject the Roman claims?

"No, why should I find that unsettling? Those other denominations are just wrong. The Eastern Church, for example, went astray at the time of the Great Schism." That's possible, but how likely is it? Isn't it much more likely that the extreme claims that the Roman church makes on its behalf are simply the expression of an exceedingly deep need for doxastic security, i.e., an inability to tolerate the least bit of uncertainty in one's beliefs? Here is one of the extreme claims:

Membership of the Catholic Church is necessary for all men for salvation.

Extra ecclesiam, nulla salus. No salvation outside the church. Which church? The Eastern church? Well, no. Our church. It would be absurd to say that the true church is true because it is ours. It would be better to say that it is ours because it is the true church: we joined it because it is true. But how justify that claim in a non-circular way?

Some will tell me that the Roman church has softened on the dogma just quoted. But if dogmas are divinely revealed as my correspondent W. K. claims, how could there be any need for softening or modification? And why would any more dogmas need to be added, as they were added in the 19th century?

Consider another dogma:

The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and from the Son as from a single
principle through a single spiration.

This proposition contains the famous filoque, "and from the Son," which was the main doctrinal bone of contention that led to the Great Schism. (See East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy.) Is this Catholic dogma in the Bible? Where? Does the Bible anywhere take a stand on this theological arcanum? I don't think so.

And then there are the Marian dogmas. I count three: Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, and Assumption. According to the first, Mary was conceived without original sin. And so the dogma of Original Sin is presupposed. That man is a fallen being in some sense or other I don't doubt. But the Fall as a sort of 'fact' and the Fall as an explicitly formulated doctrine are two and not one. Here is what I mean by the 'fact':

. . . man is wretched and only man is wretched. Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in what Pascal calls divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. We are in a dire state from which we need salvation but we are incapable of saving ourselves by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

Now compare the 'fact' with the dogmatic propositions that make up the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin:

Our first parents, before the fall, were endowed with sanctifying
grace.
In addition to sanctifying grace, our first parents were endowed with
the preternatural gift of bodily immortality.
Our first parents in Paradise sinned grievously through transgression
of the Divine probationary commandment.
Through sin our first parents lost sanctifying grace and provoked the
anger and the indignation of God.
Our first parents became subject to death and to the dominion of the
devil.
Adam's sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation but by
descent.
Original sin is transmitted by natural generation.
In the state of original sin man is deprived of sanctifying grace and
all that this implies, as well as of the preternatural gifts of integrity.
Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded
from the Beatific Vision of God.

I'll make a couple of quick points. There were no first parents, and there is no transmission in the manner described.(Further details and explanations in Original Sin category.)

In sum, I oppose both the critics of religion who, failing to appreciate its open-ended, quest-like character, want to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. I also oppose the (immature) religionists who also want religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage.

In a slogan: Religion is more quest than conclusions.

Silence

If it is a mere absence of sound, why is it so delicious? Turn off some noisemaker and the silence is there, palpably. It is supereminently there if you succeed in turning off that most noisy and hard-to-turn-off noisemaker, your own mind.

Max Picard proved unhelpful. His effusions are vaguely suggestive but neither fish nor fowl, neither philosophy nor poetry. More help is to be had from the Beatles: "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying . . . ."

In the Event of an Obama Victory

How can Dick Morris and other conservative pundits be so cocksure that Romney will win big? Do they have crystal balls? It's more a case of brass balls. Do they think that by confidently predicting a Romney landslide they will energize the conservative base? Why wouldn't it have the opposite effect? ("If Romney's going to win in a landslide, there's no need for me to head for the polls.") There is something I am not understanding here.

I am preparing for the disaster of an Obama victory. Lawrence Auster speaks of the "horror" of such a thing:

Why horror? To repeat: For America to re-elect a president who has presided over an economic and fiscal disaster and who has made it crystal clear that he intends to keep following the same policies in his second term, would mean that America has become in the full sense of the word a parasitical leftist country. Meaning, a country which believes, as Obama believes, that the conditions making possible the production of all the goods of society can be ignored, because somehow the goods of society will always be there, like rocks and stars, no matter how much we condemn and punish those who provide them, and therefore all we need to do is appropriate and distribute the goods—more and more and more of them—to the unfortunate and the oppressed, with the unfortunate and oppressed including such as groups as woman who lack totally free contraceptives; blacks who have been deprived by white racism of an education that will turn them into the intellectual and economic equals of whites; and blacks who have been deprived by America’s racist geography of full access to the white tax base.

Although I consider Auster an extremist in some ways, the above statement eloquently expresses the fundamental and deeply pernicious ignorance of human nature and of economics at the root of Obama's vision.

If Obama wins, what then? We soldier on, of course. We continue the fight but without falling into the totalitarian error of leftists for whom politics is everything. But of course this is why it is so difficult to defeat them. They seek and find their very meaning in the political sphere. Politics is their religion. Curiously, it's a religion without any morality: they will do anything to win. This puts us at a two-fold disadvantage: we don't bring the full measure of our energy and commitment to the fight, and we have moral scruples. I call it The Conservative Disadvantage.

Addendum: I just found the following at Keith Burgess-Jackson's weblog:

Why do almost all Romney supporters think he will win, and why do almost all
Obama supporters think he will win? It would be refreshing, from time
to time, to hear a representative of possibility 2 or possibility 4. I, for
example, want Romney to win, but I believe that Obama has a good chance of
winning. I won't go as far as to say that Obama will win, since I have
no basis for such a decisive judgment, but I won't be surprised if he does.

Is this evidence that great minds think alike?

More on the Kraussian ‘Bait and Switch’

I wrote:

Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy. Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.' Krauss is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense. That is the same type of trick he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is something rather than nothing. He baited us with a promise to answer the Leibnizian question but all he did was switch from the standard meaning of 'nothing' to a special meaning all his own according to which nothing is something. So instead of answering the question he baited us with — the old Leibniz question — he substituted a different physically tractable question and then either stupidly or dishonestly passed off the answer to the physically tractable question as the answer to the philosophical question.

He is doing the same thing with the homosexuality question. He is equivocating on 'right' and 'wrong' as between nonnormative and normative senses of the term. Avoid that confusion and you will be able to see that a practice cannot be shown to be morally acceptable by showing that the practice is engaged in. Slavery and ethnic cleansing are practices which have proven to be be very effective by nonnormative criteria. World War II in the Pacific was ended by the nuclear slaughter of noncombatants. Questions about moral acceptability and unacceptability cut perpendicular to questions about effectiveness, survival value and the like.

Joel Hunter responds:

. . . this causes me to wonder, in a charitable vein, whether Krauss is not, after all, performing an intentional bait-and-switch in his theorizing about "nothing," morality, and the will. Rather, because of his unassailable prior commitment to naturalize all phenomena, perhaps he's engaged in simply translating away genuine philosophical problems in much the same way that an emotivist translates away the propositional content of general moral principles. There's a logic to the naturalizing procedure whereby concepts of the nonphysical must be translated as something physical. That's the only way "nothing" is intelligible given his ground convictions. Of course, this doesn't excuse his equivocation on such matters. But if he had proposed something like the following, perhaps the bait-and-switch charge wouldn't stick: "The Leibniz question is a real puzzler. But in its classic form it is unanswerable because it is unintelligible using the explanatory tools we have at our disposal. The good news is that we can make it intelligible by translating physically nebulous terms into terms with definite physical meaning." As we both know, he is unlikely to speak this way because it is too intellectually humble, an indulgence of virtue he cannot afford since the more important aim of the translation project is to ghettoize the religious.

If I understand Professor Hunter, he is, with admirable exegetical charity, raising the question whether Krauss, rather than engaging in an intellectually dishonest 'bait and switch' ploy, is instead proposing that intractable philosophical questions such as the one Leibniz famously raised be replaced by tractable scientific ones. Accordingly, Krauss is not trying to the answer the questions of philosophy using empirical science, but is instead aiming to replace the philosophical questions with different ones, questions that are amenable to scientific solutions. Clearly, the following strategies are different:

1. Answer the traditional questions of philosophy using scientific methods.

2. Replace the traditional questions with scientifically tractable ones since the former have proven intractable.

On (1), the traditional questions can be answered, but not by the 'arm chair' methods of philosophy, but empirically. Science comes to occupy the domain of philosophy. On (2), the traditional questions cannot be answered and so must be replaced by questions that can be scientifically answered. Science does not come to occupy the domain of philosophy; it establishes its own domain. (Here is an example that would require a separate post to exfoliate. When psychology first broke away from philosophy, it ceased to concern itself with the topics philosophers of mind treated: it changed the subject to observable behavior. It is not just that psychology abandoned the method of introspection; it also abandoned the subject matter that introspection was thought to reveal.)

Consider the Kraussian metaphor of "growing up and leaving home." When a young person does this he does so without prejudice to his diachronic identity: it is not as if the person-at-home perishes to be replaced by a numerically different person-away-from-home. One and the same person is first at home and then away. So the metaphor suggests that Krauss' strategy is (1). That is also the impression one gets from his awful book on something and nothing. But there is also evidence that his strategy is (2).

I suggest that the man is just not clear as to what he is up to. Hence the impression of 'bait and switch.' He baits us with a traditional questions as if he is out to solve it scientifically; but then he switches to a different question, replacing the philosophical question with a different one.

For example, instead of answering (or rejecting as senseless) the Leibniz question as to why anything at all exists, he substitutes an entirely different question about how the physical universe has evolved from an initial material state (which is obviously not nothing). Not that there is anything wrong with the second question; it is just not the question he baited us with. Krauss' how-question and its answer are simply irrelevant to the why-question. And yet our man thinks that somehow they are relevant. Hence I say he is, if not intellectually dishonest, then badly confused.

A Second Van Inwagen Argument for the Univocity of ‘Exists’

I discussed one of the Peter van Inwagen's arguments here and found it wanting. He has a second argument: ". . . 'exists' is univocal owing to the interdefinability of 'there exists' and the obviously univocal 'all.' But this is a powerful argument, for, surely, 'all' means the same in 'All natural numbers have a successor' and 'All Greeks are mortal'?" (484). The argument could be put as follows:

'Every' is univocal.

'Exist(s)' and 'every' are interdefinable: 'Fs exist' is equivalent to 'It is not the case that everything is not an F.'

Therefore

'Exist(s)' is univocal.

I accept this crisp little argument — but with a restriction: 'exist(s)' is univocal across all affirmative and negative general existential sentences. But what about a singular existential such as 'Peter exists'? Does 'exist' in the latter have the same sense that it has in 'Rabbits exist'? I say it doesn't: 'exist(s)' is not univocal across all existence sentences, general and singular.

To warm up, what are we saying when we say that rabbits exist? On Frege's approach, we are saying that the concept rabbit is instantiated. So 'exist(s)' in general existentials means 'is instantiated.' But 'Peter exists' does not say that Peter is instantiated. So is it not spectacularly obvious that 'exist(s)' is not univocal across singular and general existentials?

But we needn't follow Frege is holding that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate. And van Inwagen does not follow him in this. Perhaps it would not be unfair to characterize van Inwagen as a half-way Fregean: he likes the notion that "existence is allied to number" but he does not take that characteristic Fregean thesis to entail that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, i.e., a predicate of concepts, not objects. Van Inwagen could and would say something along these lines:

1. Rabbits exist: It is not the case that everything is not a rabbit. ~(x)~Rx.

2. Peter exists: It is not the case that everything is not identical to Peter. ~(x)~(x = Peter)

I will now try to show that, even on van Inwagen's preferred translations, there is still equivocity as between general and singular existentials. (1) and (2) are equivalent to

1*. Rabbits exist: Something is a rabbit. (Ex)Rx.

and

2*. Peter exists: Something is (identically) Peter. (Ex)(x = Peter).

Now it seems to me that we are still stuck with equivocation. The predicate in (1*) is 'something is (predicatively) ___.' The predicate in (2*) is 'something is (identically) ___.' Now the 'is' of predication is not the 'is' of identity. So the equivocation on 'exist(s)' remains in the form of an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of predication and the 'is' of identity.

The equivocation ought to be obvious from the notation alone. The immediate juxtaposition of 'R' and 'x' in '(Ex)Rx' signifies that x is (predicatively) R. But in '(Ex)(x = Peter)' we find no such juxtaposition but a new sign, '=.'

My thesis, then, is that while 'exist(s)' is univocal across all general existentials, it is not univocal across all existentials. This reflects that fact that — to switch over to material mode — existence cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of any thin logical notion or combination of such notions.