{"id":9657,"date":"2012-06-03T15:23:57","date_gmt":"2012-06-03T15:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/06\/03\/the-how-many-and-the-why-any-questions-and-their-connection\/"},"modified":"2012-06-03T15:23:57","modified_gmt":"2012-06-03T15:23:57","slug":"the-how-many-and-the-why-any-questions-and-their-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/06\/03\/the-how-many-and-the-why-any-questions-and-their-connection\/","title":{"rendered":"The &#8216;How Many?&#8217; and the &#8216;Why Any?&#8217; Questions and Their Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">This post continues the ruminations begun <a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2012\/05\/must-we-stop-asking-why-theres-anything.html\" target=\"_self\">here<\/a> which were inspired by Stephen Maitzen&#39;s intriguing paper <a href=\"http:\/\/philosophy.acadiau.ca\/tl_files\/sites\/philosophy\/resources\/documents\/Maitzen_SAWTA.pdf\" target=\"_self\">Stop Asking Why There&#39;s Anything<\/a>&#0160;(<em>Erkenntnis<\/em> 77:1 (2012), 51-63).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Let &#39;CCB&#39; abbreviate &#39;concrete contingent being.&#39;&#0160; For present purposes, the &#39;How many?&#39; question is this: <strong>How many CCBs are there?<\/strong>&#0160;&#0160;And for present purposes the&#0160;&#39;Why any?&#39; question is this: <strong>Why are there any CCBs?<\/strong>&#0160; There might have been none, but there are some, so <em>why<\/em> are there some?&#0160; (I take that to be equivalent to asking&#0160;why there are any.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">What I want to get clear about is the connection between these two questions.&#0160; In particular,&#0160; I want to see if the senselessness of the first, if it is senseless, entails the senselessness of the second.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">I think it is clear that &#39;CCB,&#39; like &#39;thing,&#39; &#39;entity,&#39; &#39;existent,&#39; object,&#39; etc. is not a sortal expression.&#0160; There are different ways of explaining what a sortal is, but for present purposes a sortal<\/span><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">supplies a criterion for counting the items to which the term applies<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">provides a criterion of identity and non-identity among the items to which the term applies<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">gives a criterion for the continued existence of the items to which the term applies.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">&#39;Pen&#39; and &#39;penguin&#39; are examples of sortals.&#0160; I can count the pens and penguins on my desk.&#0160; There are five pens and zero penguins. (It&#39;s a tad <em>warm<\/em> for penguins here in the Sonoran desert.)&#0160; The penguins in Antartica are countable as well, in principle if not in practice.&#0160; (This use of &#39;countable&#39; is not to be confused with its use in set theory.&#0160; A countable (uncountable) set is an infinite set the members of which can be (cannot be) placed in one-to-one&#0160;correspondence with the natural numbers.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">&#39;CCB&#39; is not a sortal because it does not provide a criterion for counting the items to which it applies, say, the things on my desk.&#0160; Is a pen together with its cap one&#0160;CCB &#0160;or two?&#0160; And what about the particular blackness of the cap?&#0160; Presumably it too is a CCB. Are we now up to three CCBs?&#0160; And so on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Maitzen concludes that the &#39;How many?&#39; question is a pseudo-question because ill-formed, and its is ill-formed because &#0160; it features a dummy sortal, a term that functions grammatically like a sortal, but is not a sortal.&#0160; As senseless, the question is to be rejected, not answered.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">From this result Maitzen straightaway (without any intermediate steps) infers that the &#39;Why any?&#39;&#39; question is also senseless and for the same reason, namely, that it harbors a dummy sortal.&#0160; It is not clear, however, why the fact that the second question features the dummy sortal &#39;CCB&#39; should render the second question senseless.&#0160; We need an argument to forge a link between the two questions.&#0160; Perhaps the following will do the trick.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">1. If it makes sense to claim that penguins exist, then it makes sense to claim that there is in reality some definite number of penguins.&#0160; (It cannot&#0160; be true both that there are penguins&#0160;and that there is no definite number of penguins.) Therefore:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">2. If it makes sense to claim that CCBs exist, then it makes sense to claim that there is in reality some definite number of CCBs.&#0160; But:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">3. It makes no sense to claim that there is in reality some definite number of CCBs. Therefore:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">4. It makes no sense to claim that&#0160;CCBs exist. (2, 3, Modus Tollens)<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">5. If it makes no sense to claim that CCBs exist, then it makes no sense to ask why CCBs exist.&#0160; Therefore:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">6. It makes no sense to ask why CCBs exist. (4, 5 Modus Ponens)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">I suspect that some such argument as the foregoing is running behind the scenes of Maitzen&#39;s text.&#0160; The crucial premise is (3).&#0160; But has Maitzen established (3)?&#0160; I agree that WE cannot count CCBs.&#0160; We cannot count them because &#39;CCB&#39; is not a sortal.&#0160; And so FOR US the number of CCBs must remain indeterminate.&#0160; But from a God&#39;s Eye point of view &#8212; which does not presuppose the actual existence of God &#8211;&#0160; there could easily be a definite number (finite or transfinite) that is the number of CCBs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">On can conceive of an ideally rational spectator (IRS) who knows the true ontology and so knows what all the categories of entity are and knows the members of each category.&#0160; What is to stop the IRS from computing the number of CCBs?&#0160; We can&#39;t do the computation because we are at sea when it comes to the true ontology.&#0160; All we have are a bunch of competing theories, and the English language is no help: &#39;CCB&#39; does not supply us with a criterion for counting.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">In short, we must distinguish the question whether the number of CCBs is indeterminate&#0160;in reality or only indeterminate for us.&#0160; If the latter, then we cannot move from the senselessness of the &#39;How many?&#39; question to the senselessness of the &#39;Why any?&#39; question.&#0160; If the former, the move is valid, but as far as I can see, Maitzen has not given any reason to think that the former is the case.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post continues the ruminations begun here which were inspired by Stephen Maitzen&#39;s intriguing paper Stop Asking Why There&#39;s Anything&#0160;(Erkenntnis 77:1 (2012), 51-63). Let &#39;CCB&#39; abbreviate &#39;concrete contingent being.&#39;&#0160; For present purposes, the &#39;How many?&#39; question is this: How many CCBs are there?&#0160;&#0160;And for present purposes the&#0160;&#39;Why any?&#39; question is this: Why are there any &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/06\/03\/the-how-many-and-the-why-any-questions-and-their-connection\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The &#8216;How Many?&#8217; and the &#8216;Why Any?&#8217; Questions and Their Connection&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[142,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-existence","category-explanation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}