Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Intentionality for Third-World Entities?

    Commenter John and I are having a very productive discussion about intentionality.  I thank him for helping me clarify my thoughts about this fascinating topic.  I begin with some points on which (I think) John and I agree.

    a) There is a 'third world' or third realm and it is the realm of abstracta.   (I promise: no jokes about Frege's Third Reich. But I can't promise not to speak of Original Sinn and Original Sinn-ers.) Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are abstracta, but not all abstracta are reference-mediating senses. John and I are operating with a provisional tripartite or tri-categorial ontology comprising the mental, the physical, and the abstract.

    b) There are instances of intrinsic intentionality. Neither of us is an eliminativist about intentionality in the manner, say, of Alexander Rosenberg. (See Could Intentionality be an Illusion?)

    c) There is no intentionality without intrinsic or original intentionality: it cannot be that all intentionality is derivative or a matter of ascription, pace Daniel Dennett.  (See Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses.)

    d) Nothing physical qua physical is intrinsically intentional, although some physical items are derivatively intentional.  (Combine this true proposition with the false proposition that all mental states are physical, and you have an unsound but valid argument for the eliminativist conclusion that there is no intrinsic intentionality.)

    Agreement on the foregoing points leaves open the question whether there could be intrinsically intentional abstract items.  I tend to think that there are no intrinsically intentional abstract items.  John's position, assuming I understand it, is that some abstract items are intrinsically intentional, and that some  intrinsically intentional items are not abstract, mental states being examples of the latter.

    The bare bones of the debate between John and I may be set forth as an aporetic triad:

    1) Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items. 

    2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.

    3) Fregean senses are not conscious. 

    It is easy to see that this threesome is not logically consistent: the propositions cannot all be true. John and I assume that the Law of Non-Contradiction holds across the board: we are not dialetheists.  So something has to give. Which limb of the triad should we reject?  (3) is not in dispute and presumably will be accepted by all: no abstract item is conscious, and senses are abstract.  'Abstract' was defined in earlier entries, and John and I agree on its meaning. The dispute concerns (1) and (2). I reject (1) while accepting the other two propositions; John rejects (2) while accepting the other two propositions.

    I argue from the conjunction of (2) and (3) to the negation of (1), while John argues from the conjunction of (1) and (3) to the negation of (2).

    My rejection of (1) entails that there are no Fregean senses (Sinne).  This is because Fregean senses, by definition, are intrinsically intentional. It follows that they are essentially intrinsically intentional. So if they can't be intrinsically intentional, then they can't exist. Why are senses essentially intrinsically intentional?  Well, as platonica, senses are necessarily existent: they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds. It follows that they exist in worlds in which there are no finite minds.* Now a sense, by definition, is a mode of presentation (Darstellungsweise) of its object.  It mediates between minds and things.  Reference, whether thinking reference or linguistic reference, is routed though sense. The (re)presentational power of a sense is essential to it, and it has this power even in worlds in which there are no words to express the sense, no things to be presented by  the sense, and no minds to refer to things via senses.  For example, consider a possible world W in which there are no languages, no minds, and no planet Venus. In W the sense that 'Phosphorus' — 'Morning Star,' Morgenstern — expresses in our world exists (because it exists in every world) and has its (re)presentational power there in W. Thus its intentionality is intrinsic to it and does not depend on any relations to words or to things or to minds.  It (re)presents non-linguistically and non-mentally and without the need for physical embodiment.

    I think it follows that there is no distinction in reality — although there is one notionally — between the power of a Fregean sense to represent and its exercise of this power.  There is, in other words, no distinction in reality between the power of a sense to represent and its actually representing.  I say this because the existence of what an intrinsically intentional item is of or about has no effect whatsoever on the aboutness of the item.  Suppose I am thinking about the Washington monument, but that while I am thinking about it, it ceases to exist. That change in objective reality in no way affects the aboutness of the intentional state.  Thus the power of an intrinsically intentional item to represent does not need an external, objectively real, 'trigger' to actualize the power.  The extramental existence of the Washington monument is not  a necessary condition of the aboutness of my thinking about it.  The content and aboutness of my thinking is exactly the same whether or not the monument exists 'outside the mind.' The same goes for senses. The sense of 'Phosphorus' presents Venus whether or not Venus exists. And the content of the sense is exactly the same whether or not Venus exists.

    There is an important difference, however, between an intrinsically intentional mental state and a Fregean sense.   The occurrent mental state or 'act' — in the terminology of Twardowksi, Husserl, et al. — is the state of a mind. It is the act of a subject, the cogitatio of an ego, where the last three occurrences of 'of' all express the genitivus subjectivus.  This is essentially, not accidentally, the case.  There has to be an ego behind the cogitatio for the cogitatio to be a cogitatio of a cogitatum.  But there needn't be an ego 'behind' the sense for the sense to be a sense of or about a thing. If a Fregean sense mediates a reference between a mind and a thing, it is not essential to the mediation that there be a mind 'behind' the sense.

    Here then is an argument against Fregean senses:

    4) Every instance of intrinsic intentionality has both a subject and an object.
    5) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense do not have both a subject and an object.
    Therefore
    6) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense are not instances of intrinsic intentionality.

    When I reject the proposition that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items, I thereby reject the very existence of Fregean senses. I am not maintaining that Fregean senses exist but are derivatively intentional items.  I do hold, however, that there are derivatively intentional items, maps for example.  Maps get their meaning and aboutness from us original Sinn-ers. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater.

    So some things derive their referential and semantic properties from other things.  That is also true of language. Words and phrases don't mean anything in and of themselves. Mind is king: no minds, no meaning. I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. 

    John and I agree that Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are explanatory posits.  They are not 'datanic' as I like to say. Thus it is a pre-analytic or pre-theoretical datum that the sentences 'The sky is blue' and Der Himmel ist blau 'say the same thing' or can by used to say the same thing. But that this same thing is a Fregean proposition goes beyond the given and enters the explanatory realm.  One forsakes phenomenology for dialectics. Now what am I claiming exactly? That there is no need for these posits, that to posit senses is to 'multiply entities beyond necessity in violation of Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem?  Or am I saying something stronger, namely, that there cannot be any such items as Fregean senses? I believe my view is the latter, and not merely the former.  If senses cannot exist, then they cannot be reasonably posited either.  

    John's view, I take it, is that both Fregean senses and some conscious items are intrinsically intentional or object-directed. He is not maintaining that only third-world entities (abstracta) are intrinsically intentional. By contrast, I maintain that only second-world entities (mental items, both minds and some of their occurrent states) are intrinsically intentional.

    I assume that John intends 'intrinsically intentional' to be taken univocally and not analogically.  Thus he is not saying that Fregean senses are of or about first-world items in a manner that is analogous to the way second-world items are of or about first-world items.    

    Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional, necessarily existent, abstract entities.  By its very nature a sense presents or represents something apart from itself, something that may or may not exist. It is a natural, not conventional, sign.  

    Do I have a compelling argument against Fregean senses?  Above I mentioned the following argument:

    2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.

    3) Fregean senses are not conscious. Therefore:

    1) It is not the case that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional.

    But this argument appears to beg the question at (2).  Why can't there be intrinsically intentional items that are not conscious?  If there can be intentionality below the level of conscious mind in the form of dispositionality — see Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality — why con't there be intentionality above the level of conscious mind in platonica?

    Nevertheless, there seems to me something incoherent about Fregean senses. They actually represent even in worlds in which there is nothing to represent and no one to whom to represent.  Consider again the sense of 'Phosphorus.'  It exists in every world including worlds in which Venus does not exist and no mind exists. In those worlds, the sense in question actually represents but does not represent anything to anyone.  It is therefore a non-representing representation, and thus an impossibility.

    _____________________

    *A finite mind is the kind of mind that needs such intermediary items as Fregean senses or Husserlian noemata to mediate its reference (both thinking reference and linguistic reference) to things that it cannot get completely before its mind in all their parts, properties, and relations. An archetypal intellect such as the divine mind can get at the whole of the thing 'in one blow.'  As an infinite mind it has an infinite grasp of the infinitely-propertied thing.  An infinite mind has no need of senses. The existence of senses therefore reflects the finitude of our minds.  That the reflections of this finitude should be installed in Plato's heavenly place (topos ouranos) seems strange.  It looks to be an illict hypostatization. But this thought needs a further post for its adequate deployment.

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Intentionality for Third-World Entities?”

  • Dark Nietzschean Thoughts

    The serious thinker is self-critical: his examination of life, without which his life is not worth living, is a self-examination, even unto a painful thinking against himself.  He has the courage to entertain, which is not to say endorse, dark thoughts. He is not an apologist for a ready-made worldview. He toes no party line. His watchword is 'inquiry,' not 'worldview.' He would have a worldview if he could, but he must inquire to find one.

    The world is just power and brutality at bottom. The healthy human animal, sensing this in his guts, exercises his power for his own pleasure and to his own advantage without moral scruples. The sick human animal moralizes and reflects and hesitates, having hobbled himself with moral codes and an excess of thinking. The sick human animal's reasoning and spirituality, quest for Transcendence, pursuit of the Good, thirsting after justice and righteousness are nothing more than expressions and legitimations of his weakness. And part of his sickness are these very reflections on whether he is a sick animal unfit for life in the only world there is, and morality buncombe. The healthy human animal does not entertain dark Nietzschean thoughts.

    Christianity has civilized us but also weakened us. No longer is our penology unspeakably brutal. We have gone to the other extreme: we oppose capital punishment for even the worst miscreants and absurdly debate whether death by lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment" and thus unconstitutional.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Nationalism: Ethnic and Civic

    Here:

    Much of today’s debate fails to distinguish between two types of nationalism: ethnic and civic. The former is based on language, blood or race. American nationalism is the latter, civic in nature, holding that the United States is a nation based on a set of beliefs — a creed — rather than race or blood. This understanding of nationalism is equivalent to “patriotism.”

    This is a good start, but it doesn't go deep enough. I applaud the distinction between the ethnic and the civic. But American nationalism is not wholly civic.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine any nation that could be wholly civic, wholly 'propositional' or wholly based on a set of beliefs and value.  And yet the United States is a proposition nation: the propositions are in the founding documents. I don't see how that could be reasonably denied. 

    I also don't see how it could be reasonably denied that the discovery and articulation and preservation of classically American principles and values was achieved by people belonging to a certain tradition.  

    This has consequences for immigration policy. I take it to be axiomatic that immigration must be to the benefit of the host country, a benefit not to be  defined in merely economic terms. 

    And so I ask a politically incorrect but perfectly reasonable question: Is there any net benefit to Muslim immigration?  Immigrants bring their culture with them. Muslims, for example, bring with them a Sharia-based, hybrid religious-political ideology that is antithetical to American values.

    So I ask again: Is there any net benefit to Muslim immigration?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Federal Rats Flee Sinking Ship

    Victor Davis Hanson

    The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.

    One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.

    Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian “reset” or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own re-election bid.

    Three, Russia has a long history of trying to warp U.S. elections that both predated Trump and earned only prior lukewarm pushback from the Obama administration.

    It’s also worth remembering that President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had been recipients of Russian and Russian-related largesse—ostensibly because Hillary Clinton had used her influence as Secretary of State under Obama to ease resistance to Russian acquisitions of North American uranium holdings.

    As far as alleged Russian collusion goes, Hillary Clinton used three firewalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm and the Fusion GPS strategic intelligence firm—to hide her campaign’s payments to British national Christopher Steele to find dirt on Trump and his campaign; in other words, to collude. Steele in turn collected his purchased Russian sources to aggregate unverified allegations against Trump. He then spread the gossip within government agencies to ensure that the smears were leaked to the media—and with a government seal of approval.

    No wonder that special counsel Robert Mueller’s partisan team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump did not collude with Russia.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Why Would You Want an Academic Job?

    I quit a tenured position at a good school in 1991 at the relatively young age of 41.  One of my reasons was the increasing political correctness and groupthink of the universities which, since the '60s, have become leftist seminaries.  Now it is far, far worse. So why would any right-thinking person want an academic post?  Roger Kimball:

    Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time, and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization. Today, most are dedicated to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short, they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness. This is especially true, with only a handful of exceptions, of the most prestigious institutions. The tonier and more expensive the college, the more woke it is likely to be.

    There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.

    The eighteenth-century German aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg observed, “Nowadays we everywhere seek to propagate wisdom: who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance.” Doubtless Lichtenberg thought he was being clever. How astonished he would have been to discover that he was a prophet, not a satirist.

    You should carefully read the whole essay. Kimball has wise and very timely things to say about free speech and its limits.

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Why Would You Want an Academic Job?”

  • Time’s Alchemy

    Nietzsche is more for his present admirers than he ever could have been for Rohde, Deussen, or Overbeck. Time transforms the merely superior into heroes. Some idols are born posthumously.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Jews and Abortion

    Here:

    Jewish law does not share the belief common among abortion opponents that life begins at conception, nor does it legally consider the fetus to be a full person deserving of protections equal those accorded to human beings. In Jewish law, a fetus attains the status of a full person only at birth. Sources in the Talmud indicate that prior to 40 days of gestation, the fetus has an even more limited legal status, with one Talmudic authority (Yevamot 69b) asserting that prior to 40 days the fetus is “mere water.” Elsewhere, the Talmud indicates that the ancient rabbis regarded a fetus as part of its mother throughout the pregnancy, dependent fully on her for its life — a view that echoes the position that women should be free to make decisions concerning their own bodies.

    The above illustrates the pathetically low level of public discourse about abortion. Mere biology refutes the "mere water" nonsense, and the first clause of the first sentence. The only bit worthy of comment is the final sentence.

    Many say that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body and any part thereof.  This is the Woman's Body Argument:

    1) The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
    2) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
    Therefore
    3) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

    For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

    If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction or the removal of swarts and tumors, etc.  Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

    If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

    The argument falls victim to an equivocation on 'part.'

    For those who cannot think without a pictorial aid:

    Not your body!

    No doubt, women have reproductive rights. For example they have the right not to be forced by the state to procreate. But it cannot be assumed that the right to an abortion is automatically one of them. There is a grave moral issue here that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and others of their ilk do not want you to see. But it is not going to go away and you need to address it as honestly as you can without obfuscatory rhetoric and with attention to biological fact.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Reader Requests Book Recommendations

    Kevin writes,

    I enjoy your blog, but am very much a neophyte to philosophical thinking.  Background is B.A., major in Pol Sci, minor in English Lit. I'm currently reading Introduction to Philosophy by Daniel Sullivan. Any other good books for beginners that you could recommend?
    Does anyone have any suggestions for Kevin?
    Bill Vallicella

    10 responses to “Reader Requests Book Recommendations”

  • Of Apples and Sparkplugs

    All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, and so on.

    Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference. Or, 'You are comparing prime numbers and prime ministers.' Or, 'You are comparing anorexic girls and over-inflated basketballs.'

    This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper. A man once ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites. He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.

    But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed through the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently chopped up or watered down.

    So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my fourth grade teacher Sr Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."

    A good piece of folk wisdom that has served me well.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Distance Permits Idealization

    Propinquity diminishes what distance augments. Among friends, mutual respect is better served by distance than by close contact. Distance permits idealization. Is it an unalloyed good? No, inasmuch as idealization typically falsifies. But falsification in a world that runs on appearances can be life-enhancing. One skilled in the art of life knows how to apply 'cosmetics' to the ugly faces of people and things. One so skilled even knows how to play cosmetologist to the cosmos and put a pretty face on the the whole kit and kaboodle.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Past Present

    The past is gone, you say? But it has brought you to this fullness of life, this level of accomplishment, this richness of memory, and this wealth of experience. Thus is the past present.

    Bill Vallicella

  • It’s Tough Being a Lefty

    The howling Wolff is permanently pissed off.

    Bill Vallicella

  • ‘Platonic’ Propositions: A Consideration Contra. The Argument from Intrinsic Intentionality

    Commenter John put the following question to me:

    Which Platonist theories of propositions did you have in mind in your original post, and what are the problems involved in accepting such views?

    I had in mind a roughly Fregean theory.  One problem with such a view is that it seems to require that propositions possess intrinsic intentionality.  Let me explain.

    Propositions: A Broadly Fregean Theory Briefly Sketched

    On one approach, propositions are abstract items. I am not suggesting that propositions are products of abstraction.  I am using 'abstract' in the (misconceived) Quinean way to cover items that are not in space, or in time, and are not causally active or passive.  We should add  that no mind is an abstract item.  Abstracta, then, are neither bodies nor minds. They comprise a third category of entity. Besides propositions, numbers and (mathematical) sets are often given as candidate members of this category. But our topic is propositions.

    For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely psychologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.  Like its German counterpart, the English 'thought' is ambiguous. It could refer to an act of thinking, a mental act, or it it could refer to the intentional object or accusative of such an act.  Some use the word 'content,' but it has the disadvantage of suggesting something contained in the act of thinking.  But when I think of the river Charles, said river is not literally contained in my act of thinking.  A fortiori for Boston's Scollay Square which I am now thinking about: it no longer exists and so cannot be contained in anything.  The same is true when I think that the Charles is polluted or that Scollay Square was a magnet for sailors on shore leave. Those propositions are not  psychological realities really contained in my or anyone's acts of thinking.  And of course they are not literally in the head.  You could say that they are in the mind, but only if you mean that they are before the mind.

    A proposition for Frege is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:

    1. The sea is blue.
    2. The sea is blue.
    3. Die See ist blau.
    4. Deniz mavidir.

    (Since Turkish is an agglutinative language, the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')

    The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That 'same thing' is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by (assertively) uttering them or otherwise encoding them.  The proposition is one to their many.  (I have just sounded a Platonic theme.) And unlike the sentence-tokens, the proposition is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Herewith, a second Platonic theme. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.  

    So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content or sense can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages.  We also need to account for the fact that the same thought can be expressed by the same person at different times in the same or different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. It is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.  Similarly with judgments and beliefs: they are derivatively true if true.   For Frege, propositions are the primary truth bearers or vehicles of the truth-values.  

    There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. Therefore, a string of marks cannot be either true or false.  It is the office of minds to mean. Matter means nothing. 

    One could agree that a string of marks  or a sequence of noises cannot, as such, attract a truth-value, but balk at the inference that therefore propositional meanings (senses) are self-subsistent, mind-independent abstract items.  One might plump for what could be called an 'Aristotelian' theory of propositions according to which a sentence has all the meaning it needs to attract a truth-value in virtue of its being thoughtfully uttered or otherwise tokened by someone with the intention of making a claim about the world.  The propositional sense would then be a one-IN-many and not a Platonic one-OVER-many.  The propositional sense would be a unitary sense but not a sense that could exist on its own apart from minds or mean anything apart from minds.

    But how would the Aristotelian account for necessary truths, including the truths of logic, which are true in worlds in which there are no minds?  Here the Platonist has an opportunity for rejoinder.  Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there are no minds and/or nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that necessarily true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds. The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.

    Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One cannot just believe. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition or dictum. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the occurrent belief state is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)

    A Consideration Contra

    Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. There are all of these entities that there could have been.  Each necessarily exists although only some are necessarily true.  As necessarily existent and indeed necessarily existent in themselves and from themselves, they have no need of minds to 'support' them.  Hence they are not mere accusatives of mental acts.  They are apt to become accusatives but they are not essentially accusatives. They can exist without being accusatives of any mind. To borrow a phrase from Bernard Bolzano, they are Saetze an sich.  They are made for the mind, and transparent to mind, but they don't depend for their existence on any mind, finite or infinite.

    Even more salient for present purposes is that these Platonic propositions are not only existent in themselves but also meaningful in themselves: they do not derive their meaning from minds.  It follows that they possess intrinsic intentionality.  At this juncture an aporetic tetrad obtrudes itself.

    A. Fregean propositions are non-mental representations: they are intrinsically representative of state of affairs in the world.

    B. Fregean propositions are abstract items.

    C. No abstract item possesses intrinsic representational power.

    D. Fregean propositions exist.

    The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true.  One can therefore reasonably argue from the conjunction of the first three to the negation of the fourth.

    Bill Vallicella

    15 responses to “‘Platonic’ Propositions: A Consideration Contra. The Argument from Intrinsic Intentionality”

  • Facebook

    Most of my political linkage and 'rantage' is over there.  

    Bill Vallicella

  • How are God and Truth Related?

    By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

    1) There is truth, but there is no God.

    2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

    3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God.

    4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

    5) There is God, but no truth.

    Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of  many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, is the standard atheist view.

    Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. 

    Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept.  Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate  'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

    Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.

    Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

    I should think only the first three views have any merit.  

    Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

    I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.  

    Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds.  But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or for, a mind.  If there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

    Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

    a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

    b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

    c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

    d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

    But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

    Bill Vallicella

    7 responses to “How are God and Truth Related?”

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  2. And then there is the Sermon on the Mount. Here is a list of 12 different interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_Mount

  9. Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…

  10. The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12

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